“Do a person a favor and they may remember you, do that person a harm and they will remember you.” In both life and politics this was one of two gems of advice often supplied other politicians by the legendary Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill.

“All politics is local”was the other nugget of wisdom O’Neill offered up.  As O’Neill knew, people cared about what happened in the other state, but they voted based on what happened in theirs.

In 2020, with their deceptive and reckless handling of the COVID-19 outbreak, Xi Jingping and his Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have violated both of O’Neill’s dictates. As we go forward in US-China relations it may well be that what shapes US policies towards China will not be climate change, China’s military build up, or trade, but that in China’s handling of COVID-19, the American people saw through death and economic collapse in the US the evil and pure self interest of the Chinese Communist Party, and rather than engaging with China’s political leaders, it might just be more natural for Americans to oppose them.

COVID-19 has changed everything in US-China relations. As Wall Street Journal reporter Kate O’Keffe pointed out the other day on Twitter; the US Secretary of State, in meetings with“normal people” in Wisconsin a week back, encountered China as an issue of intense interest in a level of detail that was both impressive and ominous as subjects and questions all tilted towards negative impressions of China, and China as a threat to the United States.

President Trump aside, Hong Kong, trade talks, even camps in Xinjiang were not a major discussion of main street.  Yet, after the break out of the “China Virus” as it is called by many, Americans en mass saw what can only be described as a “clear and present danger” to our way of life, not to mention our health from the CCP.  When locked in one’s home, your kids out of school, job threatened, and worried Grandma is not gonna make it, people focus on the root cause of their situation.

New York Governor Cuomo or President Trump were topics of debate on which side of the US political spectrum was doing a worse job handling the virus, but there was little debate on who was the cause of the virus. China.

Now I am not close to believing that the Chinese grew a virus in a lab with the goal of unleashing it upon the world. Little evidence supports such a conclusion. I am also a follower of the Irish writer Bill Mcgurn’s line of logic, “where some see conspiracy, I see incompetence.” Yes, Covid-19 came from China. Might have even started in a lab, but my bet is that if it did come from a lab, Mr. Wang the lab technician probably picked out the wrong container from the frig and didn’t read the label of what he thought was his favorite sauce.

Yet, after that, CCP actions, or lack of actions, caused death and harm to the American people on a scale never seen outside war. China sat on the breakout for weeks, if not more than a month. China shut down internally while letting Chinese travel the world, virus in tow. China even prevented the US and other international agencies from gaining access to Wuhan, the epi-center. All the while corrupting what was to be the world’s agency of defense against pandemic, the World Health Organization.

I have been to the US three times since the outbreak, no one, and I mean no one, is carrying China’s water now. Years back I wrote that Xi had donned the“black hat”, a reference to the markings of the bad guy in US westerns. That may have not stuck then.  Now, without doubt, the US public sees a China that is a willful danger to the United States.

Hong Kong, a military buildup in the South China Sea, Taiwan, and the awful camps in Xinjiang, are now front and center as the American people see all things China through the prism of COVID-19.

Mark Clifford, former publisher of The South China Morning Post, on a podcast in Hong Kong a couple of weeks back asked a very good question, has the outbreak of COVID-19 from China into the US served as the same awakening to a US foe that Pearl Harbor was in 1941?

Clifford took great care to point out he didn’t see the China-sprung pandemic as an act of war, or anything to initiate a US-China conflict. Yet, he has a solid point that in terms of American attitudes towards China, and in particular the Chinese Communist Party, a sea change has occurred with the US public moved from seeing China as a strategic competitor to an opponent.

Xi Jinping and the CCP allowed, even abetted, a pandemic to ravage the world because it suited their local, internal, political needs.  My bet is the driving intellectual force in US-China relations going forward won’t be ideas of either Henry Kissinger or Peter Navarro, but the wisdom of Tip O’Neill.  When you do someone a harm, in their home, they remember you.

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