Why China won’t be paying the West coronavirus reparations any time soon

Demands for compensation not only evoke painful memories of past humiliations by foreigners, but play into the hands of Chinese nationalists
Savvy Chinese know the United States, in particular, will do whatever it takes to stymie a rising China that threatens its global dominance

Leslie Fong

Published: 5:00am, 15 May 2020

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Those in the West who blame China for the Covid-19 pandemic and demand reparations for the damage to their economies have probably done Beijing a favour.

They have unwittingly – or perhaps unthinkingly – reopened a scar that is deep in the Chinese psyche and given the party more of the ammunition it needs to rally the people against what it has portrayed as hostile moves to put China down.

Such accusations further add fuel to the fire of ardent nationalists, who have long cautioned that China has few true friends in the West and that China-bashing is what the United States and its staunch supporters will resort to whenever they need a scapegoat for their own failings.

A likely result of this? The muting of voices hitherto better disposed towards the West.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has blamed China for the coronavirus pandemic. Photo: AFP

US President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the Murdoch-owned right-wing media like Fox News and The Daily Telegraph in Sydney are throwing everything but the kitchen sink at an intense international campaign to isolate and demonise China, and demand compensation.

Yet anyone with some knowledge of China’s recent history will know that asking for reparations is certain to bring back painful memories of when the country was forced at gunpoint to pay 450 million taels of silver to eight imperialist powers in 1900 as an indemnity after losing a short war.

That amount – equal to about 18,000 tonnes and estimated to be worth some US$333 million – was 15 times the highest annual revenue ever collected by the Treasury during Qing dynasty rule.

China’s ‘stolen’ cultural relics: why the numbers just don’t add up

It followed 18,811 troops from seven members of the eight-nation alliance – Japan, Russia, Britain, the US, France, Austria and Italy – invading Beijing on August 3 that year. The German contingent was still at sea at the time of the assault and did not arrive in time to join, but the country still took its share of silver.

The alliance’s attack was launched to quell what has been recorded in the history books ever since as the Boxer Rebellion, a bloody xenophobic rampage by mobs that resulted in the loss of Western lives and damage to Western property.

About 150,000 Chinese soldiers resisted the foreign forces at first, but using information gleaned from civilians the invaders identified weak spots in the fortified barricades and soon broke through – routing the vastly outgunned Qing army. The fighting was over in just 10 days. Thereafter, they ransacked the capital, burned down the Summer Palace and looted an untold amount of treasures.

Some of these stolen artefacts and valuables are still on display in the British Museum, which has steadfastly refused to return them to China – arguing that they belong to all of mankind and are better kept in London for the world to see.

This arrogance is in sharp contrast to what some other former imperialist powers have done with booty plundered from countries they colonised. France, for example, has repatriated treasures it pilfered from its former African colonies. Last November, it returned to Senegal the sabre it took from Islamic scholar and ruler Omar Saidou Tall in the mid-19th century.

Savvy Chinese know that Trump is worried about being held to account for his disastrous mishandling of the pandemic in November’s presidential election and is thus desperate to point the finger at China.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry has called out these electioneering antics for what they are and repeatedly reminded the world that it is for scientists to determine the facts about Covid-19, and not for politicians to apportion blame.

US Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger recently delivered an impassioned appeal in Mandarin for the Chinese people to embrace democracy. Photo: AP

Even savvier Chinese know that all this animosity towards China will not pass even after November. To them, this pivotal moment in history is as good an opportunity as any to open the eyes of those Chinese who have looked at the West through rose-tinted glasses and let them see the harsh reality: that the US will do whatever it takes to stymie a rising China that threatens its global dominance.

In this regard, Beijing is likely to see US Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger’s impassioned appeal to the Chinese people to embrace democracy, which he delivered in Mandarin, as a new line of attack.

But it might not have the intended impact. It doesn’t take much to see through this thinly-veiled attempt to invoke the spirit of the famous May Fourth Movement and pitch democracy as the political system that should replace the one dictated by the Communist Party.

To be sure, it was a clever, well-crafted speech, delivered by design on the 101st anniversary of that historic day when thousands of university students marched in Beijing to protest against an utterly corrupt government for selling out the country with the signing of an unfair international treaty.

An auctioneer holds up a 10-shilling banknote autographed by all the signatories of the Treaty of Versailles, which gave China’s Shandong Peninsula to Japan. Photo: AFP

That milestone event eventually led to resounding calls among the Chinese intelligentsia for a rejection of traditional Chinese thinking and a wholesale adoption of Western ideals like democracy and the primacy of science. No doubt Pottinger hopes these calls resonate even today.

What impact his speech has on the Chinese people, who are not blind to whether democracy has or has not worked in the US, remains to be seen. But even the most elementary student of Chinese history can spot what he chose not to mention – that the signing of the Treaty of Versailles that sparked the protest on May 4 is yet another example of how Western powers have ridden roughshod over a weak China.

China was a Western ally at the time – contributing to the first world war against Germany – and had expected that with victory, the Shandong Peninsula and other territories in eastern China seized by the German imperialists would be returned to Chinese sovereignty.

Instead, the Western powers, led by France and Britain, handed them over to Japan. Which is why Beijing is wary about Western talk of a rules-based international order when the evidence shows that the very rules that Western powers write can be bent or ignored when it suits them.

Former US secretary of state Colin Powell told the UN that Iraq had sourced the uranium needed for weapons of mass destruction. Photo: AP

So expect Beijing to reject any “international inquiry” into the origins of Covid-19.

For a start, it has and will continue to ask: why should any inquiry be confined to Wuhan? Why is there no mention of any need to look deeper into the circumstantial evidence suggesting Covid-19 started in the US? And what is the likelihood that the results of any US-orchestrated inquiry will have been determined even before the first question is asked?

It is silly to think Beijing has forgotten how the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ended. On November 27, 2002, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency went to Iraq to check whether it had any such weapons. On January 9, 2003, both reported to the UN Security Council that there were no smoking guns.

Nonetheless, on January 28, 2003, President George W Bush said: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

His Secretary of State Colin Powell then told the UN that Iraq did indeed source the uranium.

“Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources … facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence,” he said, holding up a vial of white substance, which President Vladimir Putin of Russia later mocked as “the Colin Powell brand of detergent”.

Indeed all the so-called evidence was later found to be fabrication. But on March 20, US-led coalition forces invaded Iraq anyway.

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