Times good or bad, China’s out in front, showing the way

WEDNESDAY, March 11, indeed was — as I wrote last time around — no ordinary day in so many ways. Now I understand why China’s Ambassador to the Philippines Huang Xilian didn’t make it to the launch that day of my book, Dr. Jose P. Laurel Nation Above Self, A Biography. That was the day he went to make a courtesy call on President Rodrigo Duterte to discuss a variety of concerns regarding China-Philippine relationship and, most particularly, the threatening coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) outbreak in the country.

The Philippines was only just beginning to feel the real menace of the dreaded disease and was quite aware of the vast suffering of China on account of the virus outbreak in Wuhan City beginning December 2019. Ambassador Huang must have taken it upon himself to sit down with the President and see how China can help to come up with measures in order that the Filipino people may not suffer what the Chinese people could not avoid in their own experience.

In good times past, China has been tremendously generous to the Philippines, delivering packages of development for the country, some as investments at low interest rates, some as outright grants, like those two additional bridges across the Pasig River envisioned to ease Metro Manila’s traffic woes or the 10,000bed capacity drug rehabilation center in Nueva Ecija for surrendered drug addicts and pushers.

Now that the Philippines is in real danger of being thrown into an epidemic similar to what struck Wuhan late last year, it behooved Ambassador Huang to address this concern.

Already, the Philippines at the time had recorded 140 cases of Covid-19, with 12 deaths. Initially, President Duterte had ordered a community quarantine scheme but soon after, with the number of cases increasing at an alarming rate, he declared a lockdown of the entire Luzon.

As the World Health Organization (WHO) had by now ascertained, the outbreak in Wuhan was the first one for the coronavirus and its eventual spread all over the world is the first time, too, for such a strain of the virus gone pandemic. To combat Covid-19, therefore, amounted to a cross which in the beginning China alone had to bear.

Witness how United States President Donald Trump executes passivity, as Nero once fiddled while Rome burned, advising Americans not to wear face masks, saying the outbreak would soon pass and curtailing full disclosure of actual Covid-19 cases in the US.

March 11 was also the day WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus outlined to the media what he believed to be the correct handling of the virus outbreak.

“Let me summarize it in four key areas,” he said. “First, prepare and be ready. Second, detect, protect and treat. Third, reduce transmission. Fourth, innovate and learn.”

One notices that these guideposts apply only in a situation in which an epidemic is already known. In the case of Covid-19, it was not at all known when it hit China. When, in December 2019, residents of Wuhan City in

Hubei Province were getting afflicted with the disease in their thousands with those dying uncontrollably also in their thousands. Nobody but nobody knew what was hitting them.

Until now there is a persistent debate as to where the virus actually originated. Its outbreak in Wuhan had been seized upon by US President Trump to replace “corona” with “Chinese” to coin the name for the disease, “Chinese virus.” According to some analysts, this is a ploy to divert Democrats from harping on Trump’s racist image, which seriously hurts his chances in the coming US presidential elections. If this were the intention, then Trump can be embarking on a supreme irony. What is naming a deadly virus Chinese but an exercise in one more kind of racism?

Whether the gambit would get Trump reelected is doubtful though. Even among Americans, China’s economic ascendancy over America is held dear both by US big business and by the American hoi polloi. American giant companies like Ford, Apple, McDonald’s and Starbucks, among others, unabashedly declare the huge Chinese market as part and parcel of their lifeline. In one photograph that I used for my upcoming book China The Way, The Truth and the Life, tauntingly pretty American young ladies flaunt t-shirts with slogans on their breasts: “We love China.” The pressure even from his party mates to let go of his trade war with China is more than proof enough that Trump cannot be succeeding in his hate-China antics.

The real score on Covid-19, like Trump’s anal air, will just have to out smelling bad. Some columns back, working on a source’s information, I had the sincerity to declare that the virus that hit Wuhan was man-made, specifically, US-made. People questioned me for that assertion. A recent investigation by the US Congress sort of upheld my contention. It was brought out there by Director Robert Redfiled of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that anywhere between 14,000 and 20,000 Americans had died in 2019 ostensibly from influenza, but upon exhumation recently of the victims’ remains, it was discovered that what killed the victims was misdiagnosed as influenza when in fact it was the very virus now rampaging across the world, Covid-19!

And those 369 US military personnel sent to participate in the Military World Games in Wuhan in October 2019 all performed poorly, winning not one gold. Why? Because, as one credible account insinuates, they were already sick — carriers of Covid-19!

Otherwise, how explain this phenomenon, as run by Reuters, March 26, 2020: “Exclusive: US slashed CDC staff inside China prior to coronavirus outbreak.” The author, Marisa Taylor, writes: “The Trump administration cut staff by more than two-thirds at a key US public health agency operating inside China, as part of a larger rollback of US-funded health and science experts on the ground there leading up to the coronavirus outbreak.”

So, those coronavirus-infected soldiers were sent to the games purposely to spread the disease? Too bad that the WHO limits itself to investigating the medical and health concerns of the contagion, not the politics of it.

By golly, I was right after all when I wrote “China up against a horrible kind of US missile!”

China has survived those missiles, in any case, has in fact vanquished them by now. As of last count, there have been no recorded new cases of Covid-19 in China. How China did it becomes the prototype of how other countries similarly afflicted must do it.

My latest info is that China has been delivering on its promise of medical equipment, supplies and containment technology to 82 countries in all major continents of the world. This, in the spirit of what President Xi Jinping has been promoting as a “Community of Shared Future for Mankind.” Quite touching is that scene showing Serbian President Vucic kissing China’s flag in the arrival ceremonies for the Airbus plane carrying Chinese medical aid; ditto with Italy’s “balcony concert” playing the Chinese national anthem at the arrival of similar aid in Italy.

So, now, to that Wednesday when Ambassador Huang prioritized seeing President Duterte in order to discuss the current travails of the Philippines against the increasing onslaught of Covid-19. I keep my fingers crossed that with China there, cure is in sight sooner or later.

During the meeting, Huang acknowledged the volumes of medical supplies sent by the Philippines to China at the height of the virus outbreak in Wuhan, and he took the occasion to state: “In the same spirit, China stands ready to join hands with the Philippines to overcome the current difficulties, and is willing to extend assistance to the best of its capabilities in line with the needs of the Philippine side.”

Earlier than that call, Huang had donated to the Philippine government 2,000 test kits for the coronavirus; more such aid, the ambassador assures, is coming.

One thing pesters me endlessly though. So far, WHO has not quite established links between the outbreak in China and those in Italy and Iran. The implication here is that those outbreaks have been triggered separately. If it is true that the Wuhan outbreak is US-made, it would be understandable. China is a foe of the United States. Similar is the case of Iran. In the case of Italy, there is no apparent animosity existing between it and US, but for the fact that Italy had broken away from the European Union, a US ally, to integrate into President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative.

But in the case of the Philippines, by what animosity with the United States must the country be made to suffer a similar vengeance? There can be many, but space limitation constrains us to cite just one: the recent notice by President Duterte to the United States to abrogate the Visiting Forces Agreement.

Need I say more?