Americans can forget about suing China
- Given rising anti-Beijing sentiments, especially with the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s hardly surprising US citizens are filing class-action suits, but they would have an easier time getting money from their own government
The United States is a nation of lawsuits. Given the rising anti-China sentiments, especially with the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s hardly surprising that Americans are filing class-action suits against the Chinese government.
The cases are a waste of time. If it’s compensation they seek, they may have an easier time suing their own government. After all, there is a clear case of negligence and incompetence on the part of the US federal government, under President Donald Trump, in its handling of the outbreak.
On Monday, while demanding the US stop blaming China for the pandemic, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang referred to one of the lawsuits, the one in Florida. He gave a particularly lame defence, saying the suit seeking damages from Beijing had no merits because the US did not compensate anyone after the H1N1 influenza, or swine flu, pandemic in 2009, which was first detected in America.
According to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 575,400 people died globally during the first year of the pandemic.
Similar class-action suits have also been filed, in Nevada, California and Texas. The one in Texas is particularly entertaining, because it not only names the central government as defendant, but also the People’s Liberation Army, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its director, and PLA Major General Chen Wei, who is the military’s top epidemiologist and virologist.
Why? Because the Texas suit rests entirely on a conspiracy theory, widely circulated online, that Covid-19 is a biological weapon created in the Wuhan lab and was “accidentally or otherwise” released into the population. Its lawyers might make more money by selling their story as a Hollywood script than as a class-action suit.
But, whether fantastic or realistic, legal experts mostly conclude none of the suits will make headway. This is because American laws exempt the US government as well as foreign governments from being sued under the doctrine of sovereign immunity. That’s why no one bothered suing the US after the swine flu outbreak.
Besides citing US responsibility for the 2009 pandemic, Geng should have said the current lawsuits had no legal merits.
Of course, governments can give up their own immunity to allow a lawsuit to proceed. There are precedents. Perhaps Washington, with a Democrat as president after the November election, may allow such cases to proceed to discredit Trump and his Republican Party.
But China? Forget about it.