Based on an essay by Rui Sasaki published in the monthly magazine WiLL, this article examines the spread of the novel coronavirus through the Chinese Communist Party’s culture of concealment, human-rights oppression, one-party rule, and the custom of eating wild animals. It discusses COVID-19, Wuhan, SARS, ASF, the plague, and the background of disasters originating in China.

February 27, 2020
The World Health Organization named it “COVID-19,” but I would like to name it “China Concealment and Xi Jinping Lethal Pneumonia.”
The following is from an essay by Rui Sasaki, one of the finest journalists of our time, published in the monthly magazine WiLL released yesterday under the title Disasters Come from China.
The custom of eating wild beasts becomes a breeding ground for new viruses.
An Unprecedented Disaster
Everything about it is an unprecedented disaster.
I mean the new pneumonia.
The World Health Organization named it “COVID-19,” but I would like to name it “China Concealment and Xi Jinping Lethal Pneumonia.”
If one abbreviates it by taking the initials of concealment and Jinping, it becomes vulgar, so I will not abbreviate it.
Leaving the latter aside, the official disease name has not yet taken root either, so in this essay I will continue to use the term new pneumonia.
Of course, I have no intention of insulting those infected or those who have died.
I state that in advance.
The ever-increasing numbers of infected people and deaths around the world,
the unprecedented measures of city lockdowns or restrictions on going out and movement across all of Hubei Province, the four directly administered municipalities of Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, and Tianjin, and more than 80 other cities,
the dysfunctional WHO, the World Health Organization,
the economic blow to the world and to Japan,
the impact on Japan-China relations,
concerns over the holding of the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games…
Just as with swine fever, CSF, which terrified pig farmers, today’s disasters come from China.
In March the year before last, President Xi Jinping amended the constitution to remove the rule limiting the state presidency to two terms and ten years, and played the forbidden move of becoming president for life.
Has divine punishment fallen upon him?
The new pneumonia appears to have brought about a serious political crisis that shakes not only the Xi administration, but also the one-party rule of the Chinese Communist Party.
The Wuchang Uprising, which became the starting point of the Xinhai Revolution in October 1911, also took place in Wuhan.
When severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS, spread, it was also during the transition period from the Jiang Zemin administration to the Hu Jintao administration.
It would not be strange if the four characters meaning dynastic revolution passed through the mind of Mr. Xi, who is extremely nervous about maintaining his regime.
Mr. Xi has called the fight against the new pneumonia a “people’s war” and has called on all the people to cooperate with the authorities.
However, there is no doubt that it is a man-made disaster brought about in the first place by human-rights oppression under one-party rule and by a culture of concealment born from self-protection and evasion of responsibility.
In particular, criticism has arisen even inside China that, in this disaster, political stability before the holding of the People’s Congresses in Hubei Province and Wuhan City was prioritized over human life.
As of mid-February, there were more than 70,000 infected people in China, and the number of deaths was close to 2,000, surpassing SARS.
In Japan, more than 160 infections had been confirmed, including cruise ship passengers.
A Japanese man who had been staying in Wuhan, the source of the outbreak, died from the new pneumonia.
By the time this essay appears, there is no doubt that these numbers will have increased further.
They Eat Every Four-Legged Thing Except Tables
Why do epidemics spread inside China?
In a word, even to an amateur eye, it is probably because the distance between humans and beasts is close.
It is not merely at the level of living daily life together with livestock in unsanitary conditions.
It means that wild animals commonly end up in the kitchen as ingredients.
Japanese people, too, eat whale, which would make some Westerners faint, and raw fish as sushi and sashimi.
Those Westerners, too, eat birds and beasts such as pigeons and raccoons under the name of game meat.
Therefore, we cannot criticize one another too much over other countries’ food cultures.
Even so, in the case of the Chinese, is the distance between humans and beasts not simply too close?
Since childhood, I was also taught that in China they eat every four-legged thing except tables.
This new pneumonia, too, is suspected of having originated at a seafood market in Wuhan.
Although it is called a seafood market, wild animals such as bamboo rats, which feed mainly on bamboo, masked palm civets, foxes, and bats are reportedly sold there as food.
In the case of Wuhan, there is a national virus research institute in the suburbs about 32 kilometers away, and suspicion has surfaced that experimental animals there escaped and came into contact with livestock, or were circulated in the market as food.
From the Japanese point of view they are grotesque foods, but according to a Chinese man I know, they are high-class ingredients that wealthy people like to eat.
In response to my interview, this Chinese man shook his head regretfully and said,
“I was going to return to Fujian Province for the Spring Festival and eat my favorite bamboo rat.
But because of the new pneumonia, I could not go back.”
This man’s top recommendation is shepherd, the hunting dog.
While using both hands to imitate a dog running, he said,
“Because it runs, its muscles are firm and it is delicious.
Doberman is also rare and delicious, but shepherd is more delicious.”
Let me emphasize this.
What he is talking about is not the speed of its legs.
It is the flavor of the meat.
In ancient times, the plague, or Black Death, which spread widely in the 14th century, is also said to have become a major epidemic because Mongol troops who invaded the Yunnan region of China brought to medieval Europe fleas carrying plague bacteria and infected rats.
It is also thought that repeated wars, which forced soldiers to procure food locally, including wild beasts, and repeated famines, which drove suffering people to reach for wild animals such as rats, formed the background that caused epidemics to spread.
More recently, there was SARS in 2003, which originated in Guangdong Province in southern China.
The suspected sources of infection were bats, masked palm civets, raccoon dogs, and rats.
The year before last, African swine fever, ASF, which does not infect humans, spread widely in China and has come right up to Japan’s borders.
Small animals such as rats are suspected as the source of infection.
In Japan, one possible route being considered is that infected pigs are processed into food such as sausages, and wild boars eat the residue, thereby infecting pigs at pig farms.
No matter how much the sanitary environment improves in the future, unless the custom of eating wild beasts, which appears to be the root cause of epidemics, disappears, the danger of epidemics will not disappear either.
This article continues.