To borrow from Virgil, timeo Sinae et dona ferentes. I fear China bearing gifts.
There’s a lesson in Spain’s discovery that at least 9,000 coronavirus test kits it bought from China as part of a deal worth several hundred million dollars are defective. Testing kits are desperately needed in Spain, which has the second-highest death rate in Europe. More than 4,000 Spaniards have perished from the coronavirus thus far. Unfortunately, these test kits had just a 30% accuracy rate when 80% is the minimum expected standard.
China is predictably playing down its culpability here. The Chinese embassy in Madrid is claiming that Spain’s health ministry is to blame for buying goods from an unapproved vendor. But the excuse doesn’t add up.
Because it’s not just Spain, and it’s not just one Chinese vendor.
Note the comments from Germany’s health minister on Wednesday: “I get every hundreds of emails every day with people saying, ‘Buy a million quick tests from China.’ Our institutes are testing these and looking at them, and they are not sensitive and specific enough. It does not help us if we have quick tests that deliver large numbers of false positive or false negatives. As soon as we have a quick test that is good, we will start using it.”
As I say, there’s a lesson here.
It’s the same lesson we should have learned back in 2011, and certainly by 2018, when China was found to be exporting children’s toys that were laced with toxins and heavy metals. Or in 2012, when Kenyans received a 2012 bridge collapse, and Cambodians saw an apartment building collapse in 2019.
Namely, the lesson is that China’s quality and regulatory standards are nowhere close to those in the Western world. Moreover, they are specifically designed not to be of high standard. After all, higher standards require higher quality workmanship and input costs. And what communist China really wants is to dominate the global economy by undercutting all its external competitors. If that involves cutting standards and risking lives, no problem.
Top line: We need to stop buying into Beijing’s claim that it seeks a mutually beneficially global order. It doesn’t. It seeks only to maximize its own interests at our expense.
