A Tale of Two Viruses

On March 15th, 2020, Pres. Donald Trump first tweeted the words “Chinese Virus.” Of course, the phrase had already been kicking around the uglier corners social media long enough to catch the President’s attention, but its graduation into Trumpist vocabulary was important. Very quickly, Sinophobia moved from the domain of a terminally misinformed and frightened public to the doorstep of national policy. The reality of COVID-19-related xenophobia, vile enough on its own, threatens to spill over into an unprecedented global conflict. To his credit, Dr Anthony Fauci, head of infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health, has done his best to curb Trump’s xenophobic language and downplay conspiracy theories related to the origin of the COVID-19 in ‘laboratories run by the Chinese Communist Party.’ Nonetheless, even a relatively moderate figure as Dr Fauci is on the recording demanding the ‘closure of China’s wet markets.’ Wet markets (传统市场) are better known to most people in China as ‘street markets (街市)’ - the best translation of which would probably be simply ‘market.’ Wet market - a term which originates in the English-language press of Singapore - refers to markets in which fresh meat, fish and produce are sold, where the ‘wet’ refers to hosed water and melting ice used as refrigeration and maintenance in these markets. Here we have perhaps the most moderate figure who has even become associated with the Trump administration demanding the largest nation in the world shut down its chief means of food distribution, along with the countless financial, social and community networks that go along with it. At the same time it is equally true that, wherever the particular SARS-CoV-2 virus may have originated, Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market played an undeniable role as an early vector of the would-be pandemic. The Chinese state press reported on this connection quickly - in many cases no later a week after the first cases were confirmed.

In the Global North (and particularly in the United States), what began as a xenophobic debate about illicit livestock trade ended up revealing a much deeper contradiction - one that would the market economy in a much deeper way. In one corner, survival: the basic act of not getting sick and dying. In the other corner, the business of survival: the social relations that all of us, from the most precarious worker to the wealthiest capitalist, submit to in order to live another day. The depths of this contradiction have become grotesquely visible in the US - as federal and state governments weigh the costs of ‘opening up the economy’ against the value of human life. While jobless claims surge into the tens of millions, hashtags like #DieFortheDow trend across Twitter. It is unclear which workers are the lucky ones here - those whose lives have so little value that they can be thrown into precarity, or those whose lives have so little values that they are expected to continue working in the midst of a pandemic. In the Global South, this contradiction has never been much of a mystery. Hundreds of millions of workers labor long hours under loose regulations, poor safety standards, lax hygiene and countless other conditions which threaten their basic safety. A vast number of these workers are Chinese. For these workers, COVID-19 is nothing more than a symptom of a much deeper illness.

Diagnosis

2003’s The Liberal Virus showcases the late Samir Amin in rare form - not strictly an academic work, Amin is rather at his most acerbic here, expounding a thesis in which US-centric neoliberal mutation of capitalism serves as the chief ailment of our time. Acknowledging the roots of neoliberalism in the European liberal tradition, Amin argues that US and European liberal traditions split as Europe approaches a sort of liberal egalitarianism, while US liberalism is hijacked by capital in increasingly brazen and ruthless form. Amin is perhaps optimistic about European liberalism - a project which seems increasingly doomed to grim failure. Nonetheless, he accurately draws a line from the colonial and civilizing missions of early European liberalism to the militarized neoliberalism of the 21st century - at the end, both projects were nothing more than political justifications of spreading the reach of the market economy by force of arms.

It was along the banks of the Yangzi River that the first ships bringing opium from British India’s Northeast sold their wares. One of the ports along this river was Wuhan - a bustling port, which had already been referred to for centuries as 九省通衢 - “the Freeway of Nine Provinces”. Even in the nadir of Imperial China’s poverty and underdevelopment, Wuhan was a major interchange which connected all corners of the massive empire. As the centuries progressed, Wuhan served as a center of steel production, the center of the uprising which brought down China’s empire, the capital of the Republic of China, and the site of some of the most vicious battles of the Sino-Japanese and Chinese Civil Wars. The establishment of the People’s Republic of China helped rebuild the infrastructure that had been devastated by four decades of civil and international war. Seven decades later it was that track, laid in the 1950s, that helped Wuhan once again leap onto the pages of history as a weigh station for goods from all over the globe - a vital step in the building the 21st century global market that would come to spread from Beijing, through Brussels to Belo Horizonte. In 2018, the GDP of the city of Wuhan topped 22 billion USD; with the value of its imports and exports at a staggering 34 billion USD - clearly demonstrating that throughput, rather than output, has become Wuhan’s main business.

But what does all of this have to do with Amin’s neoliberal virus? Both Wuhan and China ended up where they are as direct consequences of the relentless neoliberal drive of the post-1970 world. By 1970, the first phase of China under the CCP had reached a domestic political impasse - the fallout of the Cultural Revolution had left Mao Zedong and the CCP’s ruling faction with few domestic political allies, and differences in approach between the Soviet and Chinese parties had left China largely isolated from both the capitalist and socialist camps, save for Albania. Domestically, this reality placed the central leadership in the position of having to rehabilitate the reformist - in some cases even liberal - wing of the party, best typified perhaps by the figure of Deng Xiaoping. With the political bench refilled, the new team quickly set to work opening up doors to international trade, loosening some aspects of the planned economy, and setting up meetings with dubious figures like Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the Shah of Iran, among others.

In a fine interview with Face the Nation, Che Guevara (the Cuban Minister of Finance) mentioned that nations like Cuba would be happy to do business with the US, if only the US allowed it. In fact, says Che, not only would Cuba be happy to trade, they would not impose political preconditions such as an end to race-based lynchings, racism, or violent class inequalities that prevail in the US. An incisive and proud answer - one would have hoped that Chinese party had heeded Che’s advice in the 1970s. The political preconditions that the US imposed more or less implied that China had to halt all but its most nominal movements toward socialism. In these years, the Chinese party backed the US-allied Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, invaded nearby Vietnam - in name, a fellow socialist state - only 4 years after Vietnam had emerged from a devastating two-decade civil war and, importantly, abandoned its supports for Maoist factions across the world, particularly in reactionary states like Thailand and Malaysia. But this was still not enough for the American camp to be satisfied. As neoclassical economics will tell you, there are mutual gains from trade, and the US was not about to let China benefit unilaterally from openness to trade. Trade agreements with the US and other US-aligned Western states forced the party to open Special Economic Zones to attract foreign capital - SEZs in which wages were slashed, health and safety regulations were overlooked, and conditions were often abysmal. Perhaps most importantly, the early CCP’s iron rice bowl - a cradle-to-grave system of social security, among the most thorough in the world given GDP per capita - was smashed in the name of labor flexibility and incentive. Thus, US and Western investors were able to bring their capital investments to China while also reaping superprofits through the exploitation of labor which, compared to workers in the US and Europe, was staggeringly cheap. Despite these low wages, however, Chinese workers were healthier and better educated than workers at a comparable GDP per capita - a direct result of the vast human and capital resources poured into the iron rice bowl and other social programs in the early years of the CCP.

Regardless, the reforms undergone by the CCP in the late 1970s cemented the conditions which would lead to the outbreak of not just COVID-19, but also to earlier outbreaks such as SARS and MERS. The combination of overlooking health and safety regulations - particularly in agriculture, individual precarity and the immense scale of the Chinese economy has now led several times to social and economic conditions in which epidemic outbreaks are practically a certainty. This reality highlights the core contradiction between survival and the business of survival - a contradiction which, I would argue, also underlies why China - and indeed almost every country in the developing world - underwent economic reforms in the first place. Does a developing economy guarantee decent work hours, safe working conditions, health, education, etc., and risk becoming isolated and uncompetitive on the global market? Or does it swallow the bitter pill of neoliberalism and sacrifice its people at the altar of global integration?

Workers in the Global South have woken up every morning for decades and asked themselves the same question. All that #DieForTheDow means is Western workers are now in the same position. The ship has circumnavigated the globe, and is now heading back home.

Cure

Much like in the case of COVID-19, there is still no proven cure for the neoliberal virus. In the US and the UK, attempts to move the boundaries of the neoliberal reality even slightly in the direction of justice were demolished by political opponents. The irony is that China’s relative successes in containing the outbreak relied heavily on the participation of Communist party members and volunteers, a fact mentioned in both Chinese and Western media. Similar cases of mobilization of volunteers and party members , as well as the free distribution of food to precarious workers, were crucial in Vietnam, also noted for the effectiveness of its COVID-19 response. To whatever extent that the response and reversal was sped up in countries like China and Vietnam, socialist legacies of mass mobilization and volunteer culture proved to be central - much as socialist legacies in health and education proved vital in China’s transition to a viable market economy.

Predictably, US media - including its newspaper of record, the New York Times - has done its best to frame the volunteers as forced laborers and the Chinese Red Cross as an arm of the Communist Party.

The memory of McCarthyism and Red Scare Sinophobia is never far off in the US. As recently as seven years ago, extreme-right market libertarian think tanks like the Cato Institute were touting the success of China’s transition to capitalism. Less than a decade later, we see ‘thinkers’ writing in respected press organs such as the Washington Post, warning us of the true nature of the Chinese Communist Party, making sure to rhetorically connect the party to communism as often as it can. The time frame is relevant here - rhetoric touting China as a successful case of reform and a vital trade partner began to shift decisively as it increasingly became clear that the growth of China’s market economy came packaged with a series of deal-breakers with respect to its national interests. Contrary to the hopes of market optimists, no amount of market integration was going to solve the issue of Taiwan island, put an end to the Chinese government’s overseas infrastructure and investment programs, or convince President Xi to back Syrian revolutionaries. Market integration had in fact stabilized China’s national interests, rather than weakening them, and raised fears of a rival to US hegemony as represented - minimally - by Russia, China and Iran. The election of Trump was itself an aim to break this counter-hegemonic alliance - to embrace Russia and ‘break up the band’ that way. But this attempt resulted in no lasting pivot toward Russia, and the apparent friendship between Trump and Putin - the core of liberal rage for several years - came to nought. In essence, the absurdity of the US blaming China for the outbreak of COVID-19 - an outbreak that could have happened in any developing economy of sufficient size and scale - is just the latest and most absurd attempt to break up a counter-hegemonic bloc that has only grown closer as the virus has spread. Both Biden and Trump have maintained the official ‘tough on China’ line, and regardless of who wins the 2020 election, the prospect of a ‘New Cold War’ is unavoidable.

As we said previously, there is no cure for the neoliberal virus yet. Indeed, there is research being done to find a cure - as Lebanese protestors find ways to pile into the streets and attack banks while maintaining social distancing measures, and workers in Bolivia organize against the coup forced upon them. But this research is still preliminary, and it requires much guidance and direction in order to develop the potential to cure the neoliberal virus once and for all. For now, all we can do is resist and manage the symptoms. We should resist the rhetoric of the ‘New Cold War.’ We should realize that this manufactured conflict has no ideological basis and that it will result in nothing but tragedy. It becomes incumbent upon us - every one of us - to resist the hatred and ugliness that is being foisted upon us, to resist becoming pawns in a global conflict which will achieve nothing and benefit no one.