China & Coronavirus: Parallels to the Chernobyl disaster

Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives for the National Day reception on the eve of the 71st anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing, September 30, 2020. (Thomas Peter / Reuters)

As we witness the toll of the pandemic in the world, we can speculate about its impact on the Chinese regime.

Tthirty-five Years ago, the nuclear disaster known worldwide as Chernobyl discredited an incompetent and corrupt communist Soviet regime at home and abroad and signaled the end of the Soviet Union. In February 2020, I wrote an article asking myself if the coronavirus, as we then called it, outbreak could mean a similar fate for China’s communist regime. Although no one at the time thought it appropriate to publish the essay, the eerie parallels between the two disasters remain provocative.

It was on April 26, 1986 when the No. 4 nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near the city of Pripyat (in present-day Ukraine) suffered a massive explosion – big enough to blow up the 2,000-ton reactor casting right through the roof of the reactor building. But it was not until the next day that traces of radioactive fallout were discovered in a Swedish nuclear facility that Soviet citizens – like the rest of the world – heard of the events from foreign news sources.

The number of short-term deaths from the disaster (those who died from radiation sickness immediately or in the weeks or months afterwards) is around 54; Estimates of long-term deaths from radiation exposure vary widely, from thousands to tens of thousands and even much higher.

The Chernobyl disaster cost the Soviet regime its credibility among its citizens and was the last nail in the coffin for the image of Soviet communism abroad. For the current Chinese communist regime in Beijing, the increasing evidence suggests that COVID is not of zoonotic origin – that it did not pass from animals to humans – as China still claims, but most likely leaked from a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology To blame for a global catastrophe far worse than that of Chernobyl: so much so that it is not unreasonable to speculate about its consequences for the survival of the regime.

In addition, there is evidence that the Chinese government concealed the severity of the outbreak in China while allowing the virus to spread overseas. Hence, it can also be speculated that Beijing saw the COVID crisis not as a tragedy but as an opportunity to disrupt economies and societies around the world for the benefit of China.

Could the international turmoil over COVID reach a point where Xi Jinping’s colleagues decide he’s making a convenient scapegoat and throw him out? Given that he modeled his rule after Mao’s ruthless one-man rule and seizure of power, this is likely unlikely. Even if it did, Beijing’s total surveillance state would prevent Chinese citizens from knowing anything like the truth about what happened in Wuhan and why.

When the Chernobyl disaster struck, the Soviet regime was already on its last legs. In contrast, China’s quest for global hegemony is only just beginning to peak. It’s an integral part of the Chinese Communist Party’s identity no matter what happens to Xi. Since Mao Zedong came to power in 1949, China’s leadership has had a long march to world power. Mao’s successors, starting with Deng Xiaoping, have wholeheartedly dedicated themselves to this epic journey.

Despite the friendly face he showed the West, it was Deng who first described relations with the US as a “cold war” and made it clear to his colleagues, if not the outside world, that the goal of his market reforms should be the Chinese economy “Enrich the state and strengthen the military”. What Westerners accepted as reforms to integrate China into the global economic system were in fact steps aimed at dominating and controlling that system in order to achieve hegemony.

In the 1990s, Deng’s chosen successor as General Secretary of the CCP, Jiang Zemin, led China on a course of massive military armament; In the early decades of this century, Hu Jintao constructed China’s high-tech total surveillance state, including the Great Firewall, and launched a Chinese cyber offensive that stole hundreds of billions of dollars in intellectual property from an unsuspecting world – the largest asset transfer in history .

Xi’s grandiose Belt and Road initiative and its Made in China 2025 master plan build only on the superstructure that its predecessors built to make China the world’s dominant superpower by whatever means necessary – possibly including harnessing or exploiting the COVID- Pandemic as a way to stifle the economies of China’s rivals, particularly the United States.

Indeed, China’s rise into recombinant DNA research, as outlined in Xi’s 14th Five-Year Development Plan, could signal Beijing’s interest in discovering an even more virulent compound as a potential bio-weapon.

Hopefully, however, the world has learned lessons from Chernobyl, which exposed the moral bankruptcy of the regime that allowed it to do so and then tried to cover it up. COVID, in turn, has taught us a sobering lesson about the risks we all run in partnering with or appeasing Beijing.

Three million dead, tens of trillion dollars lost worldwide: ignoring the present and future threats of a power-obsessed regime is a terrible price to pay.

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