Gongol.com Archives: January 2021
January 21, 2021
Chinese government pushes anti-vaccination conspiracy theories
Why would they try to undermine trust in the safety of American-made vaccines? The big picture isn't hard to figure out: President Xi and his cabal appear committed to a dependency posture with the world. The grand scheme is to turn many other countries into client states that depend upon a mighty and industrialized China for economic, military, and even scientific needs. ■ The Belt and Road Initiative is one manifestation of this posture: China is trying to solve some of its own domestic problems by building infrastructure abroad -- but the Chinese government also isn't trying to help build endogenous capacity in the countries where the Belt-and-Road projects are being built. They're strictly looking to build what suits their perceived Chinese self-interests. If it were about actually helping, then the phrase "debt trap" wouldn't come into the picture. But the phrase does come into the picture, because the initiative is, ultimately, about creating dependency (not capacity) between the client states and China. ■ The same logic is at play with making it appear that China has the only reliable Covid-19 vaccine supply. If China's leadership were being responsible -- or even just far-sighted -- they would look to the big scale and see that the world needs an unprecedented supply of effective vaccines, and any rivalry between vaccine-makers pales in comparison with the net good to be done by eradicating the pandemic swiftly and definitively. That's a thing that can only be accomplished by an all-hands-on-deck approach. Spreading misinformation about "rival" vaccines is a strategy that is bound to backfire, and at great cost. It says something grave about the short-sightedness of China's leadership that they would choose such a low-payoff, short-term strategy rather than participating in a global eradication effort as responsible partners. ■ That's a warning sign we shouldn't ignore: The person who's drowning may panic and flail enough to drown their own rescuer and thus scuttle their own hopes of survival. If China's leadership is panicking and flailing this much, perhaps they think there is a domestic threat to their own survival lurking much closer in the water than outsiders realize.
