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Swab diplomacy and its discontents|Kevin Carrico

蘋果日報 2021/03/05 09:15


Initial reports emerged in January that the government of the People’s Republic of China was deploying a new method of COVID-19 testing: anal swabs. This testing method involves inserting a cotton swab a few millimeters into one’s anus and rotating it for five to ten seconds to obtain a specimen.
According to the Global Times, the testing method was primarily used in Beijing, Shijiazhuang, and Qingdao on “certain high-risk groups, such as overseas arrivals.” Using such stigmatizing language to characterize all overseas arrivals as “high-risk,” one can only assume that Global Times has not yet received the World Health Organization’s March 2020 memo that when it comes to COVID, the stigma is actually far more dangerous than the disease!
In an uncharacteristically reserved statement compared to the paper’s usual tone, the Global Times article proceeded to declare that “the method is more accurate than nose and throat swabs, albeit awkward for recipients.”
Awkward is indeed one word that comes to mind when thinking about this testing regimen. Yet there are so many others: consider, for example, puzzling.
After all, every other country in the world is somehow managing to handle COVID-19 testing without compulsory anal swabs, so the suddenly declared efficiency of this new mode of testing has presented a bit of a shock, undoubtedly to both its recipients and to the wider world.
Taiwan, for example, has done a stellar job in controlling COVID without breaking out the anal swabs, raising the question on every test subject’s mind: is this really necessary?
To provide another example, I currently live in Melbourne, which has certainly had its fair share of corona, and which has also borrowed a lite version of Beijing’s lockdown approach to handle its own outbreak. However, thankfully not all practices travel so easily along the old Belt-Road: having personally sped by a number of drive-thru testing sites over the past six months, unless I was really missing something, I can say with a high degree of certainty that such swabs are not part of Victoria’s testing regimen.
Compulsory anal swab COVID tests, to be frank, seem at once puzzlingly unthinkable, while also at the same time seeming like something that only Beijing could proudly promote. There is perhaps a powerful metaphor for the effects of communism in China to be found here in the image of a government forcibly swabbing one’s nether regions while telling one that this embodies the most advanced scientific methods of the day and is all for one’s own good.
Yet the implications of this practice do not stop there. After Tiananmen, the global community liked to pretend that repression in China was a sovereign matter that, while unpleasant, would halt at its border. I have persistently argued against this fundamentally false confidence-cum-consciousness, remembering the simple fact that oppression anywhere means oppression everywhere.
Yet moving beyond platitudes about freedom and oppression to a reality-based cost-benefit analysis, Peking’s clearly demonstrated ability to ruthlessly repress its citizens at home without even the slightest of consequences empowers it to control its citizens overseas, to completely destroy Hong Kong’s free and vibrant political culture, to threaten democratic Taiwan with dictatorship, and even to export its speech controls abroad. When there is no freedom nor honesty in China, freedom and honesty everywhere is at risk.
This brings us back to this whole anal swab thing. Because when compulsory anal swabs become a fixture in China, the world might look away in awkwardness and discomfort and embarrassment: yet as with all matters of engagement with the People’s Republic, this eagerness to look away only makes the problem greater, gradually expanding to impact everyone: our fates are at the end of the day intertwined.
In late February, the United States requested that China stop subjecting US diplomatic personnel in the country to anal swabs. A State Department spokesperson noted that the US never agreed to such testing and had as such protested directly to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs upon learning of this practice. If anyone had this on their bingo card for 2021, you have far more foresight than me.
Tinfoil-hat connoisseur Zhao Lijian responded to these claims by dismissing the US complaints and declaring that US diplomatic personnel had never been subjected to such testing. Zhao’s denial would have perhaps been somewhat more convincing if it was not his job to lie for the CCP on a daily basis about anything and everything. Compulsory anal swab tests are, one must acknowledge, an extremely specific complaint that a half-baked denial from the guy who first brought us COVID-19 conspiracy theories seems unlikely to debunk.
And as if to remind us that no one should ever believe a word that comes out of Zhao Lijian’s mouth, this week the Japanese government raised complaints about compulsory anal swab testing of its citizens, noting that the practice has produced psychological distress in its subjects.
Rather than denying the practice as Zhao had previously done, Wang Wenbin of the same Ministry of Foreign Affairs went all in on the anal swabs, arguing that the method is “science-based” as well as “in accordance with the changes in the pandemic situation as well as relevant laws and regulations.” These soothing words of bureaucratese are unlikely to provide much comfort to anyone actually being tested.
There has been much joking on social media about Beijing’s swab diplomacy, and this article would of course never test negative for a few attempts at humor. Yet behind the inevitable jokes there is actually much of intellectual value that we can take away from reflecting on these discomfiting swabs: Beijing’s over-the-top approach to quarantine and testing after whining about far less restrictive and invasive controls abroad in early 2020; the inevitability of wrongs in China impacting the world, whether we are talking about human rights abuses, cover-ups of diseases, or uncomfortable testing procedures; and of course the central government’s reliable gaslighting, denying that diplomats had been swabbed before attempting to rationalize swabbing everyone by calling it “science!”
These swabs, I propose, are not about science: they are about power and control. These matters are also, one must note, the core of CCP rule, condensed here in these cottony swabs and their invasive procedures presented under the legitimizing cover of reason, health, and the common good.
(Kevin Carrico is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Monash University and the author of the forthcoming book Two Systems, Two Countries: A Nationalist Guide to Hong Kong.)
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