China’s sloppy initial response to the novel coronavirus, its concealment of information, and the WHO’s clearly biased response deepened international distrust of China. The essence of the U.S.-China confrontation is not a trade war, but a battle of values between the liberal camp and the totalitarian camp.

March 8, 2020
Seeing the sloppiness of the initial response, the concealment of information, and the WHO’s clearly non-neutral response, the international community is also increasing its vigilance, realizing that if matters are left to China, the consequences will be outrageous.
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
Irremovable distrust of China
Returning to the subject of the novel coronavirus, on January 30, the United States issued a “do not travel / leave” advisory for all of China, and on the following day, January 31, it took measures to deny entry to foreign nationals who had stayed in China within the previous fourteen days.
Following this response by the United States, more than one hundred countries imposed restrictions on travelers from China.
China reacted against these measures, and on February 7, Xi held a telephone conversation with Trump, requesting that the measures be eased, saying, “The WHO is calling on countries, from a professional perspective, to stop overreacting,” and “China is taking the strictest measures throughout the country.”
After the conversation, Trump offered lip service on Twitter, saying, “The measures led by President Xi will succeed,” and “We are working closely with China to help!”
But he did not agree to ease the travel restrictions.
This is probably a sign that the United States now has an irremovable distrust of China.
Nor is it only the United States.
Seeing the sloppiness of the initial response, the concealment of information, and the WHO’s clearly non-neutral response, the international community is also increasing its vigilance, realizing that if matters are left to China, the consequences will be outrageous.
In its handling of this virus, the Xi administration exposed to the world that the Chinese Communist Party had not progressed at all.
They have learned nothing from the experience of SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, seventeen years ago.
No, rather, they have regressed from that time, to the point that then-President Hu Jintao is now being evaluated as having made a reasonable effort, in comparison with Xi’s grave failure this time.
The current novel coronavirus problem has made clear that the confrontation between the United States and China, which began with the trade war, is not limited to trade issues, but is a far more important “battle of values.”
In other words, it has made clear how fundamentally different the basic values are on which the liberal camp and the totalitarian camp stand.
The first move that vividly impressed the U.S.-China confrontation on the world was in 2017, when President Trump criticized China in the National Security Strategy.
Under the Bush and Obama administrations, America’s enemy had been defined as terrorists, and China had rather been positioned as a country that provided terrorist information.
However, in the 2017 National Security Strategy, this changed 180 degrees.
America’s real enemies were defined not as terrorists, but as states, namely China and Russia.
The two countries were positioned as “countries that seek to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests.”
China in particular was sharply criticized in strong terms, such as that it “seeks to displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific region” and that “China expands its power by threatening the sovereignty of other countries.”
In this way, the United States clearly expressed its strong vigilance.
Bodies of unknown cause of death in Hong Kong
The second stage came in May of the following year, 2018, when China was excluded from RIMPAC, the large-scale military exercise hosted by the U.S. Navy, the Rim of the Pacific Exercise.
More than twenty countries, including Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, participate, and China had also been invited in the past, but in 2018 its invitation was withdrawn.
China took the extremely rude action of sending an intelligence-gathering vessel close to the waters off Hawaii, where the military exercise was being conducted, in order to monitor the exercise.
In contrast to the United States pushing China away, Russia rapidly moved closer to China.
The People’s Liberation Army was invited to Vostok 2018, the Russian military exercise held in September of the same year.
It was the largest military exercise since the Cold War, with 36,000 military vehicles including tanks, 1,000 military aircraft, and eighty warships deployed, and a total of 300,000 troops participating.
Among them were 3,200 soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army.
It was the first time in history that the People’s Liberation Army had set foot on Russian territory.
In a speech welcoming the People’s Liberation Army, the Russian side said, “our allied forces, the People’s Liberation Army.”
In other words, the structure was established in which China and Russia would join together militarily and oppose the United States.
And the third stage was the speech by U.S. Vice President Mike Pence in the same year, 2018, which expressed America’s vigilance more concretely, and which was included in the January 2019 issue of this magazine.
He strongly condemned China, saying that it was continuing unprecedentedly bold military challenges and, in order to gain superiority and establish dominance in the fields of robotics, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence, was trying to steal American technology and intellectual property by any means.
He also touched on China’s suppression of speech and religion, and declared that China, which monitors every one of its citizens, is trying to turn society into the world of George Orwell’s 1984.
As the U.S.-China trade war escalated, in June 2019, large-scale demonstrations broke out in Hong Kong, and the abnormal repression by the Chinese Communist Party was broadcast to the world in images.
I wrote this also in my serialized column in Shukan Shincho, but in Hong Kong, in the four months since the demonstrations of last June, there were 256 cases of suicide, and in addition, 2,537 bodies of unknown cause of death were discovered.
This is a statistic announced by the Hong Kong Security Bureau on November 13.
According to the official announcement, an average of twenty-one bodies of unknown cause of death are being discovered every day.
This essay continues.