China must pay for its Covid crimes

As John Stuart Mill put it, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’ We know in detail that the Chinese Communist Party wilfully withheld evidence about the scope, extent, and ease of human to human transmission of the coronavirus. If the Chinese government were a person, it would surely be guilty at least of manslaughter.

However, there is an even darker interpretation available than this. When I last wrote on these pages about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the middle of February, the coronavirus pandemic had called its basic competence into question. For there is no doubt that the party’s initial response to the plague was bungled. As I wrote then, “public health emergencies typically require timely, transparent, and accurate information from the relevant government to maximise its response” – qualities not normally characteristic of authoritarian states.

Along with others, I speculated if this bungled response would endanger (or at least diminish) the regime itself, much as the Chernobyl disaster indelibly tarnished the reputation of the Soviet government.

Sadly, as it turns out, this assessment has not come to pass. For while the CCP’s initial response demonstrated all the ineptitude you would expect from a corrupt autocracy, so too did the utter ruthlessness with which it has conducted itself since. For it now looks clear that once the Chinese leadership realised just how bad the outbreak would get, it decided the only course of action was to save its geopolitical position by inflicting those same awful consequences on the rest of the world too.

This evil was propagated by obfuscating, delaying the dissemination of accurate information about the virus (through useful idiots like the World Health Organisation), and placing Wuhan in quarantine, even as flights to the rest of the world continued. Indeed, a recent University of Southampton study estimated that 95% of global cases could have been avoided if Beijing had come clean just three weeks before they finally did on January 20.

China decided that if it was to suffer, so must the rest of us. There is no other word for this than evil. Far from doing nothing, we must shout this from the rooftops, and act accordingly. The Chinese Communist Party, and any regime who would do such a nefarious thing, is the eternal enemy.

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