China, Machiavelli, Sun Tzu

China, Machiavelli, Sun Tzu

If I were Machiavellian , or more appropriately, Sun Tzu-ian, I would posit that China’s recent actions concerning the origin and handling of the corona virus was organized by the Chinese communist party, to weaken the West and to increase and ensure Chinese hegemony throughout the world.  Not to say that they infected patient zero and his girl-friend in Wuhan with the virus, but they cynically covered up and took advantage of the outbreak as soon as they knew about it, and let the virus escape from Wuhan and from China to the rest of the world.  It is because of this duplicity that one must question China’s role as to where the virus started and how it spread.

Patient zero most likely worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and accidentally carried the dread corona virus outside of the lab.

We know China’s avowed purpose, as defined by Xi Jinping and discussed by John Mauldin of Forbes, “Xi’s vision of the Chinese Communist Party controlling the state and eventually influencing and even controlling the rest of the world is clear. These are not merely words for the consumption of the masses. They are instructions to party members.”  Their recent aggressive “island forming” in the South China Sea, and their world-wide “Belt and Road Initiative” to buy into (and control) the infrastructure of much of the world, are cases in point.  I’m cynical enough about the Chinese communists to think that they would like nothing better than to take advantage of a world brought to its economic knees by a virus that originated in China.

 Just consider how the whole situation unfolded and the actions of the Chinese communist party.

It appears after further investigations that the virus did not originate in the live animal “wet markets” of Wuhan.  Patient zero apparently worked at the lab in Wuhan, that was investigating corona-type viruses, and he was infected by the virus that caused the pandemic.  The lab is fairly close to the wet market, and the virus originally came from bats, as widely reported.  This could have happened as early as November, and the virus started to spread in the city of Wuhan, a relatively large Chinese city of about 11 million people.

Rather than immediately containing the spread of the virus and informing the world through the World Health Organization and other international public health entities, the Chinese government covered up the incident, lied about its spread and suppressed any news about the outbreak.  Apparently, the WHO perpetuated the Chinese cover-up and parroted the Chinese lies, including eventually the contagion of the virus, the high mortality rate and human to human transmission. In the meantime, before any mention of the impending pandemic, Chinese buyers literally cornered the world market on personal protection equipment (PPE)

Also, thousands of Chinese travelers spread throughout the world carrying the virus. Western reporters were expelled from China, ostensibly because of President Trump’s actions against the Chinese propaganda press in the U.S., but really to ensure no accurate western reports on the virus.  Also, during this time, the CCP took draconian measures to stop the spread in Wuhan, some reports saying that infected people were locked in their residences and left to die.

Apparently, we had reliable intelligence sources that Trump trusted, because he closed the U.S border to travelers from China fairly early, on January 31^st, during the impeachment fiasco, to the howls of “racist”, “xenophobe”, and worse.  He repeatedly takes personal credit for this decision, and we are all glad that he did it, because it did save countless American lives.  But c’mon, really?  He’s not clairvoyant.

When the pandemic could no longer be hidden, numbers of cases and deaths were finally released by the Chinese communists.  These numbers were quite low for China’s massive population and apparently were released to reflect how efficiently the Chinese had handled the situation in Wuhan and in all of China.  Only the large count of funeral urns in Wuhan attested to the real situation there.  And the Chinese propaganda mill went to work, first accusing the U.S. military of releasing the virus, and later threatening to withhold exports of necessary pharmaceuticals to the U.S.

The Chinese did shut down some of their large population centers and much of its manufacturing capacity like much of the world did.  They apparently, and brutally stopped the spread of the virus within China, (or only reported a fraction of the real numbers).  Since the whole massive country of 1,400,000,000 people and all of the manufacturing is under the totalitarian thumb of the central communist government, shutdown and startup were dictated directly by the government, and the shutdown/startup cycle proceeded rather quickly compared to representative countries with federalist structures, functional legislatures, judiciaries and checks and balances.  So China then fairly quickly turned some of their massive manufacturing capacity to producing and gratuitously supplying PPE and anti-corona virus items for the rest of the world, representing themselves as saviors of the world, rather than the hatchet men that allowed the virus to spread.  An interesting side note is that some of the equipment that China supplied to Spain, Turkey and The Netherlands failed to work properly.

In the meantime, the world has lost 140,000 people (as of April 16), and stands to lose, some say, upwards of $5 Trillion (with a “T”) in economic value as a result of the virus.  What better way to fulfill the Chinese communists’ avowed plan to become the preeminent economic, political and military force by the mid- 21^st century?  Do we still think, like some previous administrations that the Chinese communists are responsible citizens of the world, and not practitioners of the tenets of Machiavelli, of Sun Tzu, in addition to Mao, Lenin and Stalin?

Ray Gruszecki

April 16, 2020