 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Today, we're joined by Vijay Prashat, Director of the Tricontinental Institute of Social Research. Over the past few weeks, Vijay, along with Du Xiaojong and Veyanju have written a series of articles detailing China's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These articles also examined certain accusations that have been made against China, including that China was later informing the rest of the world about the disease, that the Chinese bungled in deliberately suppressed information about the disease, and also that China's lockdown was some top-down authoritarian move. We'll be talking to Vijay about these articles and these accusations. You can read these articles at People's Dispatch, as well as the booklet that is going to be published by Tricontinental soon. Thank you so much, Vijay, for talking to us. Before going into the articles themselves, these articles are very current because right now we saw Donald Trump recently decide to withdraw funding from the WHO pending what he calls an investigation. And this seems a continuation of a series of allegations against China to begin with, and which he also covered, and a sort of narrative that is being built that at some level China was responsible for this and maybe deserves to be punished. So how do you see the response to that? Well, you know, some of this is entirely a factual question and I'd like to go through some of the factual claims because I think these are important. But before getting there, I think it's important to say that the World Health Organization has been playing a very important role not only with regard to COVID-19, but you'll remember with regard to all the previous avian flues that have been escalating in the last 20 years, including the SARS epidemic in 2002-2003. The WHO has played a very important role in West Africa, in Ebola. I think it played a very crucial role with Zika and the very fact that in the middle of a global pandemic, the United States government has basically used its contribution to the WHO as a kind of hostage saying they won't give this money if the WHO doesn't do XYZ. I think this is disgraceful. I mean, you know, European governments have criticized the United States. I'm actually quite surprised that countries like Brazil, where the Zika was, you know, so debilatory countries in West Africa, India and so on, haven't come out publicly to defend the WHO against the US allegations and against the withdrawal of money. I think the entire world needs to come out and say, well, if the US doesn't want to provide the funds, that's one thing. But they should not be able to hold such an important international institution hostage. I think that's really quite shameful. Just to come back to what you said earlier, it needs to be said that these accusations appear odd. Here's China, which was struck by a mysterious virus in December, struggled to find out what this virus was, eventually was able to contain it to some extent. I mean, let's not lose the fact that we need to be very vigilant. Here's China doing all kinds of things and I'll come back to that, I'm sure. Meanwhile, we had the United States, India, the United Kingdom, most of Europe sitting on their hands. You know, when they had advanced warning, they did nothing. And now that they are caught in the middle of a catastrophic attack on their societies through this virus, they blame China. I find this particularly deceitful. It's a kind of transference. So what are the key accusations? In fact, you can call it maybe the key accusation is that China was what do you call slow in one, detecting the crisis and two in informing other countries about it. Now, there has been some media reports in the West about how for instance, Donald Trump himself was informed in January. So there's been at least some maybe pushback from say some of the liberal sections in the Western media. But there seems to be almost a consensus that China itself bungled the first few weeks of this. So one interesting thing in your articles is that you actually drawn a complete chronology of what to play. So could you just take us a bit to that process? Yeah, I mean, firstly, everybody admits that when the first patients came to Wuhan hospitals in December, nobody knew what was going on. I mean, they called it a virus or viral of mysterious illness. They called it unknown pneumonia. They didn't know what was happening. It is a novel coronavirus. It's not something that was well established. This meant that the early warning systems were not functioning as well as they should. When it's a plague, for in case of plague, it's very easy to input what's happening and the protocols are there. Here it was not clear what it was. That's the first thing. Secondly, on the 31st of December, long before the January period, which I'm going to come to, the Chinese CDC informed, that is the center of disease control, informed US CDC. In fact, the head of the US CDC was on vacation. And he told the New York Times later that I missed most of my holiday, I was on the phone with the Chinese. Then the head of Chinese CDC calls him up personally. And when the head of Chinese CDC is telling the head of US CDC, he starts to cry. He says, this is a terrible ailment. Now this is between the 31st of December and the 3rd of January. I mean, at the turn of the year, China has informed the United States, informed the WHO. On the 15th of April, shamefully, the Associated Press ran a story with the headline, and I'm going to read it, China failed to warn public of coronavirus threat for days. And this is what they say. They say that there was a delay from January 14th to January 20th. They say a six day delay. Now, let's look at the facts. I mean, because this is not a this is not a joke, you know, this is something you need to really understand what happened. The virus was slowly being understood. Now they say from the 14th to the 20th, the six day delay took place. On January 13th, the day before the Associated Press erroneously says China basically didn't say anything. They said 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. These six days, seven days, when they said they didn't do anything. The previous day, January 13th, the National Health Commission of China instructed Wuhan City to begin temperature checks. That happens on the day before the Associated Press says China suppressed everything. And then on the 17th of January, the National Health Commission sent inspection teams around the country. But most importantly, on the 14th of January, see the Associated Press says from January 14th to January 20th, China suppressed everything. Look, on the 14th of January, the day after they instructed Wuhan City to begin temperature checks, the National Health Commission's Health in National Teleconference that alerted the entire Chinese bureaucracy and apparatus about the novel coronavirus. And they said, prepare for a public health emergency. I'm confused now. It's in the public record that the Chinese administration, Chinese government publicly said they prepare for a national health emergency. I'm confused. This was on January 14th. The Associated Press gets away with the story that says from the 14th to the 20th, they suppressed the story. I don't get it. I seriously don't understand what they're doing. We detail the steps that the government took from the 13th, 14th, 15th onwards. The days when the Associated Press with no independent reporting suggests that nothing was done. I find that extraordinary that an organization of the caliber of the Associated Press has essentially provided propaganda rather than journalism. Right. And it's also interesting in a sense because what a lot of these narratives seem to forget like you pointed out is that one, this was a completely unknown disease and it was impossible to make the kind of, right now, test and quarantine seems, it's so ingrained in all of us that it seems very basic. But at that point of time, the possibility that doctors and medical professionals were not really sure what to do is something that is completely, you know, ignored by the press. That's point number one. And point number two, the fact somehow also narrative seems to indicate that there was no real reporting mechanism, that it is all the work of some brave whistleblowers, you know, who completely and that the Chinese system was there was no system in place at all seems to be the kind of narrative that's being pushed. I mean, look, here's what we found when we looked at the facts of the case, you know, there's a doctor in the Hubei Provincial Integrated Hospital. Her name is Dr. Zhang Zhijian. She's the Director of Respiratory and Critical Medicine. On the 26th of December, she saw an elderly couple. She was flummoxed by what she was seeing. She also did a CT scan of their son. She found round glass opacity in the lungs. That was an indicator something is wrong. She was extremely concerned about what was happening. She went and reported it to the Vice President of the hospital, you know, and within 24 hours, the Vice President of the hospital has told the Center for Disease Control of that province. This is on the 26th and 27th of December. They see something, they've reported it. Then it goes up. I mean, Hubei province starts to see more people on the 28th and 29th of December. By the way, this is long before the Associated Press claims that there was suppression between the 14th of January and the 20th of January. This doctor, Dr. Zhang, she reports the case. It goes through the official channels to Beijing. WHO is reported. It turns out that another doctor in her WeChat account talked to some friends and so on. She was reprimanded by the hospital for going outside the channels. But you see, the reprimand to her, to the doctor who is talking to her friends comes after Beijing has already been informed. So I don't get how this is a suppression story. You see, it's many things and the Chinese government has to deal with many situations. They have to go back. They have to do an after action study. Could we have handled this better? I mean, there's a lot of things that are going to happen. But if you look at the facts of the case, there is no evidence of direct willful suppression by the government and certainly not between January 14th and January 20th. I mean, it strikes me that the Associated Press with no reporting. I mean, most of our material we use is from the public domain. We've interviewed people. I interviewed lots of people. But most of it is in the public domain. It's basically at the National Health Commission's website where they posted, you know, their circulars and so on, which were for public distribution. How can you suppress something when you have it on a public website? Absolutely. Yeah. And another key aspect again is say, once the news of the disease did go out, then the favorite narrative of especially the West was that China could do this because it was an authoritarian state. It is one monolith of somebody at the top giving an order and a lot of millions of drones following it. So one of the interesting aspects of the article was the amount of community participation in the diversity of initiatives and efforts that actually helped beat this. And it's in some senses, this service to the people of China when this kind of a narrative is portrayed that, you know, this is we in the West are democratic. We can't do this. They were, you know, drones. So can we talk a bit about those community initiatives as well? I mean, the one thing is this divide between the authoritarian state and the democratic state is singularly unhelpful to understand what's happening. I mean, the way I would put it is that in practice, the Chinese state demonstrated that it had a public service mandate. That's what it demonstrates here. I mean, I'm not making an ideological claim. What the, let's say the US state demonstrated the British state is a great deal of callousness of the state towards the public. You know, when you don't prepare, you show that you're callous towards the social crisis coming. The Indian state, it demonstrated utter callousness. So there is an efficient state. There's a callous state. This is a much better way to characterize what happened. Now in China, for instance, it's not just the government doing things. As you rightly said, there were neighborhood committees. You know, we looked at, for instance, the decentralization of action. So in neighborhood committees, you had every neighborhood committee go out to temperature checks and so on. That's great. In Chengdu, which is in Sichuan province, 440,000 people volunteered to form teams to do a range of things, you know, from checking temperature to going out and just publicizing health regulations and so on. 440,000 people volunteered. They were volunteers streaming into Wuhan. You know, they were not being brought there by the government. The Communist Party in China has 90 million members. You know, millions of members went into Wuhan. Communist Party doctors, you must have seen the video of the doctors and medical professionals removing their masks. If you look closely, they were wearing a little Communist Party badge, almost all of them. You know, the fact is they volunteered because they said it is a matter of service to the people and so on. These are ethics and values that you cannot cover over by saying, well, they are authoritarian. I think that's exactly as you rightly said, it is a disservice to public action in these countries. Right. And another key question which you sort of end the article with and which I wanted to probe a bit further was the issue that why China has been very successful in containing the spread. Most of the cases now are imported cases. But nonetheless, there is a concern that there could be a second wave of infection. It's a concern that's there across the world. So what kind of steps slash vigilance are the medical professionals you talk to, the people you talk to basically thinking of considering that this might happen? Well, the first thing is that most avian flus demonstrate that they get a second wave. There is actually a great deal of evidence of secondary waves of infection and so on. Vaccines take a long time to be produced. They have to be tested. There has to be human trials. What they're doing in China is they're trying their best to just hold it down. I mean, if you come from abroad, it's two weeks in quarantine before you can go out. You're in a special quarantine hotel and so on. They're being very vigorous. A lot of the new cases have come from the Russia-China border and this is a concern because that's a very large border. There are lots of families that straddle both sides of the border. It's going to be hard to control and close it. But they're doing temperature checks at the border. They're very concerned about people coming in and bringing a second wave of infection. So, you know, let's not lie to people as the media sometimes does and say, well, the panacea is a vaccine. It's not so simple. These are very complicated things and it's going to take a lot of time, which is why vigilance is the order of the day and which is why the world economy is going to have a hard time as global trade contracts, as a consequence of this sort of closed-in move that we're in the middle of. And finally, China does have a challenge right now in addition to, of course, the economic impact in addition to the health aspects, as you mentioned. There is now definitely the challenge of, say, countering this narrative that is widespread. So, how do you think the Chinese are probably looking at countering this? There have been, of course, gestures of solidarity of concrete aid. But what about this narrative itself? I mean, I don't know if it's going to be easy. There's a residual anti-Chinese sentiment which has been there for a long time, sort of anti-synophobic racism, has been there for a long time. I think this plays right into it. The very first article I ever published was about the cholera that left India in 1817 and struck Europe in 1832. That was known as the Asiatic cholera. It was compared in Europe to the Mongols invading Europe. I mean, there's a very old tradition of trying to say that people in Asia produce disease and people in Europe, you know, have to confront or deal with these Asiatic diseases. I think this is a very old problem and we should face up to that. I don't think it's going to be easy for the Chinese government. I mean, we've produced a three-part factual assessment. I hope people read it. But, you know, I know I'm cognizant of the fact that people will say, well, your stooge is for this or stooge is for that. They just won't want to deal with the facts. You know, they'd prefer to dismiss us saying that, oh, well, that's, you know, you, I mean, it's a ludicrous thing, you know, put a story on the table, deal with it. Right. Thank you so much, Yuzia, for talking to us. Thanks a lot. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.