I’m rather skeptical, personally, to the global panic triggered by the “existential threat to Humanity” allegedly posed by COVID-19, and strongly believe that the damage incurred by combatting coronavirus is much greater than that from the virus itself. However, all this hysteria clearly transpires contours of one of its apparent beneficiaries who has put hand to the creation of the situation and is still attempting to use it for his own gain. I’m talking about none other than the People’s Republic of China, a country governed by one of the few remaining communist regimes obsessed by a perennial ambition of becoming a world superpower.
The 2012 ascension to the PRC’s leadership of Xi Jinping, a dogmatic communist who has by now managed to concentrate in his hands an amount of power unprecedented since Mao Zedong, securing also his own potential irreplaceability by rescinding the presidential terms’ limit, marked the beginning of a new era in the modern Heavenly Empire’s development under the sign of attaining global domination.
Noteworthy is the fact that international expansion is one of communist ideology’s (of which Xi Jinping is a stringent follower) fundamental doctrines. A glance at China’s modern history demonstrates that on a regional level it has been carrying it out, more or less successfully, since 1950s, by supporting the most notorious repressive communist regimes in the Asia Pacific and South-East Asia. Right in front of our eyes is the example of a totalitarian reserve known as DPRK that’s still in existence solely because of China’s support, and it had been China back in 1970s that enabled the khmer rouge regime that took lives of almost half of the Cambodia’s population.
In Mao Zedong’s era and for some time thereafter China could not successfully export communism far beyond the region due to scarcity of financial resources and lack of international political influence, but Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms that allowed the PRC to integrate into the world economy becoming a global assembly and sewing shop/copy machine (fully exploiting cheap labor, their only resource), have secured the necessary economic growth and financial assets for broader expansion that has been underway for the second decade already.
Ambitious Xi Jinping, a faithful follower of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao, cannot stay content with influence in Zimbabwe and Venezuela. He understands all too well that a functioning, albeit with difficulty at times, Western civilization in Europe and primarily in the United States is an unsurmountable obstacle in driving the Humanity into a Chinese-style communist paradise, therefore undermining and possible elimination of this civilization is the Chinese comrades’ main task of today.
‘Exogenous’ Donald J. Trump’s replacing crypto-socialist Obama in the White House had upset Xi & Co.’s apple cart. Trump feels no sympathy whatsoever either to communism or China, adheres to rigid rules of doing business and cherishes no illusions as to what the Chinese “partners” are really up to. That’s why they, lacking technological, economic or military potential to openly confront the United States (even a hypothetical cyberwar against America would have ended as a complete Beijing’s fiasco), have decided to opt for demoralizing the West with a suddenly detected in China novel coronavirus – an easy thing to do in our age of instant information where social networks reign unchallenged. To succeed, they only had to withhold information on Wuhan’s outbreak until the virus reached Europe.
The aftermath of yet another communist subversion, significantly contributed to, if not masterminded, by the PRC’s leadership, is here to behold. Irrespective of COVID-19 deadliness, economic damage incurred to “first world” countries by unprecedented measures to combat its spread is in the trillions of dollars, confirmed cases’ number grows by the hour and 90% of world population are sitting at home without a slightest idea of what tomorrow may bring.
Amid this grim global setting, China is trumpeting a triumphant victory over the epidemic in the country, touting their socio-political model and offering their experience in combatting the pandemic they have brought into being themselves. However, neither the fact of the Chinese victory not the true scale of contagion’s spread in the PRC have been objectively established. At the same time, an initiative of a UN Security Council’s resolution declaring COVID-19 a “threat of international peace and security “ has been scuttled by the Chinese representative who stated that public health issues are beyond Security Council’s competence.
The result expected by Xi Jinping is a totally demoralized West with broken economy, an easy target to take in hand by tenacious communists, given the widespread popularity of all sorts of left ideas with the people and ruling elites. Not laying much hopes on manifestly weak and largely left-leaning Europe, I see the United States as the only power capable of confronting both corona- and, most importantly, communovirus heavily spread by China, not allowing the Chinese to break the bank in this game.
Denis SUREYEV