Donald Trump’s latest threat to withdraw funding from the World Health Organisation is turning a temporary spat with China into a permanent rift, one which will affect friends and foes on both sides, and those caught in between for a long time. The standoff will go long beyond the present run of the Coronavirus pandemic – and outlast the Trump presidency, whether he gets a second term or not.
The latest cause for disagreement came at the virtual meeting of the World Health Authority that started on Monday. Australia had pressed for a full international inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak, and the conduct of various governments and health authorities, specifically indicating China. China blocked the Australian resolution from being debated, throwing an 80% tariff on all Australian barley imports into China, for good measure.
China is accused of failing to notify the WHO of the early signs of the outbreak, which now seem to have appeared in early October. The WHO is deemed too accommodating to Chinese influence. This is compounded by China keeping Taiwan out of full membership of the organisation.
The muzzling of Taiwan is piquant, not least in that the WHO membership can learn a lot from its methodology and action in tracking, tracing, and isolating coronavirus cases. Along with South Korea, Singapore, Australia and Israel it was one of the most successful public health campaigns in the current crisis.
China not only suppressed reports of the outbreak, but, notoriously, threatened the lives and livelihoods of whistleblowers.
President Trump is now suggesting the US permanently withdraws its contribution to the WHO, some half a billion dollars out of a budget of two billion. In a piece of theatrical diplomacy, President Xi Jinping offered a contribution of $2 billion for the WHO and a worldwide investigation into Covid-19. But only after the pandemic is over, whenever that may be, and then with limited access to China itself.
Germany’s Angela Merkel – a promoter of greater ties between China, Germany and Europe – seemed to go along with President Xi’s ploy, effectively to smother WHO freedom of manoeuvre in the crisis.
China is now moving centre stage in UK politics where the row over WHO compounds the festering disputes about the role of the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei in developing the new G5 phone network. As things stand, the bill approving Huawei’s crucial but minority participation in the programme is due to return to the House of Commons imminently. An increasing band of influential Conservative backbenchers and grandees, and members of the Labour opposition, now want to reject Huawei.
Boris Johnson, and Theresa May before him, had reluctantly agreed to Huawei on grounds of price, availability and the fact that it already has a decisive role in the current 4G mobile phone network. If rejected for the next phase, 5G, dismantling it from present networks would be extremely expensive. By excluding the Chinese from the “core’ of the system”, the security risk would be significantly reduced, the proponents of the deal argued.
Conservative MPs and luminaries are now campaigning with zeal against the whole Huawei package. It has become “a key Conservative fault line post Brexit,” according to Policy Exchange, the leading think tank and a conscience keeper to the party. Some 50 MPs led by Tom Tugendhat, chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, and Neil O’Brien MP have set up the China Research Group, following the role of the European Research Group on Brexit. “It’s about trying to find a better way of engaging with China,” Tugendhat told the Times.
The call for a reality check has come with the rising aggression of what China likes calling its new “wolf warrior” diplomacy, so named after cartoon characters who take on the West and its mercenaries in a series of video chronicles. The wolves have been especially active in the coronavirus crisis, and less than diplomatic, with their missions overseas, Europe especially, pumping out propaganda lines such as the claim that the SARS-CoV-02 pathogen was developed in a secret US military laboratory.
The barrage of alternative facts seems to have been lifted directly from the playbook adopted by the Russian GRU military secret service, and its affiliates, in the aftermath of the poisoning of Sergei and Julia Skripal in Salisbury two years ago. The diplomatic offensive has been accompanied by further moves into Africa during the crisis generated by a combination of the Covid-19 SARS episode and the collapse of world oil prices. China has been more present across North Africa – in Algeria especially, and establishing new toeholds in East Africa, including building a new commercial freight terminal at Djibouti.
In Europe, China now appears to have reached a decision point. “For some time now we have had to recognize that China is a major European power,” Lucio Caracciolo of the Rome think tank, Limes, told me several years back. In view of growing Chinese influence over the last six months or so in Italy, the Chinese role as European mercantilist has deepened.
Chancellor Merkel wants to draw Germany close to China, to enhance trade, counterbalance Russia, and, as yet unstated, to help more with European debt. Germany is also edging into the Belt and Road project which Italy has been the first G7 nation to formally sign up to.
In March last year, the Italian government, leading energy and infrastructure companies, and the port cities of Genoa and Trieste, agreed to a $2.9 billion deal involving Belt and Road funding and development – all signed off in Italy by President Xi and the now foreign minister, then deputy PM, Luigi di Maio.
Merkel has just agreed to an EU €585 billion rescue and investment fund for the Covid crisis for Europe. As the former diplomat and author, Bruno Macaes pointed out in his recent interview with Reaction, this will not be nearly enough. With Italy facing an eventual debt amounting to 200% of GDP and France a likely debt worth 150% of its GDP, to say nothing of Portugal, Spain, Greece and Belgium, huge extra fiscal backup will be required. It might be only a few years at most that we may find the EU in hock to Beijing.
This is likely to add to the tensions between the EU and Britain and within the Nato alliance. China will want to move further into the European telecoms and security landscape, and is already doing so. This calls into question Britain’s most important security and intelligence alliance, with America and the forum of the “Five Eyes” – the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. This would be undermined by further commitment by Britain to Huawei.
Little noticed in the current debate about China, the UK and Huawei, was a bipartisan motion attached to legislation before the US Congress prohibiting even the closest allies joining flagship security contracts, if they also were participating with Huawei.
Among the named projects was the airborne electronic surveillance system focused on the RAF’s Rivet Joint spy planes which they operate with the US, manned by interchangeable British and American crews. Another was the targeting acquisition and processing system aboard the F-35 fighter, now going operational with the Navy and RAF.
President Trump has ordered fresh sanctions against Huawei, even though the telecoms group recently recorded further healthy profits in America. Under new legislation, no US software is to be sold to companies using Huawei processors.
In Britain, human rights lawyers representing dissidents of the Uighur Turkic minority plan to bring a case against Huawei. They claim that the telecoms giant is one of 80 or so major companies using forced labour by Uighurs from re-education detention camps in at least 27 factories. China has pointed out the vulnerability of Apple to Chinese sanctions: at least a sixth of Apple’s global market is in the People’s Republic.
There is still a big mystery surrounding the China Covid story. Until a few days ago Beijing was telling the world that the Chinese people were slowly coming out of lockdown, and going to work. The all-clear was about to be sounded. Yet now we learn that a new “cluster” of some 34 cases has appeared in Shulan, a city of 700,000 in the North East province of Jilin. Jilin has a population of 107 million and runs up to the border with Russia and the city now faces a month’s total quarantine like Wuhan a few months back.