Editor’s note Has China become a giant of proportions that should worry humanity? In a series of analyzes to be read until Monday, our columnist and expert political scientist on China, Loïc Tassé, attempts to answer this question.
It took at least a year for a team from the World Health Organization to be allowed to visit China. A delay which left ample time for the government of Xi Jinping to remove the most visible traces of its inaction and to prepare the witnesses to recite the role which had been written for them.
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Worse, the experts of the WHO committee were themselves chosen … by Beijing!
The Chinese Communist Party is used to big scenes. In the 1950s and 60s, the Chinese government presented foreigners, journalists, intellectuals or ordinary visitors with an idealized version of China.
The Chinese allowed to speak to foreigners were carefully selected and they had to memorize the answers they had to provide.
From the great theater
Xi Jinping, who has great admiration for Mao Zedong, seems to have returned to his theatrical practices.
Residents of Wuhan city have been barred from speaking in public.
Ai Wei Wei, an anti-regime artist who now lives in Europe, has accumulated 300 hours of documentary footage sent to him by the townspeople.
Reuters Photo
Experts from the World Health Organization (WHO), responsible for investigating the origins of COVID-19, arrived at Pudong Airport in Shanghai, China on February 10.
We see devastated doctors, residents padlocked at home, heartbreaking testimonies. All kinds of people the Chinese authorities didn’t want WHO investigators to meet.
Chinese authorities also forced investigators to work with the only documents they provided.
In these conditions, it is difficult to formulate hypotheses other than those put forward by the Chinese authorities.
Handling accident?
In particular, a group of independent experts attacked the refusal of WHO investigators to take into account the hypothesis of a handling accident.
It is because according to these independent experts, a coronavirus very similar to that of COVID-19 would have appeared in China in 2012, and Chinese virologists would have sampled it.
China’s responsibility mainly affects the slowness with which the Chinese government raised the international alert.
It is extremely likely that doctors in Wuhan knew that a very contagious new coronavirus was present in China before Christmas.
It is almost certain that the Chinese government knew from the start of the outbreak in Wuhan that COVID-19 was contagious from human to human.
Lies and secrecy
It is evident that the Chinese government has hidden the true death toll in Wuhan, and possibly in several parts of China.
Why these lies, these secrecy and these manipulations? Because Xi Jinping cultivates the image that his administration is competent and infallible.
Because the Chinese government fears that some countries hold China responsible for the pandemic and that they ask for compensation.
The virus has not weakened its economy
If official figures are to be believed, China’s economy has been in full health since the near end of the COVID-19 pandemic on its territory.
It should experience growth of more than 7% in 2021. Except that the Chinese authorities are more and more opaque and it is more and more difficult to have the correct information.
At first glance, it makes sense to anticipate good growth in the Chinese economy in 2021, since the pandemic would have ended earlier there than elsewhere.
The International Monetary Fund forecasts growth of more than 8% in China in 2021.
But the Chinese rely relatively little on the state’s social safety net to help them in times of hardship. They prefer to save their money. And savings rates have increased a lot in 2020.
Where will the savings go?
Will these savings be used for economic growth? Household spending represents 55% of the Chinese economy. The government wants this proportion to increase. Are the Chinese going to increase their consumption? Not sure.
This is because if the official inflation is 3%, the prices of household consumption products have increased well beyond this official figure. Likewise, the price of housing continues to increase. Something to worry the Chinese and encourage them to save even more.
Moreover, the relocation of supply chains could hurt the Chinese economy.
It is because following the lessons learned from the shortages of medical supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic, the big economies want to bring home the production of strategic products.
Buy American Act
To this is added the Buy American Act reinforced that Joe Biden is in the process of setting up.
The new US protectionist measures seem more intended to counter the importation of Chinese products than products made by allies of the United States.
So far, few US and foreign companies have decided to leave China. But it is to be expected that their number will increase.
Despite these dangers, the Chinese economy is far from on the verge of collapse. It has gigantic foreign currency reserves.
China’s partners, who should also experience an economic upturn in the wake of the pandemic, will in turn fuel the Chinese economy.
All in all, the Chinese economy still has a lot of strengths.