No one - except the ruling Chinese Communist Party - seriously disputed that Covid-19 had come from Wuhan. Photo / AP
No one - except the ruling Chinese Communist Party - seriously disputed that Covid-19 had come from Wuhan. Photo / AP
OPINION:
The late Denis Thatcher, husband of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, was once at a stiff official dinner in 10 Downing Street, seated next to the wife of the president of Finland.
Speaking through an interpreter, he asked her abruptly, "What do the Finns think of the Chinese?" Slightly bewildered, she replied, "Well, in Finland we live next to the Russians. We don't think much about the Chinese."
"Well, it's about time you did," said Thatcher, "because there are more than a billion of the buggers."
I often think of Denis's prophetic words. Since he delivered them more than 30 years ago, the number of Chinese citizens he so roundly characterised has risen above 1.4 billion, and Chinese wealth and power advanced steadily, yet most Western countries have given little more thought to the implications than did the Finns in the Eighties.
With the coming of coronavirus, that changed. No one – except the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – seriously disputed it had come from Wuhan.
Views differed as to whether Chinese scientists had deliberately engineered the virus in a lab, or accidentally let out a naturally created virus they had captured for study, or whether, carried by bats or pangolins, it had run rife in the city's wet market without any human assistance; but almost the entire world was appalled.
Chinese President Xi Jinping. Photo / AP
If the CCP had admitted earlier what was going on and acted accordingly, people said, hundreds of thousands of deaths would have been avoided. So would the global infliction of poverty and fear.
People at last began to look more closely at China's Communist regime, and did not like what they saw. The secrecy, repression, propaganda and inhumanity shocked them.
Although it was not new that the CCP was persecuting Uighurs and Tibetans, forcibly harvesting their organs, clamping down on Hong Kong and threatening Taiwan, such things became much more apparent as Beijing reacted to its own mistakes by ordering further aggressions.
When the Australian government suggested it might be an idea to inquire into the origins of the outbreak, an enraged Beijing attempted (unsuccessfully) to chew it up and spit it out.
We in the West also began to look at ourselves, and noticed that many in our upper echelons were being captured by Chinese soft power, a process guided by China's United Front Work Department.
Significant numbers of Britain's cultural institutions – including grand universities such as Cambridge – had accepted Chinese money, hoping the strings attached would be invisible.
A top former civil servant, titans of industry and even one of the Queen's Lord Lieutenants were found sitting on the board of Huawei UK.
It was only after Covid changed the mood that the British Government belatedly listened to American warnings about the threat to national and global security, and reversed its earlier decision to allow Huawei a leading role in our 5G network.
Even Conservative MPs, often so dozy about foreign affairs, set up the hard-hitting China Research Group to monitor the CCP threat.
Now, though, it feels different again. First in with the virus, China now claims to be first out. This month, it was announced that in the previous quarter China's economy had grown by 4.9 per cent over a year earlier – a far better performance than any Western one.
I heard a BBC China reporter say: "China is in a politically buoyant mood over the virus". I am not sure he was fully aware how weird his words sounded, yet they were, in a way, correct.
The regime that infected the world seems to be coming out on top by having done so. Coronavirus has become China's most successful, indeed world-beating, export of 2020.
In Cold War days, the defence elites of totalitarian regimes concocted the materials for biological warfare. Nowadays, there is no need for clunky military applications to get the required deadly results: Covid-19 can be part of a useful business model.
Because of the absolute control exercised by the CCP, one does not know how to test any claim it makes. Rumours suggest more Covid cases and more economic pain than is officially reported.
Nevertheless, the new narrative is now running clearly. Forget about who started the virus, it says: Eastern "values" are better at dealing with it than Western ones. It follows that China is fitter – and more likely – to become top nation than is the United States to retain that role.
We must bow before the regime that made us ill. This seems an extraordinary line of argument. We would never have dreamt of applying such reasoning to America or Britain if either nation had been the first to give Covid to the world; yet we let dictatorships off.
This week, the think tank Policy Exchange gave space to American China experts from both Republicans and Democrats – a decision marking the fact that China is the one subject on which America's two parties are not at war.
Matt Pottinger, President Donald Trump's deputy national security adviser, characterised Xi Jinping's rule as "exquisite authoritarianism". By using advanced technology and totalitarian surveillance, he said, the CCP is experimenting with a way of governing less contested than democracy and less blatantly inefficient than old-style Soviet Communism.
China is doing well by putting out two contradictory messages at the same time: "We own the future, so make your adjustments now" and "We're just like you, so try not to worry". Neither message is true, he went on, but people in the West might be in a mood to believe both.
Pottinger's Democrat equivalent was Kurt Campbell, the man credited with inventing former president Barack Obama's "pivot to Asia". He endorsed Pottinger's notion of the Chinese threat, but emphasised that the idea of a new Cold War was wrong, preferring phrases like "strategic competition".
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden would be much likelier to galvanise European allies to develop a common policy towards China, said Dr Campbell, whereas Trump's unilateralism had put European backs up.
Both men rejected the idea of American decline – it had been said after Vietnam, the end of the Cold War and the global financial crisis, and had been proved wrong.
The struggle between the CCP and the West has been well characterised by the China expert, Charles Parton, as a "Values War". President Xi goes on about "socialist core values", all of them monolithically anti-democratic. We should counter these values with ours.
The problem seems to be, however, that we don't really know any more what our values might be. We remain wedded to the idea of democracy but, especially in Britain and America, see it merely as a forum in which contesting parties must give no quarter. We have forgotten that it is also a process of governing by consent.
Unfortunately, a pandemic is an event which will tend to show democracy in its worst possible light. Like a war, it seems to require dictatorial power from the centre: Xi, this week declared "core navigator and helmsman" at his party's plenum, fits the bill.
Unlike a war, a pandemic does not provide a common enemy against whom we can cheerfully unite. Such states of emergency empower tyrannies and appear to justify them.
All the main democracies in the West look unhappy as they wrestle honourably, but not very competently, to balance our desire to live in freedom with the danger that, by doing so, we might cause others to die.
Coronavirus could have been specifically designed to help the CCP's aim of global dominance by 2050.
• Charles Moore is a British political commentator and former editor of The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator
