 Okay, we're back. We're live with Global Connections and Carlos Suarez in Mexico, near Mexico City, where he heads the International Relations Department of a university down there. University Dodd, Puebla, did I get that right? Oh, University Dodd, there's Americas. The Americas. In Puebla, Mexico. That's right, in Puebla, Mexico. Anyway, so we need to talk about the Mexican perception of all of this and your perception and the international perception of how coronavirus is doing and how it affects governance. I mean, it's a very broad term, but governance is really at issue. And it just so happens that, you know, this issue, this whole examination is perfectly, timely, topical, appropriate in this week because things change from day to day. And this week, you've really hit it, Carlos. But tell me why you feel there's a connection. Well, it's exciting because we have several things going on. On one hand, we've got a crisis in China that has now been, you know, gradually expanding and connecting other parts of the world. It just underscores the interdependence and that this kind of issue, this type of disease, is going to be with us also in the future. It's going to be a challenge that we're going to continue to face. You know, a few years back, it was in Puebla, along the border with stars. And the nature of the global interdependent, you know, world economy, there's a movement of people. There's so much commercial, you know, shipping of goods and diseases like, you know, maybe today it's the coronavirus. They just, they don't stop at the border and show their papers. They had a way of, we can't send them that. And, you know, moreover, this becomes a global issue because it affects so many other players and countries and economies. Even Japan, the tourism industry now, and then Australia, heavily dependent on Chinese investments and on and on. We will unravel some of this. But I guess the challenge also is, you know, China today is a more, I don't know, you could say a more, I'm careful how I want to say this. I want to say a more responsible stakeholder. But what I mean is really more engaged in, let's say, multilateralism and global institutions. And to some extent, the response to this has been better and maybe somewhat more cooperative than what took place with the SARS-CoV-2 2003. The Chinese were very, very reluctant to let any international, I guess, you know, intervention or support. And here they reached out rather quickly to the World Health Organization for guidance and expertise and continue, you know, trying to manage it. It's unraveling as we speak in these last days and hours, literally. It continues to grow. But it's also just taking on more global dimension than where it was at the beginning back in December. Well, you know, it seems to me that this is a cycle. It's a feedback loop. But I mean is, you know, the more the disease goes across the border. We live in a flat world. We live in a world with great transportation. It can take you anywhere almost immediately. We live in a world where people move, you know, human flow. They move from hither to yon all the time and they carry with them whatever they're carrying. But it isn't only coronavirus. It'll be another one later and we haven't really learned to deal with it. We never really learned to deal with SARS. We never really learned to deal with MERS. And we never, for that matter, really learned to deal with Ebola. So these are international risks. They are international travelers, if you will. And we're going to have more and more of them. But what I think the revelation for me is the point you make about the effect they have on governance. But I would like to pose to you the reverse also. Governance has an effect on them. So it really tests humanity. It tests global governance. It tests global science. It tests global collaboration. It is biblical. It is biblical. I almost feel religion about this, Carlos. Yeah. And, you know, maybe I would say here again, particularly because we're dealing with China. It is a country that today has considerable expertise. And by that I mean, you know, there's more and more people connected to, let's say, global communities, a lot of virtual communities, even, you know, public health experts like these. And, you know, the World Health Organization, an agency of the UN based in Geneva, part of their role, part of their function is to simply do that, to coordinate, to sort of bring together all the key stakeholders and players. And that means, you know, public health ministries, it means doctors who have expertise in this, and, you know, different NGOs, the whole gamut of players. And again, I'm just going back to China. I mean, I'm not going to say that everything they've done is perfect, but they have today, I think, more willingness to engage. And the question here, which is a non-legal puzzle, is, you know, why is that today? Well, in some ways, you could say that over time they've developed more norms. They've been working more and more with the international community. They've tried to learn some lessons. The other interesting puzzle is to point out he is an authoritarian regime, a system, you know, that's pretty tightly controlled. And there are elements of that that can help facilitate maybe addressing a complex emergency like this. But there are other parts that can be problematic, holding back information or disinformation. And then, moreover, this kind of crisis is one that takes on a lot of psychological sort of perceptions, because you have, especially with social media, you can feel a lot of, you know, different bad information, poor information, panic information. Yeah, I want to tell you about a film clip that a friend of mine sent me from Hong Kong. Everybody has this view, it sort of catches like a virus, this view that a mask will help you. As a matter of fact, more likely the mask will help the next guy, but not necessarily you. And, you know, what happened in Hong Kong a couple of days ago was that people wanted to buy masks. And they went to a place downtown in Hong Kong, probably Nathan Road, through Buy Masks. And they lined up and they lined up beyond that. They lined up all around Hong Kong. This line was a snake line that went from block to block to block and around the next block. So some fellow took, you know, his cell phone and he walked the line. He walked from the beginning to where he thought it might end. And he never got to the end. There were virtually thousands of people waiting online for masks. And that's what I call panic. And by the way, they were all wearing masks anyway, because they wanted more masks. Yeah, you know, that's fascinating. And, you know, since Hong Kong has been, of course, you know, for the past year with these high profile protests, it's quite interesting to see where there's been sort of both on one hand. It has slowed down some of the protests, but it has also gotten renewed increase in protest activity because there's also continued fear about, you know, mainland China and, you know, what it means, either the viral transmission itself because even SARS had a profound impact on Hong Kong. But even more general, you know, concern that, I don't know, mainland Chinese may prefer to travel to Hong Kong for medical help. It could overwhelm them. But even more than that, just this whole puzzle of the protest movement that's been going on there, you know, how this could, I don't know, expand it or complicate it even more. You know what, by the way, one other point in Hong Kong was, and this points up the misinformation, disinformation or non-information, there was an apartment building and there was a case in the apartment building and within the incubation period, there was a second case, 10 stories away in the apartment building. Well, the authorities figured there must be something that transmitted the disease from this one story to 10 stories away, so they closed the apartment building. They figured it was in the air system maybe, the water system, who knows what. They closed the apartment building, took everybody out of the apartment building and put them in some kind of, you know, isolation. So what you get there is this, it's not all, it's mixed with panic, but maybe it's rational to say that we don't know how this is transmitted. So we are suspicious of everything. We are always looking for vectors and connections between one case and the next. But what I wanted to ask you, Carlos, is this, you know, just as it's a flat world, just as it takes reduced borders to transmit an epidemic or a pandemic like this, it also takes global cooperation to stop it across borders in the same way. And to the end of the day, maybe sooner than later, we need to have global leadership. So, you know, just the one country of China is not enough to stop this, because it spilled out of China already. And, you know, in the United States, I think that Donald Trump doesn't have a clue exactly what the risks are. He is cutting funds to the World Health Organization. He is not taking affirmative steps. The CDC waited a good long time before they even declared it an emergency. And so, you know, I don't have a lot of confidence that the United States is really in on trying to solve it. The World Health Organization in Europe, that is a better bet seems to me simply because it is a world organization. So would you agree with me that there needs to be a leader who steps up or a leader organization who steps up and coordinates all the efforts everywhere, brings all the medical research people together, you know, and works in a collaborative way to find a solution. And that should probably be the World Health Organization. What do you think? Yeah, no, it is. And it is the point organization here. It is long-established and it has direct ties to all of the various, you know, public health ministries in countries. So that is the role that it's playing now. And again, remarkable and noteworthy that China reached out this time quite early in the process. So it's there. And yet, keep in mind, again, what we call global governance, I mean, this World Health Organization, it has expertise, but it doesn't have somehow, you know, endless capacity. A lot of what is entailed in the logistics of dealing with this, you know, the quarantines and movement of people. And that's really more government functions. And China is basically in charge of that. Again, it is something that is remarkable because we've seen pictures, you know, the staggering, you know, isolation of that core city, and what it, you know, what, you know, it just looks like it's something from the future, one of these, you know, zombie movies. And I just go back to this. I think one of the problems, this is different than some other issues. When you have refugees or you have, you know, malnutrition, starvation, it's pretty straightforward what it entails. I guess what I want to say is this type of crisis takes a lot more managing also the information, the panic. Look at the tension now we've had to a lot of xenophobia and a lot of anti-Chinese. Even in the U.S., you know, Uber drivers refusing to pick up Asians and stigmatizing once again. And, you know, paranoia. I heard all kinds of stories there. You know, interesting, I wonder, a place like Hawaii where we have a, you know, a majority Asian population, very open and tolerant local culture, but you've got tourists that are there who are going to be nervous, you have others maybe who are, you know, not, I don't know, not as, not as much a loha spirit you could say. But I wonder, is there anything you can say from Hawaii? Have there been any local reactions or, you know, examples of... I think a lot of people don't, a lot of people don't really feel it as a threat here. But the state health department has been clear to say that it could come here anytime. And indeed, if you look at Hawaii's position in the Pacific, then in travel and in tourism, we get people coming from all over and any one of them could be affected. And before you know it, with the incubation period and the high transmitability of the disease, one person could infect dozens, who knows how many, and then it goes from there logarithmically. And so, you know, we could have it. And if we did have it, it was publicized. You know, then we have some people in isolation right now, but I don't think we have live cases. If it was publicized, you know, how would that affect our tourism, our monoeconomy in tourism? Would people come here? I'm not so sure they would. That could have a profound effect on us. So we haven't seen the state really, you know, belly up to this. I don't know if any affirmative steps are being taken. We've interviewed some medical professionals and some state officials on the epidemic. And I think, you know, they're into a kind of a regular advice to wash your hands. But that doesn't solve the problem about what you do when you're faced with a real quarantine requirement. I don't think people realize that quarantine A can increase your susceptibility, increase the likelihood of transmission to you. And B, and very scary talk about panic, and B, quarantine is like being in prison, you know? That's the complaint in China. And China has effectively imprisoned millions of people. And that undermines the stability and good order of Chinese society, which we should get to. You talked about governance, right? So how does it break down when you have an epidemic of this magnitude? What happens to governance? What's the process? What's the way in which you see it unfold? Well, again, in a state like China, very top-down hierarchical, you've got perhaps a capacity, you know, that they're just given the nature. But I was hearing in a report earlier today, even where in some of the areas there that are most closely affected, you've got the government is paying people to sort of snitch on others, to basically report people who have traveled to the, you know, main center or come back from there. So it creates this kind of, you know, big brothers watching you and pretty scary. And, you know, before I forget, I wanted to also mention, because, you know, we've been seeing it, while it is primarily in China, and that's where the back side, I think, reached over 60,000 cases now, it is beginning to spread quite a bit. And I would say one of the big concerns would be the countries in Africa, because Africa is the place where China is deeply engaged. And there's, you know, a steady flow of Chinese workers and, you know, a lot of investment in the region. At some point, you know, it's possible. And the reason that, pardon me, because many of these countries in Africa simply don't have the capacity, you know, the ability that you would have in Japan or Europe or even Hawaii for, you know, trying to contain it, trying to deal with it. So I think we, you know, we are going to be vulnerable. Moreover, like we often see in these things, it's probably going to get worse before it gets really much better. And the last few days have signaled that. The governance issue, again, it's a daunting task, because you're playing like a game of chess on many levels, and it's always constantly moving. And you've got different, you know, we saw these amazing reports that they built new hospitals in 48 hours, or is there some ridiculous, I mean, really it's just some sort of, it's not a full-fledged hospital, but certainly a place to contain people quickly. But, you know, back to this panic mode, too, that the government, but if anything, again, the Chinese government has the capacity that you don't see in many others to quickly make a decision and implement it, often with some pretty harsh means. Yeah, and sometimes wrong. I mean, you see these pictures of huge gymnasiums with virtually thousands of beds, and each bed is two feet from the next bed. If you were there, and you know you had, let's say, an ordinary, you know, run-of-the-mill cold, you should be terrified, because there's a fair chance you're two feet away from somebody who may have a serious coronavirus problem, and then you're likely to get it. So you go there and you're in prison, you can't leave. If you try to leave, you're going to be violating the law, and they're going to, you know, treat you badly as a prisoner, as a lawbreaker. And if you stay, you know, it's even worse. And, you know, you mentioned that people are being paid off to snitch on their friends, even their relatives. They're also disappearing. There was an article, I think, in the post for the proposition for the fact that two journalists who were reporting the status of this matter in China and Wuhan have disappeared. Their writings have stopped. You know, it's on the internet. That's how they do their journalism. So what you have is the government is panicking. The government is taking, you know, using its power, but perhaps in ways that are less than wise and less than humane, and that is further escalating the distrust of the people against the government. So, you know, I think it is a spiral. Yeah. And these, you know, these types of crises, whether it's natural or man-made, in this case, a disease, they can have a profound impact on the political credibility and legitimacy. If the government ends up losing trust and more faith or doesn't systematically, it becomes a pressure point. And, you know, in today's China, again, not a democracy, but certainly a larger and larger population that is more connected to the world, more aware of, let's say, different, you know, ways of doing things and increasingly likely to be more critical of the government in its response. So that's going to continue. And here, again, this issue is a global issue, again, as we said already, because it's not something that can easily be contained within a border. Simply the movement of people, the movement of merchandise, think of how many container ships come out of China every single day to the world, all those goodies that we buy. And so it's, you know, pandemic. It's one of these things that we've long been saying now for the past 10, 20 years, this is what the future is going to be, more and more of these. And so we need to learn. We need to better prepare. And like anything, it just requires pretty steady training, education training. And particularly for maybe weaker states, that's not so easy, places like Africa or even other parts of, you know, different parts of Asia, where we're going to see a difficulty. You know, real quick as well, the name of it, I think they finally gave it the formal name, but the coronavirus, as we've been calling it, I'm in Mexico, as you know, and one of the first early misinformation that came out was in the social media. Corona beer is responsible for it. And as you can imagine, this is one of the largest exports of Mexico. You can buy it everywhere on the planet and they had to move very quickly from crisis managers to somehow put out that fire and say, no, no, no, no. In fact, maybe you should drink two or three coronas and you'll feel better about that. Yeah, there you go. That's a better approach. No, it's a very good beer. It's a very good thing about Mexico. Unfortunately, there's no relationship at all. So, you know, but you point out about the economy and the economic effects. And I think that's, you know, I think there's three things operating. One is, you know, the scourge of the pandemic. The second is, you know, loss of confidence in governments because they can't seem to fix it. It keeps on getting worse. And just when you thought it might be getting better, it gets much worse every day. And the third thing is this, you know, this has an effect on human conduct. Forget about panic for a moment. They don't go to the store. They don't engage in business. They don't go to their jobs. Their factories slow down. It's not as if everybody in China has a bottomless pit of money they can draw from. They're not earning any money. The whole economy is slowing down. And, you know, they say it was going to be down some remarkable percentage, but I think it's going to be down much more than that. Because this country, more than any other country, I think, is globally connected. Okay, and if it slows down, it's going to have an effect on so many other countries. It's about the disease, just the economy. And when the economy goes down, you have instability, right? This is all part of global connection and international relations. And so each one feeds the other. Wherever are we on that continuum now? And we've already had some of the leading sort of economic forecast saying, this is going to have a profound impact on China's economy. It's down from six to five and a half, whatever. I mean, numbers are hard to know with any precision. Even places like Silicon Valley that depend on a lot of those supply chains coming out of China worldwide, every place that you can imagine. And again, the Chinese economy in many ways increasingly becoming the anchor of the global economy. And so that's another reason why there is a concern. This is a global issue. Places, I mentioned Australia, many African countries, even several South American countries, places like Bolivia and Peru, the number one foreign investor, China. If their economy tanks, if they are suddenly slowing down their production of anything, it's going to have ripple effects throughout the world economy. And places that have been for years now salivating with all this outreach by China, particularly for minerals, natural resources. But that could quickly change. So we'll wait to see how bad it's going to get. We have a show coming on this afternoon about the effect on the stock market and the economy in general, the health of the economy in general. But let me put this question to you, Carlos. So as I mentioned in the budget that Donald Trump submitted, he cut funding to World Health Organization, and I think to the CDC and for medical research, aside from all the social safety net programs that he's cutting. And so, given this development over the past few weeks, if you were Donald Trump, the leader of the free world, arguably the most powerful executive in the world, what would you do in order to get the world collaborated, get the world together on sharing medical research, on creating task forces, on expediting the research that will hopefully lead to a vaccine long before the one year or the 18 months that they are presently predicting? What would you do? Well, look, I don't expect we're going to have a lot of, you know, somehow big, bright ideas coming from Donald Trump. The best we can hope for is that he doesn't choose to intervene or interfere in some way, because in general, he's not been one who gives a lot of weight to expertise, to, you know, more studies and more analyses, or even increasing budgets for a government agency like the Center for Disease Control. So I don't know. On one hand, you know, he's got to put it in the context of, this is going to hurt you if you don't help, and maybe even it's going to hurt your friendship and you want this trade deal to, you know, somehow have more fruition, he needs to think carefully about, you know, being more positive. And again, I can't speak for the president, but in general, his approach to foreign policy has been one of critical of international institutions of globalism, of globalization broadly, and, you know, it's all about him. And so I don't see Trump taking a leadership role, and in many ways, the best hope would be that he step back, let the leaders of the CDC in Atlanta take the role, because that's what they do and what they know. And beyond that, that, you know, hopefully it might be avoided that the Congress can step up and say, okay, look, you know, if there's more money needed or more attention or whatever, let's show some broader support. I wouldn't be looking for the president for leadership on this, and, you know, our hope is that maybe he doesn't say more or intervene more, just kind of stay out of it and let the experts take the lead. Let me ask you a more ridiculous question, Carlos. It just, it appears to me that there are many organizations in this country and possibly in Mexico, too, that are stepping up non-profits or businesses that are trying to ameliorate the situation. They're sending, you know, containers full of masks and medical gear to China in the thought that that helps. This is not government money now. This is private money or non-profit money. And it strikes me that, yeah, sure, you can send it all you want, but it's peanuts compared to what could happen if government digs deeper and actually commits real resources to it. But what can the individual do? What can the non-profit do? What can the altruistic business do to actually help on this sort of thing and to help things keep stabilized, you know, the economy stabilized, governance and, you know, social order stabilized, and, of course, save lives? Yeah, well, again, no quick easy answers there. I think, on one hand, there are clear limitations on what you or I as an individual can do. Perhaps the best is to stay informed, be plugged in, know, you know, what is this about? You know, what are some of the symptoms? And the challenge of this particular disease is that, different from maybe the stars of a time ago, a very high percentage of those affected don't really show big symptoms of it. So they may have it, and that's why they've got the quarantine for up to two weeks because it can stay that long. And so many people who have relatively mild symptoms can be carrying it and be potentially spreading it. So it's information, I think knowledge, and that's the key part. Beyond that, I think, and, you know, this is something more and more, every place has to deal with. We need to be prepared for emergencies, for, you know, disasters. Every place has them, many are natural, some are unexpected or man-made, but they're going to happen, and it does require, again, a concerted effort by government, by NGOs, by individuals, by schools to help educate because, you know, these are issues that are going to continue to be with us. Where I am, for example, here, it's a very, you know, a zone prone to both earthquakes and then we have a massive active volcano that's, you know, 30 miles from here. So there's always efforts to kind of be aware of that as there are in other places. The Philippines or Indonesia, they're aware. Japan, obviously well-prepared for their tsunami and other natural disasters. So that's the best I think either local organization or local government can do is use it as an opportunity to make sure you've checked your stock that you're prepared, that you're carrying out some, you know, training because it's all about that mitigating something that's going to happen. Be prepared. I myself, since I've been here now a couple of years, I've always got my own map, again, for the volcanic ash that we get here pretty regularly and I've got them everywhere. My car, my office and my home, I even have my own little backpack disaster preparedness kit from my own days in Hawaii. We used to, you know, do some of that because again, now what if you're stuck somewhere? And today we depend so much on the ATM machine or our, you know, electronics to work. And if you don't have juice, you don't have a charger. You don't have gas in your car. You don't have water to drink. I think increasingly we all have to be thinking more about that. How can you survive, you know, a week or three days or whatever it might be, whether it's a pandemic, whether it's a natural disaster. And how can the community survive? I mean, the community, but also, I mean, lives are at stake here. And, you know, I only want to tell you one thing and then we got to go is that yesterday I went out to buy some hand sanitizer in downtown Honolulu. I went to two stores that would ordinarily cover, you know, have hand sanitizer, shelf upon shelf upon shelf. All the shelves were empty in all the stores I designed. And that tells you a lot. Anyway, Carlos, we have to follow the story. It's not going to end. Thank you so much. Carlos Juarez, University of America in Puebla, Mexico. Thank you so much. Aloha.