Ratko Knežević

 

There are two possible scenarios for the emergence of the Wuhan virus. Neither of them conforms to the “official” Chinese party line and both have their pros and cons.

The real question is not whether the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was responsible for the present, disastrous pandemic. That is a settled fact for all objective analysts. 

Rather, what remains to be established is whether the CCP has simply responded incompetently to an accidental outbreak of a highly contagious coronavirus and, then, has tried to cover-up and deflect attention from its malfeasance?

Or, alternatively, is the CCP in the process of pulling off one of the most successful intelligence-military actions ever performed in history?

To assess these two possibilities, it is necessary to review key events in the timeline that has unfolded since the pandemic began in Wuhan, China in mid- or late-November last year. Let’s first look at the chronology of what ensued and the role played by the CCP throughout.

An Illuminating Timeline

In mid-December last year, Dr. Ai Fen, the director of the Emergency Department at Wuhan Central Hospital, was the first person to speak to her colleagues about the emergence of a strange new disease.

Eight of her colleagues, including eye doctor Dr. Li Wenliang, subsequently spoke about it on a Chinese social network -WeChat – which combines features of WhatsApp and Facebook.

Dr. Ai has since disappeared. Before that happened, though, in an article entitled “She Who Whistled” posted by Renwu Magazine, the doctor described the Chinese authorities’ efforts to silence her. Like its author, the article has now disappeared, no longer accessible on the magazine’s website.

Dr. Li’s eight colleagues were all arrested on December 31, 2019, for spreading “fake news.” On New Year’s Day, Dr. Li was forced to sign a statement in the Wuhan Police Prefecture saying that he had falsified information and disrupted law and order. On February 7, 2020, he died – ostensibly from complications of the Chinese virus. The fate of his colleagues remains unknown to this day.

On January 4, 2020, Dr. Ho Pak Leung, head of the Infections Division at the University of Hong Kong, stated that it was very likely that this virus was being transmitted from person to person.  Before then, and for weeks after, however, the Wuhan Health Office declared – and Chinese health authorities confirmed – that their preliminary studies had provided no evidence of the virus being prone to human transmission.

On January 6th, the United States requested permission from China for an expert group to visit the focal point in Wuhan for a fact-finding mission. That request was rejected.

On January 17-18, the Wuhan authorities allowed for collective celebration in connection with the Lunar New Year, resulting in more than one hundred thousand people converging on the city’s streets, for among other things, a mass pot-luck dinner attended by 40,000 families.

On January 20^th, China confirmed that it had 100 cases of COVID-19.

On January 22nd, the World Health Organization’s Director-General, a Marxist former Ethiopian Foreign Minister named Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus – a man who lacks any medical qualifications and only achieved his present post thanks to China’s fierce lobbying – declared that China had done everything possible to halt the spread of the virus. He thanked the Chinese Minister of Health for the excellent cooperation. And he unctuously commended CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Li Keqiang for their “leadership and timely intervention.”

On January 23rd, just nine days after the WHO announced that the Chinese virus cannot be transmitted from person to person, and just five days after the big celebration in Wuhan, the Chinese central authorities declared a quarantine in Wuhan.

It was already too late.  Hundreds of thousands had been in the streets of Wuhan. Millions were visiting or had left Wuhan during the Chinese New Year holidays. And large numbers of PRC nationals had traveled from Wuhan to other countries, carrying the virus with them – many without exhibiting symptoms of the disease.

It was not until January the 29th that China allowed an expert WHO group to visit Wuhan.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party propagandists were touting Xi Jinping’s character as well as his crisis management skills. On February 4th, however, two well-known Chinese opposition figures issued fierce attacks against Xi and the CCP.

The first was published by Xu Zhangrun, a law professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing,  on the WeChat social network. It was entitled “Fighting the Epidemic: China Defeats COVID-19 in 2020” and appeared in Chinese, English, French, Spanish, Russian and Arabic. Prof. Xu declared:

This epidemic has shown how rotten the core of power and governance in the Chinese Communist Party is, how fragile, empty, and shaky the foundations of these buildings are….The militant ideology of this party stinks of gunpowder and it’s becoming even stronger…We have to wonder why this great country, which was once destroyed by the cult of personality, has no resistance to creating a new one. This time, the price of that new complacency will be paid by the whole nation.

This crisis, according to the distinguished professor, is just one in a series of political failures, including the management of the trade war with the USA and the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong, which highlight the shortcomings of an authoritarian system that increasingly concentrates power in the hands of one individual: Xi Jinping.

Prof. Xu concluded that “Xi has only one goal and one concern: to preserve the Communist Party in China and to preserve himself as its supreme leader. “

On the same day as the Xu article appeared, another forceful and sarcastic denunciation of the CCP was posted on Chinese social networks. It was authored by Dr. Xu Zhiyong, a Beijing University lecturer and human rights champion who spent four years in prison for anti-CCP activism. Dr. Xu demanded that Xi Jinping pay for his policy of taking the wrong steps and resign. He bravely wrote that, because everything Xi tries “while talking about reform and the opening up of China is, in fact, the smoke-screen behind which …the revival of the corpse of Marxism-Leninism lies.”

In the best manner of this sort of ideological teaching, the author continues: ‘’Xi sees enemies everywhere, and he grumbles about maintaining stability. In this name, and under that slogan, the disgraced doctors at Wuhan who spoke out about coronavirus were arrested.”

“Maintaining stability,” or in Chinese “wei wen,” is the justification for a well-established system that the Communist Party operates. It is aimed at keeping the CCP in power and exercising total control over society. It includes a pervasive network comprised of the military, the police, authorities in provinces and cities, party committees at all levels – from local communities, municipalities, cities, businesses, special “internet police” and, of course, secret police employing a disproportionately large number of people across China.

Both Professor Xu and Dr. Xu were taken into custody and no one knows their whereabouts or status – except the Chinese Communist Party.

The Provenance of the CCP Virus

In the face of such blowback, the question recurs: Was the sequence of events one in which the Wuhan virus burst forth and then was seized upon by the CCP to deflect the Chinese people’s attention, and that of the rest of the world, from the many, real problems that China had pre-pandemic? It certainly had the effect of ending the protracted unrest in Hong Kong.

Or has this whole pandemic, the virus that precipitated it and the CCP-style “lock-down” as the only possible means of fighting it been sold as part of a calculated, and highly successful, strategic operation to advantage the Chinese regime at the expense of both the population of China and that of the rest of the world?  Put differently: Could it be that this is the most successful intelligence-military operation conducted in the history of warfare since the Trojan Horse? 

Evidence emerging?

Key, instructive pieces of evidence are popping up day after day in the international media concerning the origin of this virus.

For example, a program that originally aired on Italian state-owned TV back in November 2015 recently resurfaced. In crystal-clear terms, it described a virus that can be harmful to humans. It warned the audience that, “Chinese scientists are creating a supervirus, a hybrid of viruses carried by different types of bats that will attack and destroy epithel[ial tissue] of human lungs.” The report continued, “It is only an experiment, so far. But many other scientists around the world are concerned.  And U.S. funding for this project has been halted because of its human health danger.’’

In recent days, Britain’s most widely circulated tabloid, The Daily Mail, reported that the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s staff were most likely to have contracted the virus in a lab after isolating the virus from the blood of bats in the caves of the Yunnan province. The lab is said to have conducted various experiments on such samples from 2011 to at least 2017.

Despite the CCP’s party line that the virus emanated from the so-called “wet market” in Wuhan, Cao Bin, one of the doctors at Wuhan Hospital, pointed out that the first thirteen patients out of the 41 coronavirus patients he examined had “no contact with the Wuhan market”.

The impact of the coronavirus.

A virus that has not only infected more than one million people worldwide, and will infect even more in the months ahead, has also become an incredible socio-political change agent – which sheds further light on the pregnant questions above.

Among the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the effective suspension until further notice of democratic capitalism and the free market as we know them in the country after country around the world.  These foundations of our economy and civilization were not overthrown by either Marx or Lenin or Stalin. But they have been rocked by the Chinese Communist leadership with a single – at best, mismanaged – virus.  That virus, it seems increasingly clear was researched and incubated, if not actually engineered, by Chinese scientists associated with a bio level 4 facility on a military installation in Wuhan.

So, did China want to unleash this deadly disease, knowing that its socialist economic model will inevitably lose the battle with democratic capitalism in the long run?  Were they determined to show the world how superior their model is?

Even if Xi and his clique did not purposefully release this disease, did they cunningly exploit the virus’s outbreak to change the narrative of his inability to deal with Hong Kong and Taiwan and his subordination in negotiations with Trump?

Is it material to the answer to that question that a country of up to a billion-and-a-half people has only had Wuhan subjected to a protracted and comprehensive quarantine, while huge megacities like Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing (the largest urban settlement on earth, with a population of over 36 million) haven’t been?

And most importantly, did the same Xi clique authorize the exploration of this virus as a weapon of bioterrorism?

The characteristics of this virus are enough to invite speculation that COVID-19 has something to do with biowarfare. For example:

• You can be contagious with it for up to fourteen days before the disease’s symptoms manifest themselves. You can, therefore, unknowingly spread it to many other people.

• It is passed on by the use of paper, including banknotes.

• It can remain on plastic and metal, including coins, for days.

• It has been shown to be strategically highly effective in traumatizing the societies and devastating the economies of even such powerful countries as the United States, whose cities and states have been paralyzed for weeks. And the U.S. military has been substantially sidelined in the Pacific with two powerful aircraft carriers, worth billions of dollars apiece, out of action due to large numbers among their crews falling ill with COVID-19. All without firing a shot.

Scenarios gaming outbreaks of viruses with such characteristics are the subject of Western military planning and corporate and academic exercises. In fact, one modeling a coronavirus pandemic known as “Event 201” was held in New York City with the participation of, among others, representatives of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control.

The CCP and Biological Warfare

There is reason to believe that the Chinese Communist Party and People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have, at a minimum, seriously studied such scenarios, too.

Back in 1998, two senior PLA colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui wrote an ambitious treatise on how China could wage asymmetric warfare against the United States long before it was powerful enough to use old-fashioned kinetic means.  It was entitled in Chinese, “Our Master Plan for the Destruction of America.” At the time, the leadership of China viewed the text as a creative product of two up-and-coming Army officers. (Both subsequently were promoted and served as in senior positions as general officers).

Then, in 1999, the U.S. Air Force accidentally bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, a diplomatic facility the Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, was using to hide and protect his General Staff. Within days, the Political Bureau of the CCP approved the two colonels’ comprehensive prescription for waging non-kinetic war against the United States as the official strategy of the PRC military – a policy that seems to remain in place to this day.

Two passages from the colonels’ then-secret tract are relevant for the present purpose:

The new concept of armaments will equally astound civilians and soldiers by the fact that common things that are familiar to them from everyday life can also become weapons of war. We believe that one morning, they will wake up with the surprise of a few common things (such as the “common flu,” [a term often used by Chinese media sources to refer to coronavirus]) having offensive features and a deadly reach.

The authors went on to paraphrase the ancient Chinese strategist, Sun Tzu, writing:

If the enemy offers a MOUNTAIN (sophisticated bombs, rockets, planes and other platforms for that, in other words, a race in technology that you can’t beat, to which you’re late getting involved), give it a RIVER (at first glance, an ‘’ordinary flu,’’ which is, in fact, a horrible weapon that decimates their population, ruins their stock exchanges, destroys the value of their money, halts their economy, spreads panic and fear, and puts a stop to their normal lives).

Another clue was provided in 2010 by Dr. Guo Jiwei, one of the leading military doctors in the Chinese Army and a professor at the Military Medical University who wrote a handbook: The War on Biological Dominance. The book’s underlying thesis is that, if China loses 100 million people, that is only twelve percent of China’s population. If Canada or Australia lose that many people, those nations will cease to exist. Dr. Gou warned ‘’One hundred million deaths will occur in the United States.” Is this a clear statement of intent? Is this virus part of a standing plan? Is this pandemic a “dress rehearsal”?

Yet another, ominous data point was recalled in January 2020 by J.R. Nyquist in the Epoch Times.  He recalled an address given behind closed doors by the then-Defense Minister of China, Gen. Chi Haotian. It is worth quoting from Nyquist’s article at length:

In a secret speech given to high-level Communist Party cadres nearly two decades ago, Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Chi Haotian explained a long-range plan for ensuring a Chinese national renaissance.

He said there were three vital issues that must be grasped. The first was the issue of living space – because China is severely over-populated and China’s environment is deteriorating. The second issue, therefore, was that the Communist Party must teach the Chinese people to “go out.” By this, Chi meant the conquest of new lands, in which a “second China” could be built by “colonization.” From this, arose the third vital issue: the “issue of America.”

Chi warned his listeners: “This appears to be shocking, but the logic is actually very simple.…[China is] in fundamental conflict with the Western strategic interest.” Therefore, the United States would never allow China to seize other countries to build a second China. The United States stands in China’s way.

Chi explained the problem as follows: “Would the United States allow us to go out to gain new living space? First, if the United States is firm in blocking us, it is hard for us to do anything significant to Taiwan, Vietnam, India, or even Japan. [So] how much more living space can we get? Very trivial! Only countries like the United States, Canada, and Australia have the vast land to serve our need for mass colonization.”

“We are not as foolish as to want to perish together with America by using nuclear weapons,” the general said. “Only by using non-destructive weapons that can kill many people will we be able to reserve America for ourselves.”

The answer is found in biological weapons.

“Of course,” he added, “we have not been idle. I n the past years, we have seized the opportunity to master weapons of this kind.”

The ruling Chinese Communist Party considers biological weapons to be the most important weapons for accomplishing their goal of “cleaning up America.” Chi credits former Party leader Deng Xiaoping with putting biological weapons ahead of all other weapon systems in the Chinese arsenal: “When Comrade Xiaoping was still with us, the Party Central Committee had the perspicacity to make the right decision not to develop aircraft carrier groups and focus instead on developing lethal weapons that can eliminate mass populations of the enemy country.”

Responding to the CCP Pandemic

Hopefully, we will soon be able to establish the truth about the genesis and source of this pandemic. That will not help the dead in Italy, Spain, New York, and elsewhere, unfortunately.

But the West must reassert control over its destiny, wresting it from a totalitarian communist regime that seeks to determine our fate – one that, ironically, has been financed by us with trillions of dollars since 1990. The effect has been to turn China into the world’s second greatest economic power, and a threat to the security and the survival of Western civilization.

Time and time again, the West has closed its eyes to the crimes of the Chinese Communist Party. These include, notably, the massacre in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 and today’s mass incarceration of Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps and industrial-grade organ- harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners.

Deluded by the expectation of a “free lunch” that cheap Chinese labor was expected to provide, the Europeans and Americans have allowed their respective industrial bases to be largely destroyed by the CCP’s predatory trade practices. 

The West has, so far, been short-sighted in its arrogance and complacency. Perhaps the coronavirus crisis will prove to be a sort of corrective “laser eye-surgery” for the West?

So, knowing what we do now, how should we respond?

Deterring Future Outbreaks: Several leading U.S. senators have already proposed legislation entitled “the Global Responsibility in Public Health Act” and named it after one of the first whistleblowers about the CCP virus, the deceased Chinese doctor Li Wenliang. This bill would sanction any foreign official found to have ordered or permitted the concealment of information relevant to public health in connection with COVID-19 in the early days of the present epidemic, the future spread of this disease or an outbreak of another virus down the road.

Such a measure could help deter dictators or their corrupt associates, whether inside the country in question or outside, from turning local infections into tragic global pandemics, such as the one now being caused by the Chinese virus.

Disengagement from China: Another important response to the current pandemic is disengagement from the PRC. Japan, China’s most powerful neighbor, and the historic enemy has announced that it will pay for all Japanese companies to relocate their factories from China to any other part of the world. 

No one knows China better than Japan and its other, important neighbors – South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, and Taiwan. That’s why, in the early days of the pandemic, every one of those East Asian states implemented drastic measures to contain the pandemic.

Going forward, the wider world is very likely to apply a containment strategy, not just to the CCP virus, but to the Chinese Communist Party itself – preferably using techniques that once before succeeded, albeit under other circumstances and conditions, in actually rolling back the Soviet Union and its “Evil Empire.”

Undermining the CCP’s Legitimacy and Hold on Power:  This virus will forever be associated with the harsh regime that facilitated its spread. And nothing less than its dismantling will end the threat the Chinese Communist Party poses to the world.

For starters, the CCP and the Chinese government must disclose the secrets and the protocols of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  I suspect that, very soon, this will be a prerequisite for China to have any significant relationship with other nations.

COVID-19 surely threatens the modern world, but it also threatens to become totalitarian China’s “Chernobyl” for not only has the CCP lied about, covered up and mismanaged the coronavirus, but it is also now charging the world’s nations exorbitant prices for masks and test kits, many of which have proven to be defective.

By contrast, Taiwan, a small state largely unrecognized by the West, and probably the nation that has best managed the corona crisis, has donated millions of effective masks to the European Union. After this, the West should actively reengage with and otherwise support Taiwan.

Making China Pay: Finally, in several countries, led by the United States, lawsuits and claims against China have already been published or are pending, both in local courts and the International Court of Justice.  The impact of these initiatives should not be underestimated.  The Chinese state and the kleptocrats who rule it have a lot of money, property and other things of value ​​in the West. If there is no cooperation in getting to the bottom of the COVID-19 pandemic, further sanctions against the regime and its henchmen will be inevitable.

Conclusion

If the Chinese Communist regime that produced – whether intentionally or not – a crisis of a global magnitude unseen since World War II survives in power, another horrific war between the West and China may well be inevitable.  And we are on notice, both from the Chinese own writings and in excellent books like Death by China (co-authored by one of President Trump’s key advisors on the PRC, Dr. Peter Navarro, and Dr. Greg Autry) that the PRC is preparing for such an eventuality.  And we must do the same.

This virus appears to have grown in the septic tank of Chinese Communist tyranny.  It’s time to drain and disinfect that pit – for the benefit of the people of China, for freedom and for the whole world.

 

* About CPDC

''The Committee on the Present Danger: China” is a wholly-independent and non-partisan effort to educate and inform American citizens and policymakers about the existential threats presented from the Peoples Republic of China under the misrule of the Chinese Communist Party. Its purpose is to explain these threats that range from: the PRC’s accelerating military buildup; its active information and political warfare that targets the American people and our business, political and media elites; cyberwarfare; and, economic warfare.