It's been an interesting quarter-century or so, and a very strange year.
It appears that China and the US may be reaching some sort of inflection point, with regard to development, government, and global standing.
Any reasonable observer would have predicted that China would come off worst in the pandemic.
It's clear that the coronavirus outbreak originated in China. The preponderance of genomic evidence does not support the conspiracy theories still being spread around the internet by unethical individuals and groups. Howewver, it is quite possible that SARS-Cov-2 itself did not come from China, but instead arrived amid illegally smuggled pangolins used for traditional "medicine" (perhaps from Africa or more likely Southeast Asia).
China is a backwards and impoverished nation which basically lacks a modern healthcare system ("better than India" is not synonymous with "modern", even Thailand and Malaysia are light-years ahead of China in this regard). Chinese people have a culture of poor hygiene and adhere to completely irrational, quasi-religious, cultlike medical superstitions that receive some degree of government support. As I mentioned above, it is probable that these cultlike beliefs were a contributing factor in the initial coronavirus outbreak.
The United States should have had the most effective response to the pandemic. Americans do not believe in "heatiness" or "meridians" or "qi" or nonexistent functions that TCM ascribes to organs, do not believe that bathing is unhealthy because it opens pores, and do not believe that rhino horns or pangolin scales are some miraculous panacea. Yet Americans forgot that they were supposed to be the "United" States, and a divided and polarised citizenry and government politicised a disease. Even now, as hundreds of thousands of Americans have already died, armed protestors are threatening the lives of health officials for making them wear masks and claim COVID is does not exist and was entirely fabricated. Some Americans dying of COVID were insisting to their last breath that they did not have COVID because it was a fake disease! Even as I write this post, anti-vaccination activists are urging the public to reject any vaccines on the grounds that it is a pretext for Bill Gates to inject malevolant microchips into people. The Trump administration even attempted to intentionally increase the infection rate in order to encourage herd immunity!
It is almost certain that hundreds of thousands more Americans will die in the coming months. Most of these people will be the poor and indebted who were already barely surviving before the pandemic. For some reason, the US chose to focus on developing vaccines which require storage at negative 80 degrees centigrade. Such refrigeration is not widely available, particularly in isolated and impoverished rural area or on native reservations (the latter already often resemble third-world shitholes, with many residents living in scrap-wood huts and lacking running water or any form of sanitation). Even if they trusted the vaccines, residents of such places would be hard pressed to receive them.
Americans had plenty of resources to deal with the problem, but at every turn utterly failed to contain the pandemic, largely because of self-induced social and governmental dysfunction.
In contrast, the backwards and irrational Chinese happened to be led by a government which responded forcefully and decisively as soon as the scope of the problem was understood. The Communist Party succeeded in rallying a fractious and superstitious public, enforcing lockdowns and even shutting down Chinese New Year, and deftly managing supplies and logistics so that millions of people could be tested in days. The US did not shut down Thanksgiving, leading to untold numbers of fatalities, and is not now shutting down Christmas. Even at this late date, coronavirus tests are not available to every American who needs one, and results may take weeks to process. In contrast China rapidly rebounded, because the strong response taken by the government quickly abated the outbreaks to the extent that shutdowns and quarantines soon became unnecessary. Now, which country's economy actually grew in the past year, and which country's citizens face hunger?
China may be backwards, but the rapid and effective CCP response to emergencies such as this pandemic suggest that the country would not be a pushover in times of war.
