We should welcome Sen. Josh Hawley’s resolution on Tuesday condemning China for its handling of the coronavirus epidemic. Sure, it won’t accomplish its stated goal of making China pay reparations, but it documents the ruling Communist Party’s deliberate failure to adequately address the early viral outbreak and it seeks associated accountability.
Considering the chaos and suffering that the pandemic is now causing across the globe, Hawley’s resolution is both justified and necessary. The resolution also deserves credit for its tight focus on the Communist Party’s failure, avoiding an undue attack on the Chinese people.
Beijing will not respond positively to Hawley’s demand for a framework to compensate those affected by the virus. Nor will Xi Jinping’s regime accept the resolution’s demand that international investigators be allowed access to China to investigate the nation’s handling of the crisis. Any new information we gain on the regime’s cover-up of the early outbreak will have to come from other sources.
Still, Xi should not be allowed to shape the global narrative over the coronavirus as he is presently. The Communist Party’s assertion that it did everything possible to counteract the early spread of the coronavirus is patently false. And the party’s escalating effort to blame America for the virus is nothing short of despicable.
Hawley’s resolution addresses those concerns by listing more than a dozen party actions which allowed the virus to metastasize and ultimately spread outside China’s borders. It notes, for example, Beijing’s refusal to provide early access and accurate information to World Health Organization experts. It documents the harassment and detention of doctors in Wuhan city who sought to raise public awareness of the virus’ high human-to-human transmission rates. And it points out an academic study that concluded that China could have “significantly” restrained the virus’ spread had it acted appropriately in November, December, and early January.
These things all deserve public attention — not simply for the historical record, but because they provide a context to understand what people all across the world are suffering now: the illness or death of their loved ones, the loss of employment and associated economic pain, and the great sense of doubt over when and how this crisis will end.
Again, China will not accept this resolution. Enabled by foreign sympathizers, it will likely even condemn it as racist. But the truth matters. The world must know what the Chinese Communist Party did and did not do and how that failure connects with our present condition. This resolution helps achieve that objective and should be welcomed for it.
