How Coronavirus Complicates the Way Americans Mourn the Dead The virus is making many people think about their own mortality in ways they have never done before. by Shad Thielman

At some point in late April, COVID-19 claimed the life of its 58,221st victim in the United States. We do not know the victim’s name or the exact time of death, but the death was significant: It meant that the coronavirus had claimed more American lives than the entire Vietnam War. 

That conflict, which lasted from 1955 to 1975, resulted in the deaths of 58,220 Americans. COVID-19 surpassed that number in less than four months.

Much like the nightly death counts that took place during the Vietnam era, the grim figures of the current crisis can obscure the fact that those who have perished were human beings, mourned by those they leave behind.

As a veteran and historian whose research examines burial rituals, I know that the way Americans memorialize the dead is steeped in traditions that are both social and cultural. COVID-19 is complicating these longstanding traditions.

The virus is also making many people think about their own mortality in ways they have never done before. As Princeton scholar Eddie S. Glaude Jr. recently wrote in the Washington Post, with COVID-19 Americans can no longer “banish death to the far reaches of our communities.” Instead, “Death is at our doorstep.”

A ledger for lives

In the war of attrition in Vietnam, the U.S. servicemen and women who lost their lives often became enumerated alongside their peers – relegated to a single numerical point of reference among the tens of thousands who died.

Then as now, newspapers and televised coverage included daily casualty reports as the government released the official numbers from Vietnam. These reports became a standard part of newscasts and developed into the central focus of efforts to combat the war.

The daily summaries helped normalize Vietnam deaths in the minds of Americans. The names of the American war dead were listed in numerical order by the date and time of death. Victory was assessed by the number of casualties inflicted upon the enemy. The daily ledger of all combatants who died on both sides of the conflict was used to suggest that America was winning the war.

As a consequence, quantitative data replaced the faces and names of the lost, dehumanized the war dead and influenced an obsession with raw data over traditional means of assessing progress, such as gaining or losing territory.

And much like today, the numbers became politicized as Americans’ trust for their leaders began to wane. Many, both then and now, sought alternative measures to account for the dead.

Media portrayals of the Vietnam conflict furthered this dehumanization by depicting the motionless bodies of American dead. Rarely were the names of the those killed in action included alongside these images.

Such media accounts helped to guide how the public processed death during Vietnam.

Death during crisis

The war against COVID-19 has continued these practices, immersing Americans in daily death totals against an enemy not fully understood. Daily counts of the dead, tests conducted and their results, compiled against the backdrop of overall percentages, is seen to determine success against the coronavirus.

Then as now, images of lifeless bodies with no names attached are shown – only now they’re being carted into refrigerated trucks.

In addition to the parallels in the way the dead are converted into quantitative data, Vietnam and the pandemic also share similarities in how the deceased are being mourned.

Vietnam veteran Bill Hunt wrote in 1990 that “In the end, all wars are about dying. When the dying is about honor, it is somehow OK.” But during the Vietnam War, public sensitivity to the number of dead and apathy toward the conflict actually decreased support for what the American public viewed as “sunk costs” and the loss of 58,220 lives.

Due in large part to this lack of understanding among Americans about what their loved ones were dying for, the casualties of the Vietnam War placed emotional strain on those grieving a lost service member. Deaths from the conflict were often mourned privately and without public celebration.

The same has been true of COVID-19 victims. Due to fear of contagion, families are unable to be present at hospitals during the final days and minutes of their loved one’s lives. An overburdened funeral industry and shelter-in-place orders also mean family and friends cannot bury or memorialize their loved ones in traditional ways such as by holding a wake or funeral.

In both the battle against COVID-19 and the Vietnam War, this isolation makes mourning, burial, memorialization and saying goodbye both problematic and private. As a result, reconciling the loss of their loved one is much more arduous and making it harder for those left behind to find closure and process their deaths.

Public remembrance

Eventually, the names of the service members who died in Vietnam adorned the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., acknowledging publicly for the first time the sacrifices of those who died. Having a permanent place of remembrance helped to ease the pain of those untimely deaths.

We do not know if those who perish during the current pandemic will be memorialized in a similar fashion. And sadly, not everyone will receive an obituary in which details of their lives can be read.

It may be that we have to find new ways to reconcile the deaths of those who lost their lives in the fight against COVID-19.

But to move on, we must acknowledge the men and women who are dying, give them names and faces and publicly honor them – not only for the dead but for the living who continue to mourn.

“Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan”—Can Modi Find India a Place in the Sun? India's future could be even brighter if it makes the right call. by Salvatore Babones

As the coronavirus pandemic starts to wind down, the world’s major economies are struggling to get back to business. The problem seems to be that no one except Elon Musk seems to know how to reopen. No one, that is, except Narendra Modi. While many of the world’s leaders are floundering over coronavirus recovery plans, India’s maverick prime minister Narendra Modi has seized the initiative.

Like most things Modi, his plan to turn the epidemic into an opportunity for remaking India’s economy is long on vision and short on details. “Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan” doesn’t exactly fall off the English-speaker’s tongue, but it is Hindi for “Self-Reliant India Campaign.” Exactly what self-reliance means, Modi isn’t saying. But one thing we know for certain: it’s not a return to the Congress-era “License Raj.”

From independence through the big bang reforms of 1991, India experienced a form of “communism lite.” The Congress Party was firmly entrenched in power, and nearly all big business was organized by (if not necessarily owned by) the state. That all came to an end in 1991 under Narasimha Rao and (more importantly) his reforming finance minister Manmohan Singh. Spurred on by a balance of payments emergency, the erstwhile socialist Singh devalued the currency, cut import tariffs, and deregulated industry. The economy boomed, and Singh would later go on to become a popular two-term prime minister.

Modi plans to spend 20 lakh crore rupees on India’s coronavirus response, and he wants to make it count. For the uninitiated, a lakh is 100,000 and a crore is 10,000,000, so 20 lack crore comes to 20 trillion rupees, or nearly $300 billion. That’s a lot of money in India, where GDP came in at roughly $3 trillion in 2019. At 10% of GDP, Modi can only raise that kind of money with the support of India’s central bank, the Mumbai-based Reserve Bank of India.

But self-reliance is easier said than done. Modi promises to do it with a focus on “land, labour, liquidity and laws” so as to benefit “labourers, farmers, honest tax payers, MSMEs (micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises), and cottage industry.” That sounds like an old-fashioned Gandhian plea for people to wear home-spun cotton. It certainly won’t remake India’s economy for the twenty-first century. India should certainly put more money in the hands of ordinary consumers (which in India means people earning less than $500 a month), but it should be encouraging them to get online, not buy more jewelry.

It may sound crazy, but poverty-stricken India accounts for nearly 30% of global jewelry consumption. Except that that’s not really consumption: it’s investment. Unfortunately, it’s investment in a completely non-productive asset. If India wants become more self-reliant for business investment, the fastest way to do it would be to convince people to shift their portfolios out of jewelry and into shares. That poses a difficult cultural challenge, but it’s an economic no-brainer. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government recently increased gold tariffs from 10% to 12.5%. That’s a good start, but it won’t be enough to change deeply-ingrained habits.

At nearly 25%, India’s imports expressed as a percentage of GDP are much larger than America’s 15%. The biggest chunks of India’s imports bill go to oil (17.9%), gold (9.3%), and diamonds (4.9%). Mobile phones, much touted as a potential import substitution growth industry for India, account for only 2.7%, less even than coal (4.7%). These data are from 2017 (the latest available), but the current picture probably looks pretty similar.

If Modi really wants to promote economic self-reliance, the most important thing he can do is improve the country’s energy security. Oil may be cheap right now, but it won’t stay cheap forever. Oil and coal imports have to be brought down, and for India, that means massive investments in solar and hydroelectric power. India lacks major conventional hydrocarbon reserves, and shale gas exploration has turned up few opportunities for commercially-viable fracking. Even if renewables weren’t in fashion, they are the right approach for India.

Hydro development requires long-term government support, will take years to come online, and has been tied up in the usual red tape. As the success of large-scale hydroelectric exploitation in the United States, Scandinavia, and more recently China has demonstrated, there is no more cost-effective source of reliable baseline power. The environmental challenges are tricky, but surmountable. As a flood-prone country on the slopes of the highest mountain range in the world, India would be crazy not to take advantage of its hydro potential. But Modi and his BJP have been in power since 2014 and have made little progress.

That leaves solar. A self-reliant India must be a solar India. Currently, India imports most of its solar panels from China, but the coronavirus crisis has the potential to change that. The big barrier in India is, as always, excessive (even if often under-enforced) regulation. Another is a lack of scale. The government could quickly change all that with a few big tenders for domestically-manufactured solar panels to jump-start the industry. Even if it took foreign firms to set up shop in the country to get things started, India would benefit in the long run.

A self-reliant India needs less investment in gold and more investment in sunshine. India has the investment potential and the market potential. In Narendra Modi, it has a reforming prime minster to match Manmohan Singh. If Modi wants “Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan” to be anything but a slogan, he has to reach for the sun. If sunshine is the best disinfectant, it might just be what Modi needs to get India out of its coronavirus slump.

The Early Casualties of the TAIPEI Act in the Post-Coronavirus World Political tensions across the Taiwan Strait have been reinforced during the coronavirus pandemic. The last thing that Taiwan should want to do is to provoke Beijing with direct and indirect actions to push for independence. by Patrick Mendis

mid coronavirus, Taiwan has become an epicenter of international geopolitics between China and the United States at the World Health Organization (WHO). The sovereign democracy has a complicated history with the two economic powers and has now arrived at a crossroads of political and economic challenges—with a perceived military option as a last resort. 

The longstanding Chinese conviction is that Beijing will ultimately unify the island through “force” if need be, as Chinese president Xi Jinping claimed. Meanwhile the United States’ new TAIPEI Act (Taiwan Allies International Protection and Enhancement Initiative) has all but removed the ambiguity of the “one China policy” that helped maintain the status quo since Washington recognized Beijing in 1979.

With two pro-nationalist administrations in Taipei and Washington, unprecedented political and military advances at the level of bilateral relations raise ambivalent sentiments. The re-elected President Tsai Ing-wen will soon have to deal with three political and economic challenges after her second inauguration on May 20. She will eventually be forced to address the response to the cross-Strait issues from China’s annual “two sessions” congress rescheduled for May 21–22 in Beijing.

Premature Death to the American Legislation

Anticipating a range of direct Chinese responses, the Tsai administration must first prepare strategic solutions to the likely situation of Beijing halting Taiwanese imports, which comprised over 40 percent of Taiwan’s total trade in 2019. More importantly, trade relations with China accounts for $50 billion—a critical source of Taiwan’s annual trade surplus. This could easily come in the form of forcing Taipei to label “the originality of products from ‘Taiwan, China.’” This would be an old but a brilliant Beijing strategy: forcing Taiwan to align more with the “one China policy” and circumventing the TAIPEI Act. This strategy would present the United States with an early casualty of economic warfare while foreshadowing to the Trump White House the yet-to-come implications of its own “trade war” with China. 

The political calculations in President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and the White House’s prevailing discussion of strategy to impose tariffs on the bilateral trade deal with China would negatively impact Taiwan’s prospects for better cross-strait relations. The Trump White House has neither viable economic endowment nor credible diplomatic power, lacking support and trust from even its European and Asian allies and friends. Obviously then, the TAIPEI Act will hardly be an effective strategy to convince or force other countries to side with the United States in a political standoff with China. There are hardly any exports that the United States needs from Taiwan that could not otherwise be redirected from China. Taiwan’s geographic proximity, bilateral investment relations, inherent connectivity of global value chains, historical linkages, and shared language are increasingly in China’s favor.

Trade that Binds Nations

Second, the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) signed between China and Taiwan in 2010 is another upcoming challenge for the Tsai administration if China decides to withdraw it or curtail the mutual economic benefits and tariff advantages. About 5–7 percent of Taiwan’s overall trade—mainly petrochemical, textile, electronic components, and agricultural products——entitled to zero-tariff privileges on the “early harvest list” would be seriously affected.

The most critical part of ECFA may not only be on economic give-and-take but more on the prospects for political uncertainty. Thus far, there is no clear sign as to what extent the Tsai administration will proceed. Under the prevailing negative political atmosphere in the cross-Strait relations, should ECFA be discouraged, it will imply a direct warning to Taipei.    

Nonmilitary Pressure on Taiwan

Third, it is unlikely that China would repeat a military action to take possession of Taiwan’s island-territories as it did in the past, involving the U.S. evacuation effort. Instead, China will most likely use nonmilitary tools for political ends while putting economic pressure on the Tsai administration. For example, Beijing could further shrink Taiwan’s international space through sharp-power economic diplomacy and its growing political influence on other countries, which would dim Taipei’s hope for the resumption of cross-Strait relations.

Sustained maintenance of China’s Liaoning Aircraft Carrier, reconnaissance aircraft data missions, and submarine patrols in the Taiwan Strait are also part of this auxiliary pressure strategy. The U.S. counter-military strategy in the cross-Strait and the South China Sea might continue but Beijing’s economic strategy seems to be more effective as shown in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere. 

Rhetoric Is Not Strategy

The politics of rhetoric is an asset in a political campaign as Trump is focusing on his own re-election campaign with a strategy of China-bashing against his opponent. If history is a guide in dealing with the United States and its evolved relations with China on the basis of economic and trade interests, then the Tsai administration needs to rethink its antagonizing approach to its increasingly powerful neighbor whose relations go beyond politics of noise.  

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, spreading since January 2020, Taipei has followed in Washington’s footsteps of vocal criticism of China’s cover-up of the coronavirus from the onset and openly slashed WHO. The emerging domestic nationalism and populism are supercharging the course of public opinion and netizen sentiments. In the short run, it may look good as a positive performance of the ruling administrations in Taipei and Washington. Strategically, however, it may backfire in the post-coronavirus contest of Sino-American geostrategic rivalry and Washington’s decoupling rhetoric and blame-game tactics for myopic political ends. In her second term, Tsai needs to quickly find a way to engage with China rather than speculate over the residual advantage of Sino-American rivalry.

Political tensions across the Taiwan Strait have been reinforced during the coronavirus pandemic. The last thing that Taiwan should want to do is to provoke Beijing with direct and indirect actions to push for independence. Garnered by the Trump administration’s anti-China political campaign and Taiwan’s domestic anti-China populism, the ruling Democratic Progressive Party of Taiwan prepares to push the envelope through a legislative proposal by denying “national unification” to be an alternative future between mainland China and Taiwan. A new turbulence may soon shake regional stability and peace. It would become an unprecedented challenge for Tsai when she begins her second term.     

China's Changing of International Norms Could Lead to Chaos The coronavirus is showing the world that Beijing isn’t just seeking to avoid accountability, it is seeking to change the rules. by Emilie Kao

The coronavirus pandemic has again crystallized the critical connection between human rights, accountability and public health. China’s ruthless suppression of free speech and its lack of transparency gave the disease wings to fly around the world.  

Unfortunately, the World Health Organization (WHO) and UN human rights officials turned a blind eye to China’s suppression of vital information and its censorship of whistleblowers. The coronavirus has clarified the extent to which China’s rights-violating regime influences international organizations and impacts the world. 

American citizens and those in other free countries insist on fundamental human-rights, transparency and accountability. These are, after all, elements essential to a functioning democracy. Laws that protect a robust civil society from being fettered by the government serve the public interest by protecting whistleblowers, holding parties accountable, and giving victims access to justice.  

A framework of freedom creates multiple, independent channels of data and prevents government monopolies of information. In a health crisis, workers in private and public hospitals and clinics, citizens and journalists can bring critical facts to the public’s attention through formal and informal networks, the media and social media. Watchdogs in civil society and other branches of government scrutinize the responses of authorities. And finally, litigators can go to court on behalf of victims.  

Public conflict resolution in democracies can look messy but it offers hope for justice. In America, medical professionals, patients and journalists have investigated everything from polluted water to fentanyl-laced prescription drugs to asbestos-laden talcum powder. And they are on the frontlines of treating, studying, and critiquing responses to infectious diseases.  

Because liberty is in America’s DNA, the expectations of its citizens shape not only its domestic response to the coronavirus but its international response, too. Those citizens expect local, state, and federal government to be accountable to their demands. And many Americans also expect the Trump administration and the UN to hold China accountable for respecting international health standards and universal human rights. 

But, in authoritarian one-party states like China, the state holds a monopoly on information, silences whistleblowers, and denies access to justice. Citizens face almost certain punishment for protesting and are rarely able to hold the state accountable. The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) censorship has repeatedly undermined the people’s ability to protect public health through sharing information with each other. As Heritage Senior Policy Analyst Olivia Enos writes, Chinese law makes it “illegal for any entity other than the Ministry of Health to break the news about a health-related issue…actually classifying such information as a state secret.”  

Accustomed to acting with impunity at home, it is no surprise that Chinese diplomacy is aimed at deflecting international scrutiny. But the coronavirus is showing the world that China isn’t just seeking to avoid accountability, it is seeking to change the rules. 

Crisis Management, the CCP Way 

It takes a lot of horror to embolden protest in China. Yet the CCP’s mismanagement of past disasters has sometimes been so egregious as to lead aggrieved citizens to take to the streets. The regime’s handling of the 2003 SARS outbreak and the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake rose to that level, although the resulting protests were limited and easily stifled. But another CCP misadventure gave the world a particularly tragic demonstration of how Beijing’s suppression of rights could create serious health risks that would spread beyond China’s borders.  

In 2005, a television station aired dairy worker Jiang Weisuo’s concerns about his company adding unauthorized substances to its infant milk formula. Chinese food safety officials said they could not find evidence of wrongdoing but three years later a urologist in a pediatric hospital flagged the unusual appearance of kidney stones in children.  

That same month, July 2008, a journalist at China’s Southern Weekend newspaper reported that infants had been sickened by baby formula. That report was promptly suppressed by authorities, due to the Beijing Olympics which were to be held in August.  

The weekly’s editor, Fu, later confessed that the CCP had ordered the media to report only positive news and declared the topic of food safety to be off-limits. “We couldn’t do any investigation on an issue like this, at that time, because of the need to be ‘harmonious,’” Fu wrote.  

By the time another Chinese reporter broke the news about the dangerous product on September 11, an estimated three hundred thousand babies had been sickened and fifty-four thousand had been hospitalized. Six ultimately died.  

Zhao Lianhai, a journalist whose own son was sickened, began publicly questioning the safety of the widely distributed Sanlu milk formula. He organized other angry parents through a website called “Kidney Stone Babies” but official retribution was swift. He was detained and ultimately sentenced to two and a half years in prison on charges of “disturbing social order,” “gathering illegally,” holding up signs and speaking to reporters.  

Other parents were detained to prevent them from holding a press conference, and some were sent to labor camps. Authorities harassed their lawyers, threatening them with professional discipline, and ordered courts not to hear cases from the parents. Ultimately, the CCP’s censorship of dissent stifled the protests.  

This is standard operating procedure for a totalitarian regime. It’s captured well in the Chinese adage: “Kill the chicken to scare the monkey.” By severely punishing small actors—a few journalists, some parents and their advocates—the government intimidated the masses, preventing additional criticism and protests.  

Through this repressive behavior, the Party managed to avoid domestic accountability for its role in the tragedy, even though its interference had kept parents from receiving life-saving information from whistleblowers. “I felt very guilty and frustrated then,” Fu wrote. “The only thing I could do was to call every friend I knew to tell them not to feed their children with Sanlu milk powder.”   

Muzzling International Organizations 

Once the baby formula story was out, the world took notice. Some countries also took action. Eleven nations banned the import of Chinese dairy products.  

The WHO called the scandal “a large-scale intentional activity to deceive consumers for simple, basic, short-term profits.” But with this denunciation, the WHO followed the lead of the Chinese government. It focused solely on the milk producers’ culpability, without examining Beijing’s interference in suppressing critical information.  

Meanwhile, over at the World Trade Organization, Chinese representatives criticized other nations for imposing blanket bans on Chinese food products. And at the time, the UN’s human-rights leadership breathed barely a word about Beijing’s censorship of whistleblowers or its intimidation of human rights defenders and their clients.  

Throughout it all, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao denied any culpability on the part of the CCP, claiming “there wasn’t the slightest cover up.” Rather, he said, “What we are trying to do is to ensure no such event happens in future by punishing those leaders as well as enterprises responsible. None of those companies without professional ethics or social morals will be let off.” 

And he was true to his word. The government sentenced dairy company executives to long jail terms, executed two of them, and punished local officials and the head of the Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine. 

But, by quashing freedom inside China—and in the absence of a serious investigation from the UN—the CCP never faced accountability for its role in the tainted formula scandal. Unfortunately, it was no “one-off.” Stories of tainted pet food, tainted eggs, tainted toothpaste, and lead-painted toys emerged both before and after the 2008 scandal. But nothing so clearly revealed the critical connection between freedom of speech, government censorship, and public health as the baby formula scandal did. That is, until the coronavirus.  

The Fatal Consequences of Information Suppression 

An effective international response to any health crisis, particularly an infectious disease, depends on rapid sharing of accurate scientific and medical data and coordination between international organizations and national governments. Whether or not that happens depends, in part, on whether those responsible for information-sharing and coordination are held accountable if they fail to fulfill their duties.  

None of these accountability systems exists in China because of its governance system (one-party rule) and because of its rising influence at the UN. The latter has made both WHO and human-rights officials loathe to confront China. For instance, in 2015, China refused to allow language affirming the vital role of civil society in a UN Human Rights Council resolution on public health. This is one example of how China not only seeks to shield itself from criticism but presses for a more statist approach to public health at the expense of civil society and the individual.  

In addition to defending its own human-rights abuses against religious and ethnic minorities, political dissidents, and human-rights defenders, China has tried to block investigations into atrocities in Syria, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Myanmar. In 2016, it successfully lobbied the UN in Geneva and member-states to move an event with Nobel Laureates, including the Dalai Lama, off-site. In 2017, it enlisted UN security guards to block an accredited Uighur Muslim activist from entering a gathering at the UN headquarters in New York. And it has repeatedly used its position on the UN Economic and Social Council to block the accreditation of NGOs that critique its human-rights violations. This is why the human-rights community was appalled when diplomats on the forty-seven-member UN Human Rights Council recently elected China to the panel that will appoint both the UN Special Rapporteurs on Freedom of Expression and the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health. 

Just as Beijing’s three-year censorship of information about melamine-tainted formula deprived Chinese parents of life-saving information, so its withholding of critical information about the human-to-human spread of the coronavirus led to the current catastrophe. On December 30, 2019, Dr. Li Wenliang tried to alert his classmates over social media to the risks of treating patients with the mysterious new disease—the coronavirus that ultimately killed him. Within days, Chinese authorities summoned Dr. Li, admonished him for "making false comments on the Internet” and forced him to sign a confession.   

Silencing him cost thousands of lives in China according to Dr. Ai Fen, his colleague at Wuhan Central Hospital's emergency department. She, too, was concerned by the similarities between the new pneumonia-like disease and SARS, but both hospital and government officials from China’s Center for Disease Control reprimanded doctors voicing alarm and told them to change the medical charts of patients to hide the disease. 

One doctor lamented that the state-imposed silence about human-to-human spread left hundreds of his fellow medical professionals “in the dark.” He echoed Fu Jianfeng’s helplessness over being prevented from sharing what he knew about the tainted milk. “Even when they fell ill, they could not report it. They could not alert their colleagues and the public in time despite their sacrifice. This is the most painful loss and lesson.”  

Punishment of concerned citizens was severe, as well. Outspoken businesspeople and citizen journalists like Fang Bin, Chen Qiushi, and Li Zehua simply disappeared. Of those three, only Li Zihua has resurfaced. They tried to raise the public’s awareness of the disease’s severity and the government’s poor management by reporting on the rising numbers of dead and Wuhan’s severely overcrowded hospitals.  

Aiding and Abetting on an International Scale 

The WHO abetted Beijing’s cover-up by repeating Chinese government talking points, failing to investigate the spread among medical personnel, and praising China’s management of the new disease. A study from England’s Southhampton University found that “if interventions in the country could have been conducted one week, two weeks, or three weeks earlier, cases could have been reduced by 66 percent, 86 percent and 95 percent respectively – significantly limiting the geographical spread of the disease.”  

Had China shared information earlier about the human-to-human transmission, other governments could have used the time to prepare health personnel and facilities, to create screening protocols for overseas travelers, and to tell the public how to begin protecting themselves from infection. According to one study by Axios, those three weeks might have given the world time to keep of provincial outbreak from becoming a global pandemic.  

As reports of both the virus and the Party’s censorship of whistleblowers emerged, a well-functioning, politically-independent international health and human rights bureaucracy would have coordinated to pressure Beijing to lift its dangerous censorship and allow in foreign disease-control experts. If the CCP had balked, the international human rights body could have acted in coordination with UN member-states to use public and private channels to press China to do the right thing.  

Instead, what we got was a jaw-dropping failure of leadership from the UN, followed by a total lack of accountability. On January 14, 11 days after Chinese police questioned Li for raising the possibility of human-to-human transmission, the WHO Twitter account endorsed the Wuhan Health Commission’s talking points: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus.”

As former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said, “There is some evidence to suggest that as late as January 20, Chinese officials were still saying there was no human-to-human transmission of the virus, and the WHO was validating those claims . . . sort of enabling the obfuscation from China.”

Instead of investigating how many healthcare workers had become infected during this time, which would have indicated human-to-human transmission before it was confirmed on January 23, the WHO advised nations not to close their borders. On January 28, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for China’s “openness to sharing information.” On February 20, he even thanked Beijing for “buying the world time.” 

As the outbreak spread, China clamped down on any chance that information contradicting its narrative would get out of the country. It expelled foreign journalists and denied access to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and to international humanitarian aid organizations.

After the WHO declared the coronavirus a global pandemic on March 11, new government guidelines for academic researchers were published and then deleted at Fudan University and China University of Geosciences (Wuhan). The sudden disappearance of the guidances indicates that only academic research on the virus’ origins supporting the government’s narrative will pass censorship. 

Despite the violations of both health and human rights norms, the UN bureaucracy remained silent. The WHO is responsible for compliance with the International Health Regulations that calls upon member states to consolidate input from “relevant sectors of the administration of the State Party concerned, including . . . public health services, clinics and hospitals.” Yet, the WHO said nothing about China’s censorship of doctors and researchers. And while UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michele Bachelet has warned other countries against restricting human rights during the lockdown, she has yet to comment on China’s censorship and punishment of Dr. Li, journalists, and citizens. As a representative of Reporters Without Borders stated, “Reporting the truth at the earliest possible moment would have allowed the rest of the world to react probably earlier and probably more seriously. The consequences (of stifling media freedom) are actually deadly.”

Before he died, Dr. Li told the New York Times, “If the officials had disclosed information about the epidemic earlier, I think it would have been a lot better…There should be more openness and transparency.” At a February 6 press conference, Dr. Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies program, mourned Dr. Li’s death but remained silent on his detention and arrest. He did, however, praise China for reporting the first clusters “in an extremely timely fashion.”  

Not to be outdone, UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres has called China’s efforts “remarkable.”

The combined failure of the UN bureaucrats responsible for health and human rights and the diplomats on the UN Human Rights Council to hold China accountable has compounded the human costs of the coronavirus.  

Beijing also continues its practice of using economic diplomacy to secure the cooperation of troubled nations—even democracies. This, too, has happened before. In 2017, Greece blocked the EU from criticizing China’s human-rights record at the Human Rights Council, calling it “unconstructive criticism.” Greece’s government has courted Chinese trade and investment naming it the “country of honor” at its annual international business fair. And EU representatives softened their own report about China’s disinformation under pressure from Beijing. As China spends trillions of dollars to expand its Belt and Road infrastructure across the world, it will seek to bring more democratic countries into its fold by promising financial remuneration in exchange for complicity on its human-rights abuses.  

Pushing Back 

Now, Australia, the EU, and the U.S. are calling for an investigation into Beijing’s role in exacerbating the spread of the coronavirus. When the World Health Assembly meetings on May 17, the international community should insist that these investigations include inquiries into the censorship and punishment of doctors, citizens, and journalists. These are critical issues, because the timely transmission of scientific and medical data hinges on the freedom of expression and association.  

Continued UN silence on the relationship between China’s human-rights violations and the spread of the coronavirus should further delegitimize the institution in the eyes of both democracies and authoritarian regimes and unite those on both the political Left and Right. However, we don’t appear to be there yet. 

In 2018, the Trump administration decided to leave the UN Human Rights Council because of its ineffectiveness. Now the administration has announced its intent to hold the WHO accountable by temporarily withholding funds. Prominent officials from previous administrations and both domestic and foreign media have criticized these moves, but few have offered visions for reforming either institution. It is doubtful that either the WHO or the council will reform without serious political pressure.  

Previous American administrations did little to prevent Chinese officials from taking the leadership of four UN specialized agencies, despite Beijing’s long record of violating diplomatic norms. As Human Rights Watch reported, Chinese officials have intimidated UN staff in violation of UN rules and harassed non-governmental organizations critical of Chinese policies on UN property. In addition, Beijing instructs Chinese nationals working in international organizations to advance its national interests, although UN civil servants are supposed to be neutral and independent.  

The pandemic has given the world yet another preview of a future in which Chinese leadership dominates the global system, including through international institutions. China’s violations of health and human rights norms have cost untold lives domestically and now globally.  

In both 2008 and 2020, the CCP silenced and punished whistleblowing doctors, journalists, and citizens and tried to shift blame to others. In 2008, Beijing pointed the finger at milk manufacturers, denied its role in the cover-up, and then criticized other countries for banning its products. In 2020, Beijing pointed the finger at U.S. soldiers, suggesting they imported the virus to China. It denied its role in suppressing critical information about the virus, and then criticized other countries for imposing travel restrictions.  

In both cases, neither the WHO nor the UN’s top human rights bureaucrats nor the UN Human Rights Council investigated Beijing’s role in censoring warnings to the world community of looming dangers.   

Some countries are now betting that China’s economic assistance will more than offset the costs of its rights-violating behavior. But these countries should heed the other implications of the Chinese saying: the chicken’s death should cause the monkey to pay attention and ask questions, not turn its head and look away.  

Beijing’s money may be able to buy some friends for some purposes, but it can’t buy back the lives and livelihoods shattered by the pandemic. The world needs rights-based leadership to shape the international response to the coronavirus.

Since World War II, America has led the responses of freedom-loving nations to global crises, including those spawned by totalitarian regimes. Given China’s rising influence at the UN, the international community urgently needs to grasp the intrinsic relationship between human rights, accountability, and public health. Leadership needs to come not just from America, but from democracies around the world. Otherwise, Beijing may further violate and transform international norms unleashing even more deadly global catastrophes in the future.