This is an abridged interview with jurist Laurent Pech, Professor of European Law, Jean Monnet Chair of European Public Law (2014-17), and Head of the Law and Politics Department at Middlesex University London. Professor Pech identifies rapid autocrisation in a number of EU states, particularly Hungary and Poland, where the Rule of Law has been undermined in a three stage process that has been exacerbated by the emergency conditions of the pandemic.
On Mandatory Hotel Quarantines
Technically it has always been possible for national authorities to restrict EU free movement rights on a number of grounds, such as public health. But EU law is normally opposed to collective measures. So you can only restrict on a number of grounds the exercise of free movement on a case by case basis. And you must always comply with the principle of proportionality, so you cannot impose disproportionate measures in the name of public health. You have to have a compelling reasons and you have to demonstrate them on a case by case basis. I’m not familiar with the measures contemplated by the Irish government …
Without knowing the details of any general policy of containing EU citizens or more generally, [a mandatory hotel quarantine for] EU residents, regardless of citizenship, in my view, would not be compatible with the law, as I understand it.
What I can tell you is that public health can only be used as a grant of derogation for individual cases, not for the blanket prohibition on arrivals from other EU countries. I don’t think … the European Commission, would let it fly.
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I’m not familiar with any [other] EU country … which is essentially preventing residents in the EU from travelling as a collectively speaking, as a country, imposing on EU residents, trying to get to another EU country and then the mandatory quarantine.
On the Rule of Law
I can tell you what the Rule of Law is in EU law in the law of the European Convention on Human Rights, in fact, in our Constitution, constitutional law … the case law has defined the rule of law quite compellingly. Why are we debating these days the definition of the rule of law?
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the concept is being challenged, especially from current authorities in Warsaw and Budapest. The argument is the Rule of Law is too vague and meaningless. It does not exist. And it’s just kind of an intellectual subterfuge to impose neoliberal policies or whatever. But as a matter of EU law, actually, the Rule of Law can be defined. It’s normally defined, understood as a set of legal principles, such as the principle of legal certainty, the principle of judicial review before independent courts, respect for human rights, these kind of principles.
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The Rule of Law is to be found in the EU treaties and has been exhaustively defined both in EU legislation and in the case of the European Court of Justice.
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The essence of the Rule of Law is that we have rules to prevent the abuse of power so we can do something about the abuse of power. We can fight abuse of power, abuse of public power both. But to do that, we need independent consent, which is why one of the components of the Rule of Law is independent courts, where you can assert your rights against the public authorities. So the essence of the Rule of Law, is essentially that even the king, even the president, is subject to the law. There are no distinctions; everyone can assert a right against the public authorities. So this is the essence of the Rule of Law even before the EU itself was created.
It’s one of the many checks and balances on what we can call unhealthy democracy … certain countries in the European Union have gone down a path where, as for the Rule of Law being challenged in its conception, in its very existence, also other type of checks and balances such as freedom of the press. I mean, it looks like that once one is gone. Then the other one follows.
Hungary and Poland
In the case of Hungary and in the case of Poland, essentially, we have a new breed of autocrats. They’re not like the old autocrats, where you see tanks one morning in the streets and then a clear change of regime in the afternoon. It’s much more difficult and they’re much smarter than the previous generation. So I have used the concept of Rule of Law, backsliding of democracy and the Rule of Law; I use the term backsliding to describe what has been happening in the past ten years in these two countries.
To summarize briefly the process … They only need to get free and fairly elected once and then as soon as they’re elected their job is to make sure to rig the system, to undermine the checks and balances before the next legislative elections. How do you do that? … they tend to always apply the same playbook or the same cooking recipe. The first two steps you’re going to take is you’re going to capture of the Supreme Court or the constitutional court of the country.
You either purge the current membership of the Supreme Court or you appoint new judges to the Supreme Court … You don’t care whether you comply with the Constitution, because by the time you have captured the Court, then you can get the new court to argue that what you want is not a violation of the Constitution…
At the same time, what we’ve seen in Hungary, Poland and elsewhere is that while you are violating the Constitution in plain sight, you have to capture the public broadcaster. Or do you do that? If you have a parliamentary majority it is very easy. You can violate the Constitution and you can just pretend it’s not a violation of the Constitution. You’re going to appoint a new board and you’re going to appoint a new president and you’re going to use the taxpayers’ money essentially also to bully or try to corrupt or bribe the private media outlets as well into submission. Why is it important to capture the media? Because you need to shape the public narrative while you are openly violating the Constitution.
Scapegoats
You have to explain or try to convince the people that yes, maybe, yes, we are violating the Constitution … but we are doing this in the name of the people. And you are going to convince them this is what you want and then you going to use this some scapegoats in the process. So what you see, what we’ve seen in Poland, Hungary and elsewhere is that they always have a huge need for scapegoating.
So it’s going to be George Soros … you name a new thing and then they change. They rotate. … It was perhaps worth stressing that you have a change of scapegoat every six months to twelve months when you have exhausted one you need another scapegoat … then it could be also academics. So it could be a corrupted journalist, it could be Communist judges. You need to smear, essentially, the guardians of the Rule of Law. So once you have captured the Supreme Court and the media, you’re going to use scapegoating … You’re going to then bully into submission, order what are called guardians of the Rule of Law, guardians of democracy, the press being one of the key checks on power.
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What I’ve seen emerge in the past few years, is that to avoid European criticism, what they do, they use proxies … what do I mean by proxy? A fake association, a fake NGO which indirectly or directly is given taxpayers’ money … You use a story as a way of distracting the people from the destruction of checks and balances.
The new would-be-autocrats are much more difficult to fight because a lot of time by the time people wake up it’s a bit too late … the media sector is gone, judicial branch is gone. And then obviously they’re ready for the next elections with the press either bullied into submission or brought to bankruptcy.
The Last Steps
One of the last steps in this kind of Rule of Law backsliding process is to radically change the rules of the game. So by the time you have the next legislative election, they’re going to have reformed completely the electoral code. They’re going to capture the electoral commission as well. So it means that they can essentially rig the elections … usually it’s enough to control the ecosystem of the public media. But then also, if need be, you can also rig electoral results in a specific constituency … Also, remember, if you have captured the judicial branch, it means that there’s no place for you to go to challenge the results of the election, even if the results have been gained through unlawful means
You can you still have elections. Yes, the opposition can win … but it’s virtually impossible to win in these conditions.
There is no electoral level playing field anymore. Within three, four years, the system has been completely captured … Hungary is no longer a democracy. I expect Poland to be another electoral taken custody within the next two years.
In fact, Poland is quite dramatic in a way. They had two presidential elections last year. Both of them were completely unconstitutional. I mean, there is not even a room for discussion. They were held in unconstitutional conditions.
It’s possibly what I call the authoritarian gangrene is going to spread to other EU countries because people are watching, people are paying attention and they’re saying, well, look, it’s working, it’s working fine for Orban and Kaczyński, so why not me? Why not implement this recipe as well in my own country?
In Hungary the main newspaper, which is not in the control by the government, now has sixty defamation lawsuits pending against. Essentially they’re trying to bankrupt these main opposition newspaper through lawsuits … then you’re going to punish judges if the lawsuits are wrongly decided, so to speak. In addition to that, you have the death threats, that you have a smear campaign. So much so that essentially, if you’re a critical journalist, then you may have no choice but to leave your own country if you want to pursue your profession. What’s happening to journalists is also happening across the board to judges, lawyers, academics. And so we are talking here essentially about a return to the old fashioned de facto one party state. And so I’m afraid we have to be aware of the gravity of the situation
The Silver Lining
The silver lining is that Poland and Hungary are the two most extreme cases of autocratic nations, at least in the EU … But maybe we’re going to get there slowly but surely in terms of third possible candidate in the EU. Now, we’ve been talking about Slovenia in the past few weeks because of the parameters of the attacks essentially trying to take control of the Slovenian state agency. And this Slovenian prime minister is indirectly funded by Orban. So essentially Orban is trying to export his model into the Balkans and also into Slovenia. We’ve been talking about the situation in Romania and Bulgaria for quite some time. Malta has also been in the news following the assassination of a journalist who was investigating corruption cases.
I would say some political entrepreneurs are looking at how successful Orban and Kaczyński have been. Some of them are wondering whether, in fact, this is a good way forward, not for ideological reasons, just possibly this autocratic playbook is a good way of wining power and retaining it.
The Situation in the U.K.
Poland and Hungary are just the two most advanced cases in the EU. I have personal worries about the situation in the U.K. if we leave the EU for a minute … there are clear indications that the ruling majority in the UK is trying to dismantle or capture the checks and balances. So essentially they’re trying to annihilate any accountability, including changes to elections. Usually when you see changes being contemplated regarding the electoral commission or electoral rules or IDs to be required to vote and then surprise, surprise, those most disadvantaged by the new electoral rules are those not voting for the ruling party. So this is when you have to get worried. And also in the U.K. we’ve been talking about changing judicial review to make it more difficult to challenge that. And we’ve been talking also about possibly reducing the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.
[During the pandemic] I’ve seen an excessive use of secondary legislation. So the parliament has essentially abdicated its role as the key legislator and the government has taken over defining or restricting free movement, something which normally can only be done by the parliament. So I would say this is also part of a potential authoritarian pattern. So we need to really make clear, because once the government is in the business of de facto legislating in place of the parliament, then essentially abuse of power can easily be committed. And if at the same time judicial review is undermined, then you find yourself essentially without any avenue to challenge the excessive use of power. I’m not a libertarian myself, but certainly as a lawyer, I have strong concerns when I see the government essentially becoming the de facto parliament in the name of the Covid-19 emergency.
Press Freedoms
So there is ongoing work in the EU to make it more difficult for politicians or oligarchs, these regimes, to sue or bully (journalists) into submission.
We need to go back to what was the case in the nineteen eighties through strong anti-concentration rules in the media market … if we want to have media pluralism, we need to have a properly functioning media market. You cannot have dominant players essentially asphyxiating the market. So you need to prevent abuse of a dominant position … if we had a well-functioning media market, we would be protected from public abuse of power, but also prevent abuse of power. And the abuse of power does not necessarily come from overbearing governments, it can also come from overbearing private actors. Think of Amazon, think of Google. There is a lot of work to be done in this regard. So concentration of power, whether private or public must be constrained, must be restricted and subject to the law applied by independent courts.
Covid-19 and Authoritarianism
Covid-19 has been kind of a blessing in disguise for these autocratic regimes …. giving them even more powers than they used to have … an exceptional situation calls for exceptional powers. But the problem is, once these kind of governments get accustomed to exceptional powers, then they don’t want to give it back …
So then that’s going to be the next battle as soon as the covid-19 situation is under control. I mean, we need to make sure that parliaments everywhere get back into the business of what they’re supposed to be doing in the first place, which is legislating and controlling the executive these days. What we’re seeing is just an executive without being subject to any meaningful scrutiny from any national parliaments anywhere. So this is actually the widespread issue.
Fear plays a major role in influencing the decisions we make and the actions we engage in. Research has shown that there are sound evolutionary reasons for this. The selection pressures from these types of danger have resulted in domain-specificity in the reactivity of the fear system, meaning that the system has evolved special sensitivity toward such dangers. However, ‘not all human fearsare instinctual and hardwired—we need to learn what to be afraid of.’[i] While this capacity is critical in helping humans deal with the different environments in which they find themselves and which present different sources of ‘danger’, it can also be abused by those seeking to advance their own interests at our expense.
Harnessing Fear in the name of ‘Sales’
The power of fear has long been recognised as a potential source of profit by the business world. Preying on anxieties and ‘creating’ new ones when required to suit their needs, marketing departments have managed to exploit human fears to successfully boost client sales. As Kali Halloway writes: ‘Listerine’s 1920s ads turned bad breath from a fairly common minor flaw into halitosis, a condition that made you into a social pariah, sexless and alone,’ – leading to an increase in sales in just seven years from $115,000 to over $8 million. ‘In the 1930s, Lysol – a product we now know should be kept as far from genitalia as possible – was marketed as a douche (and more covertly, as feminine birth control), in ads that basically told women no one would ever love them with their awful natural-smelling vaginas.’[ii]
Indeed, even the threat posed by pandemics have provided grist to the mill for opportunistic marketing teams, keen to leverage the fear generated in their diffusion. According to Barry Shafe, the former head of Cussons product development and man behind the launch of Carex in the UK during the SARS epidemic, ‘background noise of pandemic fear was all that was needed to drive consumers to antibacterial soap.’ There was no need to even emphasise the element of fear in their advertising for the project as ‘real fear sells better than invented fear.’[iii]
While the manipulation of the public’s purchasing choices through exploiting the evolutionary programmed and adapted prism of the human ‘fear emotion’, is at the very least questionable, it is only the tip of the iceberg in this respect.
Ad extracted from a scanned copy of the pulp magazine Weird Tales from 1950,
Fear and Hatred in Times of Plague
In times of plague and pestilence, fear is an omnipresent companion. This fear all too frequently translates into a desire to find someone to blame for the danger with which we are faced. The greater the threat to people’s safety and the less control they can exercise over it, the greater the risk that blame for their dilemma will be ascribed to an ‘outside’ group, generally those who are not members of one’s community or nation, no matter how transparently illogical the reasoning.
As Dr. Jonathan Quick writes:
We are all afraid of death. We respond to the fear of epidemic disease by wanting to blame someone else. Anytime a threat arises, we want to blame the “other,” those not like “us.” At the outbreak of the 1918 Spanish flu, Americans blamed “the Hun”. AIDS was blamed on gay men.[iv]
During the Black Death, which struck Europe in the mid-14th century, there was widespread fear and panic as this unknown disease wreaked havoc throughout Europe. Although communities around Europe often turned upon those seen as outsiders, particularly other nationalities, the Jewish community became the primary focus of this fear. This resulted in horrific instances such as the massacres of Jewish people in Frankfurt and Brussels and the extermination of the Jewish populations in Narbonne and Carcassonne.[v]
Representation of a massacre of the Jews in 1349 Antiquitates Flandriae (Royal Library of Belgium manuscript 1376/77).
‘Fake News’
The predilection to blame outsiders, the ‘other’ for the spread of infectious diseases, is further aggravated by the propagation and dissemination of false rumours. The author Maryn McKenna, who researched this phenomenon during the Ebola crisis came up with a term for this, ‘Ebolanoia’. Tracking public response to Ebola in the U.S., McKenna related how individuals and businesses that had been incorrectly identified as having been exposed to Ebola suffered as a result.
False rumors caused a small, long-standing, family-owned bridal shop in Ohio to close. Rumors forced healthy school personnel and students in North Carolina and Texas who had visited West Africa to stay out of school, even though they were thousands of miles from the nearest Ebola outbreak. Misinformation fomented harassment of African-born students as well as other acts of fear and discrimination.[vi]
The anti-Chinese messages currently being circulated in the mainstream media and through social media are generally linked by their proponents to a desire to hold China as accountable for both the spread and deadly impact of Covid-19. While some of these inferences have been less direct, casting suspicion and opprobrium on China and the Chinese people by association, others have given free rein to their racist impulses, such as the French newspaper that proudly displayed the headline ‘Yellow Alert’.[vii]
Dubious as these assertions are in the first place, they are made even worse by the conflation of ordinary Chinese people with the purported misdeeds of China, which has led to serious racist incidents and discrimination against Chinese people around the world. Furthermore, it behoves us to remember that the racist slandering of Chinese people is not occurring in an historical vacuum. It, in fact, stands on the shoulders on a substantial corpus of anti-Chinese racism that has been present for well over a hundred years.
‘Yellow Peril’
The likelihood that a specific outside group – ethnic, religious, etc – will be stigmatised and discriminated against, as well as the severity of the reaction, will be influenced by the history of how these people have been regarded in the past.
As a child growing up, I remember hearing the phrase ‘yellow peril’. I had no idea what this term meant or referred to apart from the fact that it in some way indicated a potential threat. However, like so many phrases that slipped into everyday usage, divorced from their original context, the phrase ‘yellow peril’ has an insidious and disturbing history. As Vince Cable, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, writes:
In the early years of the 20th century there was a deep fear among western societies, expressed both in politics and popular writing, that they were in danger of being overwhelmed by the Chinese: the “Yellow Peril”. Children’s comics were full of the exploits of the evil Dr Fu Manchu, a Bond-type villain bent on world domination. Even serious writers such as Jack London perpetuated the myth. In 1911, the British Home Office circulated material which warned of a “vast and compulsive armageddon to decide who is to be a master of the world; the white or yellow men”.[viii]
Anti-Chinese violence in Britain and the ‘Empire’
19th and early 20th century society in Britain overtly displayed its anti-Chinese sentiments. Racist depictions of Chinese were widespread in the media and this had a knock-on effect, impacting how they were dealt with by the judicial system and in other areas of daily life.[ix] Anti-Chinese feeling even led to acts of violent aggression against the Chinese community. Discussing the current racist violence against the Chinese in Britain, Suresh Grover of The Monitoring Groupexplains, ‘[T]he experience of racism against the Chinese community is not a new feature in British society” with “reports of race riots targeting Chinese businesses and laundries as early as 1919.’[x]
This racist attitude towards Chinese people was rife throughout the ‘Empire’. Schools were segregated in Victoria during the latter part of the 19th and early 20th century[xi] and in British Columbia Chinese Canadians were subject to social, economic and political segregation.[xii] According to OmiSoore Dryden the James Robinson Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies in the Dalhousie University Faculty of Medicine:
Anti-Chinese racism has a long history in Canada — the Chinese head tax, the Exclusion Act, just to name two. Chinese people were often referred to as the “Yellow Peril” — a plague, something that would bring destruction to white people and colonial Canada.[xiii]
These racist incidents and stereotyping of Chinese was based on a sentiment of ‘white’ superiority over other races that justified a discriminatory treatment of these people. This feeling of racial superiority is perfectly captured in the following quotation from Edmund Barton, the first prime minister of Australia, when discussing the Immigration Restriction Bill in 1901:
There is no racial equality. There is basic inequality. These races are, in comparison with white races … unequal and inferior. The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman. There is deep-set difference, and we see no prospect and no promise of its ever being effaced. Nothing in this world can put these two races upon an equality. Nothing we can do by cultivation, by refinement, or by anything else will make some races equal to others.
Anti-Chinese Violence and Segregation in 19th and 20th century U.S.
An 1886 advertisement for ‘Magic Washer’ detergent: ‘The Chinese Must Go’.
It was racist stereotypes such as these that led to widespread discrimination and segregation of Chinese people, particularly in predominantly ‘Anglo-Saxon’ countries. In the U.S. for example there were many instances of white people violently assaulting Chinese communities. In 1885, 150 armed white miners forcibly expulsed Chinese immigrations out of Rock Springs (Wyoming), murdering 28 people and burning the homes and businesses of members of the Chinese community. This massacre went unpunished. This incident, however, was only one of many. As Brayden Goyette writes, in the 1870s and 1880s, there were 153 anti-Chinese riots that broke out in the American West.[xiv] According to the historian James Mohr:
…in Honolulu, doctors, colonial administrators, and the general US colonial population lamented the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1900 because it prompted fears that the city would become associated with Asia, where plague was then present… Ultimately, the public health authorities burned contaminated buildings, but fires spread beyond their control and consumed most of Chinatown in flames. Similar anti-Chinese responses occurred in San Francisco during the plague epidemic of 1900–04, when Chinese-specific quarantines were enacted.[xv]
The insecure environment within which the Chinese found themselves led to a process of self-segregation by the Chinese to safeguard their communities and families. As John Kuo Wei Tchen, chair of public history and humanities at Rutgers University and co-founder of the Museum of Chinese in America in New York explains, ‘[T]he Chinatowns we know today — in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles — are really the consequence of the exclusion laws, which created the conditions, between racism and the law itself, for segregated, isolated Chinatowns.’[xvi]
The continuing plague of Anti-Chinese Racism
According to Suresh Grover, the 2001 Foot and Mouth crisis, saw a distinct increase in racist incidents against the Chinese community ‘due to the unsubstantiated smear that the disease had spread from a Chinese restaurant using illegally imported meat.’[xvii]
A 2009 review on the racism experienced by Chinese people, conducted by the University of Hull and The Monitoring Group (TMG), concluded that the Chinese community was subjected to significant level of anti-Chinese racism in Britain:
The UK Chinese people are subject to substantial levels of racist abuse, assault and hostility. The types of racist abuse suffered by the UK’s Chinese people range from racist name-calling to damage to property and businesses, arson, and physical attacks sometimes involving hospitalisation and murder.[xviii]
This racism can be quite insidious and permeate virtually every area of daily life, even where one might least expect it. Writing about the racism experienced by Chinese people, the actress Elizabet Chan describes how on her first role, ‘the Bafta-winning director chuckled to everyone on set that I’d trained in kung fu,’ and how in her field ‘any character who speaks in some kind of dodgy east Asian accent is considered hilarious.’[xix]
The racism that continues to permeate is inappropriately nourished by the racist tropes of our past. As Sophie Couchman, a curator at the Chinese Museum in Victoria state, states,
It is disappointing that the same language is still used, certain words we used in the 19th century to talk about Chinese immigration – ‘influx’ and ‘swamped’ – and it’s all these sort of monsoonal words.
Covid-19 and upsurge in anti-Chinese racism
The current Covid-19 crisis has seen a dramatic rise in racist assaults on Chinese people globally as a result of their stigmatisation on traditional as well as newer social media. A major contributing factor in this rise has been the reckless use of derogatory references to China by elected politicians. The most egregious example of this is of course the U.S. president, Donald Trump, who on numerous occasions referred to ‘coronavirus’ as the ‘Chinese virus’.[xx]
Trump has NO empathy or compassion.
This is what he looks like during an EPIC crisis that is #COVID19
In the U.K., there have been numerous incidents of violence perpetrated against Chinese people as well as other East Asian people mis-identified by their assailants as being of Chinese origin. Reported incidents include,
confirmed reports of incidents of serious assaults against Chinese students by large groups of white youth …abuse in supermarkets and Chinese owned Take-away businesses, racist graffiti on shop windows and physical violence on the streets or around international student hostels… a Japanese person … greeted as Chinese and then deliberately urinated upon … the attack on the young man from Singapore who was beaten up in February by youths who punched him in the face before shouting out ‘coronavirus’ .. on Oxford Street, one of the busiest streets in the world.[xxi]
Ireland has not been immune to this reaction on the part of its citizens, as was evident in the racist attack on a Chinese restaurant in Galway.[xxii] The anti-Chinese reaction, provoked by Covid-19 has also been widespread in Asia, where restaurants in South Korea displayed ‘No Chinese allowed’ signs in the early stages of the pandemic, Twitter users in Japan initiated the hashtag #ChineseDontComeToJapan trend and over 125,000 people in Singapore, added their names to a petition urging their government to prevent Chinese nationals from entering the city-state.[xxiii]
Promotion of anti-Chinese racism
The perfect storm of victimising the ‘other’, arises the ‘desire’ to blame the other for one’s predicament is seized upon by ideologues to promote their objectives or, in the case of political, business and religious leaders to cover up their own inadequate or misdirected efforts to tackle the threat. The willingness of prominent politicians with large constituencies of ‘followers’, to promote a ‘Blame China’ narrative has contributed significantly to the upsurge in the targeting of the UK’s Chinese and South East Asian communities.[xxiv]
There are two principal reasons why political and other major economic and social figures in the Global North are seizing upon this opportunity to stigmatize China.
At the broader level, the emergence of China, particularly in terms of its’ economic and technical expansion, has created unease and anxiety amongst many in both the US and Europe, as they fear their position of economic and political dominance is being threatened. As the journalist Patrick Cockburnobserves while:
Many politically palatable reasons… will be advanced in the coming months… the real charge against China is one of effectiveness. It has shown itself more competent than other powerful states in dealing with two world crises: the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic of 2019-20.[xxv]
A secondary and, in the case of leaders such as Trump who have completely mishandled the Covid-19 crisis, more immediate goal is to indict, criminalise and convict China in the court of public opinion, thus distracting from their own ineptitude in a desperate effort to revitalise their political prospects. Now, rather than being seen as the principal architects of the disastrous response to Covid-19 which has resulted in many thousands of death, political leaders in Covid-19 ravaged countries can depict themselves as righteous defenders of their nation’s security and safety against the new ‘yellow peril’.
Fudging Statistics
One of the major excuses for the political onslaught against China has been the alleged fudging of statistics on the number of fatalities and case incidents in Wuhan and how this may have impacted upon the measures the U.S. and Europe implemented to tackle the virus.[xxvi] The thesis appears to be that if more cases and more deaths had been reported early on by the Chinese authorities, this would have conveyed the seriousness of the threat to the political leaders in the U.S. and Europe. The authorities in these countries would then have taken the threat of Covid-19 more seriously and ensured appropriate measures were in place to minimise its impact on their countries and citizens.
Covid-19 was a new virus and therefore required a certain amount of time to be identified and its exact nature determined. It is more than possible that the number of fatalities and cases was greater in China than recorded and that its virulence was therefore underestimated initially. It is also likely that at the earlier stages many cases were not identified and that it was circulating earlier and more widely than initially thought. We have seen in the past week or so, reports emerging from several countries including, inter alia, France and the U.S, that cases were present well in advance of earlier estimations.[xxvii]Ireland probably also had cases prior to initially believed, as this coronavirus might actually have reached Irish shores as early as last year.[xxviii]
It is clear that if there was a significant excedent of cases and fatalities above those initially communicated by China to the international community that this could be argued to have made the new virus appear less threatening that it actually was. However, the reports on the level of fatalities and cases received by the international community were the same for all. Yet, despite this, countries such as Viet Nam, Singapore, South Korea, New Zealand, Cuba, and several others were able to introduce measures to effectively minimise the spread and impact of this coronavirus, others failed miserably.
A case in point is that of Viet Nam. In Viet Nam, as of May 7th, there were only 288 confirmed cases with no reported fatalities.[xxix] This low incidence of cases has been achieved despite the fact that Viet Nam has a population of over 90 million, shares a lengthy border with China, has a relatively weak health sector, compared to wealthier countries, and the inability to carry out widespread testing as was the case in South Korea. Critical to the success of Viet Nam in tackling Covid-19 has been the stringent and effective measures imposed by the authorities there, a united political will and the social discipline and unity of the Vietnamese people along with building on the lessons learned from dealing with previous epidemics.[xxx]
This would appear to indicate that irrespective of the validity of the charges against China with respect to their transmission of the number of cases and fatalities, the information provided by China was sufficient for appropriate prevention and containment measures to be implemented.
International Fudging?
Fellipe Lopes/Cassandra Voices
Furthermore, there is reason to doubt much of the figures that have been reported internationally on both fatalities and incidence of cases.
Ireland has encountered several difficulties in providing reliable and up-to-date statistics on Covid-19 in Ireland and adjustments have already had to be made to previously supplied totals. Ireland has also had issues with respect to delays in testing[xxxi] resulting in late updating of coronavirus figures, false negatives[xxxii] and the tragic case of an 89-year-old man who died of the virus before even receiving his results[xxxiii], which would appear to confirm the belief that we will see more amendments to the current totals further down the road. The accuracy of the numbers provided of people infected has also been criticised by members of the health service involved in treating patients directly.[xxxiv]
There are serious grounds on which to question the figures that the United Kingdom has reported. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) in the UK estimated that the actual number of deaths in England and Wales up to April 17, and registered to April 25 were some 23,000, some 6,375 higher than the figures by NHS England and Public Health Wales collectively, which were only documenting hospital deaths.[xxxv] However, on the 28th of April, the day before the UK started to include non-hospital Covid-19 related deaths, the Health Ministry announced the total deaths for the UK were 21,092 in hospital settings, still less than the number provided by the ONS for 11 days earlier and which only covered England and Wales[xxxvi]. The Financial Times in a report, which generated significant attention, estimated that, in fact, the actual death total in the UK would be over twice the figure reported.[xxxvii]
A further issue arises in trying to engage in international comparison of available statistics, in particular the fatality rate per confirmed cases. As it currently stands on May 7th, the number of confirmed cases in Ireland amounts to 22,385, with a reported mortality total of 1,403.[xxxviii] This is a mortality rate of just under 6.3 % relative to the number of confirmed cases. In the U.K., the total confirmed cases on the same day was 215,858, with 29,958 deaths recorded. This equates to a mortality rate of 13.9% of the identified cases. While allowance needs to be made for the fact that countries are at different stage of the Covid-19 curve, this can hardly fully explain the dramatic differences in these statistics.
Cooperation and Respect
As Patrick Cockburn writes, the approach of the Trump administration in promoting a form of cold war against China is highly irresponsible given the need at this time for a ‘global medical and economic response… to counter a virus that has spread from Tajikistan to the upper Amazon and can only be suppressed or contained by international action.’[xxxix]
It is not only in tackling Covid-19 now that such cooperation is essential. If we are to ensure the global protection of humanity, of all people wherever they may live, we need to establish an international framework through which we can all contribute to the future protection of our species, in an atmosphere of mutual respect free from discrimination and racist slurs.
As OmiSoore Dryden remarks,
…racist stereotype causes harm, not only to Chinese people and to Asian people, but to all of us. Viruses are not caused by a specific people. Gay people and African people did not create HIV. Chinese people did not create SARS or COVID-19. These types of racist stereotypes are diversionary tactics that do nothing to stop the spread of viruses.[xl]
The Way Forward?
Writing in 2004, Christopher Duncan, a zoologist and Susan Scott, a social historian, noted that since 1970, some 34 years, [A]t least 30 previously unknown infectious diseases for which there is no fully effective treatment have appeared… more than are known to have emerged in the preceding 3,000 years.”[xli]
The zoologist Peter Daszak, president of the New York – based EcoHealth Alliance, has researched coronaviruses and inter-species transmission of viruses in China. In 2013, he suggested that given the ability of coronaviruses to rapidly move between species, that it would be advisable to made an investment of about $1.5bn. which he estimated would enable the discovery of ‘all the viruses in mammals.’ This would permit the development of the required vaccines and test kids to successful cope with and stop the first stage of new infection disease emergences.[xlii]
If Daszak’s advice had been heeded when it was made back in 2013, it is quite possible that we might have been able to effectively stop Covid-19 at source or at least severely impede its progress, thus buying time for the implementation of the required measures to eradicate its threat. Of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing but while we can’t turn back the hands of time, we need to prepare for the future and other potential viruses. The past 20 years have seen the emergence of a growing number of infectious diseases– SARS, MERs, Zika… It is therefore imperative we come together as an international community and pool our cumulative resources to formulate policies and put in place measures to protect ourselves from future potential threats. The stigmatisation and abusive racialisation of nations or people has no place in this process and we must reject it absolutely.
Final Thought
As Prabir Purkayaashta writes, [T]he Covid-19 pandemic is only uncovering the deeper fissures that are already existing, and widening existing fault lines in the world.[xliii] We need to be vigilant to this, particularly the appalling legacy of anti-Chinese racism at this time, though we should also remember that the colonial empires of the European nations as well as the expropriation of U.S, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and other lands from indigenous peoples were based upon an all pervasive racist ideology that also targeted many other peoples.
I would just like to conclude with what a quotation from Melanie Coates which it eloquently summarises our current situation as well as how the current pandemic of anti-Chinese racism should be tackled.
In this torrent of fear and anxiety, we cannot afford to isolate people even more through stigma and xenophobia; we each have a responsibility to support each other and advocate for a better society. Those with the loudest voice—the government and media—must speak out to condemn these actions. They have a duty to educate the public, protect the vulnerable, and hold people accountable for prejudice and discrimination. By staying silent we let xenophobic narratives—specifically, anti-Asian sentiment—and racist attacks damage our society, the repercussions of which will likely persist beyond the pandemic.[xliv]
[iv] Dr. Jonathan D. Quick, The End of Epidemics: The Looming Threat to Humanity and How to Stop it, Scribe Publications, Brunswick (Victoria) Australia / London U.K., p. 18
[v] Sean Martin, The Black Death, 2007, Pocket Essentials Harpenden (Herts), p. 75
[xviii] COLE, Bankole, ADAMSON, Sue, CRAIG, Gary, HUSSAIN, Basharat, SMITH, Luana, LAW, Ian, LAU, Carmen, CHAN, Chak-Kwan and CHEUNG, Tom, Hidden from public view: racism against UK Chinese (Technical Report), Hull University and The Monitoring Group, 2009, http://shura.shu.ac.uk/10529/1/Cole_Hidden_From_Public_View_-_English.pdf
