China Back to Normal. US COVID Surging.
by John Lawrence,, October 14, 2020
According to The Lancet: "As of Oct 4, 2020, China had confirmed 90,604 cases of COVID-19 and 4739 deaths, while the USA had registered 7,382,194 cases and 209,382 deaths." Clearly, China has had a much better response to the pandemic than has the US. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, offered “deepest congratulations...to the front-line health workers in China and the population who worked together tirelessly to bring the disease to this very low level”. Fareed Zakaria in his excellent book, "Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World," writes:
The pandemic has accelerated America's selfish turn - its abandonment of its role as leader of the free world and provider of public goods within the multilateral system. Perhaps the most striking example came with its vaccine strategy. Far from coordinating a global effort, or even encouraging its allies to pool resources, the Trump administration was simply looking to "win," edging out other countries in a race to get the vaccine first. The German press reported that the American government offered "large sums of money" to secure a German company's vaccine "for the US only." Meanwhile, partners like France, Brazil and Canada accused the US of swooping in on deals to acquire critical medical equipment and outbidding them, or even blocking shipments.
But it has been to no avail. The Trump administration's botched handling of its response to the pandemic has landed the US up in the situation that COVID is on the upsurge 9 months after Trump first knew about it. The denouement is that China is surging ahead with its economy while the US is surging ahead with the virus. What's more is that people are dying at a rate of some 700 a day while the President himself, having caught the virus, was given Regeneron's monoclonal antibodies cocktail which seems to have killed off the virus in short order. Unfortunately, that treatment isn't available to everybody.
Zakaria opines on the US relationship with China. Trump can't condemn China too much as a huge amount of American products from American corporations are manufactured in and imported from China. The two countries are intertwined despite Trump's "Made in America" push. American corporations will not make their products in America as long as they can get cheaper labor elsewhere. After all their imperative is the bottom line and maximizing profits. Wall Street has told them this is what they must do, patriotism be damned.
Zakaria details the US response to the rise of China, its growing influence in the world even among US traditional allies, who seem to have more respect for Xi Jinping than for Trump. Trump is considered a loose cannon in the world today. The US can degenerate into Cold War II with China or America can play a more constructive role with its chief rival, which rivalry has come about rather suddenly. For example, the US can quibble with China about the situation in the Xinjiang region with the Uighurs, an Islamic minority, while ignoring its own history of forcing the Indians off their lands and onto reservations. In the long run, more is at stake in the US-China relationship them petty rivalries. As the two largest emitters of greenhouse gasses (GHGs), the US and China must cooperate to achieve net zero carbon emissions in short order or the earth will become uninhabitable. Scientists think Venus was inhabitable for billions of years before runaway GHGs made it uninhabitable. The same thing could happen to earth unless we take the situation seriously. For this reason the US and China must cooperate, not compete. We must avoid Cold War II or else the winner of this rivalry will win nothing more than a scorched earth.
