How Bush and Obama Ceded the World Health Organization to China, Increasing Risk of Pandemics Like CoronavirusNewsweek, Apr 14, 2020, Bill Powell
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The move will be controversial, given the optics of cutting off funding to the world's primary public health agency in the midst of a pandemic. But the WHO does have questions to answer, particularly as to when it really knew when the virus was spread human to human. On December 31, the government of Taiwan, which China blocks from being a member of the the WHO because it regards Taipei as a renegade province, got in touch with WHO to say that the mysterious disease in Wuhan bore similarities to SARS, the disease that China tried to cover up in 2003. SARS, like COVID-19, was transmissible human to human.
Less well understood in this debacle is the role that the United States, and its allies in the developed world, played in allowing Beijing to become so influential in the organization, with consequences that now appear to be ruinous. The coronavirus catastrophe is the second massive "China shock" to hit the United States and the rest of developed world in the last 20 years. The first unfolded in slow motion, in the years after Beijing, with the U.S's enthusiastic support, joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. What followed over the next decade and a half was, in the words of a landmark 2016 study by three U.S. economists for the National Bureau of Economic Research, "an epochal shift in patterns of world trade."
In industry after industry—including, we now learn, the pharmaceutical and medical equipment industry— large companies shifted their supply chains out of the United States and into China, lured by the extraordinarily plentiful and cheap labor available there. Entire industries were hollowed out, and in the Rust Belt in particular, entire towns were devastated.
The bet that the U.S. political and economic establishments made was straightforward: that as China prospered, its authoritarian style of government would mellow, someday perhaps going the way of South Korea or Taiwan and embracing democracy. The costs imposed on blue collar, working class America would thus, in this view, be worth it.
The way successive U.S. administrations, first Bill Clinton's, then Bush's and Obama's, dealt with China was fundamentally rooted in that hope. Clinton, in his last month in office, managed to get Congress to extend "permanent normal trade relations" to China, a critical step on the way to WTO membership. The next year China joined the WTO, and the Chinese economic miracle was jump-started. Obama's Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's views on economic engagement were little different than those of his predecessor, former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson. That was fine with Obama, particularly during his first term.
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