2020 Coronavirus from the strategic defense angle
Here are some of my high level thoughts with regards to the chronovirus issue affecting China and the broader implications in terms of the Chinese economy, development and outlook... While the current situation is still in some ways too early to form a definitive assessment, and the virus may or may not continue to mutate and spread even farther and faster etc, and as of this time its an open question whether or not ultimately this will spread massively to the rest of the world, given the already known knowns, here are three classifications in order of ascending severity that think the leadership of China should at least be cognizant of and perhaps formulate a dynamic plan given the emergent contingencies that have already played out, those that continue to evolve, and possible other threats on the horizon. I don't mean to be alarmists but sometimes its good to think about the worst case and how it might play out in order to better strategize to try and avoid some of the pitfalls.
1) Racism and resentment against China on a global level, perhaps most intense in some of the Western hemispheres as we have already beginning to see in some Dannish newspaper about "freedom of speech" to malign China etc painting a virus on the Chinese flag... This outbreak, regardless of root cause, may seriously stir anti-Chinese racisms sentiment in many parts of the world, creating fear of Chinese people/tourists, and basically a lot of finger pointing, fault finding, maybe some western powers will take advantage of the situation to use it as a jumping board to launch other international smear campaigns (now that the Huawei smear campaign has peaked in its effectiveness) against China and all things Chinese, and if other smaller and weaker countries less prepared to counter this virus threat than China eventually succumb heavily to this virus, it would stand to reason that these countries or their people may harbor resentment and become more wary of dealing with China or the Chinese in the future.
2) Rip and replace of China from the international system, from the world order and from the global trade/economy and worldwide supply chain as a whole. The US trade war with China and the US blocking of Huawei all had one thing in common as the main goal and that was to decouple from China, to erode or destroy the China/Huawei supply chain, and persuade its allies and vassals alike to stop trading or doing business with China. Not long ago Trump twitter commanded all US CEO to immediately move their factories out of China. The goal was to take China out of the equation, to isolate China economically, geopolitically and hegemonically etc and re-route the global supply chain around China, and to have the major players of the world move their own supply chains out of China. The trade war was not as effective as US hoped and in some ways it may have backfired. But now that the US sees China is being ravaged by this new novel virus, it will surely find ways to take advantage of the situation and reformulae its strategies to both contain China's rise and to isolate China on the world stage, including attempting to move the world to re-route supply chains, trade etc to completely bypass China.
3) Loss of C&C (Command and Control) and making the CCP Central authority ineffective, whilsts causing destablizations that lead to chaos that then spreads like Australia's uncontained wildfire to every region of the mainland China. As Steven Bannon had publicly hoped, this would "break the back of the Chinese CCP", and effectively open to the door to outside influence in terms of foreign external regime change. This virus, by effectively forcing China to lockdown and self quarantine itself from the rest of the world, and even segregating its own cities from each other internally, has not only become the very antithesis of China's globalization, BRI, and digital Yuan plans, but have indeed seemed to create the sort of environment that if not resolved may eventually lead to uprising of the citizenry. Ironically there is even a chance that Chinese government could overplay its hand and in some ways overcorrect for the virus, not only leading to broad criticsms abroad but also more importantly to situational contempt amongsts it own population... Realistically how much longer can Wuhan and Huebei continue to be locked down before people start to panic in mass? Before food starts running out and people go hungry? Or before Wuhan's economy gets destroyed and shattered to tatters and the people roit, uprise and revolt? There is no doubt that certain Western powers would like to see nothing more than for China to collapse from within, possibly even leading to a new Chinese civil war or worse. Or the virus could suddenly and mysteriously mutate into something far worse, potentially causing a civilization ending event, or at the very least if it is largely contained inside the borders of China then it may be responsible for effectively wiping out and ending the middle kingdom, one of the oldest civilizations on earth.
I hope to be proven wrong and to be shown that the outlook was too pessimistic. Maybe this ends up being just SARS times five or ten, which would be very significant and wipe out a lot of growth in China's GDP in 2020 but wouldn't lead to the world re-routing its global supply chain to go around and bypass China; that it would slow down China's BRI plan and 5G dream and other projects and initiatives --(such as the digital blockchain based Yuan that Huawei is helping Xi implement that could eventually help China de-dollar and might even lead to the bypassing of the SWIFT system, and that of the US petrodollar hegemony, etc etc etc)-- but that it wouldn't completely stop them; that it wouldn't lead to massive uncontrollable roits in the mainland cities as what had happened in Hong Kong etc; and that China would not be destablized nor would it lose its central command and control effectiveness or the worst cases like be ripe for outside regime change or even the bottom case of having its entire Han population wiped out...
It seems that just as the world is on the cusps of the greatest transition in modern times, that this new Chronovirus that apparently started in Wuhan has the potential to throw a monkey wrench into the equations as it becomes a randomizer event that reshuffles the scene, re-balances the odds, and injects a mysterious question mark into the prevalent high-level macroeconomic, geopolitical, and hegemonic situations and trends of this new decade. This could yet turn out to have serious geopolitical and strategic implications for China, for the US and indeed for the entire world at large.
Here are some of my high level thoughts with regards to the chronovirus issue affecting China and the broader implications in terms of the Chinese economy, development and outlook... While the current situation is still in some ways too early to form a definitive assessment, and the virus may or may not continue to mutate and spread even farther and faster etc, and as of this time its an open question whether or not ultimately this will spread massively to the rest of the world, given the already known knowns, here are three classifications in order of ascending severity that think the leadership of China should at least be cognizant of and perhaps formulate a dynamic plan given the emergent contingencies that have already played out, those that continue to evolve, and possible other threats on the horizon. I don't mean to be alarmists but sometimes its good to think about the worst case and how it might play out in order to better strategize to try and avoid some of the pitfalls.
1) Racism and resentment against China on a global level, perhaps most intense in some of the Western hemispheres as we have already beginning to see in some Dannish newspaper about "freedom of speech" to malign China etc painting a virus on the Chinese flag... This outbreak, regardless of root cause, may seriously stir anti-Chinese racisms sentiment in many parts of the world, creating fear of Chinese people/tourists, and basically a lot of finger pointing, fault finding, maybe some western powers will take advantage of the situation to use it as a jumping board to launch other international smear campaigns (now that the Huawei smear campaign has peaked in its effectiveness) against China and all things Chinese, and if other smaller and weaker countries less prepared to counter this virus threat than China eventually succumb heavily to this virus, it would stand to reason that these countries or their people may harbor resentment and become more wary of dealing with China or the Chinese in the future.
2) Rip and replace of China from the international system, from the world order and from the global trade/economy and worldwide supply chain as a whole. The US trade war with China and the US blocking of Huawei all had one thing in common as the main goal and that was to decouple from China, to erode or destroy the China/Huawei supply chain, and persuade its allies and vassals alike to stop trading or doing business with China. Not long ago Trump twitter commanded all US CEO to immediately move their factories out of China. The goal was to take China out of the equation, to isolate China economically, geopolitically and hegemonically etc and re-route the global supply chain around China, and to have the major players of the world move their own supply chains out of China. The trade war was not as effective as US hoped and in some ways it may have backfired. But now that the US sees China is being ravaged by this new novel virus, it will surely find ways to take advantage of the situation and reformulae its strategies to both contain China's rise and to isolate China on the world stage, including attempting to move the world to re-route supply chains, trade etc to completely bypass China.
3) Loss of C&C (Command and Control) and making the CCP Central authority ineffective, whilsts causing destablizations that lead to chaos that then spreads like Australia's uncontained wildfire to every region of the mainland China. As Steven Bannon had publicly hoped, this would "break the back of the Chinese CCP", and effectively open to the door to outside influence in terms of foreign external regime change. This virus, by effectively forcing China to lockdown and self quarantine itself from the rest of the world, and even segregating its own cities from each other internally, has not only become the very antithesis of China's globalization, BRI, and digital Yuan plans, but have indeed seemed to create the sort of environment that if not resolved may eventually lead to uprising of the citizenry. Ironically there is even a chance that Chinese government could overplay its hand and in some ways overcorrect for the virus, not only leading to broad criticsms abroad but also more importantly to situational contempt amongsts it own population... Realistically how much longer can Wuhan and Huebei continue to be locked down before people start to panic in mass? Before food starts running out and people go hungry? Or before Wuhan's economy gets destroyed and shattered to tatters and the people roit, uprise and revolt? There is no doubt that certain Western powers would like to see nothing more than for China to collapse from within, possibly even leading to a new Chinese civil war or worse. Or the virus could suddenly and mysteriously mutate into something far worse, potentially causing a civilization ending event, or at the very least if it is largely contained inside the borders of China then it may be responsible for effectively wiping out and ending the middle kingdom, one of the oldest civilizations on earth.
I hope to be proven wrong and to be shown that the outlook was too pessimistic. Maybe this ends up being just SARS times five or ten, which would be very significant and wipe out a lot of growth in China's GDP in 2020 but wouldn't lead to the world re-routing its global supply chain to go around and bypass China; that it would slow down China's BRI plan and 5G dream and other projects and initiatives --(such as the digital blockchain based Yuan that Huawei is helping Xi implement that could eventually help China de-dollar and might even lead to the bypassing of the SWIFT system, and that of the US petrodollar hegemony, etc etc etc)-- but that it wouldn't completely stop them; that it wouldn't lead to massive uncontrollable roits in the mainland cities as what had happened in Hong Kong etc; and that China would not be destablized nor would it lose its central command and control effectiveness or the worst cases like be ripe for outside regime change or even the bottom case of having its entire Han population wiped out...
It seems that just as the world is on the cusps of the greatest transition in modern times, that this new Chronovirus that apparently started in Wuhan has the potential to throw a monkey wrench into the equations as it becomes a randomizer event that reshuffles the scene, re-balances the odds, and injects a mysterious question mark into the prevalent high-level macroeconomic, geopolitical, and hegemonic situations and trends of this new decade. This could yet turn out to have serious geopolitical and strategic implications for China, for the US and indeed for the entire world at large.
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