@BaronVonGrim:
It's a Chinese virus... man made.
Supposing that you're correct, what should be done about it? Are you proposing war?
Their reaction time to it was too fast... No element of surprise to them...
Respectfully, I disagree.
Look at it from their perspective: It hammers a big city in their industrial base. It happens in near-proximity to one of their own biowarfare labs, leading the world to immediately ask the question whether they incompetently let one of their own biowarfare bugs escape! It wasn't predicted, but reacted-to, and initially by trying to silence anyone who raised the alarm. ("Shushing" is a sign of embarrassment.) People died, and some of the government reaction (welding people into their apartments!) looks obviously ham-handed and jerry-rigged.
If you're familiar with the...um. To say "Asian mind" is generalizing too broadly and failing to differentiate between Korea, Japan, and China, let alone provincial subsets within the Chinese population. So let's not say "Asian," broadly. But there is a cultural template at play in the Chinese leadership which had predecessors in Imperial culture both in China and Japan, and which is exaggerated since the communist revolution. It takes the form of wanting to avoid confusion and embarrassment in order to stave off any slightest hint that they have lost control, for if that happens, it means a catastrophic loss of legitimacy and authority to rule. (Look up the phrase "mandate of Heaven" if you want to dig into this.)
Look, people in China don't love being eavesdropped on all the time. They don't love having bribe-hungry local aparatchicks telling them what to do. But they make a deal with the leadership to keep their heads down so long as the leadership keeps providing prosperity and looks like it's got a clue, is in control, and is making things smooth. But if Xi and his apparatus lose control, or if they can't keep pork on the table, they look incompetent. If they're caught off-guard, they look confused. If they have egg on their face, they look like they can't keep it together.
They were already struggling with the consequences of the trade negotiations with the U.S.; after that came locusts (!) in the West and riots on the streets of Hong Kong. Then this. The whole population is feeling Xi lose the mandate of Heaven, in their bones. So he grips tighter, in response...will it work? Oh, probably. But this was in no way something Xi wanted.
Here's how it would have looked if it
had been planned: The biowarfare attack would have happened in close proximity to someplace in the U.S., belonging to the U.S. government, like Fort Detrick. Or perhaps at Mar-a-Lago, if Xi thinks of Trump as a cult-of-personality leader (projection is a common cause of cultural misunderstanding). It would have been crafted to look like
the U.S. screwed up. Here, it just looks like
the Chinese leadership screwed up, or at best, the Chinese
culture of wet markets.
No, no, the outbreak didn't make Xi happy at all. ("Oh, bother....")
Now, are
some players in that regime nasty enough that, once it was happening, they'd make a
special effort to spread it worldwide? You know: to ensure that everybody got equally hammered by it, rather than just China? Sure, I could buy that, if there were
specific evidence. After Tiananmen Square the whole world knows that they
would do it, if it occurred to them and they got their ducks in a row
fast enough before it spread worldwide naturally. But we have no specific evidence. It's more likely that it spread worldwide naturally long before they had a chance to take action to artificially up the growth. Bureaucracies, as a rule, are not nimble.
...they brought it up right away... while blaming US military games.
Yes, but not even their own population believes
that. The fact that the lie is so transparent, clumsy, crude, and hilarious suggests that they were
improvising. They had to make up some crap on-the-fly, which means it
wasn't a carefully-plotted stratagem.
Again, if they'd wanted to make themselves look good and the U.S. look bad, it'd have been easy enough to make it break out in the U.S. rather than China, and then have China magnanimously provide protective gear and masks to the poor, foolish, obviously-in-decline U.S.A. whose strategic stockpile of protective garb was reduced from billions of units to hundreds of thousands way back in 2009 over H1N1, and never rebuilt (!) in all the years (!!) thereafter.
That would have enriched Chinese industry, and made
America look foolish and incompetent. It would have been so much
better a move, that it highlights just how comparatively bad, how counter-productive, the COVID-19 pandemic has been for China, if it
was intentional.
Let's put it this way: If some junior military planner
ever did come to Xi trying to sell the plan, "Hey, let's punish the U.S. by letting loose an engineered virus in a wet market half-a-mile from the lab where we built it, in one of our profitable manufacturing zones...," then I guarantee you that kid's organs are now for sale, mixed in with the usual lot of Uighurs and Falun Gong. (All but the brain tissue. After producing such a plan,
that brain would be deemed too suspect for reuse.)
The US is obviously responding to this in the matter of national security. The flatten the curve strategy is one that allows the virus to flush through at controlled measures until heard immunity or a vaccine is achieved.
You make that sound as if the flatten-the-curve strategy was
selected by us from some long list of available options. I disagree; from the moment this thing got started, it was our only play. A virus
this infectious will be with us forever, with annual outbreaks like the flu, unless a vaccine is found. Without a vaccine, five years from now there will be no single homo sapiens on earth that hasn't had it.
That's a done deal; the only question is how do we transition to the new normal in the smoothest, least-destructive way possible. The only option was to buy time to get tests and treatments and to prevent the overwhelming of the system.
So I don't see how this response screams "national security" any more than it screams "natural pandemic." We'd be trying to flatten the curve either way.
The rhetoric of the US is that of one that plays this as not only a made made virus, but as a possible preemptive attack.
I strongly disagree. Hmm. I don't want to get censored for political talk, but...your theory would seem to require that the current administration's personality be one of playing things close-to-the-vest, of euphemizing and obliquely hinting at things. Sorry, but I just don't see
that as this administration's primary character trait, at all. "Letting it all hang out," in a kind of free-association way, is more the current style.
The rest, I don't feel I can reply to. I'm not perfectly sure what you're asserting.
But all that I've said above is a first-pass at why I think you're mistaken about this having been a planned, intentional move by China. I don't think that, and I don't think the current U.S. administration does, either.
