As a continuation of Rui Sasaki’s essay in the monthly magazine WiLL, this article examines the Chinese Communist Party’s culture of concealment over the new pneumonia, the reality in Wuhan and Hubei where political stability was prioritized over human life, the custom of eating wild animals, and links with SARS and ASF.

February 27, 2020
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.
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
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.