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With the containment of Covid-19 nowhere in sight, a war of words has broken out between the United States and China about the culpability of the latter for the worldwide spread of the deadly virus. US President Donald Trump fired the first salvo by repeatedly referring to the novel coronavirus as the ‘Chinese virus’. Although Trump has since promised to forgo that epithet, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stepped into the void by insisting at the recent virtual meeting of the G7 that the virus be characterised as the ‘Wuhan virus’. His demand that the term be used in the joint statement normally issued after such a conclave resulted in the cancellation of the statement.

Other nations rejected the term as being unnecessarily divisive at a time when international cooperation is essential to combat Covid-19. However, Pompeo maintained that it was important to point out that the virus came from the Chinese city and that China’s government failed in its duty to warn the world about the dangers. Similarly, a UN Security Council statement on Covid-19 has been stymied by America’s insistence that China be singled out as the country of origin.

The Chinese have hit back at the US by indirectly accusing it, through obviously government-encouraged posts on social media, of being behind the manufacture and spread of the virus. Conspiracy theories originating from China have implied that US government agencies were testing the virus as a biological weapon for use in times of war.

Observers have also criticised World Health Organization, particularly its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, not only for underplaying the global threat posed by the virus but also for protecting China from blame for not having publicly acknowledged the imminent threat of the disease and the possibility of its global spread. They point to the fact that Tedros, in a statement on 23 January when the virus was raging in Wuhan and spreading to other parts of China, declared that ‘China has taken measures it believes appropriate to contain the spread of coronavirus in Wuhan and other cities. We hope that they will be both effective and short in their duration. For the moment, WHO does not recommend any broader restrictions on travel or trade.’

That statement clearly implied that it was safe to travel to China and to permit Chinese nationals to travel abroad at a time when infections and deaths were multiplying and when it was the duty of the WHO to warn the global community of dangers of unrestricted travel to and from China. Such a warning could have saved thousands of lives. Some critics have extrapolated from the WHO’s decision not to pin blame on China for the virus, and especially for its failure to report it quickly, that the organisation was trying to shield Beijing from blame because it was a major contributor to the WHO’s budget at a time when the US and Europe had been cutting down their contributions.

The argument about the culpability of China’s autocratic regime gained additional strength with the revelation that eight Chinese doctors who acted as whistleblowers about the virus were summarily discredited by the Chinese government as rumour-mongers. One of the eight doctors, Li Wenliang, unfortunately succumbed to the disease soon after Beijing’s effort to discredit him and his colleagues.

The sequence of events makes plain that the Chinese regime is primarily responsible for hiding the outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan and delaying publicising it and, consequently, for the great havoc it has caused in the world. No amount of whataboutery can hide this fact.

However, the US tactic of public name-calling of China on this issue isn’t simply based on altruistic considerations; it’s also motivated by strategic and political factors. Washington is especially worried that its inability to control the virus and find antidotes to it could not only lead to loss of face but also in the long run irretrievably erode its position as the pre-eminent global power with the capacity to set the international security and economic agendas.

Several American commentators have made clear that the US’s failure to act quickly and lead the world in finding a solution to the crisis could in the long run result in a reversal in the global pecking order with the US losing its position to China. Explicitly laying the blame on China in international forums for its duplicity and complicity in spreading the global pandemic could do much to put China in the dock and protect America’s position in that pecking order.

But, these political and strategic considerations apart, it cannot be denied that China must be held responsible for this catastrophe. The very least it should do is compensate the rest of the world for the economic losses incurred. Furthermore, Tedros should not be absolved of blame for his part in facilitating, whether deliberately or unwittingly, the spread of Chinese falsehoods. He must be forced to resign if he is unwilling to step down voluntarily.

Only drastic measures like these will send the signal to rogue states and to international public functionaries that the global community will no longer tolerate such irresponsible actions and that those committing them will be held accountable and made to pay for their sins.

Rank the threats, risks and challenges the South Pacific faces.

What’s most significant? What matters most in the lives of islanders?

Putting things in order of importance appeals to the orderly minds of public servants and the ordering minds of politicians. Journalists have always loved lists (even before clickbaiting became an art form). Ranking must look beyond headlines to define what really matters.

Using headlines, Canberra puts the China challenge on top. Certainly, the South Pacific is passionate about climate change. Both are in the top five, but neither is on top, in my list of the biggest threats, risks and challenges for the South Pacific:

1. Human security and state security

2. Climate change

3. Natural disasters

4. Natural resources

5. China

So, in reverse order …

5. China: Canberra judges that China wants to become the dominant strategic power in the islands, with military reach and bases to match. As I put it in 2018: ‘Australia today sees its strategic interests in the South Pacific directly challenged by China.’

Not since World War II and the Cold War have the islands been so strategically relevant—and that’s a view from the Pacific Islands Forum.

The region is waking to the China challenge. It’s manageable. It has to be, because China offers plenty of upside, as the Australian economy attests. China has economic reach but little soft power.

Canberra worries about China’s ability to buy island elites. As the switch of diplomatic recognition by Solomon Islands shows, Beijing can buy a government, but it’s harder to buy a people and a country.

Australia needs to have confidence in our shared history with the South Pacific—the breadth, the depth and the intricate, strong linkages. The islands know how to bargain; they’ve been dealing with the arrival of big powers for 250 years. China is being judged on its performance and it’s not winning everything.

4. Natural resources: A set of assets with lots of risks attached. The islands strive to protect and use their fishery resources. Today, tuna rates as a relative success story, while the tropical forests are a tragedy.

The dwindling, ravaged forests of Melanesia show what happens when extraction becomes exploitation, flavoured by corruption. Logging has been unsustainable and often illegal. Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands are the biggest sources of tropical logs for China. Global Witness says log exports from the Solomons are more than 19 times a conservative estimate of the annual sustainable harvest.

Individual nations have done poorly on logging, compared to the collective action of the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency, which works to manage, monitor and control the distant-water fleets from China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

Logging and fisheries offer lessons and cautions as the islands consider future prospects for exploiting seabed resources.

3. Natural disasters: The peoples of the South Pacific inhabit an environment that’s as harsh as it is beautiful. Island countries are among the most vulnerable in the world to natural disasters.

The 2019 World Risk Index lists four Pacific island countries among the top 10 most at-risk countries, with Vanuatu ranked first, Tonga third, Solomon Islands fourth, and Papua New Guinea sixth.

In addition to the force of nature, the index assesses government and society and the ability to respond to emergency: ‘The more fragile the infrastructure network, the greater the extent of extreme poverty and inequality and the worse the access to the public health system, the more susceptible a society is to natural events.’

2. Climate change: A huge threat, but a powerful unifier—something island leaders and their nations can all agree on.

The South Pacific has securitised climate change as its top security threat. In the words of the Pacific Islands Forum’s 2018 Boe declaration: ‘We reaffirm that climate change remains the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific and our commitment to progress the implementation of the Paris Agreement.’

The forum’s declaration last year was even louder on the threat to the survival of the Blue Pacific:

Right now, climate change and disasters are impacting all our countries. Our seas are rising, oceans are warming, and extreme events such as cyclones and typhoons, flooding, drought and king tides are frequently more intense, inflicting damage and destruction to our communities and ecosystems and putting the health of our peoples at risk.

Accepting the force of those statements, how is this only at number 2? The answer is to see the hierarchy in terms of power and responsibility.

Island leaders can unite and campaign on climate change because, as an old pop song puts it, they’re Not responsible.

Island leaders certainly aren’t responsible for global warming. Talking about the danger unites nations and puts leaders on the diplomatic offensive. Yet it’s a way for leaders not to talk about their core responsibility to deal with the greatest challenge facing the islands—the needs of their own people.

The ordering offered by the forum’s Boe declaration has a big ‘not responsible’ flavour. The first two points of the declaration are about climate change and the dynamic geopolitics of ‘an increasingly crowded and complex region’.

The third point in the Boe document is where the leaders step forward to claim ‘stewardship’ of the Blue Pacific. Not until point 7 of the declaration does an expanded concept of security arrive. Even then, human security is discussed in terms of outside ‘humanitarian assistance, to protect the rights, health and prosperity of Pacific people’. It’s an indirect way to discuss the biggest threat, which is also the major responsibility.

1. Human security and state security: In all its forms—social, health, economic and political—the security of the islands and their peoples is merging into traditional security threats.

The islands are strong societies with weak governments. The societies stretch and strain while the governments get no stronger.

The traditional stabilisers of village, clan and religion are shaken. The challenges of modernisation come from outside and inside.

It’s flip, but more than alliteration, to say South Pacific cities are as challenged by sewerage as they are by sea level. The ocean tide coming in matches the tide of those leaving the villages for Pacific towns and cities. The islands grapple with urbanisation.

Health problems abound. Colin Tukuitonga—a doctor from Nuie who was head of the Pacific Community from 2014 until recently—says the climate crisis is matched by the health crisis:

Noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes and heart disease cause three out of four deaths in the Pacific. These conditions are fuelled by a pipeline of risk factors such as high levels of smoking, unhealthy diets and reduced levels of physical activity. These conditions cause considerable personal costs such as blindness and kidney and heart failure.

In the South Pacific country most important to Australia, Papua New Guinea, Covid-19 adds to PNG’s economic, fiscal and social crisis.

The islands have the youth bulge that brings revolutions. Australia worries quietly about a breakdown of state legitimacy and capacity among the neighbours.

Thinking about likely flashpoints in the manner of the Oz military, John Blaxland offers a crisis scorecard for the coming decade, with 10 being the highest probability. Bougainville’s quest for independence from PNG is an 8. The prospect of a breakdown in law and order in the island arc, as happened in Timor-Leste and Tonga in 2006, and repeatedly in Solomon Islands in the last two decades, is also an 8.

The threat hierarchy lines up the problems and then poses stark questions about need and responsibility.

Papua New Guinea faces its most critical economic, fiscal and social crisis since independence in 1975. This dangerous mix is largely unrelated to the coronavirus sweeping the world, despite attempts by some PNG leaders to claim otherwise.

PNG so far has just one confirmed case of Covid-19. But when the virus takes hold there, as it surely will, it will have a massive and tragic impact on the nation’s 10 million people.

The health system in PNG is wholly incapable of addressing a major upsurge in any illness or disease, let alone Covid-19. It has already started affecting tourism, travel and the nation’s airlines, but so far the impact remains comparatively minor. That will change quickly as the virus escalates.

It’s disappointing that leaders who have generally been upfront about the extent of the nation’s economic problems are now trying to shift the responsibility away from poor policies and unsatisfactory fiscal management that long predate the virus outbreak.

The real danger in this approach, which won’t fool thinking people in PNG, is that the virus may be used as an excuse for the tough decisions that their leaders can no longer avoid addressing. The people will doubtless be told the nation will recover from the impact of the virus, but those in charge may ignore or downplay the economic and fiscal challenges and their likely consequences.

The level of government debt is approaching 40% of GDP. The 2020 budget is clearly in serious difficulty, even after a substantial projected deficit is funded (if it can be funded). The economy is in decline and the government can’t evade its share of the responsibility for that.

Investment and confidence in the mining and oil and gas sectors have never been worse. The Papua LNG Project is effectively on hold. The Wafi Mine is in a similar position, and even the Ramu Nickel Mine expansion is off. The collapse in resource-sector-related construction is not only affecting employment and business, but also putting real pressure on foreign reserves and government revenue.

The government is understood to be in detailed negotiations with the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank on a budget support and debt management program reportedly worth around A$2 billion.

That will mean accepting tough IMF and ADB conditions.

These are certain to include a devaluation of the PNG kina, which has been propped up by the central bank. Any devaluation will boost exporters in the mining, oil and gas, and agricultural sectors. But it will force up the cost of imports that PNG remains too dependent on, such as rice and fresh milk, as well as consumer appliances and vehicles.

The IMF and ADB will undoubtedly demand massive cuts in public spending, especially recurrent spending on salaries and wages and related bureaucratic costs.

That will all be very tough medicine for Prime Minister James Marape and his government to have to swallow just two years out from the next national elections.

The real danger is that the government will try to bail itself out by another route—a massive debt management loan from the People’s Republic of China. The impact of the coronavirus on China’s economy might mitigate against that, but it’s still not off the agenda.

Soon after his election,  Marape was in discussions with the Chinese embassy in Port Moresby about a total debt restructuring funded by China.

Last November, Australia’s urgent loan of $440 million helped finance the 2020 budget. It replaced a similar loan being negotiated with China.

What Australia must not do now is allow the PNG government to drive it into a bidding war with China to bail out the economy.

The most effective way to avoid that happening is to use our influence with both the IMF and the ADB to ensure that whatever package is agreed on is not dominated by funding, and control, from China.

The ADB has a generally good record in PNG, influenced largely by Japan, South Korea and Australia. But China is clearly playing a greater role in the bank, and of course in the IMF.

Just weeks ago, the contract for a major upgrade of the Kavieng airport in New Ireland province was awarded to the China Railway Construction Company, the latest example of the massive presence of Chinese-state-owned entities across PNG.

There may be limited support among Australians for increased aid, especially if it comes in the form of budget and debt bailouts rather than direct assistance to address health, poverty and education challenges. And we have to expect that Pacific island countries that are less resource rich, and more dependent on tourism, such as Fiji and Vanuatu, will seek Australia’s help in the coming months.

It’s overwhelmingly in Australia’s interest to help PNG and the South Pacific deal with the consequences of the coronavirus as it spreads. But we need to keep a very close eye on our neighbour’s growing economic and fiscal crisis. And we must ensure that Beijing isn’t allowed to broaden and strengthen its already extensive hold on key sectors of the PNG economy through a desperate arrangement that would not be in the interests of the people of PNG.

The new coronavirus, Covid-19, has spread to more than 130 countries—bringing social disruption, economic damage, sickness and death—largely because authorities in China, where it emerged, initially suppressed information about it. And yet China is now acting as if its decision not to limit exports of active pharmaceutical ingredients and medical supplies—of which it is the dominant global supplier—was a principled and generous act worthy of the world’s gratitude.

When the first clinical evidence of a deadly new virus emerged in Wuhan, Chinese authorities failed to warn the public for weeks and harassed, reprimanded and detained those who did. This approach is no surprise: China has a long history of shooting the messenger. Its leaders covered up severe acute respiratory syndrome, another coronavirus, for over a month after it emerged in 2002, and held the doctor who blew the whistle in military custody for 45 days. SARS ultimately affected more than 8,000 people in 26 countries.

This time around, the Chinese Communist Party’s proclivity for secrecy was reinforced by President Xi Jinping’s eagerness to be perceived as an in-control strongman, backed by a fortified CCP. But, as with the SARS epidemic, China’s leaders could keep it under wraps for only so long. Once Wuhan-linked Covid-19 cases were detected in Thailand and South Korea, they had little choice but to acknowledge the epidemic.

About two weeks after Xi rejected scientists’ recommendation to declare a state of emergency, the government announced heavy-handed containment measures, including putting millions in lockdown. But it was too late. Many thousands of Chinese were already infected with Covid-19, and the virus was rapidly spreading internationally. US National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien has said that China’s initial cover-up ‘probably cost the world community two months to respond’, exacerbating the global outbreak.

Beyond the escalating global health emergency, which has already killed thousands, the pandemic has disrupted normal trade and travel, forced many school closures, roiled the international financial system and sunk global stock markets. With oil prices plunging, a global recession appears imminent.

None of this would have happened China had responded quickly to evidence of the deadly new virus by warning the public and implementing containment measures. Indeed, Taiwan and Vietnam have shown the difference a proactive response can make.

Taiwan, learning from its experience with SARS, instituted preventive measures, including flight inspections, before China’s leaders had even acknowledged the outbreak. Likewise, Vietnam quickly halted flights from China and closed all schools. Both responses recognised the need for transparency, including updates on the number and location of infections, and public advisories on how to guard against Covid-19.

Thanks to their governments’ policies, both Taiwan and Vietnam—which normally receive huge numbers of travellers from China daily—have kept total cases to fewer than 60. Neighbours that were slower to implement similar measures, such as Japan and South Korea, have been hit much harder.

If any other country had triggered such a far-reaching, deadly, and above all preventable crisis, it would now be a global pariah. But China, with its tremendous economic clout, has largely escaped censure. Nonetheless, it will take considerable effort for Xi’s regime to restore its standing at home and abroad.

Perhaps that’s why China’s leaders are publicly congratulating themselves for not limiting exports of medical supplies and active ingredients used to make medicines, vitamins and vaccines. If China decided to ban such exports to the United States, the state-run news agency Xinhua recently noted, the US would be ‘plunged into a mighty sea of coronavirus’. China, the article implies, would be justified in taking such a step. It would simply be retaliating against ‘unkind’ US measures taken after Covid-19’s emergence, such as restricting entry to the US by Chinese and foreigners who had visited China. Isn’t the world lucky that China is not that petty?

Maybe so. But that is no reason to trust that China won’t be petty in the future. After all, China’s leaders have a record of halting other strategic exports (such as rare-earth minerals) to punish countries that have defied them.

Moreover, this is not the first time China has considered weaponising its dominance in global medical supplies and ingredients. Last year, Li Daokui, a prominent Chinese economist, suggested curtailing Chinese exports of active pharmaceutical ingredients to the US as a countermeasure in the trade war. ‘Once the export is reduced’, Li noted, ‘the medical systems of some developed countries will not work’.

That is no exaggeration. A US Department of Commerce study found that 97% of all antibiotics sold in the US come from China. ‘If you’re the Chinese and you want to really just destroy us’, Gary Cohn, former chief economic adviser to US President Donald Trump, observed last year, ‘just stop sending us antibiotics’.

If the spectre of China exploiting its pharmaceutical clout for strategic ends were not enough to make the world rethink its cost-cutting outsourcing decisions, the unintended disruption of global supply chains by Covid-19 should be. In fact, China has had no choice but to fall behind in producing and exporting pharmaceutical ingredients since the outbreak—a development that has constrained global supply and driven up the prices of vital medicines.

That has already forced India, the world’s leading supplier of generic drugs, to restrict its own exports of some commonly used medicines. Almost 70% of the active ingredients for medicines made in India come from China. If China’s pharmaceutical plants don’t return to full capacity soon, severe global medicine shortages will become likely.

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the costs of Xi’s increasing authoritarianism. It should be a wake-up call for political and business leaders who have accepted China’s lengthening shadow over global supply chains for far too long. Only by loosening China’s grip on global supply networks—beginning with the pharmaceutical sector—can the world be kept safe from the country’s political pathologies.

It may seem preposterous to suggest that the outbreak of the new coronavirus, Covid-19, has imperilled the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, especially at a time when the government’s aggressive containment efforts seem to be working. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the political implications of China’s biggest public health crisis in recent history.

According to a New York Times analysis, at least 760 million Chinese, or more than half the country’s population, are under varying degrees of residential lockdown. This has had serious individual and aggregate consequences, from a young boy remaining home alone for days after witnessing his grandfather’s death to a significant economic slowdown. But it seems to have contributed to a dramatic fall in new infections outside Wuhan, where the outbreak began, to low single digits.

Even as China’s leaders tout their progress in containing the virus, they are showing signs of stress. Like elites in other autocracies, they feel the most politically vulnerable during crises. They know that, when popular fear and frustration is elevated, even minor missteps could cost them dearly and lead to severe challenges to their power.

And ‘frustration’ is putting it mildly. The Chinese public is well and truly outraged over the authorities’ early efforts to suppress information about the new virus, including the fact that it can be transmitted among humans. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the uproar over the 7 February announcement that the Wuhan-based doctor Li Wenliang, whom the local authorities accused of ‘rumour-mongering’ when he attempted to warn his colleagues about the coronavirus back in December, had died of it.

With China’s censorship apparatus temporarily weakened—probably because censors hadn’t received clear instructions on how to handle such stories—even official newspapers printed the news of Li’s death on their front pages. And business leaders, a typically apolitical group, have denounced the conduct of the Wuhan authorities and demanded accountability.

There is no doubt that the authorities’ initial mishandling of the outbreak is what enabled it to spread so widely, with healthcare professionals—more than 3,000 of whom have been infected so far—being hit particularly hard. And despite the central government’s attempts to scapegoat local authorities—many health officials in Hubei province have been fired—there are likely to be more questions about what Chinese President Xi Jinping knew.

Not surprisingly, Xi has been working hard to repair his image as a strong and competent leader. After the central government ordered the lockdown of Wuhan in late January, Xi appointed Premier Li Keqiang to lead the coronavirus taskforce. But the fact that it was Li, not Xi, who went to Wuhan seemed to send the wrong message, as Xi realised in the subsequent days.

On 3 February, at a Politburo Standing Committee meeting, Xi took an unusually defensive tone in a speech that smacked of damage control. While Xi admitted that he had learned of the outbreak before he sounded the alarm, he emphasised his personal role in leading the fight against the virus.

On 10 February, Xi made a series of public appearances in Beijing, aimed at reinforcing the impression that he is firmly in command. Three days later, he sacked the party chiefs of Hubei province and Wuhan municipality for their inadequate handling of the crisis. And two days after that, in an unprecedented move, the CCP released the full text of Xi’s internal Politburo Standing Committee speech.

Though Xi has apparently regained his aura as a dominant leader—not least thanks to CCP propagandists, who are working overtime to restore his image—the political fallout is likely to be serious. The profound uproar that marked those fleeting moments of relative cyber freedom—the two weeks, from late January through early February, when censors lost their grip on the popular narrative—should be deeply worrying to the party.

Indeed, the CCP may be highly adept at repressing dissent, but repression is not eradication. Even a momentary lapse can unleash bottled-up anti-regime sentiment. But what might happen to the party’s hold on power if Chinese were able to speak freely for a few months, not just a couple of weeks?

The most consequential political upshot of the Covid-19 outbreak may well be the erosion of support for the CCP among China’s urban middle class. Not only have their lives been severely disrupted by the epidemic and response, but they have been made acutely aware of just how helpless they are under a regime that prizes secrecy and its own power over public health and welfare.

In the post–Mao Zedong era, the Chinese people and the CCP have adhered to an implicit social contract: the people tolerate the party’s political monopoly, as long as the party delivers sufficient economic progress and adequate governance. The CCP’s poor handling of the Covid-19 outbreak threatens this tacit pact. In this sense, China’s one-party regime may well be in a more precarious position than it realises.