Will Covid-19 Spark a Cold War (or Worse) With China? (Ep. 414) - Freakonomics Freakonomics
"AUSLIN: Well, I think it’s hard to make an assessment on how China, and Beijing in particular, has handled the Covid crisis because of the lack of transparency in information. It is increasingly accepted now, and the evidence is starting to come out, of the degree to which the party state covered up its knowledge of the crisis, the severity of the crisis, the actions it took, the house arrests of doctors, intellectuals, businessmen who tried to warn about this. We know now that in the beginning of January, what is known as Document No. 3 went out to research institutes ordering them to destroy samples, virological samples, or send them to central repositories...
Sources— New Tang Dynasty. These are Taiwanese, Hong Kong, and opposition mainland news sources. And if you look at today, the report on Document No. 3, they had pictures of the document that went out... I would say that the idea that an outfit like New Tang Dynasty doesn’t have an agenda would be naive. Of course they have an agenda. They’re opposed to the regime. But they also have a track record of bringing out information that we haven’t found in other places. And this is information, by the way, that the Chinese people are trying to get out. And we need to make a very clear distinction, of course, between the people and the government. And what we saw early on was Beijing’s concern, not with informing its own people or the world about the crisis, but rather with clamping down and controlling social media so that the information could not get out...
AUSLIN: We had a report just the other day that the U.S. not only helped fund part of that lab, but that State Department visitors at the lab several years ago warned about the lax security. So I think the pieces are coming together where it’s no longer crazy to suggest that it came from the lab... Just yesterday, the government revised upward by 40 percent the number of deaths in Wuhan. But people in Wuhan themselves for the past month have been using crowdsourcing by looking at crematoria activity and the number of people picking up urns of deceased family members, to come up with a widely accepted figure of 45 to 47 thousand who died in Wuhan alone.
DUBNER: Woah. That’s more than 10x what we’ve been told, yes?
AUSLIN: It is definitely more than 10x. There was unquestionably a cover-up in Wuhan because the party state did not want the world to know how bad this was. More importantly, though, is that Beijing knew in early January that this disease was transmitted human-to-human. That is the key marker. They did not inform the W.H.O. as they were legally bound to do under the international health regulations which they signed. They did not tell their own people. They let people travel. They did not inform the world that healthcare providers were getting sick, which is the way you know that it’s transmitted initially between people. This is what caused the global pandemic. A Chinese researcher at the University of Southampton in Britain with a team calculated that if the party had acted just three weeks earlier, in a period when we know that it knew about this, to shut down travel and warn the world, 95 percent of this could have been avoided.
DUBNER: But Michael, I gather from what you’ve written in the past, that you’re not surprised that those choices were made, correct?
AUSLIN: Transparency is the enemy of the Communist Party. It always has been. We know the nature of the regime. And we know the nature of communist regimes in general. And so we should respect that. We saw this in 2003. In fact, ironically, it was the World Health Organization in 2003 that discovered that the party state was lying about the SARS epidemic. It did it in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. It’s done it over and over. At a certain point, I think we need to ask ourselves when we begin giving the party the respect of actually dealing with it as it is. And as it tells us it wants to be, as opposed to the party that we hope it to be. It’s a little bit like Waiting for Godot in the Chinese sense...
FLOURNOY: I would say back in the 1990s and through the first decade of the 2000s, China would come to dialogues with the United States or international fora and say, “Look, we’re just a developing country. We’re trying to bring billions of people out of poverty, so there are limits to what we can do as an international good citizen. And don’t worry about us. Yes, we’re a rising power, but we’ve got all these things to deal with at home. We’re not going to hurt anybody. We’re not aggressive. Don’t worry about us.” They certainly didn’t present themselves as a technology competitor, and they weren’t one seriously at that point.
So they were in this posture, which we’ve come to call hide-and-bide. Hide your true intentions and aspirations to be a global power, to take on the United States as a competitor, and bide your time. Wait until China is stronger and more ready before you pull away the mask and show your true intentions.Well, the arrival of President Xi soon after, as he consolidated power, was that moment where the mask finally fell and he began taking much more assertive, if not aggressive, actions in everything from contested areas of the South China Sea to trade and technology and so forth. And this is, to Michael’s point, I think this dropping of the mask really occurred in the second Obama term in a way that was undeniable...
DUBNER on sponsoring China to join the WTO: And do you think the Chinese were laughing when they made that agreement under those terms?
FLOURNOY: I don’t think they were laughing. We can’t treat even the Communist Party as a complete monolith. There were internal debates within Beijing, between people who thought that that path was actually a good one for China, and then others who wanted to take a more nationalist and assertive posture.
AUSLIN: There were reasons to hope that this approach, which we saw very much from our own sets of interests and our own sets of values, would carry out the way we wanted. But there’s two problems with it, that I think we should blame ourselves for. First, we didn’t do our due diligence along the way. Was China living up to the promises it made? Was it evolving in a way that would justify the continuation of that policy? We didn’t do that, number one.
And number two — and here’s where it is really a purely domestic issue of a split between the heartland and the coasts, or those who are more globalist in orientation than those who are not — we didn’t stop to think, what does it mean to offshore and hollow out so many American industries? In the 1980s we had 30 producers of antibiotics in this country. Today we have none. And you can just go through industry after industry on this. And what we didn’t say was, “Yes, of course, we’re getting better consumer prices and we’re creating efficiencies. But what does that do at home?”You asked about China, were they laughing all the way to the bank? Honestly, I think if they weren’t laughing, they were probably amazed. Because you just have to think that they could never have imagined that we would help them to the degree that we did, which benefited some sectors of our society, but clearly not others.
DUBNER: Okay, but where did this American assumption come from? Was it just wishful thinking? Was there some historical precedent?
AUSLIN: Our assumption, based on postwar-Europe, Germany, postwar-Asia, Japan, and throughout the Cold War period, was that as countries modernize, as they integrate with a global economy, you always, or at least very often, see liberalization. You see the growth of a middle class that identifies itself in certain understandable ways. This is our modernization thesis. And in some ways, of course, the China of today is nowhere near the China of Mao. But did the nature of the regime change? Did the nature of its goals for China change? And the answer was no. And certainly I think we could have made that determination after 1989, after Tiananmen, but instead we doubled down...
FLOURNOY: China’s behavior in the defense and security realm. So we started seeing Xi make promises. For example, China was using landfill to create what it called “islands” in the South China Sea. The promise was made again and again: “We will not militarize these. You have nothing to worry about. You’re getting way too concerned about this, United States, back off.”
And then sure enough, within a couple of years they were putting military personnel, military equipment, air-defense equipment, and so forth. They were militarizing them. So that was one example where it was very clear that Xi was deceiving the United States. He was untruthful about his intentions. It was a very blatant transgression, if you will, or act of aggression. So I think that even people who were very supportive of China and maybe some would argue might have been soft on China, — even in those circles, their eyes were opened. And they realized this is a change of behavior, this is something we have to reckon with...
AUSLIN: Well, I think we do have to go back just a little bit and understand that the party of today is the party that developed in response to SARS in 2003, and the cover-up and the loss of reputational standing in China. In fact, in some ways, Xi Jinping himself was picked because of the party’s fear that, in the period after SARS, it was losing control of parts of society because it was seen as corrupt, as inefficient, as incompetent. So Xi Jinping was picked by the party in order to bring back its strengths and reassert itself over civil society, over government and the like.
So the fear was that if you have another SARS-like epidemic — and in this case, it was far worse — that the same incompetence and venality and basically malign actions of the party would once again ripple through a society that had higher expectations now, that was wealthier, that didn’t expect its lifestyle to be upended. We talked about the economic contraction. Something like 40 million jobs potentially being lost. This is what the party fears. And so the crackdown that came about immediately, once the officials began to understand the nature of this pandemic, was precisely designed to avoid that.
Their fear today, as opposed to two months ago, is that the world is no longer buying the propaganda line and the explanations. The very fact that the party was forced to revise upward the death rates in Wuhan means that they know that their story is cracking. And that, by the way, is the reason Beijing launched an unprecedented global propaganda campaign in the face of this pandemic, getting the World Health Organization to talk about how wonderful it had been giving — which was actually selling — defective medical equipment.
When Beijing understood the scope of this pandemic, orders were sent out to buy up as much P.P.E. as possible. The total calculation of this is now that China bought about 2.2 billion pieces of protective equipment, including about two billion masks. From Taiwan, from Japan, from Australia, from the United States. Now, some of that has been repurposed and sold back. But that propaganda campaign is breaking down. The fact that all around the world, governments have been returning the useless, worthless medical equipment, the tests, the antibody tests, the masks, the gloves that China sent, or more usually, sold to them. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the masks and gloves that American companies made in China are being held up by export restrictions.
All of this is putting the party’s reputation at risk. Unfortunately, what I think you’re seeing is a party that is doubling down on the propaganda, doubling down on the fantastic claims. You’re having a party that is becoming more repressive, which has disappeared critics, public critics of the regime. Prominent public intellectuals. Prominent businessmen. This is a party that knows that it can’t stand the sunshine of truth to come in. And that’s a real problem for us in figuring out how to deal with it...
[We should] make clear to Beijing that we are going to expect reciprocity. And I’ve heard people say that that’s really bad, because that means we’re going to become like China. We’re going to act like them. That’s not what it means at all. Reciprocity means not that we become like China, but that we demand equal treatment. That when it kicks out our press, that it’s not going to have unalloyed press access here. They don’t allow our American cultural centers on their campuses. We shouldn’t allow unfettered Confucius Institutes. Academic access — our students can only go to limited numbers of programs, their students can go anywhere.The point is not to punish China. The point is to make clear that relationships must always be two-way streets."
