Trump aides pound on China. Health experts say: Please stop.
By Nahal Toosi, Politico•March 13, 2020
They call it the “Wuhan virus.”
As a lethal pandemic races across the world, overwhelming health systems and upending entire societies, President Donald Trump’s top aides and allies see an opening to weaken a vulnerable adversary.
The Trump team’s escalating drumbeat against China is worrying some public health experts, who say the attempts to blame Beijing for the coronavirus outbreak could harm efforts to combat the spreading contagion, while winning praise from others.
And it’s come amid conspiracy theories and counteraccusations from Chinese officials, some of whom are alleging the virus’s true origins lie outside China, in what U.S. officials say is a malicious effort to shift blame.
National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien has accused China of covering up the health crisis. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has repeatedly labeled the illness the “Wuhan coronavirus” — a reference to the Chinese city that is the epicenter of the disease.
Hawkish pro-Trump lawmakers in Congress, meanwhile, have raised alarms about China’s outsized role in global supply chains for key medicines. And that’s on top of other anti-Beijing moves that have nothing to do with the virus at all.
The Chinese are fighting back with their own harsh rhetoric, all while signaling that their herculean effort to eradicate the virus means the world should look to them – and not the United States — as a leader and role model.
As for the president, he has largely stayed above the fray, limiting his criticism to noting the virus’s geographical roots and labeling it a “foreign virus” during an Oval Office address on Wednesday. He’s even praised Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s stewardship of the crisis, tweeting that Xi “is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus.”
The Trump administration’s hardline reaction to Beijing’s handling of the coronavirus is in many ways par for the course: Its foreign policy relies more on sticks than carrots, and it has flatly declared the ruling Chinese Communist Party a long-term global threat.
That dim view of China is shared increasingly across the political spectrum in Washington. Few in either party will defend China’s management of the virus, or call to emulate its draconian methods.
But some former U.S. officials say that by kicking China while it’s down, the Trump team is wasting a golden opportunity to build trust with an increasingly powerful country whose cooperation it will need to tackle future transnational challenges, including pandemics.
“A lot of these emotional and punishment policies will over time come back to bite us,” warned Paul Haenle, a former National Security Council official who dealt with China under the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.
Within the Cabinet, America’s top diplomat has been China’s most expansive critic. The secretary of state is arguing to anyone who will listen that China’s lack of transparency, especially early on, has damaged global efforts to halt the virus.
“It has proven incredibly frustrating to work with the Chinese Communist Party to get our hands around the data set which will ultimately be the solution to both getting the vaccine and attacking this risk,” Pompeo told CNBC last week.
But Pompeo’s attempts to rebrand COVID-19 as “the Wuhan virus” or the “Wuhan coronavirus” are drawing a furious backlash from Chinese officials and semi-official pundits, who say the terms are xenophobic.
State Department officials insist that Pompeo is using the term to counter Chinese disinformation – prevalent on internet forums and voiced by some Chinese officials – that the virus might have actually sprung from the United States.
O’Brien sent a similar critical message on Wednesday, asserting that authorities in China had “covered up” the initial outbreak. As a result, the national security adviser said, "it probably cost the world community two months to respond."
National security adviser Robert O'Brien arrives at a signing ceremony with President Donald Trump for a trade agreement with Japan in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Monday, Oct. 7, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)More
Other Trump aides have suggested the virus offers the U.S. economic opportunity.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the outbreak could “accelerate the return of jobs to North America,” although that was before the virus was detected in large numbers inside the United States. Peter Navarro, a strident anti-China voice within the executive branch, has used the outbreak to push for ways to decrease U.S. reliance on China for the manufacturing of key drugs and medical equipment.
Some of Trump’s most vocal supporters in Congress have expressed similar concerns about dependence on Chinese manufacturers. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida on Thursday chaired a hearing titled “The Coronavirus and America’s Small Business Supply Chain” to highlight U.S. vulnerabilities.
Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas has been among the harshest anti-China critics as the coronavirus has spread. He, like Pompeo, refers to it as the “Wuhan virus” and has floated the unsubstantiated theory that the virus was manufactured by the Chinese in a bioweapons lab, a claim scientists dismiss as conspiratorial and implausible.
Even as Cotton announced Thursday that he was temporarily closing his Washington, D.C., office after a Senate staffer tested positive for the virus, he hinted at unspecified moves to retaliate against an unnamed culprit, presumably Beijing.
“We will emerge stronger from this challenge, we will hold accountable those who inflicted it on the world, and we will prosper in the new day,” he said.
The virus-related rhetoric and actions have been coupled by other anti-China moves large and small, many of them led by Pompeo and the State Department.
During the Munich Security Conference in February, Pompeo launched several broadsides at Beijing. He accused it of fostering maritime disputes, undermining pro-democracy movements and trying to co-opt local and state officials in the United States. He also warned other countries that “Huawei and other Chinese state-backed tech companies are Trojan horses for Chinese intelligence.”
In recent weeks, the State Department has designated five Chinese media outlets as “foreign missions,” effectively declaring them extensions of China’s government. Those outlets now have to get U.S. federal government permission for various actions, such as leasing office space.
Shortly afterward, China expelled three Wall Street Journal reporters, a move it linked to its unhappiness over a headline in the Journal’s opinion pages that described China as the “sick man” of Asia. In apparent response, the Trump administration said it was imposing caps on the number of Chinese citizens allowed to work for Chinese media outlets in the United States.
"President Trump has made clear that the United States will establish long-overdue reciprocity in our relations with China," a State Department spokesperson said. "We urge the Chinese Communist Party to immediately uphold its international commitments to respect freedom of expression, including for members of the press."
On Wednesday, Pompeo singled out China and a handful of other countries – Iran, Cuba and Venezuela – as he unveiled the State Department’s annual human rights report. China, Pompeo said, is imprisoning citizens because of their religious beliefs and “Chinese citizens who want a better future are met with violence.”
Former U.S. officials and analysts in the China and global health fields offered mixed reactions to the Trump administration’s handling of the diplomatic side of the crisis.
Some said that Pompeo and others’ tough commentary has been helpful by raising pressure on China to be more open about developments on its soil. In mid-February, China finally allowed in a team from the World Health Organization that included Americans.
“Clobbering the Chinese on some of the things they need to be clobbered on is not a bad thing at all,” said Stephen Morrison, director of the Global Health Policy Center at Center for Strategic and International Studies. The WHO “has been super deferential toward the Chinese, and we were getting stiffed and stonewalled for weeks and weeks.”
But Morrison and others agreed that other U.S. moves have probably done more to degrade trust than build it – including using labels like the “Wuhan coronavirus.”
“Naming a disease after a place stigmatizes that place and that’s why there’s been an intentional move away from that,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former Obama administration official who help lead the U.S. response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa. “Ultimately, diseases are about biology, not geography.”
Konyndyk added that initial U.S. offers to send specialists to China to examine the outbreak came across as demands more than genuine friendly offers, turning off Chinese officials already wary of any U.S. presence on the ground.
“The way that the administration [was] framing it and talking about it was really about us getting visibility on their situation rather than us helping them,” he said.
The analysts and former officials didn’t doubt the reasoning behind some of the U.S. moves – Chinese media outlets, for one, are widely considered propaganda operations. But the timing of the U.S. moves sent a poor signal, they argued.
That being said, given the downturn in U.S.-Chinese relations in recent years – predating Trump – there’s no guarantee that China would have reacted any differently on the coronavirus outbreak had the U.S. not been making such moves.
In a recent essay, Haenle and co-author Lucas Tcheyan noted that epidemics have typically been seen as “non-sensitive areas for U.S.-China cooperation.” One result of 2002-2003 outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in China was more U.S.-Chinese collaboration in the field of global health, the authors said.
“In the nearly two decades following SARS, in which other global health crises involving the H1N1 influenza strain and the Ebola virus unfolded, Washington and Beijing demonstrated a growing willingness to manage threats to global health, stability, and economic growth together,” they wrote. “The coronavirus, however, has demonstrated just how low bilateral ties have sunk.”
State Department officials point out that the U.S. has delivered some 18 tons of supplies and pledged up to $100 million to help China and other countries battle the coronavirus. According to some media accounts, the Chinese have quietly accepted much of the aid.
In public, however, some Chinese officials are not showing much gratitude.
Lijian Zhao, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, is among the most outspoken critics. On Friday, he used his Twitter account, which is infamous for its mean-spirited rhetoric, to link to clips of a recent Capitol Hill appearance by Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“When did patient zero begin in US?” Zhao asked in one tweet, implying without evidence that the outbreak began in the United States. “How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!”
Perhaps the most intriguing development on the geopolitical side of the coronavirus crisis is China’s attempt to capitalize on it diplomatically.
Thanks to quarantines, lockdowns of entire regions and other stringent measures, the Chinese appear to have brought the outbreak to heel -- albeit after it killed more than 3,000 of their citizens. Earlier this week, Xi, the Chinese leader, visited Wuhan in a show of confidence.
At the same time, China is increasingly offering expertise and aid to other countries struggling to contain the illness. A group of Chinese experts headed to Italy this week to help combat the virus in that badly hit European country; Italy has put its entire 60 million population under quarantine.
Chinese propaganda organs, meanwhile, have painted Xi as taking heroic steps to arrest the outbreak. The argument, pushed over and over in state-run media, is that China’s authoritarian system is uniquely capable of solving such crises.
The state-controlled outlets also paint the U.S. political system as incompetent in its response.
“Political virus puts US behind the curve of infection control,” read one headline in China's Global Times, a tabloid that often pushes the views of anti-U.S. voices within the Chinese system.
By Nahal Toosi, Politico•March 13, 2020
They call it the “Wuhan virus.”
As a lethal pandemic races across the world, overwhelming health systems and upending entire societies, President Donald Trump’s top aides and allies see an opening to weaken a vulnerable adversary.
The Trump team’s escalating drumbeat against China is worrying some public health experts, who say the attempts to blame Beijing for the coronavirus outbreak could harm efforts to combat the spreading contagion, while winning praise from others.
And it’s come amid conspiracy theories and counteraccusations from Chinese officials, some of whom are alleging the virus’s true origins lie outside China, in what U.S. officials say is a malicious effort to shift blame.
National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien has accused China of covering up the health crisis. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has repeatedly labeled the illness the “Wuhan coronavirus” — a reference to the Chinese city that is the epicenter of the disease.
Hawkish pro-Trump lawmakers in Congress, meanwhile, have raised alarms about China’s outsized role in global supply chains for key medicines. And that’s on top of other anti-Beijing moves that have nothing to do with the virus at all.
The Chinese are fighting back with their own harsh rhetoric, all while signaling that their herculean effort to eradicate the virus means the world should look to them – and not the United States — as a leader and role model.
As for the president, he has largely stayed above the fray, limiting his criticism to noting the virus’s geographical roots and labeling it a “foreign virus” during an Oval Office address on Wednesday. He’s even praised Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s stewardship of the crisis, tweeting that Xi “is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus.”
The Trump administration’s hardline reaction to Beijing’s handling of the coronavirus is in many ways par for the course: Its foreign policy relies more on sticks than carrots, and it has flatly declared the ruling Chinese Communist Party a long-term global threat.
That dim view of China is shared increasingly across the political spectrum in Washington. Few in either party will defend China’s management of the virus, or call to emulate its draconian methods.
But some former U.S. officials say that by kicking China while it’s down, the Trump team is wasting a golden opportunity to build trust with an increasingly powerful country whose cooperation it will need to tackle future transnational challenges, including pandemics.
“A lot of these emotional and punishment policies will over time come back to bite us,” warned Paul Haenle, a former National Security Council official who dealt with China under the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.
Within the Cabinet, America’s top diplomat has been China’s most expansive critic. The secretary of state is arguing to anyone who will listen that China’s lack of transparency, especially early on, has damaged global efforts to halt the virus.
“It has proven incredibly frustrating to work with the Chinese Communist Party to get our hands around the data set which will ultimately be the solution to both getting the vaccine and attacking this risk,” Pompeo told CNBC last week.
But Pompeo’s attempts to rebrand COVID-19 as “the Wuhan virus” or the “Wuhan coronavirus” are drawing a furious backlash from Chinese officials and semi-official pundits, who say the terms are xenophobic.
State Department officials insist that Pompeo is using the term to counter Chinese disinformation – prevalent on internet forums and voiced by some Chinese officials – that the virus might have actually sprung from the United States.
O’Brien sent a similar critical message on Wednesday, asserting that authorities in China had “covered up” the initial outbreak. As a result, the national security adviser said, "it probably cost the world community two months to respond."
National security adviser Robert O'Brien arrives at a signing ceremony with President Donald Trump for a trade agreement with Japan in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Monday, Oct. 7, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)MoreOther Trump aides have suggested the virus offers the U.S. economic opportunity.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the outbreak could “accelerate the return of jobs to North America,” although that was before the virus was detected in large numbers inside the United States. Peter Navarro, a strident anti-China voice within the executive branch, has used the outbreak to push for ways to decrease U.S. reliance on China for the manufacturing of key drugs and medical equipment.
Some of Trump’s most vocal supporters in Congress have expressed similar concerns about dependence on Chinese manufacturers. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida on Thursday chaired a hearing titled “The Coronavirus and America’s Small Business Supply Chain” to highlight U.S. vulnerabilities.
Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas has been among the harshest anti-China critics as the coronavirus has spread. He, like Pompeo, refers to it as the “Wuhan virus” and has floated the unsubstantiated theory that the virus was manufactured by the Chinese in a bioweapons lab, a claim scientists dismiss as conspiratorial and implausible.
Even as Cotton announced Thursday that he was temporarily closing his Washington, D.C., office after a Senate staffer tested positive for the virus, he hinted at unspecified moves to retaliate against an unnamed culprit, presumably Beijing.
“We will emerge stronger from this challenge, we will hold accountable those who inflicted it on the world, and we will prosper in the new day,” he said.
The virus-related rhetoric and actions have been coupled by other anti-China moves large and small, many of them led by Pompeo and the State Department.
During the Munich Security Conference in February, Pompeo launched several broadsides at Beijing. He accused it of fostering maritime disputes, undermining pro-democracy movements and trying to co-opt local and state officials in the United States. He also warned other countries that “Huawei and other Chinese state-backed tech companies are Trojan horses for Chinese intelligence.”
In recent weeks, the State Department has designated five Chinese media outlets as “foreign missions,” effectively declaring them extensions of China’s government. Those outlets now have to get U.S. federal government permission for various actions, such as leasing office space.
Shortly afterward, China expelled three Wall Street Journal reporters, a move it linked to its unhappiness over a headline in the Journal’s opinion pages that described China as the “sick man” of Asia. In apparent response, the Trump administration said it was imposing caps on the number of Chinese citizens allowed to work for Chinese media outlets in the United States.
"President Trump has made clear that the United States will establish long-overdue reciprocity in our relations with China," a State Department spokesperson said. "We urge the Chinese Communist Party to immediately uphold its international commitments to respect freedom of expression, including for members of the press."
On Wednesday, Pompeo singled out China and a handful of other countries – Iran, Cuba and Venezuela – as he unveiled the State Department’s annual human rights report. China, Pompeo said, is imprisoning citizens because of their religious beliefs and “Chinese citizens who want a better future are met with violence.”
Former U.S. officials and analysts in the China and global health fields offered mixed reactions to the Trump administration’s handling of the diplomatic side of the crisis.
Some said that Pompeo and others’ tough commentary has been helpful by raising pressure on China to be more open about developments on its soil. In mid-February, China finally allowed in a team from the World Health Organization that included Americans.
“Clobbering the Chinese on some of the things they need to be clobbered on is not a bad thing at all,” said Stephen Morrison, director of the Global Health Policy Center at Center for Strategic and International Studies. The WHO “has been super deferential toward the Chinese, and we were getting stiffed and stonewalled for weeks and weeks.”
But Morrison and others agreed that other U.S. moves have probably done more to degrade trust than build it – including using labels like the “Wuhan coronavirus.”
“Naming a disease after a place stigmatizes that place and that’s why there’s been an intentional move away from that,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former Obama administration official who help lead the U.S. response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa. “Ultimately, diseases are about biology, not geography.”
Konyndyk added that initial U.S. offers to send specialists to China to examine the outbreak came across as demands more than genuine friendly offers, turning off Chinese officials already wary of any U.S. presence on the ground.
“The way that the administration [was] framing it and talking about it was really about us getting visibility on their situation rather than us helping them,” he said.
The analysts and former officials didn’t doubt the reasoning behind some of the U.S. moves – Chinese media outlets, for one, are widely considered propaganda operations. But the timing of the U.S. moves sent a poor signal, they argued.
That being said, given the downturn in U.S.-Chinese relations in recent years – predating Trump – there’s no guarantee that China would have reacted any differently on the coronavirus outbreak had the U.S. not been making such moves.
In a recent essay, Haenle and co-author Lucas Tcheyan noted that epidemics have typically been seen as “non-sensitive areas for U.S.-China cooperation.” One result of 2002-2003 outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in China was more U.S.-Chinese collaboration in the field of global health, the authors said.
“In the nearly two decades following SARS, in which other global health crises involving the H1N1 influenza strain and the Ebola virus unfolded, Washington and Beijing demonstrated a growing willingness to manage threats to global health, stability, and economic growth together,” they wrote. “The coronavirus, however, has demonstrated just how low bilateral ties have sunk.”
State Department officials point out that the U.S. has delivered some 18 tons of supplies and pledged up to $100 million to help China and other countries battle the coronavirus. According to some media accounts, the Chinese have quietly accepted much of the aid.
In public, however, some Chinese officials are not showing much gratitude.
Lijian Zhao, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, is among the most outspoken critics. On Friday, he used his Twitter account, which is infamous for its mean-spirited rhetoric, to link to clips of a recent Capitol Hill appearance by Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“When did patient zero begin in US?” Zhao asked in one tweet, implying without evidence that the outbreak began in the United States. “How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!”
Perhaps the most intriguing development on the geopolitical side of the coronavirus crisis is China’s attempt to capitalize on it diplomatically.
Thanks to quarantines, lockdowns of entire regions and other stringent measures, the Chinese appear to have brought the outbreak to heel -- albeit after it killed more than 3,000 of their citizens. Earlier this week, Xi, the Chinese leader, visited Wuhan in a show of confidence.
At the same time, China is increasingly offering expertise and aid to other countries struggling to contain the illness. A group of Chinese experts headed to Italy this week to help combat the virus in that badly hit European country; Italy has put its entire 60 million population under quarantine.
Chinese propaganda organs, meanwhile, have painted Xi as taking heroic steps to arrest the outbreak. The argument, pushed over and over in state-run media, is that China’s authoritarian system is uniquely capable of solving such crises.
The state-controlled outlets also paint the U.S. political system as incompetent in its response.
“Political virus puts US behind the curve of infection control,” read one headline in China's Global Times, a tabloid that often pushes the views of anti-U.S. voices within the Chinese system.
Vice President Mike Pence at a recent briefing on the Trump administration's coronavirus response. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Getty
National security adviser Robert O'Brien. (Michael Sohn/AP)