China's Great Covid

I have been asked by TCW Defending Freedom to do a piece on China’s mad and persistent zero Covid policy. The article below is long and was written in January 2021. I am posting it here as a refresher, prior to the new piece.

We have all heard the expression – did you have a good Covid?  Was the lockdown kind to you?  Many have suffered, massively, while others have done all right.

Covid was kind to Big Pharma.  It was kind to the World Health Organisation.  It was kind to the pro-Vaxxers.  It was kind to the public health lobby.  It was kind to big government.  It was kind to police forces with embedded fascist tendencies.  It was kind to Karens.  It was kind to those who drew a government stipend.  It was kind to big corporations who, unlike small businesses, could absorb the pain, or in some cases, profit from it.  See under Bunnings.  Churches?  Not so much.

Above all, 2020 was kind to China, already effectively ruling the world through apparently benign means, and only now awaiting the mopping up operations.

Well, Xi Jinping had a great Covid.  Xi is a thug who has got lucky.  He has prospered from China’s emerging economic dominance of the world and has figured out ways of keeping his people crushed.

So said David Flint:

‘A year after coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China’s Xi declares 2020 a triumph.’ The Washington Post thus approvingly headlined the Communist Chinese dictator’s New Year Address to celebrating crowds ignoring social distancing in the streets of Wuhan, the very place from where Xi released a plague onto an unsuspecting world.

Just look at the year China has had.  The Chinese leadership was laughing at the recent events in Washington DC.  And why wouldn’t they?

Remember that the Chinese created and exported the virus.  On one view:

It comes from the lab, the lab in Wuhan, and the lab is controlled by the China government,” claimed Dr. Li-Meng Yan, the virologist who fled Hong Kong, in a Loose Women interview in September. “This virus is not from nature.”

Did China launch, prosecute and win a biological war in 2020 without anyone noticing?  It is a thought.  Speaking of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China specialist Gordon Chang has stated:

The lab once bragged it stored more than 1,500 strains of coronavirus, and it is known to have engaged in the dangerous engineering of chimeric coronaviruses, as documented in a 2015 article in Nature Medicine. Even if the Wuhan institute was not trying to create viruses designed to attack ethnic minorities—Bill Gertz of the Washington Times reported this inflammatory possibility—Beijing may have much to hide, such as an illicit biological weapons program.

Chang continues:

The case against China rests not only on how the coronavirus came to first infect humans—something scientists will argue about for years—but also what Chinese ruler Xi Jinping did once the pathogen crippled his country. In short, he took steps he knew or had to know would spread the disease beyond his borders.

Frederick Edward thinks it is “game, set and match to China, and one can readily agree with him:

As Western governments continue to delight in the destruction of their economies and the humiliation of their serf-like populaces, I can’t help but somehow admire the audacity of Beijing’s geopolitical coup.

Covid-19 and its subsequent effects must rank among the greatest strategic gambles ever to have been pulled off. Regardless as to the virus’s exact origin, it seems beyond doubt that Chinese officials were complicit in allowing it to circulate unannounced throughout the world for weeks on end. How else to explain the decision not to close Wuhan’s airport during the weeks following the ‘discovery’ of the virus?

Ensuring its global spread, China could play its best card. By employing a major, but in hindsight extremely short-lived, overreaction to the virus, with people literally welded into their homes, it signalled to the rest of the world the apparent seriousness of the novel virus.

By whatever means WuFlu was generated and thence escaped to northern Italy then the world, the subsequent facts are clear. 

Because of Covid, “Beijing Biden” won the US election.  Trump is gone, now disgraced in the eyes of the elites who, all the while, sought to bring him down.  Trump was the one force that could have saved the world from the Chicomms’ end game.  The one leader who knew the China game, and its impacts on the West.  And who was prepared to stand up to the China global swamp.  China’s global scam.  For which we all have fallen.

Amber Athey in The Spectator states (on 15 January 2020):

Trump’s aggressive actions against China in an attempt to counter the regime’s growing global economic influence and hold it accountable for a litany of misdeeds is one of the biggest foreign-policy shifts in decades. In contrast, past administrations normalized trade relations with the CCP and allowed it to play-act as a liberal regime in global institutions in the misguided hopes that a beneficial economic alliance would encourage China toward good behaviour.

On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order banning transactions with several Chinese apps. Previously, he pulled the US out of the World Health Organisation after it helped cover up China’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, implemented heavy tariffs on Chinese goods, sanctioned Chinese officials responsible for abuses in Hong Kong and purged pro-CCP education programs from American universities. The administration’s efforts highlighted in the OMB report to cut or divert taxpayers’ funds from aid to China are merely the latest, perhaps the last example of Trump’s determination to maintain his tough stance against China.

The West’s economy, belief system, societal energy and will to live is shredded.  Individual freedom is all but dead.  We are cowed, confused and now turning on one another.  The great reset championed by China’s globalist allies is all systems go.  China’s surrogates in the WHO have unleashed an end game without peer.  They pulled off a gem of a global coup.  They managed to upend their own science, clearly stated over many decades!  Masks?  Lockdowns?  Quarantine?  Forty years of settled science upended in February 2020.  An opportunity was seized.  And it worked.

All the “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (NPIs) enforced in the West are core to what we should all term the Chinese Covid Model.

Get facile, idiot, cringing governments to implement their new vision of pandemic management.  Useful idiots like Boris Johnson were on board, conned by Professor Pantsdown and his already disgraced modellers at Imperial College.  Chicomm strategy met supine Western cringing in the face of fears of electoral retribution.

The rest of the Anglosphere fell immediately into line.  Dominoes all.

They had even changed the definition of pandemic to help things along.  There is now a much lower threshold required to be able to use the loaded term “pandemic”.  They changed their view of non-pharmaceutical interventions, very conveniently.  Overnight.  Remember that the WHO is a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Pharma.  And China.  In each relationship, there is massive funding support, Board memberships, and so on.  WHO does the bidding of each.  Coinciding interests, indeed.

They got Imperial College London to drive the process.  The man who admitted this has been driving British Covid policy since March 2020.

Lockdown Sceptics and others have drawn attention to astonishing admissions in The Times of London by Neil Ferguson.  He spilled the beans big-time:

Professor Neil Ferguson has given an extraordinary interview to Tom Whipple at The Times, in which he confirms the degree to which he believes that imitating China’s lockdown policies at the start of 2020 changed the parameters of what Western societies consider acceptable.

“I think people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March,” Professor Ferguson says. When SAGE observed the “innovative intervention” out of China, of locking entire communities down and not permitting them to leave their homes, they initially presumed it would not be an available option in a liberal Western democracy: “It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”

He almost seems at pains to emphasise the Chinese derivation of the lockdown concept, returning to it later in the interview:

“These days, lockdown feels inevitable. It was, he reminds me, anything but. ‘If China had not done it,’ he says, ‘the year would have been very different.’”

To those people who, still now, object to lockdowns on civil liberties principles, this will be a chilling reminder of the centrality of the authoritarian Chinese model in influencing global policy in this historic year.

China did it!  We have it right from the horse’s mouth.  The man who single-handedly set up the global response to Covid got the idea from Beijing.  Well, he already had the idea himself.

The Chinese Covid model has been rolled out right across the West.  We are idiots.

A joint investigation by the New York Times and Politico has revealed the extent of China’s efforts to censor social media at the beginning of the pandemic, hoping to conceal its role in triggering the global crisis. Were the architects of the West’s lockdowns inspired by that policy too?

But concealment wasn’t the only use the Chicomms made of social media.  As the journalists Aya Velazquesz and Michael Senger have pointed out (in The Tablet magazine), the Chinese have engineered a deliberate, well-organised information operation to trumpet the “success” of their own Covid policies and the nudge the West towards emulating them.  A “flu d’etat”, as Senger termed it.  An on-message army of global trolls and bots got to work to apply moral pressure to Western governments to help ensure the West’s utterly disastrous Covid NPIs.  Hundreds of thousands of fake accounts were established, and allowed to thrive by Twitter (of course).  We all walked right into the trap.  A fake news narrative reminiscent of the film Wag the Dog.  And this info-wars campaign quickly embedded two messages of great and lasting consequence.  First, the virus was disastrously bad, and second, the only solution was economy-crushing lockdowns.

As Velazquesz notes:

The core message of CCP Propaganda is always the same: China is the only country in the world to have perfectly managed the pandemic. The Chinese system is superior. Whoever doesn’t do it like China is inhumane.

With a short but hard lockdown, quarantine, disinfection of inner cities, social distancing, PCR-test saturation, rigorous contact tracing and total surveillance of all citizens, face recognition, rapid tests, and temperature measurements at the entrance to all public building, “Containment” and “Zerocovid,” total containment of the Corona Virus was reached. Governments and politicians who instead opted to let the pandemic run its course or for herd immunity are amoral, two steps from eugenics, and responsible for thousands of avoidable deaths.

https://ayavela.medium.com/china-and-the-great-reset-f111d297853c

The wonderful Laura Perrins of The Conservative Woman has termed the West’s lockdown policies “neo-communism”.  Lockdowns, masks, social distancing and vaccines, are all direct borrowings from the Chinese Covid handbook, written on the run (perhaps) in February 2020.  We even copied the dobbing!

There is not the least doubt about this.  Professor Pantsdown let the cat out of the bag.  Careful observers of Imperial College’s earlier role in using climate scares to bankrupt the West would have been in no doubt that they were up to their old tricks.  The Imperial College playbook.

Could the Chinese have remotely hoped for the result they achieved in 2020?  There must be shaking of heads in Beijing.  We couldn’t have possibly hoped they would be THIS stupid.

What a year for the Chicomms!  Indeed, a reason for Xi to celebrate.

They released the virus (however generated) into Northern Italy following the Chinese New Year celebrations attended by masses of Northern Italy Chinese workers and entrepreneurs.  Useful Chicomm idiots, at best.  At that time, the world was totally unaware of the close ties between the “industrial districts” of Venice, Milan, Florence and Turin with China.  There was a whole industry of “made in Italy” products that were actually “made in China”.  And the Italians were living in multi-generational homes with aged people with crap metabolic health and crap hospitals.  The body bags hit the world headlines.  And so it rolled…

Ivor Cummins called the Chinese system of government “corporatocracy”.  This is a very good description.  Cummins says that China runs its country “as a business”.  Corporatism on a grand scale.  With all of the viciousness with which anyone who has worked for a corporation will instantly be familiar.

Salvatore Babones, writing in Quadrant, has aptly termed the modern Chinese system of totalitarian governance “techno-totalitarianism”.  Chinese party control of every aspect of the lives of its citizens.

And it is here that the Chinese political model met the opportunity of 2020.  A pivotal opportunity, and a pivotal moment.  Here is the backstory of the Chicomms’ 2020 moment.  The Chinese regime already had in place the mechanisms to effect a global coup that has affected all of our lives.

More must be said about the Chinese system in order to explain properly how 2020 developed. 

The Chinese Communist Party has created “artificial intelligence national champions” to help run its digitally enabled totalitarianism.

As Babones reports:

Techno-totalitarianism gives the leaders of China’s party-state inside access to and ultimate control over everyone’s bank accounts, mobile payments and social media accounts. In a country where nearly all transactions are made on mobile phones (everything from booking a ride to buying vegetables from a street vendor), the government’s ability to control your phone is equivalent to the power of house arrest. China has also invested heavily in facial recognition technology, allowing mass public surveillance of the kind used for policing in London to be tied to individual identities.

When Wuhan Central Hospital’s Dr Li Wenliang was arrested for warning colleagues about the novel coronavirus, he wasn’t turned in by a colleague-turned-informant. He was betrayed by his WeChat account—and the accounts of others who spread screenshots of his messages. In his case, the party-state’s monitoring was relatively unsophisticated: his name was on the images being posted to social media. But others routinely report their messages being edited in real-time as they type them. There is no human agency behind that kind of repression; it’s an entirely electronic process. But there is a human principal. His name is Xi Jinping.

Compared to earlier party-state totalitarianisms, China’s techno-totalitarianism is extraordinarily centralised. There is no role for local party secretaries in designing the algorithms that WeChat uses to suppress political speech. All of the relevant strings can be pulled directly from Beijing. The Chinese government has named at least fifteen private companies as artificial intelligence “national champions” that report directly to the national government, wherever their home offices may be. These companies include well-known brands like Huawei, Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent (owner of WeChat), as well as more specialised operators like Hikvision (surveillance systems), Megvii (facial recognition), Yitu (image processing) and Unigroup (chip design). Assigned the joint mission of completing the surveillance state, they certainly don’t have to worry about local party committees interfering with their research.

This is a model that the West seems only too willing to replicate in the age of CovidMania.  Just look at Professor Pantsdown.  Useful idiots in the cause of Chinese imperialism.  A war won without shots being fired.  George Orwell, not able to predict the internet, would be saying, “Jeepers, I didn’t think of that!”

Australasia has had its own useful idiots in the Chicomm grand plan.  (Professor!) Bob Carr, Shanghai Sam Dastyari, Andrew Robb, Bob Hawke, Alexander Downer.  Daniel “Belt and Road” Andrews.  And Jacinda Adern, of course, panting at the thought of China’s embrace.  All witting or unwitting servants of the People’s Republic of China.  Spivs sucking up to arguably the most grotesque regime in history.

Here is the unlamented former Prime Minister, Paul Keating:

Criticism of Beijing constitutes little more than the “pious belching” of journalists.

Australasia signed up for the Chicomm con.  It all started with Gough Whitlam, of course.  Billy McMahon, at the time, was said to have been caught on the hop.  What we sow, we reap.

It took an old leftie, Clive Hamilton, to alert Australia to the malign influence of Chinese incursions into Australian institutions, including but not limited to our universities.  Hamilton’s two books (Silent Invasion and Hidden Hand) have laid out in graphic detail the Chinese strategy for global aggrandisement, both in Australia and internationally.  The Confucian Institutes so beloved of Australian chancer, academic suckholes are but one channel of influence.  The Chinese plan for world domination, revealed quite openly in CCP statements, is clear and there is no excuse for not seeing it.

There is no excuse for not having noticed it, nor having seen the essence of the 2020 Covid strategy of the CCP.

But Australia wasn’t the only country taken in.  Michael Pillsbury, author of The Hundred Year Marathon, states:

For more than forty years, the United States has played an indispensable role helping the Chinese government build a booming economy, develop its scientific and military capabilities, and take its place on the world stage, in the belief that China's rise will bring us cooperation, diplomacy, and free trade. But what if the China Dream is to replace us, just as America replaced the British Empire, without firing a shot?

China has played the long game. Stewart Paterson spotted the critical points of surrender by the West in his astonishing book, China, Trade and Power.

China took a huge step along the path to global domination with its acceptance into the World Trade Organisation on 11 December 2001, three months to the day after 9/11.  This occurred on the clueless watch of George W Bush.  But driven by Bill Clinton.  Entry to the globalist WTO gave China permission to take over the world.  Through capitalism!

What of the connection between China and the global elites, who drive global events and ideologies through such organisations as the World Economic Forum? 

The links are tight and ongoing.  There is a massive coincidence of interests between Beijing and Davos.  The shared desire for global technocracy, neo-communist control over individuals, elite rule, the crushing of the deplorables and a disabled USA drives this symbiotic partnership.  The WEF is in love with China. 

Here is what the WEF says:

China is taking an increasingly active role in reshaping the international system of trade, environmental protection and economic development while simultaneously grappling with the local implications of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Facing the deteriorating geopolitical and geo-economic environment following the COVID-19 crisis, the Global Future Council on China will explore emerging models of Chinese leadership adapted to a new norm of globalization. It will make recommendations for building trust between China and the rest of the world – based on mutual respect and shared interest – in pursuing strategic cooperation in areas such as climate change, health research and sustainable technologies. It will develop case studies to illustrate how business leaders both inside and outside China can navigate this changing landscape to bring an entrepreneurial approach to solving global challenges.

Quod erat demonstrandum.  A beautiful coincidence of interests and globalist ideology.  But note that China will use the WEF then spit it out.

Here is Aya Velazquesz:

From the 20th to the 24th of January, 2020, the 50th World Economic Forum met in the Swiss city of Davos. At the same time, on January 23rd, China imposed the first lockdown in the history of humankind, and the global avalanche of corona coverage began. Just a few days later, WHO Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was already praising China’s method as “precedent-setting.” Almost every country on earth copied China in the following months. In the meantime, Klaus Schwab, executive chairman of the WEF, was looking forward to the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a “Great Reset” that he conjured out of his hat in front of the global public in Davos. Each additional day of lockdown brings Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Money unbelievable profits. 

… From Davos to Silicon Valley, managers, CEOs and transhumanists are praising the efficiency and precision of the Chinese system. The Chinese Communist Party has been building up its institutional influence in the Western world for decades. They now have the right friends and supporters on the right switchboards.

China is the second biggest contributor to the United Nations.  China’s extremely useful links to the WHO, so integral to the 2020 Covid strategy, are clear and significant.

A diplomatic source in Beijing stated, with considerable understatement:

China and the WHO have extremely close ties.

You don’t say.  Aya Velzquesz:

The WHO is acting as a kind of shadow world government and instrument for the lockdown-reset apologists by implementing agreed-upon measures through the health departments of individual countries. The dictator-approved WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus owes his post as WHO director to China’s voting power. One hand washes the other: On January 30th, 2020, only six days after a lockdown was imposed in Wuhan, he praised China’s crisis-management in the highest tones — at a time when it was impossible to empirically determine if it were effective.

Remember that it was WHO that talked Italy into lockdown in March 2020, and the rest followed, including countries like Australia where the impact of the virus was minimal by all sane definitions.  The WHO has been critical to China’s strategy.

China saw early the huge potential of using supranational institutions to screw over the USA and the rights of individuals across the West.

The absence of journalistic and bureaucratic analysis in the West of events that Blind Freddie could see bespeaks massive cognitive failure at best, and ideological collusion at worst.

China’s master strategy was hatched in the 1980s in the aftermath of Deng Xiaoping, who had realised that the Maoist model of socialism in one country was a necessary, but not sufficient for China’s route to world domination.  The emerging Chinese model was essentially an imperialist, capitalist model, ironically.  Lenin had said that imperialism was the highest form of capitalism.  Under cover of communist ideology, China absorbed the core messages of Lenin – and struck!  Struck gold.

It was pure genius.  And the benign West looked on, with admiration and naïve hopes of a better world of Sino engagement.

Listen to WEF founder, Mr Great Reset himself, Klaus Schwab:

In a world marked by great uncertainty and volatility, the international community is looking to China.

A generation of Western idiots believed that China’s capitalist road was a great thing, and that capitalism would lead to political liberalism.  The new China was seen as a good thing.  In the unbounded optimism of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Francis Fukuyama’s superficially appealing “end of history” rubbish, Western nations in the 1990s shut down their geopolitical brains.  They believed their own b.s.

China’s greatest ally in 2020 was the Democratic Party in the USA. 

The CCP’s links to the Democrats go back at least to the 1996 presidential election, where China linked companies gave generously to the Bill Clinton campaign.  One doesn’t need to show the links between Chinese corporates with companies that ran the corrupt, computer-driven vote counting software that harvested Democrat votes in November 2020 to lay bare the strategy that was critical to Beijing’s global interests.

Obsessed by Trump and fearing the populist forces that he had mobilised, the corrupt, power-hungry Democrats jumped on board.  Under cover of Covid, they marshalled their Tammany Hall state machines to unleash the greatest fraud in US history.  One hundred million US voters took to postal voting as a direct result of the Chinese-inspired Branch Covidianism unleashed on the West.  Enabled by a corporate media obsessed with crushing Trump and his deplorables.

Enter the Bidens, a wholly owned subsidiary of the CCP.  According to one US journalist, Beijing is “licking its chops over January 20”.  With Trump, the one US leader in the past two generations to recognise the strategic threat posed by China and to start a process to push back, gone, the Chinese have now in Washington a free pass to resume the activities they drove prior to Trump.  Another job done in the year of Covid.  Achieved as the result of a virus that they thought up. 

Mark Steyn has drawn our attention to the fact that the CCP’s centenary is in March 2021.  Let us hope that they don’t decide to celebrate with a big bang gesture.  No, they are not likely to start a hot war (for example, by invading Taiwan).  The strategies and tactics to date have been flawless.  No need for a hot war when the other side is so damned stupid.  As David Goldman has concluded, we in the West have already been well and truly assimilated, “Sino-formed”.  Not a shot fired.

With apologies to Frank Sinatra, it might be said by Xi that “when I was sixty-seven, it was a very good year”.

Covid was, indeed, kind to China.

Paul Collits

17 January 2021