China locked in hybrid war with US

By Pepe Escobar

March 17, 2020

https://thesaker.is/china-locked-in-hybrid-war-with-us/

Among the myriad, earth-shattering geopolitical effects of coronavirus, one is already graphically evident. China has re-positioned itself. For the first time since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, Beijing openly regards the US as a threat, as stated a month ago by Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the Munich Security Conference during the peak of the fight against coronavirus.

Beijing is carefully, incrementally shaping the narrative that, from the beginning of the coronavirus attack, the leadership knew it was under a hybrid war attack. Xi’s terminology is a major clue. He said, on the record, that this was war. And, as a counter-attack, a “people’s war” had to be launched.

Moreover, he described the virus as a demon or devil. Xi is a Confucianist. Unlike some other ancient Chinese thinkers, Confucius was loath to discuss supernatural forces and judgment in the afterlife. However, in a Chinese cultural context, devil means “white devils” or “foreign devils”: guailo in Mandarin, gweilo in Cantonese. This was Xi delivering a powerful statement in code.

When Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, voiced in an incandescent tweet the possibility that “it might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan” – the first blast to this effect to come from a top official – Beijing was sending up a trial balloon signaling that the gloves were finally off. Zhao Lijian made a direct connection with the Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019, which included a delegation of 300 US military.

He directly quoted US CDC director Robert Redfield who, when asked last week whether some deaths by coronavirus had been discovered posthumously in the US, replied that  “some cases have actually been diagnosed this way in the US today.”

Zhao’s explosive conclusion is that Covid-19 was already in effect in the US before being identified in Wuhan – due to the by now fully documented inability of US to test and verify differences compared with the flu.

Adding all that to the fact that coronavirus genome variations in Iran and Italy were sequenced and it was revealed they do not belong to the variety that infected Wuhan, Chinese media are now openly  asking questions and drawing a connection with the shutting down in August last year of the “unsafe” military bioweapon lab at Fort Detrick, the Military Games, and the Wuhan epidemic. Some of these questions had been asked – with no response – inside the US itself.

Extra questions linger about the opaque Event 201 in New York on October 18, 2019: a rehearsal for a worldwide pandemic caused by a deadly virus – which happened to be coronavirus. This magnificent coincidence happened one month before the outbreak in Wuhan.

Event 201 was sponsored by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum (WEF), the CIA, Bloomberg, John Hopkins Foundation and the UN.  The World Military Games opened in Wuhan on the exact same day.

Irrespective of its origin, which is still not conclusively established, as much as Trump tweets about the “Chinese virus,” Covid-19 already poses immensely serious questions about biopolitics (where’s Foucault when we need him?) and bio-terror.

The working hypothesis of coronavirus as a very powerful but not Armageddon-provoking bio-weapon unveils it as a perfect vehicle for widespread social control – on a global scale.

Cuba rises as a biotech power

Just as a fully masked Xi visiting the Wuhan frontline last week was a graphic demonstration to the whole planet that China, with immense sacrifice, is winning the “people‘s war” against Covid-19, Russia, in a Sun Tzu move on Riyadh whose end result was a much cheaper barrel of oil, helped for all practical purposes to kick-start the inevitable recovery of the Chinese economy. This is how a strategic partnership works.

The chessboard is changing at breakneck speed. Once Beijing identified coronavirus as a bio-weapon attack the “people’s war” was launched with the full force of the state. Methodically. On a “whatever it takes” basis. Now we are entering a new stage, which will be used by Beijing to substantially recalibrate the interaction with the West, and under very different frameworks when it comes to the US and the EU.

Soft power is paramount. Beijing sent an Air China flight to Italy carrying 2,300 big boxes full of masks bearing the script, “We are waves from the same sea, leaves from the same tree, flowers from the same garden.” China also sent a hefty humanitarian package to Iran, significantly aboard eight flights from Mahan Air – an airline under illegal, unilateral Trump administration sanctions.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic could not have been more explicit: “The only country that can help us is China. By now, you all understood that European solidarity does not exist. That was a fairy tale on paper.”

Under harsh sanctions and demonized since forever, Cuba is still able to perform breakthroughs – even on biotechnology. The anti-viral Heberon – or Interferon Alpha 2b – a therapeutic, not a vaccine, has been used with great success in the treatment of coronavirus. A joint venture in China is producing an inhalable version, and at least 15 nations are already interested in importing the therapeutic.

Now compare all of the above with the Trump administration offering $1 billion to poach German scientists working at biotech firm Curevac, based in Thuringia, on an experimental vaccine against Covid-19, to have it as a vaccine “only for the United States.”

Social engineering psy-op?

Sandro Mezzadra, co-author with Brett Neilson of the seminal The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism is already trying to conceptualize where we stand now in terms of fighting Covid-19.

We are facing a choice between a Malthusian strand – inspired by social Darwinism – “led by the Johnson-Trump-Bolsonaro axis” and, on the other side, a strand pointing to the “requalification of public health as a fundamental tool,” exemplified by China, South Korea and Italy. There are key lessons to be learned from South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.

The stark option, Mezzadra notes, is between a “natural population selection,” with thousands of dead, and “defending society” by employing “variable degrees of authoritarianism and social control.” It’s easy to imagine who stands to benefit from this social re-engineering, a 21^st century remix of Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death.

Amid so much doom and gloom, count on Italy to offer us Tiepolo-style shades of light. Italy chose the Wuhan option, with immensely serious consequences for its already fragile economy. Quarantined Italians remarkably reacted by singing on their balconies: a true act of metaphysical revolt.

Not to mention the poetic justice of the actual St. Corona (“crown” in Latin) being buried in the city of Anzu since the 9^th century. St. Corona was a Christian killed under Marcus Aurelius in 165 AD and has been for centuries one of the patron saints of pandemics.

Not even trillions of dollars raining from the sky by an act of divine Fed mercy were able to cure Covid-19. G-7 “leaders” had to resort to a videoconference to realize how clueless they are – even as China’s fight against coronavirus gave the West a head start of several weeks.

Shanghai-based Dr. Zhang Wenhong, one of China’s top infectious disease experts, whose analyses have been spot on so far, now says China has emerged from the darkest days in the “people’s war” against Covid-19. But he does not think this will be over by summer. Now extrapolate what he’s saying to the Western world.

It does not even spring yet, and we already know it takes a virus to mercilessly shatter the Goddess of the Market. Last Friday, Goldman Sachs told no fewer than 1,500 corporations that there was no systemic risk. That was false.

New York banking sources told me the truth: systemic risk became way more severe in 2020 than in 1979, 1987 or 2008 because of the hugely heightened danger that the $1.5 quadrillion derivative market would collapse.

As the sources put it, history had never before seen anything like the Fed’s intervention via its little-understood elimination of commercial bank reserve requirements, unleashing a potential unlimited expansion of credit to prevent a derivative implosion stemming from a total commodity and stock market collapse of all stocks around the world.

Those bankers thought it would work, but as we know by now all the sound and fury signifying nothing. The ghost of a derivative implosion – in this case not caused by the previous possibility, the shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz – remains.

We are still barely starting to understand the consequences of Covid-19 for the future of neoliberal turbo-capitalism. What’s certain is that the whole global economy has been hit by an insidious, literally invisible circuit breaker. This may be just a “coincidence.” Or this may be, as some are boldly arguing, part of a possible, massive psy-op creating the perfect geopolitical and social engineering environment for full-spectrum dominance.

Additionally, along the hard slog down the road, with immense, inbuilt human and economic sacrifice, with or without a reboot of the world-system, a more pressing question remains: will imperial elites still choose to keep waging a full-spectrum-dominance hybrid war against China?

Western states’ ‘surrender’ to COVID-19 shocks Chinese

By Yang Sheng Source: Global Times Published: 2020/3/16 

As voices have grown louder for countries to learn from China's rigorous measures, some Western countries such as the UK and Sweden decided to apply a totally different approach of "herd immunity," allowing the deadly virus to decide the fate of millions of people in the hope those infected would acquire immunity.

Many Chinese internet users expressed shock at the inaction and ineptness of those governments for apparently adopting a policy of "total surrender" to the virus without regard for human life. Meanwhile, Chinese experts highlighted the hypocrisy of those Western countries that frequently try to lecture China on human rights. 

They also noted that some Chinese commentators and media that lambasted China's initial response was now rushing to defend herd immunity even as it is criticized by the countries' own people and World Health Organization (WHO) experts.

The UK chief scientific adviser stoked controversy Friday when he said that about 40 million people in the UK would need to catch the coronavirus to build up "herd immunity" and prevent the disease coming back in the future, the Financial Times reported on Saturday.

Chen Fengying, a research fellow at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations in Beijing, told the Global Times, "maybe the UK government believed this was a responsible approach as it can save money for their taxpayers and prevent the NHS (National Health Service) from collapsing, but from a Chinese perspective, this is truly inhuman."

Countries like the US, the UK, and Sweden have enough money and advanced technology, Chen noted.

Shortage of money or technology was no excuse for them to surrender, but they were treating the situation with a "cold blood and extremely rational" attitude, Chen said.

They believed the people killed by COVID-19 are old or sick already, and there was no need "to spend national resources" on them.

Shen Yi, an expert on politics from Fudan University in Shanghai, told the Global Times "This is why the Chinese public are shocked, as they found those Western countries who always lecture and criticize China on human rights issues are actually reluctant to save lives during a pandemic situation.

"They found China, which is a socialist country always criticized by the West, is putting people's lives at the priority and willing to accept heavy sacrifices in the economy, while some capitalist Western democratic states actually choose to protect economic interests and stock markets first to serve the interests of the capitalists, instead of the health of ordinary people."

Some media that hold a cynical attitude toward the way China handles the fight against COVID-19 are defending the Western states' approaches, like herd immunity. They commented that this fits the UK's national condition, and some "liberalist" Chinese commentators said this is how democratic countries minimize their cost rather than wasting money on mission impossible, a view heavily criticized by Chinese netizens. 

Shen said some media or commentators were defending their pro-Western values rather than speaking the truth, which showed their double standard. "When Wuhan local government used a similar approach at the early stage of the outbreak, which was wrong and quickly corrected afterward, these commentators criticized the practice as irresponsible but when it goes to the UK, they changed their tone."  


Domestic backlash 

Many UK people have expressed anger and disappointment with their elected government. 

Thomas Sampson, 31, a Wales-based columnist, said the herd immunity was "so risky that it cannot be justified and it makes us feel like animals."

"In theory, it requires 60 percent of the UK [38 million people] to be infected to be effective. That means hundreds of thousands of people will die in this 'experiment'," he wrote.

Michael Taylor, from Birmingham and who works in Kunming, Southwest China's Yunnan Province, said "the UK government is ridiculous" and "China has the tested and proven way to control it. Why don't other governments just follow that?"

He said "I think people in the UK would accept the same measures as China did give the circumstances."

US political scientist and president of Eurasia Group Ian Bremmer tweeted a question on his Twitter account Sunday: "Who is doing the best job responding to the coronavirus crisis?" 

China received 68.2 percent of 27,208 votes as of press time. The EU got 14.3 percent and the US 17.5 percent.

Sampson argued the UK could shut down all non-essential services, but "we have not done anything. I feel abandoned by our government, the only country in the world to do absolutely nothing to protect its citizens." 

There was a lack of civil obedience in Europe and so for this the reason, the approach of China would be more difficult to implement here, Sampson noted.

Yue Yue, a Chinese who lives in London, said she felt scared as many people were unaware of the dangerous situation with crowded underground stations and streets. Almost no people wore masks, she noted.

"Local Chinese are trying to save themselves," Yue said. "They are sharing advice from Chinese doctors and organizing home delivery to supply necessities and also planning to charter airplanes to fly back to China as they don't trust the UK government's plan."

Daniel Miller, a UK national living in China with his family, told the Global Times on Sunday he would not go back to the UK before 2021, as "this is the worst situation for the UK since the Second World War."

Irresponsible 

Herd immunity is not just considered irresponsible for the country's own people, but also for other countries, said Song Luzheng, a Chinese political scientist based in Paris.

"This is very selfish and irresponsible," Song said. "In the UK policymakers' brains, there is no international responsibility."

Some Chinese experts urged the Chinese government to launch travel bans against the UK and Sweden for their perceived surrender to COVID-19.  

Anthony Costello, former WHO director, said Friday that the UK government was out of kilter with other countries in looking to herd immunity as the answer, the Guardian reported. 

It could conflict with WHO policy to contain the virus by tracking and tracing all cases, Costello said in a series of Twitter posts. 

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general, said at a mission briefing on Thursday that describing COVID-19 "as a pandemic does not mean that countries should give up. The idea that countries should shift from containment to mitigation is wrong and dangerous."

      When Efficiency Isn’t Enough

THE INTERPRETER

NYT

March 12, 2020

Welcome to The Interpreter newsletter, by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, who writes a column by the same name.

One of the great strengths of capitalism, its proponents argue, is that it allocates scarce resources through markets, rather than through central planning. In an efficient market, goods go to the people who value them most in the quantities they are willing to pay for. No one has to be in charge.

There were always drawbacks. Most obviously, markets do not take morality or ethics into account when distributing necessities. And poverty, inequality, discrimination, inefficiencies and imperfect information have always warped distribution of goods and services away from the smooth curves the theories predict.

But now the coronavirus is revealing an even more fundamental problem: Following market incentives may be the most efficient way to make a profit, but that goal may be at odds with what is needed to stop a pandemic like COVID-19.

Consider service workers in retail shops and restaurants. They come into contact with many people each day, making it especially important for them to stay home if they contract the virus. But in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, many of those workers won’t get paid if they don’t go to work. The market, in other words, is telling them to go to work sick, even though it is in society’s interest for them to stay home.

In the United States, the private health care system lets the market allocate health resources to those who can pay the most for them. The huge bills for a hospital stay or serious illness are beyond many families’ means. That had terrible costs, financial and otherwise, before the pandemic. But now, if people who are sick avoid going to the doctor for diagnosis or treatment because they are afraid of catastrophic medical bills, they will be more likely to spread the disease,.

A market approach to consumer goods has created problems as well: private citizens buying up masks and other protective gear that they don’t need but hospitals desperately do, shortages of hand sanitizer, grocery store shelves standing empty after people panic-bought necessities to hoard at home.

In ordinary times, an economist might say that we shouldn’t worry too much about that. Shortages, the theory goes, will send a loud message to manufacturers, who will ramp up production until availability returns to normal.

But these are not ordinary times. Plenty of companies would like to increase their production of masks and hand sanitizer but can’t because the virus has disrupted global supply chains. It will get even harder to meet demand if quarantines shut down factories closer to home.

Following market incentives at a time of public crisis can seem like selfishness. Glance at social media these days and you are likely to see screeds against people who are raising prices for goods that are scarce or buying more toilet paper than their families really need.

But in a system designed around everyone protecting their own interests, failing to do so carries risks. Acting differently requires information, planning, and trust — all of which are in short supply at the moment.

Four Reasons Civilization Won’t Decline: It Will Collapse

by CRAIG COLLINS

MARCH 13, 2020

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/13/four-reasons-civilization-wont-decline-it-will-collapse/

As modern civilization’s shelf life expires, more scholars have turned their attention to the decline and fall of civilizations past.  Their studies have generated rival explanations of why societies collapse and civilizations die.  Meanwhile, a lucrative market has emerged for post-apocalyptic novels, movies, TV shows, and video games for those who enjoy the vicarious thrill of dark, futuristic disaster and mayhem from the comfort of their cozy couch.  Of course, surviving the real thing will become a much different story.

The latent fear that civilization is living on borrowed time has also spawned a counter-market of “happily ever after” optimists who desperately cling to their belief in endless progress.  Popular Pollyannas, like cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, provide this anxious crowd with soothing assurances that the titanic ship of progress is unsinkable.  Pinker’s publications have made him the high priest of progress.[1] While civilization circles the drain, his ardent audiences find comfort in lectures and books brimming with cherry-picked evidence to prove that life is better than ever, and will surely keep improving.  Yet, when questioned, Pinker himself admits, “It’s incorrect to extrapolate that the fact that we’ve made progress is a prediction that we’re guaranteed to make progress.”[2]

Pinker’s rosy statistics cleverly disguise the fatal flaw in his argument.  The progress of the past was built by sacrificing the future—and the future is upon us.  All the happy facts he cites about living standards, life expectancy, and economic growth are the product of an industrial civilization that has pillaged and polluted the planet to produce temporary progress for a growing middle class—and enormous profits and power for a tiny elite.

Not everyone who understands that progress has been purchased at the expense of the future thinks that civilization’s collapse will be abrupt and bitter.  Scholars of ancient societies, like Jared Diamond and John Michael Greer, accurately point out that abrupt collapse is a rare historical phenomenon.  In The Long Descent, Greer assures his readers that, “The same pattern repeats over and over again in history.  Gradual disintegration, not sudden catastrophic collapse, is the way civilizations end.”  Greer estimates that it takes, on average, about 250 years for civilizations to decline and fall, and he finds no reason why modern civilization shouldn’t follow this “usual timeline.”[3]

But Greer’s assumption is built on shaky ground because industrial civilization differs from all past civilizations in four crucial ways.  And every one of them may accelerate and intensify the coming collapse while increasing the difficulty of recovery.

Difference #1:  Unlike all previous civilizations, modern industrial civilization is powered by an exceptionally rich, NON-renewable, and irreplaceable energy source—fossil fuels.  This unique energy base predisposes industrial civilization to a short, meteoric lifespan of unprecedented boom and drastic bust.  Megacities, globalized production, industrial agriculture, and a human population approaching 8 billion are all historically exceptional—and unsustainable—without fossil fuels.  Today, the rich easily exploited oilfields and coal mines of the past are mostly depleted.  And, while there are energy alternatives, there are no realistic replacements that can deliver the abundant net energy fossil fuels once provided.[4]  Our complex, expansive, high-speed civilization owes its brief lifespan to this one-time, rapidly dwindling energy bonanza.

Difference #2:  Unlike past civilizations, the economy of industrial society is capitalist.  Production for profit is its prime directive and driving force.  The unprecedented surplus energy supplied by fossil fuels has generated exceptional growth and enormous profits over the past two centuries.  But in the coming decades, these historic windfalls of abundant energy, constant growth, and rising profits will vanish.

However, unless it is abolished, capitalism will not disappear when boom turns to bust.  Instead, energy-starved, growth-less capitalism will turn catabolic.  Catabolism refers to the condition whereby a living thing devours itself.  As profitable sources of production dry up, capitalism will be compelled to turn a profit by consuming the social assets it once created.  By cannibalizing itself, the profit motive will exacerbate industrial society’s dramatic decline.

Catabolic capitalism will profit from scarcity, crisis, disaster, and conflict.  Warfare, resource hoarding, ecological disaster, and pandemic diseases will become the big profit makers.  Capital will flow toward lucrative ventures like cybercrime, predatory lending, and financial fraud; bribery, corruption, and racketeering; weapons, drugs, and human trafficking.  Once disintegration and destruction become the primary source of profit, catabolic capitalism will rampage down the road to ruin, gorging itself on one self-inflicted disaster after another.[5]

Difference #3:  Unlike past societies, industrial civilization isn’t Roman, Chinese, Egyptian, Aztec, or Mayan.  Modern civilization is HUMAN, PLANETARY, and ECOCIDAL.  Pre-industrial civilizations depleted their topsoil, felled their forests, and polluted their rivers.  But the harm was far more temporary and geographically limited. Once market incentives harnessed the colossal power of fossil fuels to exploit nature, the dire results were planetary.  Two centuries of fossil fuel combustion have saturated the biosphere with climate-altering carbon that will continue wreaking havoc for generations to come.  The damage to Earth’s living systems—the circulation and chemical composition of the atmosphere and the ocean; the stability of the hydrological and biogeochemical cycles; and the biodiversity of the entire planet—is essentially permanent.

Humans have become the most invasive species ever known.  Although we are a mere .01 percent of the planet’s biomass, our domesticated crops and livestock dominate life on Earth.  In terms of total biomass, 96 percent of all the mammals on Earth are livestock; only 4 percent are wild mammals.  Seventy percent of all birds are domesticated poultry, only 30 percent are wild.  About half the Earth’s wild animals are thought to have been lost in just the last 50 years.^[6]  Scientists estimate that half of all remaining species will be extinct by the end of the century.^[7] There are no more unspoiled ecosystems or new frontiers where people can escape the damage they’ve caused and recover from collapse.

Difference #4:  Human civilization’s collective capacity to confront its mounting crises is crippled by a fragmented political system of antagonistic nations ruled by corrupt elites who care more about power and wealth than people and the planet.  Humanity faces a perfect storm of converging global calamities.  Intersecting tribulations like climate chaos, rampant extinction, food and freshwater scarcity, poverty, extreme inequality and the rise of global pandemics are rapidly eroding the foundations of modern life.

Yet, this fractious and fractured political system makes organizing and mounting a cooperative response nearly impossible.  And, the more catabolic industrial capitalism becomes, the greater the danger that hostile rulers will fan the flames of nationalism and go to war over scarce resources.  Of course, warfare is not new.  But modern warfare is so devastating, destructive, and toxic that little would remain in its aftermath.  This would be the final nail in civilization’s coffin.

Rising From the Ruins?

How people respond to the collapse of industrial civilization will determine how bad things get and what will replace it. The challenges are monumental.  They will force us to question our identities, our values, and our loyalties like no other experience in our history.  Who are we?  Are we, first and foremost, human beings struggling to raise our families, strengthen our communities, and coexist with the other inhabitants of Earth?  Or do our primary loyalties belong to our nation, our culture, our race, our ideology, or our religion?  Can we put the survival of our species and our planet first, or will we allow ourselves to become hopelessly divided along national, cultural, racial, religious, or party lines?

The eventual outcome of this great implosion is up for grabs.  Will we overcome denial and despair; kick our addiction to petroleum, and pull together to break the grip of corporate power over our lives?  Can we foster genuine democracy, harness renewable energy, reweave our communities, re-learn forgotten skills, and heal the wounds we’ve inflicted on the Earth?  Or will fear and prejudice drive us into hostile camps, fighting over the dwindling resources of a degraded planet?  The stakes could not be higher.

Notes.

[1] His books include: The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

[2] King, Darryn. “Steven Pinker on the Past, Present, and Future of Optimism” (OneZero, Jan 10, 2019) https://onezero.medium.com/steven-pinker-on-the-past-present-and-future-of-optimism-f362398c604b

[3] Greer, John Michael.  The Long Descent (New Society Publishers, 2008): 29.

[4] Heinberg, Richard. The End Of Growth. (New Society, 2011): 117.

[5] For more on catabolic capitalism see Collins, Craig. “Catabolism: Capitalism’s Frightening Future,” CounterPunch (Nov. 1, 2018). https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/11/01/catabolism-capitalisms-frightening-future/

[6] Carrington, Damian. “New Study: Humans Just 0.01% Of All Life But Have Destroyed 83% Off Wild Mammals,” The Guardian (May 21, 2018). https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study

[7] Ceballos, Ehrlich, Barnosky, Garcia, Pringle & Palmer. “Accelerated Modern Human-Induced Species Losses: Entering The 6th Mass Extinction,” Science Advances. (June 19, 2015). http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/5/e1400253

                                                                                                                         

Craig Collins Ph.D. is the author of “Toxic Loopholes” (Cambridge University Press), which examines America’s dysfunctional system of environmental protection. He teaches political science and environmental law at California State University East Bay and was a founding member of the Green Party of California.