How China's Communist Party Made the World Sick

Bill Gertz

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781641771542
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Comunismo, post-comunismo e socialismo

The outbreak of a deadly new form of pneumonia that began in Wuhan, China in December 2019 has shown the world that the regime in Beijing poses the most serious threat to world peace and freedom since the Soviet Union. Early missteps by China's ruling Communist Party — repressing doctors who sought to alert China and the world the dangers of Wuhan virus and permitting millions to travel out of Wuhan for a holiday — caused the global pandemic now devastating populations and economies around the world.

In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the state. In breaking with the lie we are performing a moral act, not a political one, not one that can be punished by criminal law, but one that would immediately have an effect on our way of life.

ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN
Russian writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner, January 1974

ON DECEMBER 1, 2019, a man in Wuhan, China, suffering from flu-like symptoms for several days was admitted to a hospital for what would be diagnosed as a severe form of pneumonia. His fate is unknown.

For thirty days the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took no action to alert the world of the impending danger of a deadly new disease. Those thirty days shook the world.

A Marxist-Leninist regime that was built on the bodies of 60 million Chinese since its founding in 1949 lied to the world and repressed medical doctors who tried to warn of a new highly contagious virus.

Why have American scientists not demanded a full accounting from Beijing for its bat coronavirus research?

In the days ahead, tens of thousands of people would die, and the entire world would be thrown into economic chaos.

This is nothing less than a crime against humanity facilitated by CCP influence within the World Health Organization (WHO), a United Nations agency with the primary mission of preparing to fight just the kind of disease outbreak that took place. The WHO and its leadership turned out to be worse than useless during the single crisis for which the agency exists. Instead, the WHO served as an agent for spreading dangerously false information by the CCP.

U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to cut off the United States’s annual $400 million in funding for the WHO as the epidemic forced the shutdown of the American and global economies in a bid to mitigate the spread of the disease.

“The world is shut down,” the president said. “Nobody has ever seen anything like this. The entire world is shut down.”

Only Information Age communications that emerged within the nearly totalitarian control system in China prevented the CCP from completely covering up the epidemic and perhaps inflicting even greater global damage.

Social media posts by Wuhan doctors sounded the alarm early on in the crisis. The clues allowed Western intelligence agencies to pick up the first signs. A brief period of time during the earliest days also allowed official and unofficial media to reveal what was going on. That was abruptly shut down in January when the CCP imposed harsh censorship and restrictions, including jailing unofficial bloggers in Wuhan who were telling the world of the horrors inflicted upon a city of 11 million people.

The party under Xi Jinping and his functionaries, from the highest levels in Beijing down to local officials in Wuhan, lied and deceived their own people. Then they launched a campaign of deception and disinformation. They failed to inform the world of the outbreak of a deadly new disease caused by a new coronavirus derived from bats, animals that were the subject of extensive research after the first outbreak in 2003 of the disease called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The new virus is called SARS-Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2).

After first covering up the outbreak by attributing it to poor sanitary conditions at a wild animal market in Wuhan, Chinese authorities launched a disinformation campaign asserting that the virus had originated outside China. Official propaganda mouthpieces said the virus was created in the United States and spread by U.S. Army soldiers who attended a military sporting competition in Wuhan in October 2019.

President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo denied the lies but did not condemn them over fears that China was preparing to pull out of a landmark trade agreement with the United States that requires China to purchase $250 billion in American goods. The president and senior officials exposed the campaign as a desperate effort by Beijing to deflect international attention from its criminal mishandling of the virus outbreak.

The People’s Republic of China and the CCP that has ruled it with an iron fist since 1949 carried out the cover-up in a premeditated fashion. Like the Soviet Union that spawned it, the CCP was built, as the Russian writer Aleksander Solzhenitsyn said of the Soviet Union, on lies and deception. It thrived on lies and has held on to power with lies.

Communist leaders constantly harp on bogus assertions that China is mistreated by the international community and is not recognized as a great nation. The truth is that the damage the CCP has inflicted upon the world proves without a doubt that the institution is a force for evil that must be replaced with a new and open system of government.

For the United States, the CCP has shown through its missteps that anything related to it – its representatives, its controlled businesses, its fellow travelers, and its apologists – should no longer be welcome inside free Western institutions built on trust.

As part of a strategy of seeking global supremacy under Xi’s Chinese Dream, the CCP is exploiting the global health crisis to advance its agenda. For Beijing, achieving global supremacy is intimately linked to seeking the ultimate destruction of the United States of America – the main obstacle to that goal.

THE OUTBREAK

The Wuhan Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention is located about three miles from what many Chinese and American scientists believe is the epicenter of the virus outbreak – one of the many notorious wild animal markets. The Wuhan Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market is a source of exotic fresh meat from animals such as civet cats and pangolins, scaly anteaters considered delicacies by China’s ruling elites.

The Wuhan CDC is home to a laboratory staffed by a researcher named Tian Junhua. Tian burst into prominence in China in December 2019 just as the deadly coronavirus was attacking its first victims. State-controlled propaganda outlets, both print and video, lionized Tian as a dedicated researcher committed to finding vaccines for deadly bat coronaviruses. He was shown wearing protective gear inside caves in China, catching bats and taking swabs from their mouths.

The documentary revealed that Tian at one point in his field research was exposed to bat urine inside a cave because he had failed to wear protective gear. To avoid contracting a disease, the researcher self-quarantined for fourteen days – the same time period now being used around the world to protect people exposed to the new coronavirus. How did Tian know that the possible incubation period for a SARS-like bat virus to infect a person was fourteen days? What kind of research was he doing on deadly bat coronaviruses at the CDC’s Level 2 security laboratory, a facility lacking the kind of equipment needed for handling deadly pathogens? Was he working on the recently discovered bat coronavirus now dubbed SARS-COV-2?

These and other questions remain unanswered by the CCP. And many in the international scientific community appear to be running interference for the party by dismissing all public discussion about Chinese laboratory research on bat coronaviruses as a conspiracy theory.

Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insists that the idea of the virus leaking from an unsecure Chinese laboratory is no conspiracy theory. “It should be no surprise that we’ve taken a keen interest in that, and we’ve had a lot of intelligence [agencies] take a hard look at that,” he said. “I would just say at this point it’s inconclusive, although the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural. But we don’t know for certain.”

The remarks to reporters in April were the first time a senior American leader had disclosed that the deadly virus may have escaped from a Chinese laboratory.

The market China claimed was the source of the outbreak remained open throughout December despite doctors in Wuhan linking the outbreak there.

State Department cables from January 2018 revealed that American scientific diplomats issued several warnings about the lack of security at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. One of the cables, publicized by the Washington Post, disclosed a “serious shortage” of trained personnel at the institute’s new French-built lab that were needed to “safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”

The origin of the virus remains couched in CCP secrecy. Chinese government spokesmen sidestep questions about the virus’s origin by saying the question is a matter for scientists to investigate. Why then has no action been taken by Chinese authorities? And why have American scientists not demanded a full accounting from Beijing for its bat coronavirus research? The silence has raised suspicions that the CCP has played a malevolent role in the crisis.

For several weeks in early 2020, the disease was called Wuhan pneumonia throughout China. Then in March 2020, Chinese Communist Party authorities realized the use of the city name was fueling the growing international outrage and resentment toward the People’s Republic of China that for a second time since 2003 was inflicting a deadly global disease outbreak on the world.

Using its political influence, the CCP pressured the WHO to give the disease the more technically neutral name COVID-19, short for “coronavirus disease 2019.”

In 2003, SARS created the first Chinese pandemic as a result of a bat coronavirus. Although the origins of that virus also remain murky, the official explanation for that outbreak was that somehow the microbe had made the leap from cave-hanging nocturnal mammals into humans, possibly through a civet, one of the wild animal meat market delicacies.

The pandemic in 2003 was less devastating than the coronavirus crisis now spreading around the globe. It turns out that the new virus has a unique feature: those infected can easily spread it for a period up to fourteen days without symptoms.

The new coronavirus outbreak that began in Wuhan mushroomed into a deadly epidemic throughout China and then spread to the rest of the world. It struck with a vengeance not seen since the influenza pandemic in 1918 that claimed the lives of at least 50 million people.

By April 10, 2020, more than 1.6 million people had tested positive, with a death count of nearly 100,000 people.

U.S. intelligence agencies believe the Chinese lied about the numbers of people infected and those who had died, that the true numbers are orders of magnitude larger. An analysis by Derek Scissors, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, estimates that at least 2.9 million people were stricken in China alone, causing at least 136,000 deaths.

It is important that blame for the current crisis be placed squarely at the feet of the ruling CCP, an institution that has perpetuated its reviled rule for decades through a combination of raw power and repression. It is backed by the connivance of foreign politicians, business leaders, and journalists who refuse to recognize the inherent evil of the Chinese communist system. The fawning over this revolutionary anti-American regime is similar to liberal progressive praise for the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991.

If there could be a single bright spot amid the death and disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic, it is that this incident has laid bare the dangers of continued economic and political engagement with the CCP.

It is now clear the United States must shake off any past delusions about the so-called Chinese economic miracle – a success story built largely on the massive theft of American technology. America must clearly recognize that Communist China today poses the most significant threat to world peace, freedom, and stability. Further, now is the time to declare that the only solution to the problem is for the Chinese Communist Party, like its progenitor the Soviet Union, to be quickly dispatched to the dustbin of history, as the great American President Ronald Reagan once said of that earlier evil empire.

December 1, 2019, marked the day the first known case of COVID-19 was discovered. It was revealed by a group of twenty-nine Chinese scientists writing in the British medical journal The Lancet. Another news outlet, the Chinese government-controlled Caixin, dates the first case to December 15. The Wall Street Journal, before its cadre of reporters was ousted from China, provided further details and linked the first known case to December 10.

Around the same time as that first reported case, another man presented at a Wuhan hospital with pneumonia-like symptoms. The man would be the first of several cases linked by authorities to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. Five days later, his wife caught the disease. The couple provided the first clue that the highly contagious virus could be transmitted between people.

This is one of the most important reasons the pandemic is directly caused by the Chinese Communist Party. It was the most important piece of information that could have prevented global devastation.

In The Lancet, the twenty-nine Chinese scientists examined what were suggested as the first forty-one victims of the coronavirus, including the first patient who became ill on December 1. The paper notes that the research was funded by the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission. The authors were doctors from Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan that handled the forty-one cases.

The study became a key part of the CCP’s initial propaganda campaign about the virus outbreak – that the disease began at the market. Yet the study also contained the seeds that would eventually unravel the market origin theory of the virus.

Trusting false Chinese data in the early days of this crisis has been lethal for countries foolish enough to do so, including the United States.

According to the study, most of the first patients stricken with the disease had a “shared history of exposure to Huanan seafood market” – the wet market that trafficked in exotic animals. Thus, the scientists were pointing to the food market as the problem and away from the nea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Statement
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Series Page
• Copyright