Months ago, information filtered out, almost as rumors, but with an unmistakable level of intrigue and verified actions by the Chinese Communist government. At the time, it was the ChiComs' own actions that portrayed something evil was afoot. Those initially known actions included placing an emergency room doctor from Wuhan province, Mei Zhongming, under arrest, forcing him to recant earlier public warnings about COVID-19, and then withheld treatment until it was too late to save him from the virus that killed him. This was ironic given he was among a half dozen doctors who made social media posts trying to warn the public about the dangers from this viral pandemic. Despite him knowing of the lethality before most others did, he treated many infected patients at his hospital. For his principled efforts, Dr. Zhongming was treated like a criminal and allowed to die. His "crime" was to make social media posts to the website WeChat, that simply warned medical school graduates that they needed to wear protective clothing when treating the influx of patients arriving with the symptoms of the COVID-19 virus.
Another doctor from the same hospital, Ai Fen, has been rounded up by Chinese security forces and she has not been seen since late March. Her "crime" was as director of emergency medicine, she announced and chaired an emergency meeting of a half dozen doctors at her hospital in Wuhan, where the discussion was about the emerging threat of the COVID-19 virus, and how best to treat the disease. She also publicly announced that if the disease was not treated properly, it could spread into a worldwide epidemic. Of course, Doctor Fen's warnings were entirely correct, and had the Chinese government acted in moral principle to them back when first uttered in December, then it is believed that 95% of the worldwide impact of COVID-19 would have been prevented. This assertion by the British University of Southampton.
All of the six doctors at the meeting that Doctor Fen convened, including the aforementioned Doctor Zhongming, were placed under arrest and forced to sign statements that refuted their earlier announcements of the diseases' pending social impact.
Since then, the cell phone accounts of these doctors have been suspended, and other critics of the Chinese government's handling of his epidemic have also gone missing, including real estate billionare Ren Zhigiang. Ren said of China's President, Xi Jinping's speech on COVID-19, "I saw not an emperor standing there exhibiting his new clothes, but a clown stripped naked who insisted he continue being emperor." Shortly after this public statement, he disappeared, never to be seen or accounted for again.
Secretly, while the same Chinese government told the world that COVID-19 was not even transmittable between humans, it rushed to effect a domestic travel ban on Chinese citizens traveling to and from Wuhan province, but only after it allowed an annual celebration to take place, where hundreds of thousands of people gathered to Wuhan province, and then spread out among China and the world. Worse, while this domestic travel ban was in place, no such travel restriction was placed on Wuhan's people traveling on international flights! The people first at the epicenter of the disease were kept away from fellow Chinese, but allowed to travel around the world!
This is why Italy became the new epicenter of the pandemic, due to the high numbers of people from Wuhan province who regularly travel to Italy to manage business interests based in northern Italy. The same Chinese government lied to the world, and withheld vital epidemiology data, primarily by pressuring the now discredited World Health Organization into spreading deliberate misinformation across the globe.
Moreover, at the same time the Chinese government was destroying vital medical records, removing key data from medical professionals that would have helped craft treatments and possibly cures, it was buying up medical personal protective equipment (PPE), in a macabre act to corner the worldwide market and turn a healthy profit selling to the highest international buyers! At the same time, the Chinese government initially tried to blame COVID-19 on the Italians, and then on the American Army, and when that failed, on Chinese "wet markets" that sell live wild animals for food. The problem with all of those claims is that they violated so many well established facts. The propaganda to blame Italy and America mostly fell flat immediately. It took more time to discount the wet market in Wuhan, but the world eventually learned that this particular market does not even sell bats, so a virus originating from bats could not have come from that market.
But, a viral laboratory located in Wuhan was studying bats viruses, and now information has leaked that this laboratory was the source of the COVID-19 outbreak, which first infected people in Wuhan in early December, and then aided by Chinese malfeasance, spread throughout China and the globe. The Chinese government did nothing for two months except order destruction of vital records, and arrest and falsely imprison without trial, many Chinese who's only offense was to try to alert the public to a mortal threat. The international press also tried to report on it, but they were pressured into silence, and those who angered Chinese authorities were quickly arrested and deported. These were deliberate acts designed to keep the world blind to the emerging threat.
What kind of government does all this! The true answer is only a government that is devoid of morality and human compassion!
While the United States worked to gin up domestic manufacturing of PPE and ventilators, the Chinese were busy buying up all they could get to corner the market. The United States is now working to distribute this equipment as free international aid. The Chinese are selling this equipment at a premium price, and much of the equipment they are selling is of such poor quality that it is considered unusable.
While much of the American media is playing sick politics with this pandemic, ignoring Chinese guilt and trying to falsely blame Donald Trump for the adversity, the truth is only now being reported in reputable press. The Jerusalem Post published a well researched news article on these facts back in early April, and in the last week Fox News has spearheaded American media efforts to uncover the ugly truth of Chinese malevolence.
Right now, the worldwide death toll from COVID-19 is reported to be 164,716. Though it appears the disease hit its peak impact a week ago, many more people are going to die before the world gets a firm control over it. When a single government's malicious acts cause the needless deaths of over 200,000 people, almost certain to happen in this case, that is normally seen as an act of war.
Fortunately, the rest of the world doesn't have to get more people killed by declaring war on the Peoples' Republic of China. There are more civilized ways to obtain principled retribution. First, international efforts must start to immediately divest the world from Chinese economic attachments. All vital industries should be pulled from China simply because the same Chinese government that is responsible for this global pandemic also owns nearly all of this domestic industry. They personally profit from it. At minimum, all pharmaceutical manufacturing must be considered vital to public health and immediately removed from China, as well as the PPE manufacturing, which the Chinese government sought to horde and profit from when most acutely needed. Chinese government threats to punish nations who dared speak the truth of the COVID-19 virus, by withholding vitally needed drugs to treat the disease, is another unmistakable clue to the risks of allowing such evil people to control such vitally important industries.
Debt owned by Chinese interests should be immediately seized by internationally coordinated actions, as an initial tort remedy for the economic devastation so needlessly caused. National governments must join together to support the filing of tort claims against the Chinese government for their negligent actions, which have undoubtedly caused great human suffering. In sum, nothing less than an international alliance of determined nations must rise and punish the Chinese Communist oligarchs.
Another truth must also be boldly stated. People don't of themselves cause international strife and tribulations. Rather, evil cultures do!
We should temper the desire some may have to label this a "Chinese" problem with the very accurate observation that there is a second Chinese government that was made as much a victim of COVID-19 as the rest of the world, one that exists with a strong Constitution, guaranteed human liberties, and fair democratic elections. That nation is called the Republic of China, aka Taiwan. It is time that the world stop trying to placate the sensibilities of evil tyrants and boldly declare Taiwan is a free and sovereign country, one we are committed to defending against the Chinese Communists. Equally, we must strongly assert that the only way all of China unites as one nation is after the Peoples' Republic of China is no more, only after the evil Communist oligarchs are removed from power, placed under arrest for their crimes against humanity, and their evil government replaced with one enshrined in the human rights and dignity of a Constitution and truly fair elections.
That only happens when the Chinese people living in the PRC decide to make it so. Until then, they can share in the economic misery their government ordained for them. They have a stark choice to make. They can either blindly follow evil leaders who are leading them to ruin, or they can follow the examples from Tiananmen Square, and more recently in Hong Kong, and stand up and fight to end their tyranny over them.
Communism has done the unthinkable. Through its century long presence in humanity it has actually become a more grave threat to humanity that the Nazis ever were. Mao Zedung led a Chinese Communist insurrection and civil war in China that was responsible for tens of millions of human deaths, and his progeny currently leading China engage in the same wholesale malice against its own people. How can the world trust a group of people so wholly evil, that it thinks so little about killing its own people, and people across the globe, that it would actually seek to extract profit from the human suffering that it caused?
Money does not bring about peace. Let's dispel that fiction once and for all. Communism is evil whether it impoverishes people or actually improves their economic condition. Human philosophies aligned in harmony with each other bring about peace. Likewise, philosophies that run counter to each other cause strife and conflict. We were greatly mistaken about our decades' long efforts to improve the PRC's economic condition. It did not make them more like us. It just made them a greater human threat worldwide. We must now bravely recognize our error, and correct those mistakes, and do so swiftly and resolutely. Autocratic governments are the problem, not geography.
Our futures depend on it. And so while we should not outrightly declare war on the PRC, our combined actions against that government must show the same resolve.
-- Ken Stallings
This column is copyrighted under provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and all rights are reserved. Please do not re-transmit, host, or download these columns without my written permission.