Coronavirus: Virulent Competition

On December 26, several Chinese state media outlets reported a mysterious disease with symptoms similar to influenza quickly spreading in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province. The reports raised alarm that, according to laboratory analysis, the virus responsible for the disease bore a high genetic resemblance to the coronavirus that had caused the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in China and other parts of Asia in 2002 and 2003.

The novel coronavirus, by the end of January, was deemed a global emergency by the World Health Organization. By March, it was a global pandemic, with hundreds of thousands of cases in more than 150 countries. The economies of Europe and the United States had ground to a halt by the end of March as some political leaders mandated self-isolation for the masses.

The novel coronavirus disease, or COVID-19, is already by several measures a transformative global event of the sort that arises perhaps once in a generation. In epidemiological terms, it appears to be a once-in-a-hundred-years pandemic, with its alarmingly high infectiousness and relatively high case fatality rate (estimates are still uncertain, but range from anywhere between 0.7 percent to as high as 3.5 percent, with higher rates for certain vulnerable populations). The economic consequences of this pandemic are causing increasing alarm across the world. Already, the United States, the world’s largest economy, is looking at a sudden surge in unemployment that makes the jobs lost during the 2008 global financial crisis look like a modest blip. American equity markets have shed more than a third of their early February all-time-highs; elsewhere, emerging markets and developed markets alike are being devastated. The crisis has caused investors to flee to the U.S. dollar, causing an unparalleled collapse in several world currencies as well. Meanwhile, it appears nearly certain that the worst in terms of COVID-19’s toll on human health and welfare is yet to come: hundreds of thousands of cases may soon balloon into the millions.

Given the serious, systemic impacts of the virus on the health and wealth of millions, it holds the potential to redefine contemporary geopolitics. One of the most important consequences that is already visible is the rift that COVID–19 has accelerated in an already difficult U.S.-China relationship. The high from the signing of a “phase one” trade deal between Beijing and Washington in January 2020 has now given way to a growing blame game. In the United States, an opportunistic political leadership under President Donald J. Trump has taken to highlighting at every turn the virus’ origins within China’s borders. Though this does little to reduce the growing daily impact on American lives, it ostensibly has political utility in the president’s eyes: It allows a frustrated America to identify a culprit for the country’s predicament. With advisors at his side like Peter Navarro, who once oversaw the production of a documentary hyperbolically dubbed Death by China, Trump may hope that pointing the finger at Beijing will serve his political fortunes as the United States hurtles toward the presidential election this November.

But Washington isn’t alone in playing the blame game. In Beijing, a propaganda campaign is underway to rewrite the history of the virus’ spread. Early signs of the campaign were visible in late February, as it became clearer that the situation in Hubei province and elsewhere in China was being brought under control. Zhong Nanshan, a Chinese scientist involved in the official government response to the epidemic, raised doubts about the provenance of the virus, which most reporting – including Chinese – in January pinpointed to Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market (the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the culprit behind COVID-19, is thought to have zoonotic origins). “Though the COVID-19 was first discovered in China, it does not mean that it originated from China,” Zhong said at the time.

That messaging was quickly picked up by more authoritative mouthpieces for the Chinese government’s global efforts. Lin Songtian, the Chinese envoy to South Africa, repeated Zhong’s point nearly verbatim on Twitter. The world began to take notice more clearly, however, after Zhao Lijian, a Chinese diplomat who’d gained notoriety for his widespread use of Twitter during his time in Pakistan, raised the possibility that the U.S. Army had developed and imported the virus to Wuhan – a ludicrous claim that eventually prompted the U.S. Department of State to summon Cui Tiankai, the Chinese ambassador to Washington, D.C. Zhao wasn’t just any Chinese diplomat: He had recently been promoted to an official spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As Zhao, Lin, and others, including China’s nationalist Global Times, sowed disinformation, the Chinese government reached out to countries hard hit by COVID-19, including Italy, to offer assistance. Elsewhere, Chinese propaganda efforts sought to erase evidence of the mismanagement of the disease’s early spread by Hubei local authorities in late December and January; instead, the messaging focused on the notion that China had bought the rest of the world time through its containment efforts.

It may be too early to write a definitive geopolitical history of COVID-19, but the winds are not blowing in the direction of superpower collaboration. It was once the case that despite sharp disagreements on Taiwan, the South China Sea, North Korea, and other matters, the United States and China could collaborate on clear global threats, such as climate change. The pandemic’s origins within China, however, have become a political fixation in the United States and a propaganda priority for Beijing, pushing both sides down a zero sum path when the most productive path forward would be to set differences aside temporarily in the name of cooperation.

COVID-19 won’t be over soon, raising questions about what the world might look like on the other side of this pandemic. As this issue of The Diplomat went to print, economic projections for the United States appeared decidedly grim. Economists at both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs published projections that suggested a fall in gross domestic product in the United States of anywhere between 30 and 50 percent in the second quarter of 2020. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, meanwhile, predicted that the U.S. unemployment rate could hit 30 percent that same quarter. Together, these would present economic shocks to the American system unseen in the modern era and surpassing, in some respects, the collapse that heralded the Great Depression between 1929 and 1932. For geopolitical thinkers who’ve long considered the seeming inevitability of the Chinese economy outpacing that of the United States, COVID-19 might require a rethink of expected timelines for such a transition.

The geopolitical implications of COVID-19 should be a tertiary matter, with preserving life and prosperity ranking higher on the list of priorities for policymakers, but if anything can come close to representing a “Suez moment” for the United States – a major reset to Washington’s post-Cold War primacy – it may be COVID-19. How the United States and China manage this difficult period, globally and bilaterally, will determine much to come ahead. COVID-19 will leave the world transformed. It remains to be seen if Washington and Beijing can find space to coexist and establish a new, peaceful modus vivendi for what will come next; or if the tumult of these months and years ahead will accelerate the path to confrontation and even open conflict between the two sides.