Posts Tagged ‘China’
on real countries
”On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians“
Vladimir Putin
China as it might have been, around 30 BCE
Since retirement I’ve been helping out with English conversation groups and such, helping people from China, Japan, Taiwan, Columbia and even France (my almost-second language is French) to get more of a handle on our language, but recently one Chinese attendee caused a bit of a ruckus when she told a woman from Taiwan, whom I knew well and whose children I’d recently tutored, that ‘Taiwan is not a real country’. Sound familiar?
So there were a few immediate responses, and the Chinese stirrer, who I would guess to be in her mid-twenties (I’m not sure if that’s relevant), pointed out that Taiwan’s nationhood wasn’t recognised by the UN. I piped up with the obvious remark that the UN would be concerned about China’s reaction to such recognition, to which the stirrer responded with a smug grin, saying ‘yes, exactly’, whereupon my co-convenor of the group quickly changed the subject. At the end of the session, the Community Centre’s co-ordinator, aware of the teacup-storm, asked me what could be done to prevent this sort of thing escalating – should this woman be given a bit of what-for? That was some weeks ago, and the young woman hasn’t been seen since.
I found this little contretemps fascinating of course, as well as disturbing. How do countries become ‘real’? Are any countries actually real? Aren’t they all just human inventions? But then so are computers, and they’re surely real, in spite of having no existence 200 years ago, just as countries had no existence 2000 years ago, and most are no more than a few centuries, or decades, old. I’ve been reading God’s War, Christopher Tyerman’s monumental, and sometimes tedious, history of the crusades – sporadic bloody misadventures waged by Christians of all types and all levels of fervour and belief, against ‘heathens’, ‘pagans’, ‘Saracens’ and other others, from the 11th to the 15th centuries. It was bloody hell, but what makes the book tedious is something I can’t really blame Tyerman for. Hundreds of more or less pre-European principalities, bishoprics, duchies, demesnes, fiefdoms and their hereditary or usurped heads, and the eastern sultans, emirs, atabegs and khans, are mentioned in passing or (rarely) in detail, and it’s quite bamboozling from a modern European or Levantine perspective. There’s no France, Spain, Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, etc, and if Tyerman were to go into detail about where all his locations are in respect to modern counterparts, his 900-odd page book would have to be about twice as long (he does provide some maps, but they don’t help much).
The story of the formation of countries is largely one of rape and pillage and ‘might is right’. Thereafter, the victors establish a kind of nationalist pride by presenting to themselves and to the world a more or less distorted view of their history. There are of course other, very different types of nation formation, as is the case with Afghanistan, India, Pakistan and the sub-Saharan African nations, to name a few. Broadly speaking, these are the product of colonisation, a more or less euphemistic term for land-grabbing and more or less successful cultural demolition.
So I thought I might look at one example of the blood-stained formation of nations, and since all this started with the ‘Taiwan isn’t a real country’ woman, China has struck me as the ideal choice.
Chinese culture goes back to a time before the Chinese nation, or indeed any nation, existed. Of course this isn’t surprising, the same can be said of Aboriginal culture here in Australia, the native cultures of the Americas, and of Africa, the Middle East and so forth, and so actually pinpointing when China first became a country or nation – really quite a modern concept – may not even be possible. The difficulties are obvious from Wikipedia’s opening lines on the subject:
The history of China spans several millennia across a wide geographical area. Each region now considered part of the Chinese world has experienced periods of unity, fracture, prosperity, and strife.
Note the phrase ‘now considered part of the Chinese world’. Without going into all the pros and cons of that world, the word ‘Chinese’ could be replaced with ‘French’, ‘German’ ‘English’ ‘Spanish’ and more. Consider the Almoravids of al-Andalus, which once covered most of Spain and Portugal, or the Norman conquest of England, and the endless battles for control of north-eastern Europe, long before the existence of Germany, Poland or the Baltic states. And that ‘Chinese world’ was once as multilingual as Europe is today (there are in fact some 300 languages spoken in today’s China, not a fact that its government likes to advertise).
So when exactly did China become a ‘real country’? Chinese language dates back to 3,000 years or more, but countries weren’t a thing back then. Think of an even older language, like 5,000 year-old Sumerian. Sumer, located in and around modern-day Iraq, was no more a country then than was China 2,000 years later. What we had in those early millennia were expanding, contracting and conflicting dynasties, throughout Eurasia. There were of course no borders, there were power centres of varying magnitudes, with the power dissipating as it radiated outwards, and much conflict in the intersections. These power centres were associated with dynasties, such as the Tang and the Song, and the Ming dynasty established by the all-conquering Mongols. Certain cultural and religious beliefs and practices, such as Taoism and Confucianism, connected people of the region covered roughly by modern China, just as Christianity connected much of western Europe from the 12th and 13th centuries.
It wasn’t really until the 20th century that China had anything like the clear borders that it arguably has today. The last dynastic empire was that of the Manchus, the Qing dynasty, which came to an end in 1912. During its 280 year hegemony the territory controlled by the Chinese almost doubled, just another example of power and violent suppression radiating outwards. However, the regime was seriously weakened by the Taiping rebellion (1851-64) in which some 20 million lives were lost. After a military uprising, the ‘Republic of China’ was declared in 1912, with Sun Yat-sen, briefly, as its head. This was far from bringing peace and territorial certainty to the region however, and rebellion, conflict and suppression on its western borders – the 1950 military occupation and annexation of Tibet being a powerful example – continues to this day.
So that’s China, and the story of its ‘territorial integrity’ continues, as is the case with Russia and other power and land-obsessed nations – including today’s USA it seems.
So nowadays, the legitimacy of a nation supposedly, or arguably, depends on the UN, obviously a very recently constructed organisation, the international support for which is varied. But the term has gained its own air of sanctity and power. This is why we nowadays hear of the Sioux nation or the Cherokee nation and the 250 or so Aboriginal nations of Australia. And so it goes, and it’s hard to make sense of it all. What we can be fairly sure of, though, is that when somebody starts going on about X not being a real country, they’re spoiling for a fight.
References
The Han Dynasty of Ancient China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_China
Christopher Tyerman, God’s war, 2006
capital punishment ‘is good’
Once again, the Central Politburo of the Testosterone Party of China – the world’s leading executioner
I still do a bit of teaching, or presiding over English conversation classes, though I’ve retired from the profession. Recently I’ve been taking a very low level English language group, and one of the women, visiting the country for a short period from China, expressed outright disbelief that capital punishment didn’t exist in Australia. ‘Kill bad people is good, we strong country’, were her words, more or less. She clearly doesn’t realise that China is an outlier on this issue. Every single country in Europe, without exception as far as I’m aware, has abandoned the practice, and that includes such ‘problematic’ countries as Turkey, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Romania, Moldova and Montenegro. Outside of Europe, there’s Canada, New Zealand, Liberia…. many African countries in fact, and virtually all South American countries. Much easier to name those countries that still maintain the practice, and they include many of the usual suspects – Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, the USA (in about half of their states), Iraq, Yemen…
State killing came in many forms in those good old days. Hanging was the thing in Australia, in obeisance to our British overlords. La Guillotine, once a popular French restaurant here in Adelaide, was a quaint reminder of Robespierre and the Terror – though the guillotine was in use right up to 1977. We’ve had gas chambers, electric furniture, garrotting, Zyklon B, stoning, keelhauling (possibly mythical), crucifixion (not fiction) and burning at the stake (popular for women), and of course a variety of individualised torture-killings beloved of kings and despots down the ages. In fact the further back in time you go, the more grotesquely elaborate the punishment seems to become – but of course, the past is where the barbarians come from. I wonder what they’ll say about us in a thousand years’ time, if our species survives.
I don’t think it’s too much to claim that capital punishment and other brutalities tend to go with more patriarchal societies. The connection can obviously be made with the more fundamentalist religious societies – the Abrahamic god of the three religions being as male as male can be. But what about supposedly atheist China, with its Chinese Testosterone Party? Well, Confucianism has had a profound impact on their society for well over 2000 years, and it’s every bit as patriarchal as Judaism, Christianity and Islam – and it’s also been massively influential in Korea, Vietnam, Japan – the whole region of South-East Asia. It’s a kind of operational synergy – these religions and politico-social systems were born out of patriarchy and they’ve strengthened and sustained that patriarchy through the past couple of millennia. The post-religious age, for example here in Australia and in western Europe, particularly Scandinavia, is only a few decades old by comparison. We might call it humanism, or naturalism, but by whatever name, it is here to say, and it will steadily encroach upon older ways of thinking and living. Without even analysing the situation I’d be willing to bet my house, if I owned one, on it being the case that the US states that retain the death penalty are those that are most avowedly religious. It’s a matter of ‘turn the other cheek, that way we can slit the whole throat, not just half’.
Anyway, China really is a hard nut to crack. Of course, as with all extremely top-down societies, a change of leadership might bring some progress. Xi Jinping has recently set himself up as the nation’s monarch, but he’s in his seventies now… Neighbouring countries might be influential too, but a powerful country like China obviously tends to dominate its neighbours, as in the case of Burma/Myanmar. One development that might help to speed up the transition to a more humane and remedial treatment of criminals is the one I’m using now – social media. Another is travel. Both help to broaden the mind, to inform us on how the other half live. Or in China’s case, the other 80% or so.
So I’m trying to do my bit. When I next see my Chinese conversation student, I hope to gently inform her that many many countries – almost all of the richest, safest and happiest countries in the world – have given up on executing their citizens for their crimes. Some, like Norway, have created prisons that are heavily focussed on education and re-integration into society, and building or rebuilding family and other human connections.
Then again, she may not turn up.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country
https://www.firststepalliance.org/post/norway-prison-system-lessons
global warming or climate change? Does it matter? More importantly, how are we going in dealing with it?
…climate change (now interchangeably, albeit inaccurately, called global warming)….
Vaclav Smil, How the world really works, pp 168-9
Man-0-man-o-man-o-man-o-man-o-man….
I was a bit miffed by this slight put-down, because for some time I’ve been insisting (as if anybody noticed) on using the term ‘global warming’ in the face of what I’ve considered a move towards the ‘climate change’ term. In other words my subjective impression has been that ‘global warming’ is being replaced by ‘climate change’, a less urgent term to my way of thinking. I suspect this impression has come from my listening to expert podcasts and videos from New Scientist and other scientific sources, and it seems to me that some agreed-upon descriptor has come down from the Scientists on High, which of course stirs my anti-authoritarian blood.
My semi-informed view is that, yes, the climate is changing due to ‘greenhouse’ gases, by-products of our industries, particularly carbon dioxide, methane and water vapour, accumulating in the atmosphere, creating a greenhouse effect which is essentially a warming effect. And heat is energy, creating volatility and unpredictability. And the water vapour in particular, evaporating from the oceans, is broadening the tropical belt, causing storms, floods, lightning and fire. Of course there are countervailing factors – ice melt from the poles cools the oceans, adding to the volatility.
So I’ll go online to explore this rather minuscule issue, in my minuscule way. The US Geological Survey (USGS) has this to say:
Although people tend to use these terms interchangeably, global warming is just one aspect of climate change. “Global warming” refers to the rise in global temperatures due mainly to the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. “Climate change” refers to the increasing changes in the measures of climate over a long period of time – including precipitation, temperature, and wind patterns.
That tells me it’s all much of a muchness, and the climate change we’re concerned about today is a product of greenhouse gas concentrations and the warming this is creating. So I’ll continue to use the global warming term, which isn’t at all inaccurate, because for me at least, it’s clear that the climate changes we’re experiencing stem from this warming, which is why experts like to connect our planetary future to 1.5 degrees, or 2, or 3 degrees, etc. Having said that, I’m more than impressed by Vaclav Smil’s analytical approach to the Big Issues of our modern world, and by his work ethic, which of course puts me to shame (he has written 36 books on energy, food, technology and other key aspects of human civilisation). He can be pedantic, but in a useful way, for example in pointing out that the ‘greenhouse effect’ isn’t really about how greenhouses work:
Labelling this natural phenomenon as the ‘greenhouse effect’ is a misleading analogy, because the heat inside a greenhouse is there not only because the glass enclosure prevents the escape of some infrared radiation but also because it cuts off air circulation. In contrast, the natural ‘greenhouse effect’ is caused solely by the interception of a small share of outgoing infrared radiation by trace gases [water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide].
V Smil, How the world really works, p178
Yeah, we kind of knew that, Vaclav, but thanks for the detail. What’s more interesting in his book is the detail of the challenges we face, and how we’re actually facing them. And one of the critiques he makes, what with all these COP meet-ups and IPCC projections, is the lack of detail and realism in dealing with these enormously complex issues faced by diverse states at varying levels of development, with competing needs, resources, issues and challenges. Our environmental footprint is embiggening, though its embiggening rate is reducing, in much the same way as our global population is, and our continued reliance on the Big Four, cement, steel, plastics and ammonia, to maintain our civilisations, means that fossil fuel emissions and global temperatures will continue to rise in coming decades. Moreover, as Smil points out, predictions about the growth in EV sales haven’t panned out in the last decade or so, and many other prognostications, especially about the future, have fallen flat, such as global supersonic flight, the population bomb, peak oil (I once read a book on that one), nuclear energy (for air travel and for uncovering natural gas fields, and some even nuttier schemes, such as creating ‘instant harbours’!), synthetic life forms (good-looking, hopefully), the 2000 tech-meltdown, and so on.
We seem often to underestimate our genius for surviving – and to overestimate our tendency to fuck things up. Which isn’t to say that we always get things right, or foresee the results of our manipulations of the so-called natural world. Smil is undoubtedly a good skeptic in this area, although I do find him something of an aloof overseer, unlike, for example, Gaia Vince, an intrepid traveller, moving from coal-front to coal-front, befriending and interviewing movers and shakers in the field, from the Sahel to the Columbian mines and the disappearing Himalayan glaciers. Both individual types help us to view the world richly, from individual and global perspectives (and it’s interesting, and unsurprising, that the overseer is male, and the engager is female).
Another problem preventing us from facing the real issues is the petty but mass-murderous ambition of the Putins and Xi Jinpings of the world and their horrific concepts of nationalism and power. The WEIRD world needs to reach out to the suffering peoples of these countries – especially the Chinese, a smart, industrious, ambitious and forward-thinking people who would thrive under a democratic regime (the Russians, by contrast, seem more cowed by their centuries of horror). This raises the question of how we deal with a country like China. My approach would be to maintain relations as much as possible while promoting better, more inclusive forms of government. Raise again and again the lack of women in government. Ask why this is so. What is the justification for an all-male politburo? How can they (the tiny governing minority) pretend that women in power is ‘Western’ and anti-Chinese? Isn’t the generally more collaborative approach of women a boon at a time when we face global crises needing global, collaborative solutions? Doesn’t the drumbeat of war, in these times, sound jarring and out of tune?
A greater internationalism is upon us, and more of it will be forced upon us as we face a global warming issue that will worsen in coming decades, without any doubt. Nationalism tends to get in the way of responses to international crises, as happened with the recent global pandemic. We tend to live in the moment, an eternal present, and we don’t realise, most of us, that if we were born a couple of centuries ago, we could travel throughout much of the world without crossing a border, without having to produce a passport or a visa, and without having to prove our ‘legality’. And we certainly can’t predict what systems will pertain in a couple of centuries from now, but they’re surely more likely to promote communication, co-ordination and exchange rather than isolation. I can only thank the writers and communicators that I’m able to plug into for helping me to focus on the future – my own and beyond – with as much realism and positivity as can reasonably be mustered.
References
How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future, by Vaclav Smil, 2022
Adventures in the Anthropocene; Transcendence; Nomad Century, by Gaia Vince, 2018 – 2021
we’re running out of gas on this topic
Jacinta: So we need to look at why high domestic energy costs come as a shock to Chinese arrivals here in Australia. It seems the essay we analysed last time took the view that we should be capitalising on high gas prices, getting top dollar for our gas exports, and exporting even more of the stuff, including increasing production as much as possible, and not capping the domestic price but somehow offsetting the cost to local consumers through the tax system. But it seems that Chinese consumers are getting it cheap.
Canto: Yes, it’s hard to make sense of it – how is it that gas producers/retailers are making windfall profits by selling LNG to China when the consumers there are paying much less for it than we are? Is it just the sheer quantity they’re sending offshore?
Jacinta: Well, we’re not economists, far from it, so it’s a battle for us to understand it all. But I’m reading an Aussie article from a little over a year ago that puts it bluntly:
Australia [has] gas. Loads and loads of it. Far more than we could ever possibly need. It comes out of the ground at $1GJ all across QLD and SA. But then what happens to it is beyond all hope and reason. Three-quarters of it is shipped to China as LNG at $31GJ, $4GJ cheaper than it is sold locally.
That doesn’t seem to me to be that much cheaper, but the author, David Llewellyn-Smith, seems to be claiming that the cost of bringing the gas out of the ground is $1 per gigajoule, but it’s sold, presumably after much processing, as LNG at $31 per gigajoule in China. And sold here at $35 per gigajoule. Or was. And that may not mean the cost to the household consumer. I’ve been trying to find out current domestic prices, but the economic gobbledegook is beyond me.
Canto: I’ve located our last gas bill – $344.64 for 91 days usage (i.e quarterly). The usage is measured in megajoules, and a gigajoule is 1000 megajoules. Our average daily usage for the period May through July was 52.24 MJ. That’s about 4754 MJ or, say 4.75GJ used in the period. That means we’re paying around $72.50 per gigajoule. Something very wrong here, I give up. The average quarterly gas bill in South Australia is currently $218, so we’re way over. I presume that’s per domestic household. Average daily usage over winter in SA was 21.64MJ, and we’re way over that. We have only gas hot water, and we rarely ever use the gas stove. I cook on a small electric oven we bought – not induction, sadly.
Jacinta: They may be adding other costs on to the basic usage costs, but our high usage is extremely surprising, and it won’t necessarily be less in the warmer months, because we’re only using the gas for showering and washing dishes, not for heating. That means we’re likely spending nearly $1400 annually for gas. Can we change the subject now?
Canto: Well, no, we need to change our usage, not the subject. That’s assuming this usage number is reliable, and I have to be sceptical of that. Anyway, I think we can dispense with gas usage totally, at least I can. For example, washing dishes via electricity (boiling the electric kettle), and body-washing also via electricity (same system) and doing without showering. That would reduce my gas usage to zero.
Jacinta: Okay, good luck with that. We still haven’t really worked out why the Chinese are paying less for gas, or maybe for energy in general, than we are.
Canto: Well, economics bores me witless, but here we go. In 2021 China became the world’s largest gas importer, surpassing Japan. What this means for the cost to the domestic consumer I’m not sure. There has been a decline in commodity prices, including gas, in recent months apparently, but I suspect that low prices to the consumer have little to do with that. I suspect it has to do with the deviancies of the Chinese Testosterone Party – which I blame for everything in that country.
Jacinta: Haha, but is blame the word? How have they managed to shield their people from the costs we suffer under?
Canto: Anyway, our way out is to get our electric dishwasher fixed, stop using the gas hot water system, and switch off the gas tap.
Jacinta: Yes, and then we can get back to talking about bonobos and such…. Please!
References
What is the average (MJ) cost of gas in Australia?
nuclear issues – the end of complacency? Vive la révolution des bonobos!
So, Japan’s sense of itself as a mighty, controlling power, which had been corroding fast since its foolhardy attack on Pearl Harbour, was brought to an abrupt end in August 1945, the result of two atomic bombs, the only such weapons ever used against a human population.
Those explosions also set off two contradictory trends, which have persisted ever since; the proliferation of nuclear weapons at the behest of two ‘superpowers’, the USA and the Soviet Union (together with desperate attempts to acquire such weapons by wannabe superpowers), and a refrain of ‘never again’ by most members of the world community. This disastrous contradiction has persisted to this day, so that we’re now faced with the bizarre scenario of a worldwide anti-nuclear consensus, together with a total nuclear arsenal which could destroy the biosphere many times over. If ever any alien needed proof of the crooked timber of humanity, surely this scenario would be the first thing to point out.
It’s hard for a non-military person to make sense of the quantity and type of nuclear weaponry owned and deployed, if that’s the word, by the USA. But I’ll give it a go. Here’s the first thing I found:
As of 2021, American nuclear forces on land consist of 400 Minuteman III ICBMs spread among 450 operational launchers. Those in the seas consist of 14 nuclear-capable Ohio-class Trident submarines, nine in the Pacific and five in the Atlantic.
This doesn’t appear to tell us anything of the destructive power of these ICBMs. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, gets to the point quickly enough:
Less than one percent of the nuclear weapons in the world could disrupt the global climate and threaten as many as two billion people with starvation in a nuclear famine. The thousands of nuclear weapons possessed by the US and Russia could bring about a nuclear winter, destroying the essential ecosystems on which all life depends.
So the first quote is from Wikipedia, I think, and clearly 400 isn’t thousands, but does it really matter when we know from experience that two bombs can bring a nation to its knees? Those bombs may have killed as many as 200,000 – the exact total will never be known – but even while the world was reeling from the shock, the USA was experimenting with more powerful hydrogen fusion bombs, and the Soviet Union was trying desperately to catch up. The situation today, I’ve read somewhere, is that Russia has slightly more bombs than the USA, but with these numbers, comparisons are meaningless, and odious.
We’ve lived with this situation for the whole of my 66-year lifespan. Presumably the leaders of the nuclear-armed countries feel that this situation, this stand-off of sorts, should continue ‘forever’, which reminds me of Mr Pudding’s recent remark that the regions of eastern Ukraine that he subjected to sham referenda were now Russian ‘forever’, forgetting that Russia itself has only been a country for a mere few centuries – as has Australia, New Zealand, all the countries of North, South and Central America, most of Europe and Africa. It all makes this ‘forever’ talk sound pretty shallow to me.
The point I’m making is that we can’t rely on the ‘foreverness’ of the mutually assured destruction argument for possession of nuclear weaponry. After all, as the buffoon that the USA recently allowed to become its President allegedly said while in office – ‘What’s the point of having nuclear weapons if you don’t use them?’
Yes, true, in a sense. There’s no point in using them, so there’s no point in having them. We can surely do better than this, despite our crooked timber.
Again, I look to the women. Think of these two self-styled superpowers. The USA is on its 46th President. How many of them have been women. I suspect that country will only be brought to its senses when the number of female Presidents historically matches the number of males. That’s unlikely to happen in the next 500 years. Hopefully, though, before that happens, they will have ditched their abysmal Presidential system entirely. I hope, but I don’t expect. United Staters are way too worshipful of their Presidential monarchy to submit to a more collaborative and flexible political system. Again, the ascent of women is their best hope for political improvement.
As to Russia, it experienced some of its best days under their Empress Catherine II, which admittedly, isn’t saying much. The description ‘enlightened despotism’ Is often used to describe her reign, and she certainly compares well to her predecessors and those who followed her, but again that’s not saying much. She was the last female ruler of Russia, as her son Paul introduced the Pauline Laws in 1797, effectively preventing women from succeeding to the Tsardom. And of course we know how many women became leaders during the Soviet period.
Returning to the present, clearly Mr Pudding’s days are numbered, even if he survives his obscene Ukrainian venture. There is no clear system of succession, and I suspect that the scramble for power, post-Pudding, will be vicious. My hope, though, is that a more accommodating leadership will emerge – and indeed that will, I think, be more likely than the alternative, if only for pragmatic reasons. Relying solely on old Xi’s China for companionship is a more than risky proposition. Not much honour among thieves. Eventually, some time, one day, the Russian leadership will have to turn west, and start to moderate its thuggery. And then, maybe, the nuclear de-escalation, not to say disarmament, might begin. Yeah, and human bonobos will preside benignly, and playfully, over the earth.
References
A brief history of Afghanistan, by Shaista Wahab & Barry Youngerman, 2007
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Poland
feminism in China? Must be too busy holding up half the sky…
Chinese feminists, happily out there, but sadly not in China
As I’ve mentioned before, it’s not just religion that’s providing a brake to the progress of female empowerment. The Chinese ‘Communist’ Party, which seems to be religiously opposed to religions of all kinds, with their popes and patriarchs, hasn’t benefitted from this opposition by promoting any of its female citizens to leadership positions.
I say ‘communist’, because there’s surely no organisation on the planet that’s less communist than the thugocracy that currently rules China, and has done for the last seventy-odd years, since Mao bludgeoned his way to power. If we take communism to mean the dictatorship of the proletariat, clearly it will only happen when ‘prole’ and ‘dictator’ mean the same thing – that’s to say, never. And it’s a sad irony that any nation with any reference to communism in its title has always engaged in the most brutal – and very macho -authoritarianism. So basically I’ve come to consider both communism and fascism as synonymous with thugocracy.
So Mao’s statement that woman hold up half the sky was just patronising claptrap, apparently. Xi Jinping, the unutterably worthless bag of scum that is China’s latest dictator (I’m sorry, but I always get emotional where thugs like Mr Pudding and his Chinese mate – can’t think of a nickname just yet – are concerned. My anti-authoritarianism goes back to earliest childhood and is deeply ingrained), is suppressing the equality of women as part of his corruption campaign. It doesn’t seem to be phasing outspoken women in China, most of whom are destined to outlive the scumbag. Still, for the time being, they’re being muzzled, their Weibo accounts suspended, and their harassment by Party goons adds another layer to the harassment they’ve lately been experiencing on campuses and in workplaces.
These are backward steps for women in China. It was the fascinating Empress Dowager Cixi, one of China’s most under-rated political leaders, who first banned foot-binding back in 1902, a ban that was overturned, probably because it was instituted by a woman, but later reinstated. Even so, China was at the forefront of women’s rights in the early twentieth century. A researcher on women’s rights in China, Emeritus Professor Louise Edwards of the University of NSW, points out that early progress in equality and supportive legislation came from within the system rather than from grassroots activism:
If you were working in the state sector in China, as a woman in the 1950s, you had access to maternity leave, breastfeeding leave — these kinds of protections were way ahead of Australia at the time.
But the Party has become more repressive and ‘anti-western’ since the events of 1989, and especially since the rise of Mr Pingpong (okay this needs a bit of work). Clearly the Party has become more macho (there has never been a woman on the politburo standing committee, in its almost 70-year history), so feminists have had to work from outside that framework, and are more of a threat, and therefore more ‘western’. It’s all rather predictable in its stupidity. So China has dropped down the rankings for gender equality, temporarily. But Mr Pingpong will be dead meat soon enough (actually, not soon enough), and women will rise again, inevitably. The arc of the moral universe may be long, but it bends toward justice, in spite of these pingpongy, Mr Puddingy gremlins in the works. In fact, once Pingpong is out of the way, hopefully without being able to secure another fascist to replace him, feminism will likely burst into the public sphere with a vengeance, as identification with feminism is increasing big-time in China. Lu Pin, the founder of Feminist Voices, an influential media outlet shut down in 2018, remains confident about the future. An ABC article, linked below, quotes her:
Today, more young people than before agree that they are feminists. Today, the debate on feminism in Chinese society is unprecedentedly fierce.
Again, it’s a matter of nature eventually overcoming oppressive cultural artifice, but meanwhile the attitude of the Party towards increasing sexism and male brutality is to downplay the violence and to avoid at all costs any mention of feminist values and aspirations. It’s a very backward move considering that, by the 1970s, Chinese women, who in ancient China often didn’t even have their own names, formed the largest female workforce in the world. The one-child policy, introduced in 1979, led to abortions and abandonment of female infants, and a noticeable gender imbalance problem into the 21st century. Although the policy has since been relaxed, women are reluctant to become ‘baby factories’ for the Party, given the lack of support for child-rearing, and the current patriarchal fashion.
China’s first ever law dealing with domestic violence was enacted in 2016, over 40 years after Australia’s Family Law Act (1975) defined and legislated against domestic violence. However, it appears that the law is largely a well-kept secret. Frida Lindberg, in an article on women’s rights and social media for the Institute for Security and Development Policy (a Swedish NGO), writes this:
Despite the Anti-Domestic Violence Law, domestic violence cases have nevertheless continued. Some argue that the law is ineffective due to low public awareness about the issue and punishments that are too lenient. In addition, the law has been criticized for promoting family harmony and social stability, a principle that stems from Confucianism, as this seems to contradict the law’s principle of preventing domestic violence.
Lindberg’s article shines a light on current obstacles to female participation and progress in the Chinese workforce, obstacles that many WEIRD women now in their sixties and seventies (my generation) experienced regularly four or more decades ago. But of course the social media issue is new. Weibo and other social media sites became a vital outlet for women after the treatment of the so-called feminist five were muzzled, at least partially, after street protests in 2015 over domestic violence and the lack of public facilities for women. Unsurprisingly there was a backlash against feminist posts, which many in the movement saw as a good thing – any publicity being good publicity – but the Party decided to put a stop to the argy-bargy, removing many social media accounts of prominent feminists in 2021. It also appears to be lending support to anti-feminist nationalists, who have been trolling outspoken women for anything they can find, including sympathy for Hong Kong and for oppressed minorities. The Party has used the excuse of ‘disrupting social order’ to harass and shut down whistleblowers who’ve posted about sexual harassment, but the number of views these posts garnered argues for a groundswell of concern about the issue, one way or the other. Feminists have fought back by coding their messages to avoid censorship, but this obviously has its limitations for attracting public attention, and is usually identified and reported by the ‘nationalists’.
So, it’s a ‘watch this space’ situation, or rather, watch this region. Having taught scores of Chinese women over the years, I know all about their intellect, their passion and their power. In his book Asia’s reckoning, the Australian journalist Richard McGregor described the irony of how conformist Japan has become a liberal democratic country of sorts, while the more liberal and individualist Chinese are saddled with the Party and its goons. It’s surely a temporary situation, but just how temporary is temporary?
References
Click to access Lindberg.-2021.-Womens-Rights-in-China-and-Feminism-on-Chinese-Social-Media.-1.pdf
Richard McGregor, Asia’s reckoning, 2017
a bonobo world, and other impossibilities 13
macho macho clan
Chinese culture – not so bonobo
I heard recently that the all-controlling Chinese government provides no sex education for its young citizens, and that the abortion rate is astronomically high there. The government as we know had a one-child policy, starting in the late seventies, and firming into law in 1980. It was abandoned in October 2015. Unsurprisingly, this involved forced abortions, even though abortion was made illegal there in the early 1950s. Anti-abortion law was gradually watered down in ensuing decades. The government in its wisdom, especially under Mao, saw population growth as the key to economic success. Deng Xiaoping, who became China’s numero uno in 1978, saw things differently as China’s population soared.
Journalist Mei Fong, who wrote a book about the one-child policy, points out that, among many other negative effects, the policy led to widespread abortions of female infants, since in China as in most other countries, male offspring are more highly valued. Not the case, of course, for bonobos.
Humans are the only apes who are capable of aborting the not-yet-born. They have also, throughout their history, engaged in infanticide, as have other animals. But of course another, rather recent development has had a powerful influence on our reproductive behaviour, that of contraception. Religious organisations, such as the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, frown upon the practice, though their holy scriptures are of course mute on the matter, and practising Catholics worldwide have largely ignored church teachings, preferring pleasure to abstinence. Other Christian denominations, and Islamic and Hindu religious leaders tend to be more accepting, though there are no doubt conservative naysayers.
Bonobos are highly sexual, though of course not as much as many humans, but they eschew contraception, and yet their birth rate is low, and infanticide has never been observed among them, unlike among chimps. Of course their genito-genital frottage is most often used to relieve tension, and generally among females – and more power to that – but more importantly, bonobos present themselves in estrus even when they can’t conceive. Their all-round availability to males – when they’re in the mood (males have occasionally had the tips of their penises bitten off by disgruntled females – and more power to that) means there’s less competition between male bonobos than there is between male chimps. The low birth rate is presumably explained by the fact that full-blown in-out-in-out is no more common among bonobos than it is among chimps. It’s also likely that year-round availability means that total rumpy-pumpy is spread out over the year and isn’t concentrated only in the fertile period. With bonobos, not every sperm is sacred.
Getting back to China and abortions, obviously if you have no way of discovering, through normal educational channels, the biological facts of pregnancy, and your family and local community, wedded to Confucian or other traditions of sexual modesty and general avoidance of discussing this all-too-basic animal instinct, that instinct might just get the better of you before you become aware of the consequences. So the Chinese authorities appear to have used abortion as an easy solution to the problem. With their peculiar top-down administration (peculiar to we in liberal democratic countries, but China’s communist party has essentially taken over the role of the all-powerful Manchu administration of previous centuries, so they’re used to it), the Chinese seem to have been persuaded in toto that abortion isn’t a moral issue. But of course there’s an exception – whereas in previous decades it was a duty to limit your offspring, now it’s becoming a duty to refuse sexually selected abortion, in favour of boys. This male-female imbalance has become a serious issue, brought about by a patriarchal administration blind to the problems created by the patriarchy that it continues to uphold. The Chinese Communist Party is of course no more communist than the strife-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are democratic. It is a complex, multi-faceted, circumlocutory organisation, but its most important decision-making office is the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC), which consists of a handful of the most powerful political figures in the country, including the General Secretary (currently Xi Jinping). Since its full establishment in the 1950s, the PSC has had 57 members, of which 57 have been male. The CCP has in recent decades promoted capitalism, which it now calls, inter alia, Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. Whatever that means, it definitely does not allow for bourgeois liberalisation, a term deliberately singled out. Long story short, no sex education in schools – or very little, often too late. Homosexuality, in particular, is a touchy matter – and more power to that – which neither the government nor parents are particularly willing to confront. However, it’s probably fair to assume that, as far as attitudes can change, they will do so in the right direction – towards a bonobo world, rather than away from it.
Meanwhile, the impact of all this conservatism weighs more heavily on girls and young women, of course. And it’s not just in the matter of sex and pregnancy that Chinese females are getting a raw deal. Women in China have recently demonstrated, in small numbers, about such matters as the dearth of female public toilet facilities, and the very high rate of domestic violence in the country. And they’ve been punished for it, imprisoned, harassed, and belittled by government thugs, who also harass their families and workplaces into keeping them in line. Some of these women have become heroes of the international feminist movement, but are unknown in their own country due to the CCP’s stranglehold on the social media network. And yet, reform will gradually come. The mighty male Chinese government hates to be humiliated by protesting ‘little girls’, so it silences them and then, knowing full well the justice of the women’s cause, makes a few changes in the right direction. And maybe if they, the women, are lucky, the next General Secretary, though surely another male, will be a little more of a bonobo, and there will be just a little more free love and a little less domestic warfare in the land.
References
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chinese-Communist-Party
https://bonobohumanity.blog/wp-admin/post.php?post=8955&action=edit
Empress Dowager Cixi: tradition and reform
Canto: So we’ve written a piece on Cixi (to save time I won’t keep referring to her by full title), touting her as a reformer, within strict limits, but without actually mentioning and discussing any of her reforms.
Jacinta: Yes, there’s so much to write, to put her in context, that a few blog posts wouldn’t be enough. But before we begin I want to express my annoyance at the Wikipedia article on Cixi. It ends with this on Jung Chang’s book:
In 2013, Jung Chang’s biography, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China, portrays Cixi as the most capable ruler and administrator that China could have had at the time. Pamela Kyle Crossley said in the London Review of Books that Chang’s claims “seem to be minted from her own musings, and have little to do with what we know was actually going in China”. Although Crossley was sympathetic to restoring women’s place in Chinese history, she found “rewriting Cixi as Catherine the Great or Margaret Thatcher is a poor bargain: the gain of an illusory icon at the expense of historical sense”.
Canto: Yes, this is a travesty of the book, which at no point makes comparisons with the other leaders mentioned, or ever hints at such comparisons. Having said that, Chang’s book was a biography, not a history of China during this period, which of course would’ve been a far more monumental task. The book focuses particularly on the court and the Forbidden City, and the struggles and machinations there, and only occasionally, but effectively, expands outward to the nationwide repercussions. As to being ‘minted from her own musings’, the book is clearly massively researched, with primary sources linked to almost every page of the book. Of course some decisions and actions require speculation, all of which, it seems to me, fits with a coherent description of Cixi’s character – that of a proud and often ruthless, baggage-laden Manchu aristocrat with progressive tendencies in keeping with her love of knowledge and innovation, struggling to make sense of and keep abreast of a wave of progress, internationalism and foreign encroachment without precedent in Chinese history. And also of course that of a powerful 19th century woman in a part of the world even more repressive of powerful women than that of ‘the west’.
Jacinta: Yes, it’s particularly disappointing that Wikipedia ends with this hatchet-job, leaving the unwary reader with a very wrong impression of the book, IMHO. Anyway, to the reforms. Chang highlights most of them in the epilogue to her book, and the list is well worth presenting here:
Under her leadership the country began to acquire virtually all the attributes of a modern state: railways, electricity, telegraph, telephones, western medicine, a modern-style army and navy, and modern ways of conducting foreign trade and diplomacy. The restrictive millennium-old educational system was discarded and replaced by western-style schools and universities. The press blossomed, enjoying a freedom that was unprecedented and arguably unsurpassed since. She unlocked the door to political participation: for the first time in China’s long history, people were to become ‘citizens’. It was Cixi who championed women’s liberation in a culture that had for centuries imposed foot-binding on the female population – a practice to which she put an end. The fact that her last enterprise before her untimely death was to introduce the vote testifies to her courage and vision Above all, her transformation of China was carried out without her engaging in violence and with relatively little upheaval.
Canto: Yes, all this is true, and it largely came from her, or more accurately from her complex response to the massive changes going on in the outer world, and that world’s growing impact on China. I’m sure Chang wrote this partly as a corrective to the propaganda surrounding Cixi, that she was an obstacle to progress and, in contradiction, a figurehead manipulated by powerful aristocrats and factions.
Jacinta: And also a cruel and lascivious harridan. And I must say, in response to Crossley’s review, she does bear comparison to other major female power-wielders. To Thatcher perhaps, if only for her formidable ‘she who must be obeyed’ presence, to which many eye-witnesses throughout the book testify, and also perhaps to Elizabeth I (I don’t know enough about Catherine the Great), for her concern for stability and moderation, and for the Chinese people.
Canto: And yet she could be ruthless and cruel, though I put this partly down to the absolute power wielded by the throne, and the history of imperial and aristocratic cruelty she was born into – the eunuch system, lingchi (death by a thousand cuts), the bastinado and so forth. Reforms to the Qing Legal Code, late in Cixi’s lifetime, banned many of these cruelties, though certainly this was under pressure from other nations.
Jacinta: Yes, she has to be seen in the context of China’s long isolation from the ‘enlightenment’ ideas of the west, which was coming to an end just as she gained total power. And her experience, for example, of the wanton destruction of the Old Summer Palace – regarded as ‘the garden of gardens’, an apparently wondrous complex of outstanding architecture, floral designs and historical treasures – by the British in the 1860s would hardly have warmed her to any ideas of western superiority. In fact I think her early sympathy for the Boxer Rebellion well captures her sympathy for so many of the ordinary people who felt threatened by the many changes wrought by foreigners and the arrogance with which some of those went about their ‘mission’. And I’m thinking about Christians in particular.
Canto: The cruelties and the despotism of mid-nineteenth century China bear comparison to the different cruelties of pre-enlightenment Europe, with its burnings by fire, its trials by ordeal, its divine rights and so forth. Reforms came to China almost too quickly, and the path from that nineteenth-century ‘opening up’ to the extremely repressive and unrepresentative government of modern China is no doubt as complex as it is depressing. Cixi was bowing to the inevitable towards the end of her life, it seems, acknowledging, or hoping, that a constitutional monarchy, with popular representation in some kind of parliament, would be the eventual result of all the pressures being brought to bear on the system she’d been accustomed to manipulating. Certainly she was a traditionalist in many ways, full of superstitions that seem bizarre to us, overly loyal to her heritage, the Manchu minority (though she appointed more Han people to positions of authority and power than any previous Qing ruler), and keen to uphold court ceremonial (though flexible when it suited her). It seems to me that if she was twenty or thirty years younger at the turn of the century, with the same hold on power, she would’ve had a better chance than anyone else of effecting a peaceful transition in China, from an absolute monarchy – one of the last – to some kind of more democratic system. But that wasn’t to be, and the rest, sadly, is history.
References
Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: the concubine who launched Modern China, 2013
the politics of Covid-19: the China problem
So far we have no treatment for Covid-19, and can only use non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to stop or slow its spread. Evidence from Wuhan has conclusively shown that stringent NPIs have been effective in this regard. Not only did the case rate fall sharply from early February (after rising sharply from December to the end of January), but the proportion of critical cases was substantially reduced over the whole period. While recent very low numbers reported from China are creating an understandable skepticism due to the Chinese government’s tight grip on information, experts generally agree that the Wuhan data is reliable.
Reducing the rate of transmission is the goal of NPIs. Once the transmission rate (Rt) is reduced to less than 1.0, cases will reduce, and this will show in the statistics (while taking account of an incubation period of roughly 5 days and laboratory confirmation). Analysis in this JAMA article of the Wuhan measures, which became increasing stringent over a two-month interval, and which analysts divided into five consecutive periods, suggests that the period 3 measures (strict travel restrictions, including automobile travel, and home quarantine) were the likely determining factors in Rt reduction. This analysis, however, conveniently chimes with the fact that the more severe period 4 and 5 restrictions, involving heavily policed physical distancing measures, central quarantining, and door-to-door, individual-to-individual screening, would not go down well in an open society. I don’t want to cast doubt on the article, but this is China we’re talking about, and there are all sorts of political sensitivities in dealing with this heavy-handed economic giant.
I’ve long been thinking about this, but a Sydney Morning Herald article I found on my twitter feed (I virtually never tweet but it’s a useful resource) has prompted me to explore a bit more. It’s about Taiwan.
Taiwan’s experience re Covid-19 is worth comparing to Australia’s as their overall population is the same as ours. For a while I’ve been perhaps complacently touting Australia’s success in keeping the numbers down – we’re now the world’s 29th in number of cases, compared to 18th a couple of weeks ago. But Taiwan shits on us in this respect – 388 cases compared to our 6313, 6 deaths compared to our 61. It ranks 98th out of the countries and regions on Worldometer’s list.
The SMH article is essentially an interview with Professor Su Ih-Jen, the infectious diseases expert responsible for Taiwan’s response to Covid-19. He explains that this response, probably the most successful of any country, is all about Taiwan’s mistrust of China. The relationship between the two countries is about as bad as it can get, with China using its power internationally to stifle Taiwan’s voice in international forums such as the World Health Organisation. China has never recognised Taiwan’s nationhood, and is seen as an ever-present danger by the Taiwanese. So when word spread about the outbreak in Wuhan in December, Taiwanese experts assumed the worst and acted quickly, imposing quarantines and travel bans from China. The country had learned lessons from the first SARS outbreak, also from China, and substantially increased their numbers of ventilators and hospital beds. And have spent the past 17 years literally rehearsing for this new outbreak.
So while Taiwan’s success can’t be measured in any precise way in terms of its relationship to China, it has undoubtedly been a major factor. It’s worth considering in terms of other states influenced by the CCP. Hong Kong, for example, has a population of some 7.5 million, with obviously a very high population density. That’s somewhere between a third and a quarter of Australia’s population, yet it has less than a sixth of our confirmed cases – and we would be one of the most successful countries in containing the outbreak, by any measure. I hardly need to go into Hong Kong’s somewhat perilous relationship to China, but it’s worth comparing Hong Kong, with its 4 deaths so far, to New York State, the USA’s most hard-hit region, which has suffered over 10,000 deaths. That state has about 2.5 times the population of Hong Kong. It’s of course possible that there’s been suppression of data in Hong Kong, but it’s more likely that its preparedness, given its proximity to and intense suspicion of its powerful neighbour, provides a better understanding of its success.
A more complex case is that of South Korea. Having recently read a potted history of Korea, I’m now an expert haha. Korea, like Japan, has been massively influenced historically by Chinese culture, and generally recognises its debt. Of course there have been tensions, and battles, between the two nations, but they have generally been in uneasy alliance for centuries. Koreans adopted a variant of Chinese writing for their language, until the Hangul alphabetic script became popular in the 17th and 18th centuries. China is South Korea’s largest trading partner by far. It’s one of few countries that can boast a surplus in its trade with the economic giant. Tourism both to and from China has always been very popular, though the South Korean government introduced measures to reduce the flow of Chinese tourism in 2017. In the early days of Covid-19 reporting, South Korea was often mentioned as one of the most, if not the most, affected/infected nations outside of China. That has since changed dramatically, with the country receiving sometimes grudging, and certainly qualified, praise for its response. It developed effective testing kits in a matter of days, and is now exporting them to the world. Its rapid mobilisation of all government departments, its widespread testing of asymptomatic subjects, its quarantine measures, have been generally seen as exemplary. It seems South Korea has also learned from the SARS outbreak in 2003, though its late recognition of the dangers has sadly cost lives. Could this be because it was too trusting of China’s first muted reports of the virus? And couldn’t it be said that South Korea’s eventual forceful response, regarded as overly intrusive by some westerners, owed something to that of its largest trading partner?
So neighbourhood politics have definitely played a role in how the response to Covid-19 has played out in Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea, though the details are necessarily fuzzy. It’s also surely the case that complacency, even exceptionalism, in those regions far from what has been deemed the epicentre, has been very costly. In those regions, alertness about, and full preparedness for, the dangers of viral pandemics in general, setting aside China, should be the major lesson.
References
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2764656
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-korea/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china-hong-kong-sar/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
A brief history of Korea, by Michael Seth, 2019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_South_Korea
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/20/south-korea-rapid-intrusive-measures-covid-19
Covid 19, bird flu, etc – why China?
The recent coronavirus now has an official name, Covid 19, and the death toll at present is a little under 2000, considerably more than that for the SARS coronavirus of 2003. It has spread to at least two dozen countries according to ABC reporting. I note that the WHO are emphasising how co-operative the Chinese authorities have been, I suspect as an attempt to keep those channels of communication and co-operation open, or to open them wider. The infamously over-controlling Beijing government is faced with a dilemma as its economy is taking a major hit – it desperately wants to get over this epidemic, which means downplaying it as much as possible, but its dependence on international trade means having to co-operate with those over whom it has no control. The Middle Kingdom has always been sensitive about this issue of control and dominance, which clashes with the co-operative spirit of modern global trade relations.
Having said that, Chinese authorities have certainly learned from the reaction to their fairly disastrous early handling of the SARS coronavirus outbreak in 2002. In terms of the really essential stuff, co-operation and information-sharing have rapidly improved – motivated by the apolitical spirit of research, detection and problem-solving that constitutes science’s unique value.
Of course, one of the questions being asked, with Covid 19, the SARS virus, and other viruses such as H7N9 avian influenza virus (which had a very high mortality rate), is ‘Why China?’ An article from late 2017 in the Smithsonian magazine provides a plausible if shocking answer.
It seems imprinted in Chinese culture that freshly killed-birds and other animals are tastier and somehow healthier than anything frozen or otherwise processed. The Chinese government has, in the past, been reluctant to interfere with the demand for freshly slaughtered produce, and it’s likely that, even if it enforced a clamp-down, the market would go underground. Melinda Liu, author of the Smithsonian article, described the scene at one of these markets, in the Sichuan city of Chingzhou:
Half a dozen forlorn ducks, legs tied, lay on a tiled and blood-spattered floor, alongside dozens of caged chickens. Stalls overflowed with graphic evidence of the morning’s brisk trade: boiled bird carcasses, bloodied cleavers, clumps of feathers, poultry organs. Open vats bubbled with a dark oleaginous resin used to remove feathers. Poultry cages were draped with the pelts of freshly skinned rabbits. (“Rabbit meat wholesale,” a sign said). These areas – often poorly ventilated, with multiple species jammed together – create ideal conditions for spreading disease through shared water utensils or airborne droplets of blood and other secretions.
Flu viruses can crop up and mutate anywhere – for example, the H5N2 flu strain which broke out in the USA in 2015 led to the slaughter of 48 million poultry – but China’s mixed farming habits, in which poultry and other livestock live in close proximity with their keepers, together with the taste for freshly slaughtered and disturbingly exotic meat, and the conditions in many markets and slaughter-yards, presents a massive cultural problem for China’s huge and increasingly mobile population. The country will have to come to terms with these issues, sooner rather than later, if it wants to recapture and grow beyond the leading economic role it led before the advent of Covid 19.
References
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/china-ground-zero-future-pandemic-180965213/
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019
https://www.who.int/influenza/human_animal_interface/influenza_h7n9/en/