Chestnut Wed 15-Apr-20 14:35:30
Your perspective is definitely persuasive.
China seems to always magically escape censure for all its abuses. Yet most of the rest of the world can have sanctions dropped on them almost at a whim.
Let's not forget that China has such economic power on the world stage because it has a huge cohort of very cheap labour which is often used abusively. People are forced to work in sweatshops.
Another source of its economic power is its state organised theft of intellectual property rights and consequent manufacture and sales of goods made from stolen patents.
Manufacturing there does not have to follow stringent environmental and pollution regulations and agreements, thus saving them $billions.
Off-shore banking/financial dealings are also offered.
I'm afraid we and the rest of the world have turned a blind eye to all this underhand and widely destructive activity. Just so that we can buy cheap stuff and elevate ourselves to what politicians seem to consider a 'higher status' as service economies. It seems that good, honest manufacturing is beneath us now.
IMHO we need to take a good, hard look at ourselves and decide what values we really want to uphold and whether we're ok with farming out our dirty work to far eastern nations to do as they please - or whether we want the whole world to conform to decent standards and ethics.
This virus apparently arose because of the West's laissez faire attitudes to very minimal operating standards applied by the Chinese government to all aspects of health and safety. The many, many dangerous debacles over the years are
If the Chinese government withheld information and tinkered with numbers etc, (and there is strong evidence that points to this) then they are responsible for this pandemic. They do need to be held to account, just as they would hold us to account if we'd unleashed a horror on them.
Our intelligence services very rarely comment on anything. When they do, everything is vetted and scripted precisely. No doubt there's a lot of behind the scenes politics and diplomatic activity going on and this little intimation was there for a reason. I'd float a guess that the public is clearly being invited to draw our own conclusions, maybe to build a groundswell of support for whatever renegotiations will follow when we're out of the Covid woods. I note that Commonwealth countries and the US have all made similar noises, in some cases more forthrightly.