The Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic has unleashed the biggest crisis across the world since the end of the Second World War. The economy is in ruins, people are still dying in huge numbers and countries are forced to make peace with the very real possibility that the virus is not going anywhere anytime soon and it could very well become endemic. While fools and drunks expected the world to unite as a whole to fight the threat, the basic truths of life soon made their presence felt. At the heart of it all lies China, the epicentre of the Coronavirus outbreak that has plunged the world into devastation.
After refusing to warn the world about the seriousness of the threat and using its influence in the World Health Organisation to keep countries lax in their attitudes, China has now decided to use its economic clout to threaten the world into submission. Being the manufacturing hub of the world, it has significant leverage over other countries and the regime is fully aware that it can cripple countries if it so desires. It is with this confidence that it threatened to cut off medical supplies to the USA due to Donald Trump calling the virus the ‘Wuhan Coronavirus’. If China were to do so, USA would have been gravely hit as the overwhelming majority of essential US Drug supplies comes from China. More than 95% of all antibiotics in the US is manufactured in China. Consequently, the US President stopped calling COVID-19 the Wuhan Coronavirus.
Emboldened by its success, China has resorted to threatening others and cower them into submission. Last month, China threatened to stop medical aid to the Netherlands after the Dutch renamed their embassy in Taiwan to ‘Netherlands office Taipei’. The Dutch did it to express their gratitude towards the Taiwanese for donating face masks to the country during the Coronavirus crisis. It did not sit well with China as it contradicted their ‘One China’ policy.
Earlier this week, Tokyo registered its protest to China over an incident the previous week after Chinese government ships chased Japanese fishing boats near the Senkaku islands in Japanese waters. Furthermore, Australia could also suffer the Dragon’s wrath as China threatens to impose an 80 per cent import tax on Australian barley after Australia refused to retract its demand for an investigation into the origins of the Coronavirus pandemic. In addition to all of this, two Chinese media claimed that Kyrgystan and Kazakhstan have been part of China and with Kazakhstan even “eager to return back to China”. Both these countries have received huge financial investments from China which has made them particularly vulnerable to the Communist regime’s hostile tendencies.
China’s strategy is, of course, no different than the one pursued by the United States of America. While the latter uses an elaborate network of ‘civil society organisations’ and ‘human rights NGOs’ to undermine the sovereignty of other nations and secure its hegemony around the world, backed by its great economic and military might, China seeks to achieve the same objectives using its economic prowess and its pole position in the global manufacturing chain to achieve the said objectives.
Going forward, the only way that the world could hope to undermine the Chinese communist regime is by undermining the country’s dominance in the global supply chain. Such a feat is, of course, possible but would also mean the world going through a period of immense turmoil and great conflict. The recent development also demonstrates that China could very well emerge stronger from the pandemic than any other country and the post-Coronavirus world will not be one based on American hegemony.
