Stretching the International Order to Its Breaking Point The greatest error that geopolitical analysts can make may be believing that the crisis will be over in three to four months. By Thomas Wright

At this stage in the COVID-19 pandemic, uncertainty prevails. The greatest error that geopolitical analysts can make may be believing that the crisis will be over in three to four months, as the world’s leaders have been implying. As documented in The Atlantic and elsewhere, public-health experts make a compelling case that COVID-19 could be with us in one way or another until a vaccine comes on the market or herd immunity is achieved—either of which could take 12 to 18 months, unless we get lucky with a cure or an effective treatment before then. A long crisis, which is more likely than not, could stretch the international order to its breaking point. Even after a vaccine is available, life will not go back to normal. COVID-19 was not a black swan and will not be the last pandemic. A nervous world will be permanently changed.

COVID-19 is the fourth major geopolitical shock in as many decades. In each of the previous three, analysts and leaders grossly underestimated the long-term impact on their society and on world politics.

The end of the Cold War was a momentous event, but few saw the era of American hegemony and prosperity that would follow (the late Charles Krauthammer was a notable exception). In the 1992 presidential primary, one of the leading Democratic candidates, Paul Tsongas, had as his campaign slogan “The Cold War is over and Japan won.” That year, the U.S., suffering through a recession, saw Ross Perot make the strongest third-party bid of modern times on a platform of pessimism about the country’s trajectory.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were widely seen as the effective end to the 20th century, but at the time many analysts argued that the long-term geopolitical impact would be limited. For instance, Michael Howard, the distinguished war historian at the University of Oxford, said that while the terrorist threat “will never entirely go away, I suspect that once we have hunted down the present lot of conspirators the world will return to business as usual.” Many others did forecast dramatic changes, of course, but few believed that the United States would be still fighting in the Middle East almost two decades later and that drones would revolutionize warfare.

American policy makers also underestimated the financial crisis of 2007–09, when they opted to let Lehman Brothers fail in September 2008 on the mistaken assumption that the decision would not trigger the collapse of other companies. European officials thought that the crisis had been made in the United States and would not affect global financial markets, and dismissed any concern that the euro zone may have its own vulnerabilities. The cooperation among G20 states, especially the United States and China, in responding to the crisis blinded many to the era of great-power competition that was about to unfold, as well as the nationalistic tendencies that would take hold in many governments. As the historian Adam Tooze has argued, in 2012, the populist wave had ebbed, but the biggest shocks—Brexit and Donald Trump’s election—lay in the future.

Now the COVID-19 pandemic has severe public-health, economic, and geopolitical ramifications, and many of those outcomes depend on how long the world will be in this suspended state. If the crisis lasts for a few months, the economy might well bounce back quickly, as aggregate demand returns.

However, in a long crisis, countries will emerge profoundly changed. No one knows how exactly, but educated guesses are possible. A collection of massive domestic crises will collide, as health systems collapse or come close to it and governments struggle with double-digit unemployment, a severe recession or depression, plummeting revenue, increased expenditure, and mounting debt. Intermittent shutdowns, returns to work followed by retreats, and the continued suppression of demand are likely. The recession will look more like an L or W shape than a V. Companies and governments will run out of cash. They may default on debts, which will have ripple effects for other companies and could destabilize financial institutions.  

Those countries that can afford to will be forced to turn to a stimulus package multiple times. Voters appear to be understanding of their leaders now, but the mood in six months or a year will be very different. As Warren Buffett once remarked of the markets, you see who is swimming naked when the tide goes out. A long crisis exposes which countries are truly competent. Which states can undertake the extensive, massive testing needed to have broad public-health surveillance and tailored isolation? Which will allow for the least restrictive economic measures? And which states can scale up industrial production to maintain resilient health-care systems and personnel all at the same time?

As a number of astute observers have noted, COVID-19 could end globalization as we know it, particularly if the pandemic is prolonged. Gérard Araud, formerly France’s ambassador to the United States, told me that when a crisis occurs, one should ask whether it breaks a trend or confirms it. “There is,” he said, “an assault on globalization” from multiple sources—the financial crisis, U.S.-China competition, climate-change activists pushing for people to buy local. COVID-19 piles on the pressure. Countries will be wary of outsourcing crucial medical supplies and pharmaceuticals to other countries. Supply chains more generally will be disrupted and will be hard to repair. Governments will play a much larger role in the economy and will use that role to rebuild a national economy instead of a global one—their priority will be domestic industry.

Some of these steps to restrict globalization are not only likely; they are necessary. Democratic governments cannot and should not tolerate a situation in which they lack the capacity to produce face masks, respiratory machines, and vital medications. The public will demand, and is entitled to, levels of redundancy in our manufacturing system. The challenge after this crisis ends is not to resist calls for reducing globalization, and the associated vulnerability, but to understand how best to reshape that process.

Meanwhile, those actors that have surveillance technologies may enforce quarantines on people who test positive for COVID-19 or other potential viruses as they emerge. For instance, leaders in Israel have empowered Shin Bet, the country’s internal security service, to use cellphone location data to track Israeli citizens during the outbreak. Others will surely follow, putting a new twist on vital questions about privacy, accountability, and safety.

A long crisis will not discriminate and will damage all of the world’s power and regions, although some countries will suffer more than others.

Much has been made of the opportunity that China has to supplant the United States as the leader of the international response to the pandemic, but COVID-19 is likely to be a strategic setback for China, particularly in its efforts to make inroads into Europe and other democracies. The Chinese Communist Party suppressed early warnings about the virus and an official at the Hubei Provincial Health Commission reportedly ordered a genomics company studying it to destroy “all existing samples,” causing public-health officials to lose invaluable time that could have been used to contain COVID-19. There is widespread concern that Chinese pressure has compromised the World Health Organization’s response to COVID-19 at at a time when multilateral cooperation was desperately needed. China subsequently allowed diplomats to falsely claim that the U.S. Army developed COVID-19 as a bioweapon and used it against China. The CCP is now trying to limit the damage of its errors by providing assistance to other countries in the form of face masks, respirators, and other supplies. Many see this aid as an act of confidence, but it might be evidence that the regime feels vulnerable and fragile.

Governments have welcomed China’s help, but they are under no illusion about the CCP’s responsibility. Ordinary people around the world, particularly in Europe, have suffered greatly from COVID-19—losing loved ones and their livelihood. They are unlikely to forgive or forget those who made mistakes that worsened their predicament, whether they are domestic or foreign. These matters will likely be litigated for years, with every action gone over with a fine-tooth comb. The damage to China’s international reputation may be the least of the CCP’s worries; the government’s legitimacy lies in its perceived effectiveness. China will also struggle to recover its high levels of economic growth while the world is in a deep recession. The country is reliant on global demand, and a protracted recession will demonstrate its interdependence with the rest of the world. If the crisis continues for 12 to 18 months, the virus will likely return to China, with all of the risks that poses for the regime.

However, China may also take advantage of a long crisis, particularly in hard-hit countries in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia, and parts of Southeast Asia where China’s footholds through the Belt and Road Initiative and its digital infrastructure will give it a head start when the time comes to rebuild after the crisis. Meanwhile, America’s industrial deficiencies and its failure to come up with a real alternative to BRI will handicap its capacity to help even if there were a wiser and more strategically minded president in the Oval Office.

The Middle East will likely pay a high price. The virus has decimated parts of the Iranian elite and spread from there to ravage much of the region. The Iranian regime appears incredibly fragile, but if the government falls, no one knows what comes next, given the lack of any organized opposition within the country. My Brookings colleague Tamara CofmanWittes told me that Egypt, Iraq, and Lebanon are also particularly poorly equipped to deal with what lies ahead. Two Egyptian generals died from COVID-19 almost two weeks ago, which suggests that the problem is much bigger than the government admits and has gotten into the army, one of the few institutions in Egypt that is capable of delivering services in a crisis. Revolution is unlikely—people will be sick, unable to organize, and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has already systematically destroyed the opposition. Basic governing effectiveness in the whole region has been degraded over many years because of corruption and unresponsive dictators. After a long crisis, much of the Middle East will consist of zombie governments that are widely perceived as ineffective.

The European Union is a potential loser, although not inevitably so. One European official, who spoke with me under the condition of anonymity in order to talk frankly, said the crisis will be “transformative.” “Both the society and the international system we live in will be determined by how we act throughout the crisis,” the official said. The pandemic will “bring out the best and worst in us—maybe both simultaneously.” Health care is not a core competency of the EU, so all of the responses have been at the national level and will likely continue that way. As a result, borders have been closed and EU foreign ministries are negotiating with one another over the rights of transit for EU citizens to travel home through other member states. Another official told me that no leaders, except for President Emmanuel Macron, have shown interest in a cooperative response, at least in the first couple of weeks. They don’t oppose cooperation on principle; they are just so preoccupied with their own domestic crisis that no bandwidth is left for anything else. But recent days have brought signs of greater coordination and cooperation among EU member states.

The crunch for the EU will come on economics, which unlike health care is very much its business. The economic crisis of COVID-19 will be much worse than the euro crisis and will affect everyone—north and south, east and west. No European country can cope on its own, with the exception of Germany, which runs a surplus. The big question is whether Germany will agree to far-reaching reforms, such as common debt instruments (known as euro bonds) that the country has previously resisted. Italy, Spain, and other countries that suffered mightily in this pandemic and performed heroically will not respond well if the EU fails to move beyond the old orthodoxies of the euro crisis and doesn’t demonstrate the solidarity it prides itself on.

That brings us to the United States. COVID-19 is a disaster for Americans. The United States now has more cases than any other country. President Trump is singularly ill-equipped to handle the pandemic. For weeks, he parroted Chinese talking points that the virus was under control, and he predicted a good ending for the United States. He did not use the time he had to increase crucial medical supplies or prepare for a surge in medical personnel. In a long crisis, many people will die needlessly and the financial cost will be in the many trillions of dollars. The world has lost whatever confidence remained in the ability of Trump’s America to take charge. Leaders have watched in horror as the administration focused the bulk of its diplomatic efforts on renaming the virus. If Trump is reelected—and his polling numbers suggest he has benefited politically from the pandemic so far—substantial international cooperation is unlikely after the crisis ends and the recovery begins. Each country will go its own way.

The United States’ inaction has allowed the virus to spread inside its borders, and it has actively increased the risk to other countries. Sins of omission, however, are not generally as egregious as sins of commission, at least according to the rest of the world. Based on my conversations with officials from European and Asian allies, the United States has not figured much in other countries’ calculations. Europeans were vexed by Trump’s criticism of the EU, but didn’t care much about the travel ban. People had stopped traveling anyway, and European nations would soon close their own borders. Reports that Trump sought to purchase a German firm to monopolize a vaccine for the United States were more damaging, but the plan was thwarted by the German government. New reports, denied by the Trump administration and the company involved, that the United States is intercepting shipments of masks destined for Europe will raise similar fears. Generally, however, the United States is seen as a warning—an example, along with Brazil, of how a populist government is incapable of handling this crisis.

However, if Americans hit the reset button in the November election, a Biden administration will have the opportunity to turn the page and help lead an international recovery effort. This reset is not an option in CCP-ruled China.

As Evan Medeiros of Georgetown University recently pointed out, the only countries who have emerged from this crisis with their credibility intact so far are Asian democracies like South Korea and Taiwan. Germany is showing similar signs of competency, particularly in testing. They have offered a model for others to follow.

The real risk is that a long crisis will eviscerate international cooperation—among Western allies and between America and China—and leave a more anarchic world in which all are against all. As Gérard Araud pointed out to me, in 2019 the WHO published a plan to respond to a pandemic. Not a single major country followed the guidance. All did what they thought was necessary to protect their interests. Major powers will likely have less capacity—in terms of both materials and time—to cooperate on the geopolitical shocks that will surely occur during this crisis. They are completely preoccupied with their domestic problems and will be hard-pressed to invest time in a problem where their national interests are not directly threatened. And then there is the personal element. One official reflected to me that leaders are frequently moved to action only when they meet one another in person. Phone calls are simply not the same. It’s too easy to hang up, prevaricate, and turn back to the domestic problems.

The crisis no doubt reinforces power politics, particularly between the United States and China. But the pandemic also underscores the importance of cooperation with rivals on shared interests even as they compete ferociously in other spheres. During the Cold War, for instance, the United States and the Soviet Union worked together on the nonproliferation treaty and on arms control. Cooperation between rivals is not a simple matter and requires new strategies to create the conditions for a partnership to happen. Arms control was possible in the Cold War only because strategists understood the importance of second-strike survivability—the counterintuitive notion that your country was vulnerable to a first-strike nuclear attack if you could destroy all of your enemy’s weapons in one go (because it would give your enemy an incentive to strike first rather than to wait and retaliate after an attack). We have yet to invent similar concepts to advance cooperation on transnational issues, such as pandemics, with an authoritarian Chinese regime that has a system and worldview at odds with our own. For instance, is it better to allow such cooperation to be linked to other issues or ringfence it from everything else? How can you ensure sufficient levels of transparency, particularly when sensitive scientific matters are involved? That is a key task for the foreign-policy community.

No historical lessons will guide the world this time. The last global pandemic—the Spanish influenza of 1918–19—is not generally regarded as a driver of domestic and international politics over the 1920s and ’30s, likely because the world was already broken by World War I and less integrated than it is now. Never before has a single event upended everyone’s lives simultaneously and so suddenly. The longer the pandemic goes on, the more the world will change.

Chinese Americans Have Seen This Before The lockdowns, equipment shortages, and overburdened hospitals feel all too familiar. By SARAH ZHANG

Back in January, when a mysterious virus in Wuhan still seemed like faraway news, Mei Mei and her husband bought N95 masks and two boxes of hand sanitizer to take to her elderly parents, who live 300 miles east of the Chinese city. Mei, 48, a real-estate agent in Fremont, California, had planned to bring the supplies on a trip to China to celebrate her parents’ 60th wedding anniversary. Then Wuhan went into lockdown, and all of it was canceled.

Mei still mailed the masks to her parents, but not the hand sanitizer—“which became such a blessing,” she told me, because hand sanitizer would soon sell out in stores around the U.S. Masks started disappearing, too. Over the month of March, a strange reversal began as new COVID-19 cases in China started to fall and those in the U.S. started to skyrocket. Mei’s parents in China were now worried about her. They still had some unused N95s left over. Should we, they asked Mei, send the same masks you mailed us the 6,000 miles back to you in California?

For lots of Chinese Americans, the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. feels eerily familiar in a deeply personal way. First-generation immigrants in particular, many of whom still have close personal ties to China, followed the situation there closely and recognized the virus as a serious threat before it registered for the rest of America. Now the social isolation, the overwhelmed hospitals, the equipment shortages, the deaths—all of this is a replay of what loved ones in China went through two months ago.

“For the people who are connected to Wuhan, the overwhelming sentiment is terrible déjà vu,” Tony Fan says. Fan, 32, grew up near Atlanta, and he and his wife have family in and around Wuhan. They moved to Hong Kong a few years ago, and spent January concerned about their relatives in mainland China. His wife’s father, a dermatologist, was briefly conscripted into seeing COVID-19 patients. Worried about the lack of personal protective equipment, or PPE, in his hospital, his wife stayed up late trying to source Tyvek coveralls from a factory. Fortunately, no one in the family got seriously sick with COVID-19. But lately, Fan has been buying masks in Hong Kong to ship to friends in the United States. At the end of our call, he offered to ship me some too.

With COVID-19 cases mounting in the U.S., Chinese Americans have mobilized through WeChat, GoFundMe, and other social-media platforms to source and donate PPE for health-care workers in the U.S.—often drawing on the same connections made just a few months ago, when the outbreak in China was at its worst. Jerry Hu, an ophthalmologist in Fort Worth, Texas, ordered 5,700 surgical masks for a Beijing hospital in early February. Recently, he told me, staff at that same Beijing hospital donated about $14,000 for PPE, boxes of which are on their way to Hu’s house right now. He plans to distribute the equipment to local health-care workers.

Mei Mei has been coordinating donations of equipment like masks and gloves for health-care workers in California. (Erin Brethauer)

Mei, the real-estate agent in California, has also been coordinating a donation effort on the popular Chinese messaging app WeChat, collecting more than 27,000 masks, face shields, goggles, gloves, and other equipment to send to local hospitals. Packages are showing up every day outside her house from friends and acquaintances of her Bay Area Chinese American community. “A lot of the donations I received, they were all still in the original package shipped by their family [from China],” she told me.

After Mei canceled her trip to China, she immediately began social distancing at home in California. This was January and February, when life around her in the U.S. still went on as normal. She canceled Chinese New Year celebrations. She stopped going to church services on Sundays and Bible study on Fridays. Having paid close attention to the stories out of China, she took the dangers of the coronavirus seriously—so did, she says, about half of the people in her Chinese community. “For everybody who was non-Chinese, I think they thought I was crazy,” she said.

Mei’s college-age daughter thought she was overreacting, too. In early March, when her daughter’s school had a charity dance event, Mei emailed the university president to urge them to cancel the event. The event did get canceled a few hours later, though Mei doesn’t know whether it was her doing. In any case, her daughter replied to the news with a sad face, saying, “Half of the school hates you.” “They don’t hate me now!” Mei told me on the phone. Her daughter has since admitted her mom was right.

I have to say I was getting uncomfortable flashbacks at this point in my conversation with Mei. My own parents are first-generation Chinese immigrants, and when they were stocking up at Costco all the way back in February, I was rolling my eyes. “It’s not that scary, is it?” I asked my dad on the phone. I worried about my aunt in China, who is a doctor, but I never thought to worry about us here. And in the nearly dozen conversations I had for this story, I noticed the same general pattern in how first- and second-generation Chinese immigrants responded to COVID-19.

Like most Americans, Angela Zhang, a medical student in Rhode Island, wasn’t too concerned about COVID-19 early on. At least not compared with her mom, who has been sending her multiple messages a day telling her to wash her hands, wear a mask, and stay at home. “It’s how she shows love,” says Zhang (no relation to me).

Zhang’s mom, Yahua Yu, is a neurologist in Seattle. She had gone to medical school in Wuhan, and throughout January and February, she was getting dire updates from former classmates still in the city. The reality that seemed so far away and so unreal to many Americans felt very real and very close to her and other Chinese immigrants. Now that distant reality is America’s reality. “You tell people around you, but they didn’t really want to believe that,” she told me. “Then you start saying, ‘You will see. You will see.’”

We Need to Link Local Leaders Directly to One Another A strategy that helped Americans defeat al-Qaeda could be the key to stopping the coronavirus. By Chris Fussell Former U.S. Navy SEAL

As the United States fights the spread of the coronavirus, health-care workers are recycling personal protective equipment, governors are engaging in bidding wars for ventilators, and large sections of our health-care infrastructure are being overwhelmed. Despite the herculean efforts of personnel across the federal government, it’s clear that a top-down approach to fighting COVID-19 is insufficient, and will continue to create silos between our frontline leaders. This war is being fought by governors, mayors, and hospitals, and they need a network that links them directly to one another, and moves as fast as the virus they are working to defeat. Otherwise, even if they win their local battles, the nation could still lose its war on COVID-19.
I’ve seen this kind of challenge before. In 2008, 10 years into my career as a Navy SEAL, I visited a small, inconspicuous green tent on the outskirts of Baghdad. After years on the front line of the fight against al-Qaeda, I’d joined General Stanley McChrystal’s staff for a one-year tour as an aide-de-camp. Our visit that day was to something I’d heard about, but only vaguely understood—a “fusion cell.” Although Baghdad was still racked daily by horrendous violence, we knew we’d gained the upper hand on the al-Qaeda network, but it wasn’t until I stepped into this small tent that I understood why.

While McChrystal spent time with the various members of the fusion cell, I sat quietly in the back and watched. A small number of personnel from different agencies and military units were reading intelligence reports, shouting across the room, running between desks, and hopping on and off calls to various strike forces on the front line. I realized: This is how we’re moving faster than the al-Qaeda network.

I was late to the game, of course. The people in that fusion cell, and McChrystal’s senior leadership team, had appreciated the importance of this approach for years. They knew that the most easily exploited location on a traditional battlefield is where two lines meet. This can be a physical gap between units on the ground, or a gap in lines of authority between different agencies. When these gaps in communication are encountered, bureaucracy steps in to ensure deliberate, albeit slow, coordination. In Special Operations, we referred to these as “blinks”; moments when our eyes were closed, and the enemy network was safe to expand.

Our fusion-cell network was the answer. Under McChrystal’s leadership, we placed small teams of intelligence analysts from Special Operations, conventional military units, civilian intelligence, and law-enforcement agencies at key locations around the world, as close to key nodes in the al-Qaeda network as possible. They weren’t frontline operators, but they were only one step away from, and in direct communication with, those teams. Wherever al-Qaeda was around the world, McChrystal fought to place a fusion cell there as well.

These interagency teams were constantly scanning raw data from ongoing missions in the field, which they fused across their agencies. Each member of a fusion cell had the authority and responsibility to quickly connect with other fusion cells, in real time, without letting their home bureaucracy slow things down. The larger this global, interconnected fusion-cell network became, the more exponential its returns. While the visible fight was mostly centered on Iraq and Afghanistan, our network would grow to more than 70 discreet locations around the globe. If operators and helicopters were the muscle and skeleton of the fight against al-Qaeda, the fusion-cell network was its nervous system.

The fusion-cell network accomplished three major goals that no bureaucracy could keep pace with. First, it captured and shared raw intelligence from one location that could drive immediate action at another. Second, it gave a nonsiloed view of the fight so that crucial decisions about where to allocate resources—where to send operators, helicopters, surveillance drones—were made with one common operating picture. And third, it provided a real-time network through which best practices on one side of the fight could be shared with other units, immediately saving lives on the battlefield. To illustrate: In a single night, the information gleaned from a raid in downtown Baghdad could be sent directly to a team 200 miles away in Anbar, which would step off for a mission with additional resources that had been coordinated by frontline leaders, and crucial intelligence that had yet to reach higher headquarters.

The close-quarters fight against the COVID-19 pandemic will be waged—and the losses borne—by our doctors, nurses, and first responders. But those who have the privilege of leading these men and women—our mayors, governors, and medical experts—must be provided with a similar network methodology to tap into; we must ensure they’re not being forced to fight 50 state-level battles against COVID-19, but one unified war as a nation. A fusion-cell-network approach would ensure that intelligence sharing isn’t limited by state borders, bureaucratic rules, or the down-and-in structure of a hospital system, city, or state. We must ensure that they can establish real-time connectivity with one another, and not depend solely on traditional bureaucratic channels.

In short, mayors, governors, and the federal agencies assisting them should stand up fusion cells across the country. This is a light and fast solution. With two or three people in key locations, armed simply with smartphones and laptops, a network could quickly be put into place across our country. An existing entity, such as the U.S. Conference of Mayors, could quickly create a network of local leaders who are fighting this threat in a coordinated fashion.

The results of fusion cells would be quickly apparent. Raw, accurate emergency-room numbers from New York City wouldn’t need to go through layers of national bureaucracy and spreadsheet input before reaching other cities. A tactical improvement made in a Los Angeles emergency room would be shared immediately with doctors and nurses in Detroit and San Francisco. The network would provide mayors and governors with a more reliable single operational picture of this fight, so they can make informed decisions about resource allocation. Such a network wouldn’t be perfect—it never is—and would require trusting your team, but it could be crucial as the nation faces shortages and overload. We should not have governors or hospital systems in bidding wars for ventilators and personal protective equipment; instead, they need a network that allows them to make effective cross-border, cross-agency, and cross-party decisions.

After my time on McChrystal’s staff in Iraq, I was able to spend a year at graduate school, and my thesis team’s research focused on interagency fusion cells. This was relatively early in the special-operations community’s recognition of their importance, and our goal was to flesh out the key variables that were making some of them so successful. We found, surprisingly, that one key factor far outweighed more obvious and visible ones, such as technological infrastructure, geographic location, the number or seniority of personnel, or physical constructions. Success hinged, quite simply, on the human factor.

If the members of a fusion cell were experienced players who enjoyed high levels of trust in their home community, regardless of their seniority or positional authority, they were empowered to quickly push insights across bureaucratic firewalls and create action on the front lines. Without personnel like that, a fusion cell became just another repository for information from which those closest to the fight needed to pull insights. A network node intended to add speed and connectivity can quickly turn into another bureaucratic layer. Keeping the nodes fast, light, and staffed by seasoned people proved key to success.

This pandemic presents an incredible challenge for our nation, but we’ve learned previously how to defeat a problem like this. Agency and state bureaucracy will help us make sound and structured decisions, but it’s impossible to move key insights and raw intelligence through traditional means alone. The doctors, nurses, and first responders who are in this battle each day deserve every solution we can possibly offer. Minutes count. They need a network.

China's big donors are pitching in to deal with the new coronavirus – and not just in their own country

Alibaba founder Jack Ma, left, is funding African entrepreneurs through his foundation. VCG/VCG via Getty Images

Less than a month after China confirmed the emergence of what soon became the new coronavirus pandemic, the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba pledged US$144 million in medical supplies for Hubei province and its capital city Wuhan.

Soon after that Jan. 29 announcement, Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder, said he was giving away $14 million through his own foundation to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. These gifts from Ma, a former high school teacher, and the company roughly equaled everything else given by that point to fight coronavirus.

Ma has continued to step up. On March 3, he donated 1 million masks to Japan. On March 13, he announced that he was shipping 500,000 test kits and a million masks to the U.S. Three days later, he announced a donation of 1.1 million test kits and 6 million masks to be distributed to all 54 African countries.

By the end of March, every other region of the world benefited from his largesse, including Western Europe, Latin America, Asia and Russia.

A wave of giving

This wave of Chinese giving goes beyond Ma’s own checkbook.

The Chinese search engine company Baidu has pledged $43 million to support drug research and help disseminate public health information in China.

The giant tech company Tencent Holdings says it donated $211 million in February for medical supplies, efforts to fight the new coronavirus in China and other related priorities.

In addition, on March 24, Tencent announced the creation of a $100 million global fund to support international efforts to deal with the pandemic. The company seeks to harness the power of internet by providing faster access to health care services online, facilitating remote working and battling misinformation.

Tencent also played a key role in getting more than a million N95 masks delivered, courtesy of the private jet the New England Patriots football team uses, to Boston on April 3.

Separately, China Evergrande Group, China’s largest real estate company, has set up a $115 million effort in Boston that brings together researchers at top universities such as Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology China’s Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Health along with local biotechnology companies to develop tests, treatments and do other work aimed at halting the pandemic.

All told, Chinese donors, foundations and corporations are already planning to kick in some $900 million, about a fifth of the estimated $4.3 billion in this initial wave of worldwide donations raised by April 2 to deal with COVID-19 and its many repercussions, according to Candid – a group that tracks charities and funders.

We have observed through our research that private philanthropy is flourishing in China. The response by Chinese donors to this pandemic illustrates how this generosity is beginning to extend far beyond China’s borders.

Chinese charity

Ma is, according to Forbes Magazine, the 21st wealthiest person in the world with a pre-pandemic fortune estimated to be worth approximately $43 billion.

In the fall 2019, he stepped away from his leadership role at Alibaba, the company he founded in 1999 that now has more than 100,000 employees. The entrepreneur stated at that time that he wanted to devote himself to philanthropy, especially causes tied to education.

Large-scale private charity only emerged in modern China after 2000.

After China embraced capitalism, it experienced meteoric economic growth, which generated not just islands of wealth but also vast inequalities. China’s first private foundations flourished in the 1980s and 1990s in attempt to halt this process and help the government establish a safety net.

In 1994, China’s leaders officially admitted that philanthropy and socialism could be compatible. Its philanthropy is fueling China’s worldwide influence through what’s known as “soft power” – an effort to persuade others to do what it wants without force or coercion.

Other Chinese billionaire philanthropists

The proliferation of Chinese philanthropists is directly linked to the rise of massive Chinese fortunes and “wealth polarization.” There were 325 billionaires in mainland China and 436 in greater China in 2018 – the second-largest number anywhere after the United States, where 607 billionaires live.

Ma isn’t the only self-made Chinese entrepreneur to go big with philanthropy. Charles Chen Yidan, a Tencent co-founder, left the company in 2013. Like Ma, he’s emphasizing education. The Yidan Prize – which amounts to $3.8 million – is the world’s most generous award for educational research.

He Qiaonv, who made her fortune in China’s burgeoning landscaping business, pledged that she would give away $1.5 billion for wildlife conservation in 2017. At that time, this was the world’s largest-ever personal philanthropic commitment for this cause.

The government is also encouraging giving. China increased its tax incentives for philanthropy in 2018. Individuals can deduct donations up to 30% of their taxable income, and businesses can do the same with up to 12% of their annual profits.

Despite the global economic downturn that’s unfolding now, we expect Chinese philanthropy to become an even bigger force to be reckoned with far beyond its borders in the years ahead.

‘New York Is in Crisis’: Cuomo Pleads for Help as State Suffers Worst Single-Day Death Toll

More people in New York State have died in the last 24 hours than in most of March, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Friday—but the Empire State, the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S., is still struggling to find enough medical equipment to combat the pandemic.

“The curve continues to go up,” Cuomo said at a Friday briefing in Albany, adding that, in the last day, the state saw its “highest single increase in the number of deaths since we started.” “New York is in crisis," he said. "Help New York.”

More than 2,935 people have died and 102,863 people have been infected with the virus in New York State, marking 562 deaths in a single day on Thursday. The state’s death toll has almost doubled in just three days, Cuomo said. In the 27 days after the state's first coronavirus case was confirmed on March 1, 366 New Yorkers died.

NYC Is on the Brink as Patients Flood Hospitals Already ‘Under Siege’

New York accounts for almost 50 percent of 6,069 virus-related deaths nationwide. At least 245,658 individuals across the country have been infected with COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University’s tracker.  

The daily surge speaks to a nationwide problem: while state governments are working to get ahead of the virus, hospitals across the nation are overwhelmed, understaffed, and short on supplies necessary to combat the flu-like virus. 

The shortage has caused several states to bid against each other for purchase supplies from China. In New York, projections state that the apex of infections could come anytime between one week and a month from now. Those same projections suggest the virus could continue to plague New York until August, Cuomo said.  

“No state can get the supplies they need. No state can get the PPE they need. No state can get the ventilators they need,” Cuomo said. “The market has literally collapsed.”

Cuomo begged on Friday for New York manufacturers to start making gowns, gloves, and N95 masks. In an attempt to combat the shortage, Cuomo said Friday he will authorize the National Guard to borrow and redistribute ventilators and other personal protective equipment (PPE) from hospitals across the state—an attempt to put a band-aid on medical facilities hemorrhaging with too many patients. The equipment, which Cuomo said he would pay for as well, will be eventually given back to the hospitals.

Hospital Suppliers Take to the Skies to Combat Dire Shortages of COVID-19 Gear

The executive order comes one day after Cuomo said the state stockpile of supplies only had enough ventilators to last six days at the “current burn rate.” Over the last 24 hours, the trajectory of daily hospitalizations hit a new record, with 1,427 more people admitted and 335 new ICU patients. 

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio also said Friday the city is expected to run out of ventilators by Tuesday. 

“I’m not going to let people die,” Cuomo said. “I’m not going to get into a situation where I know we are running out of ventilators and we could have people dying because there are no ventilators, but there are hospitals in other parts of the state that have ventilators that they’re not using.”

Cuomo said he’d asked the federal government for help in obtaining more ventilators, stating that it was unacceptable for doctors to be forced to split one ventilator between two patients or use other machines as short-term fixes. 

So far, state officials have already taken extraordinary steps to combat the pandemic. The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, originally converted into a makeshift, 3,000-bed overflow hospital facility to alleviate overcrowding, will now be fully dedicated to COVID-19 patients, Cuomo said. 

The USNS Comfort—a naval ship with 1,000 beds, 12 operating rooms, a medical laboratory, and over 1,000 officers—docked in Manhattan on Monday and is now the only facility meant to relieve hospitals of non-coronavirus patients. As of Thursday, Cuomo said the converted supertank once used after 9/11 has only treated 20 patients.

“I’m going to speak to the secretary of defense,” Cuomo said when asked about the ship’s low admission rate. “I know they’re not taking COVID-positive patients. But they said that from day one, to be fair.”

Central Park has also been transformed into a field hospital to help house COVID-19 patients, and construction has begun on a 350-bed facility at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens for patients without the virus. 

City officials have also increased the number of mobile morgues. As of Thursday, 45 refrigerated trucks have been set up across the five boroughs, some of which are already full, as morgues and funeral homes struggle to find space and time to keep up with the mounting bodies. 

New York doctors and nurses on the frontlines of the pandemic have previously told The Daily Beast they are “constantly stressed” about working for an overwhelmed hospital system without the proper supplies to protect themselves and those around them.

At least three nurses in city hospitals have died after contracting the coronavirus during their shifts and dozens more have tested positive.

On Friday, several terrified city nurses protested outside Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan to demand more supplies to help them combat the daily surge of cases.

“Here we are, against the worst enemy, because this one we can’t see,” Diana Torres, a nurse, told the New York Daily News. “We can’t touch it. It’s killing us all. And we have nothing to fight with.” Sasha Winslow, a 9-year nursing veteran, stood next to Torres outside the entrance with a sign states: “We won’t be your bodybags.”

And New Yorkers may still be confused about what precautionary steps to take against the coronavirus on Friday after New York Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker said no data suggests that wearing masks, scarves, or bandanas while outside will protect people against infection. 

The statement directly contradicts guidance from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio—and expected guidance from President Donald Trump—that all residents should wear masks to prevent contracting and spreading the highly contagious virus.

“The masks couldn’t hurt unless they gave a wearer a false sense of security,” Cuomo said.

WHO Official Warns Against ‘Profiling’ China, Says Observers ‘Over-Focused’ on Coronavirus Data. By Zachary Evans

Dr. Michael Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Program, defended China on Thursday against accusations that the country has underreported cases and deaths from the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak.

“I think we need to be very careful also to not to be profiling certain parts of the world as being uncooperative or non-transparent, and we need to look at transparency across the board,” Ryan said at a Geneva press conference.

“We need to be balanced in that, and we need to recognize that systems under pressure find it hard to share everything on a minute-to-minute basis,” Ryan continued. “Frankly, at times I think we get over-focused on this issue.”

Ryan claimed that there was a “lack of precise information from Italy,” whose medical system has been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of coronavirus patients. “Are we saying they’re lacking in transparency and not sending WHO all the data every day? No.”

As of Friday morning, Italy has over 115,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 13,915 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracker. However, a Wall Street Journal analysis suggests the Italian coronavirus death toll could be much higher than was reported, because health workers did not have the time or resources to test all the casualties for the illness.

The U.S. Intelligence Community has reportedly concluded that China covered up the extent of the outbreak in the country. One recent study found that roughly 95 percent of global cases could have been prevented if China acted earlier to stem the outbreak. Meanwhile, Senator Rick Scott (R, Fla.) has called for a congressional hearing on the WHO’s ties to China, while Senator Martha McSally on Thursday called on the director of the WHO to resign.