China, seems to be above criticism

Test appears to be facing its worst crisis since 1939 because of a new global pandemic. Thousands of people have died. More, we are told, will die. And the economic shock to the system has been profound. Yet one country, China, seems to be above criticism. As China begins to expel American journalists, I am left wondering: who are the villains of this piece?

I have to confess that last week I found myself feeling more depressed than I had been in my adult life by the words of the chief scientific officer Sir Patrick Vallance. He said that 60 per cent of the U.K. population needed to get COVID-19 in order for our nation to build herd immunity, yet Boris Johnson had said nothing about this. I worked out pretty quickly that this tactic would trigger in the region of 400,000 deaths. A few days later it transpired that the Imperial College COVID-19 response team had done some work for the government and estimated that about 260,000 people would die if this disease was allowed to spread.

Since then, I am pleased to say that government policy has changed. Britain is acting in line with many other countries in attempting to suppress the virus. Downing Street has recognised that a rapid spread of COVID-19 would overwhelm the NHS. The penny has dropped. We must hold our nerve and hope for the best.

I believe that attention should now turn to China. When President Trump has talked about the "Chinese virus" (others have called it the "Wuhan Virus") he has been met with waves of criticism and accusations of racism. In the House of Commons, the shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry even said of Trump: "Now he's calling it the foreign virus, blaming it on Europe for its spread and today blaming China." I hate to break it to Ms Thornberry, but Trump is right. And it is time we all challenged China there is plenty for us to consider. Coronavirus is the third major public health scare this century that I can think of which can be traced back to China. First we had SARS, then we had swine flu, now we have Coronavirus. There is nothing to suggest that the COVID-19 virus is a deliberately created virus. This isn't the same as saying that its emergence is free of all human involvement. Experts have warned of appalling hygiene conditions in Chinese wildlife markets for years, with living, dead or dying creatures as diverse as bats, pangolins and other are held in close proximity, their body fluids and all the bacteria, viruses and parasites they carry mixing and mutating in direct contact with human shoppers. It seems to have taken this crisis for it to dawn on China's government that something was amiss. Vietnam also got the memo and announced it will be closing down all such markets with immediate effect.

It's not just about hygiene. China has won somewhat alarming plaudits for the draconian measures it imposed to stop—or, just as likely, temporarily pause—the pandemic in its epiceneter, Wuhan. The doctors and nurses who fought in the frontline certainly deserve every praise. But quite apart from the question of whether these measures are something we should emulate in a democracy, this risks obscuring the fact that China suppressed the truth about the nascent epidemic even among its own people, clamping down on whistleblowers delaying a global response by month, at the cost of thousands upon thousands of lives worldwide.

Isn't it time we in the West had a grown-up conversation about China, beginning with the truth that several layers of the regime—from sanitary inspectors to secret police— are responsible for this nightmare? Isn't this the moment when we need to remind ourselves that China is a deeply unpleasant communist dictatorship, a surveillance society that executes thousands of its own people every year? We all need to examine our attitude to the Beijing regime. For too long, no global leader dared to say a word against it, much less adopt a remotely conditional approach to engaging with the regime. The priorities of globalization have been deemed far too important for human rights to even be considered. This is plain wrong.

The Left screams and shouts about Trump and, indeed, about anybody it perceives as being on the Right. We are all smeared as racists, fascists and homophobes. These days many of us are classed as transphobic, too. But while the Left is happy to pummel us into submission on so many subjects, they barely say a word about China. What about the oppression of Chinese Muslims? What about Tibet? Perhaps Emily Thornberry would do better by attacking President Xi rather than Donald Trump.

By Nigel Farage