Before being handed over to China’s tender mercies in 1997, Hong Kong’s people feared that reunification would kill the colony’s wealth-generating boom. A foreboding joke went, “China has had 5,000 years to screw up its economy … and it hasn’t wasted a second.” The dark humor was wrong about prosperity, but right about China playing a long game.
That’s worth remembering now, as we look at the devastation wrought by the tyranny’s export of a global pandemic, its manipulation of the World Health Organization to deceive the world, and the consequent and perhaps intentional economic damage, which is unprecedented in scale and speed.
China is playing the long game, intent, as Stephen Moore says, on overtaking the United States as the world’s preeminent power. It has been as willing as ever to sacrifice mere people — its own citizens and everyone else — in pursuit of that strategic goal. Its malignancy, cynicism, and dishonesty not only deserve punishment but should also persuade the rest of the planet’s people to treat it with skepticism. The lesson of social distancing now is that there should be strategic distancing from China in the future.
We devote much of this week’s magazine to this matter under the cover headline, “Crime Against Humanity.” Reporter Jerry Dunleavy lays bare the way that China loosed the plague upon us all and then committed atrocities to cover it up. Tyler Grant argues that the U.S. must end its economic dependence on China by reindustrializing America and moving supply lines, so they don’t originate in enemy territory. Joseph Simonson reveals what a public relations calamity the pandemic has been for China, destroying the idea long nurtured in America that it is mostly a trading partner that helpfully underpins our comfortable life. It is now exposed as the untrustworthy and dangerous rival it has always been.
Not all of today’s unpleasantness can be blamed on China. Here at home, ill-intentioned forces are as relentless as ever. Corey DeAngelis reports on accelerated efforts by anti-homeschoolers, but fortunately finds that the pandemic could increase rather than decrease the number of people who decide their children are better off taught by parents. In other news, some officials want the pandemic to turn us into a nation of snitches, writes Nicholas Clairmont. The egregious Mayor Bill de Blasio asked New Yorkers to inform on each other by sending him photos of people violating social distancing guidelines. The first person they might snitch on is him, given that he traveled to his favorite gym in Brooklyn from his residence, Gracie Mansion, 11 miles away.
It may seem unclear at present, but the world is still about more than the coronavirus. Politics continues, and James Antle reports that President Trump is losing support among elderly voters who were crucial to his 2016 election victory. Elsewhere, all professional sports have stalled, but America’s summer pastime still has lessons to teach us. Kyle Sammin reviews The Inside Game, in which Keith Law uses baseball to demonstrate how flawed thinking can hold us back in life.
