[American Thinker] The Wuhan virus has ended the game China has been playing for the past three decades to rise from Marxist-rooted poverty to the world's biggest manufacturer. Virtually all of the world's advanced economies and many of the less developed countries now realize that China is not a trustworthy partner. Donald Trump may have been the first world leader to call the Chinese out, but he now has plenty of company:With a series of high-level summits culminating in a visit to Germany in the fall by President Xi Jinping, this was supposed to be the year of Europe-China diplomacy. Instead, Europeans are warning of a damaging rift.
Diplomats talk of mounting anger over China's behavior during the coronavirus pandemic including claims of price gouging by Chinese suppliers of medical equipment and a blindness to how its actions are perceived. The upshot is that Beijing's handling of the crisis has eroded trust just when it had a chance to demonstrate global leadership.
"Over these months China has lost Europe," said Reinhard Buetikofer, a German Green party lawmaker who chairs the European Parliament's delegation for relations with China. He cited concerns from China's "truth management" in the early stages of the virus to an "extremely aggressive" stance by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing and "hard-line propaganda" that champions the superiority of Communist Party rule over democracy.
China's leaders used tactics that it learned the hard way more than three centuries ago, when it tumbled from millennia-long status as the "middle kingdom," incomparably more powerful than any rivals, to a helpless victim of more powerful foreigners, able to impose their will on and extract vast wealth from it. Virtually all Chinese people are marinated in the history of its decline and impoverishment at the hands of the West. The two Opium Wars led to the forcible opening of China to untrammeled trade, including the mass importation of opium, one of the few products that found a ready market there. Britain conveniently was able to produce opium in its Indian colony and sell it to the Chinese, who sought escape from their misery.
One of the keys to Western dominance of China was the creation and growth of a class of Chinese merchants who worked with the foreigners, making huge fortunes as their nation declined into poverty and subservience. They were called "compradors" ("Mǎibà n" in Chinese) — a term originally from Portuguese, meaning "buyers" — and are reviled in Chinese culture as traitors who sold out their country. Some became so wealthy that they even helped finance railway development in the United States. I still recall the lectures half a century ago of John K. Fairbank, widely regarded as a "dean of Sinologists," informing me that the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad ("The Burlington Route"), a system I had traveled on extensively as a child, was built in part with capital coming from a major comprador in Canton (called Guangzhou by today's China).