Only two weeks ago Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister, insisted in a press conference, despite the grim statistics, that Christmas celebrations in Britain should go ahead, for it would be “inhumane” on the part of the government to cancel family get-togethers in the festive season.  Two days after the press conference in which Johnson urged the British public to scale back their plans and “have a merry little Christmas,” in an unexpected U-turn on the relaxation rules, the British government announced a full lockdown but in name on most of England last week.  From December 20, London, along with the South East and the North, went into lockdown-like “Tier 4” curbs, under which millions of Britons are ordered to stay at home and gatherings of any kind are banned.  Businesses are closed with the exception of supermarkets and groceries stores.  “Christmas cancelled.  Thank you China,” tweeted Nigel Farage, leader of the Brexit Party, soon after the announcement.

Much as one might dislike Farage’s politics, one has got to agree that what he said about China is right.  Farage is justified to attribute the pandemic ultimately to China, as is US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who, with good reason, pointed out in his speech back in July this year that “today we’re all still wearing masks and watching the pandemic’s body count rise because the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] failed in its promises to the world.”  Thus far, the Chinese government has denied accusations made by western countries such as the United States and Australia that it deliberately concealed information about the virus and its initial outbreak in Wuhan, maintaining that it has always been upfront since the onset.  In fact, such is the intensity of China’s insistence of its innocence that when Australia called for an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus and suggested recruiting independent investigators akin to “weapons inspectors” to determine the source of major disease outbreaks, China hit out and later announced a ban on Australian coal, along with other Aussie products, at its own expense. The ban on Australian coal surely reflects Beijing’s anger over the issue, for it was enforced notwithstanding a serious power shortage in the country which saw factories falling silent and office workers being forced to climb the stairs of high-rise buildings.  In parts of China people are even banned from switching on their heating unless the mercury drops below 3° C.

It is understandable why China is on the warpath whenever the world mentions the word “coronavirus” – Beijing is hot under the collar precisely because the virus indeed originated in China.  As a matter of fact, leaked documents showed that the Chinese authorities knew that the virus was highly transmittable as early as back in December 2019, yet not until late January did they own up to the fact – they had downplayed the scale of the outbreak and supplied false information to the WHO until at least mid-March.  Earlier this month, the CNN gained access to a 117-page leaked dossier from the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention and revealed that at the start of the outbreak, Chinese officials gave the world more optimistic data than they had access to internally.  It has also been uncovered that a large and previously undisclosed outbreak of influenza happened in early December in Hubei province.  Had it not been for China’s cover up of the scale of the outbreak in Wuhan in the first place back in January, we surely would not have found ourselves in this pickle: Taiwan and Korea came out of this all in all unscathed mainly because the two countries never trusted the Chinese authorities and the information they supplied to the WHO in the first place.  If anything, it is Xi Jingping who has the blood of the 1.5 million people around the world who died of the coronavirus on his hand.

Now that a more transmittable mutant strain of the coronavirus has been found in the UK, Britain now seems to have taken the place of China as the new Typhoid Mary.  Naturally, no one could be more excited by this new development than China, whose marionettes in Hong Kong have already started to refer to the coronavirus as the “English Virus” in their press conferences.  Whereas it is indubitable that the British government’s response to the virus has been ignominious in its sheer incompetence in handling the outbreak and the subsequent epidemic in the country, it does not follow, as many are suggesting, that attributing the coronavirus to China is part of a “blame game” whose aim is but to divert the focus from the west’s incompetence in handling the pandemic. The two facts are not logically disjoint. The UK’s response to the pandemic might be contemptible, but that does not mean that China is off the hook.  In fact, the west’s culpability is in no way comparable to that of China.  The UK and US might be incompetent in handling the virus but China went so far as to cover up the epidemic back in early December in 2019, and when that failed they downplayed the whole situation and supplied false information and data to the WHO.  It has never been a blame game, but a matter of holding the country accountable for this great disaster to humanity for which 1.5 million people paid with their lives.

(Joseph Long is a London-based writer and linguist from Hong Kong.)

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