When the histories of the first half of the twenty-first century come to be written, it is a reasonable bet that the current pandemic will figure as a watershed. How exactly the post-pandemic world will differ from what now seems like the ancient history of 2019 remains to be seen: perhaps Covid-19 will accelerate processes that were already in train – a story of slower global growth, the steady rise of an increasingly assertive China and the continuing decline of US influence. Or perhaps it will slow or even reverse these trends, dealing a blow to China’s ambitions from which it fails to recover, forcing it to turn its attention inwards to its mounting domestic problems. Certainly, it has sharpened doubts about the globalization that proved to be China’s great opportunity: the US–China trade war has not abated and even in the EU, external borders have now slammed shut against infection, causing members states to question their supply chain dependencies. In this moment of global disruption, a fierce contest is also raging to control the first draft of the pandemic narrative.
One version blames the failings of the Chinese political system, of which the most critical was its inability, in contrast to Taiwan or Singapore, to apply the lessons of the SARS epidemic of 2003. SARS was also caused by a species-jumping virus that found its opportunity in a wet market, this time in Guangdong province. Such markets have repeatedly proven to be dangerously insanitary both in their species mix and their operating conditions. The government-supported farming of wild animals and the rampant illegal trade in exotic creatures and their body parts compounded to make the world sick and crash the global economy.
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