Invisible wars – Part 2 : New Dimensions to Warfare
corona
By
Sunil Sabarwal
Wuhan Virus : A Conflict Analysis
Conflict is a better term than war in present Wuhan Scenario simply because biological confrontations will not be space or battle field specific and will remain obscure till unleashed. Such conflicts are not likely to be as visually dramatic as ‘Brute Wars’ since they will be contested in the invisible spectrum, the consequences however may be far more bone chilling and stupefying. After World War II, Wuhan Crisis has the fatalities and casualties to place it on the same pedestal as that of a World War. It is true that such warfare has many existential examples of usage of Biological Agents in pages of history, but they were certainly not as debilitating, as virile, as silent and as toxic. The world like in WWs also appears to be divided into haves and have-nots in this Wuhan Crisis. With China , North Korea and Pakistan on one end & being in China’s fan club are relatively unscathed, and the balance world on the other side. China also perhaps had learnt from WW II, to not open two fronts as Germany did and got bogged down at Stalingrad and finally met its nemesis. Russia, as such other adversary, has been kept relatively aloof to possibly first tackle the prime adversary – USA. Chinese Generals, since 1990s have realised the asymmetry between China and USA in a ‘Conventional Confrontation’ as evident in their prophecy ‘Unrestricted Warfare’ and appear to be tackling it the Ying -Yang way .
This Invisible warfare turns national conflicts upside down . “Brute Wars” graduated to “Brain Wars”. Clausewitz had observed that war in every period will have its own doctrine and weapons. Wuhan Virus Saga is proving to be a game changer of all polemics. War in 21st century aims at total annihilation of the enemy by adopting the “invisible” approach . Wuhan Virus-2019 perhaps is the invisible Chinese answer to the ‘Trade War’ launched by USA on China. It also corroborates successfully, the Chinese YING – YANG theory – within strength lay weakness and within weakness lay strength. It is furtherance of this doctrine that China has been espousing and preparing for over two decades now. Have no apparent FRONTS, no FLANKS & no REARS . Conflict though will have an apparent epicentre and a prolonged end but with a blurred invisible median of conduct – like a mirage striking between fact and fiction. Conflicts will also no more be an appendage of Destructive Munitions like Nukes or Missiles – and are now going to be in the grip of silent weapons like the acute BW strains.
“Some people, mainly experts firmly believe that the Wuhan Virus is a genetically altered biological-weapon that got unleashed. Two Scenarios are evolving, ONE – possibly a BW virulent strain that got out of control in the Wuhan Laboratory as most claim or TWO – perhaps, as a remote but possible chance, may have been used cleverly, clandestinely, deceptively but strategically as an Economic Weapon to counter the Trade War by USA (and EU) against China ? In both case, the end aim is to subdue USA.
What do you think?”
Alvin Toffler had observed in his “War and Anti War” that armies across the world mainly USA, have to change its orientation from “Space” towards “Time”. Wars are no more for gains through “Force”. It has changed from Brawny Conventional Wars to WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction) to Indirect Wars by Terrorists and Insurgents, to Smart Weapons – RPVs and Drones and is now in the Invisible Zone. In these designer conflicts the source and perpetrator remains anonymous, shrouded between facts and fiction and the reality is literally untraceable till it is too late . After the use of A-Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, USA faced intense criticism and internal backlash which is continuing till date. Perhaps it was thus that BW agents started getting prominence due to their silent usage and invisibility, silent reach and mainly leaving an environment shrouded in doubt about who,how and under what circumstances were they used while still leaving it in the realm of a possible natural occurrence.
Brian Beckett in his book ‘Weapons Of Tomorrow’ written in 1983 dedicates two entire chapters to Biological Warfare. He writes then that “extremely minute amounts of biological material can constitute the most efficient weapons science has ever developed”. He also states that this very capability creates a myth and unbelievability by a combination of state / government secrecy on it , dramatisation by the media and the fanned colour-full imagination of the masses about thriller writers & stories. Beckett says that inspite of Geneva Convention there is a serious threat of such weapons, specially since the genetic engineering is progressing by leaps and bounds. He says un-imaginable will be the efficacy of such weapons to annihilate enemy silently but surely.
Development and use of BW have been in news since decades. Almost all counties have been silently exploiting bio technology under the garb of immunological research. Numerous reported mishaps amplify this aspect, be it the Sverdlovsk accident in Russia killing over 1000 persons, reports of testing of BW agents mainly Botulin by USA, Japan and Germany during WW-2 or the Gruinard Tests in Scotland. Till a decade or so back, Gruinard area was still found uninhabitable since Anthrax was reported to have been tested there. America’s Vigo plant was also supposedly used to produce Botulin during WW 2. There are numerous reports of strains of Q Fever, Rabbit Fever, primitive virus strains and many other such agents being tried out / produced for military use. It must be noted here that all such information is mainly leakages from democratic nations, the totalitarian states, strongly and ruthlessly clamp down on any information osmosis .
The Geneva Convention, permits defensive biological research. But there is little alteration required to upgrade a defensive bio research into an offensive weapon development. Immunology defensive research requires to produce very low virulent strains for vaccines. These studies can easily be altered to convert them into a BW research by increasing the virulence, stability and incubation parameters. Emerging techniques of advanced genetic engineering gives an open ended unfathomable scope in this field. Brian Beckett had stated that even in 1980s, there were numerous reports of a highly virulent lung specific strains that could be bred by deliberately altering the virus proteins, thus altering them to overcome immunity with increased stability and modified incubation.
Invisible biological conflict will also tend to follow the principles of war, especially ‘simplicity of approach’ and ‘economy of effort’. It aims at evolving strength from own weakness by remaining covert and by reducing enemy strength into weakness by its virulent & silent nature. Conflicts now will have an obscure D-Day and a visible prolonged E – Day (end – day) but the conduct – the MEDIAN period, will be ruthless, silent and confusing to the adversary. The perpetration of this conflict will revolve around the realms of myth and reality and that is its greatest power it has to subdue the adversary. The target is devastated and while undergoing this devastation, it does not have the time nor clear analysis to counter attack due inability to firmly decide of how and what hit him and the question – was that disease a natural phenomenon. The most essential ingredient in such conflicts is the subservience and monitoring of intelligence and secrecy. Victory finally can only be assessed after the rout / destruction of the target is almost over and when the economic and political capabilities of the adversary appear shattered in terms of monetary power, social might and international dominance .
Erstwhile wars had bravado and grit as the glamour ingredients. The present designer conflict gets its ‘glamour’ from the blurred line of myth an reality. Brute wars required large factories, super production lines for war making machinery, proto-testings, logistics etc etc. Invisible wars can now be planned and perpetrated from small non-descript structures with utmost secrecy, like the Wuhan Lab that supposedly unleashed death, without warning of any build-up or propagation. Pertinent to note is that conflicts till now had Formation Operations Room, War Zones and Theatres, with tiers of logistics trains. The War Rooms of these conflicts will be the Offices of the Bureaucratic Secretaries or / and the Offices of the State Political Heads, the Hospital Control Rooms and ICU theatres, the ICMRs and the Media Studios of the Nation. All these entities will have to post-haste, up their ante and get a grasp of impending disasters to confront the fast arising fluid situations, fraught with self inflicting ailments by such attacks. Intense phschological training to satisfactorily face and salvage the deteriorating situation will also require a massive upgrade of the forgotten aspect of public health and medicinal research systems.
These customised invisible wars would also demand ‘customised soldiers’ like doctors , health care workers, microbiologists, research laboratories workers, medicine retailers, media and information warriors , panic controller and disaster management experts. They will have to be motivated and trained like the soldiers to face severe & adverse situations and to continue to fight under duress for prolonged periods at times disregarding personal safety. It is not to say that Soldiers in Olive Green would become redundant . But they may have reduced roles in such wars . Emergence of Bio -Weapons would render these erstwhile instruments of waging war as “reduced efficacy asset ”possibly in support.
Wuhan : Case Study
Reverting back to the Wuhan Virus spread to analyse the field propagation of a silent and invisible conflict.
The first two questions that arise on the Wuhan Virus epicentre are – Was it a natural mutated virus strain or a manual genetic modified virus and Was it spread by design or by default..?
The list of the factuals of the incident is long. The first major fact is that the genesis of the virus strain was in Wuhan. It is also a fact that there is wild animal wet market in close vicinity of a BL4 – Bio Test Lab, both located in Wuhan. It is a fact that the virus strain engulfed the Wuhan City and Hubei province but left Beijing and Shanghai relatively unscathed & while it fanned out all over the world, from New York to Brazil, from Australia to Italy, all over it was not permitted to go beyond Hubei district in big way. The other fact is that Wuhan has quickly recouped and is fast reverting back into normalcy. It is also a fact that China has now re-started its economic activity & commenced production and is now in a position to supply large demands of bio protection equipment all over the world. The next fact is that this Wuhan bio strain came into being, just before the Chinese lunar holiday season in which over 5 million Chinese people travelled world wide as potential carriers of the virus . It is a major fact that China suppressed the information from the virus hot spot in Wuhan and hid that the spread got initiated in November 2019. It was under denial that it is acute calamity till it was too late for world to react. China also suppressed the fact that the virus had spread from man to man and failed to clamp down on the tourist traffic it generates in the holiday season to the other parts of the world. The other fact is that though Wuhan was locked down & mothballed and the spread was ruthlessly contained from moving towards Beijing and Shanghai, it spread worldwide, especially towards and through Hong Kong which was under unrest at that time .
The virus spread is claimed by China to be from an infected animal in the Wuhan Wet Market which had a mutated virus strain and which infected first, in the vicinity of the Wuhan Market. This last fact has been readily lapped up by the social media but with time, the veracity of this claim has been questioned. Can a naturally mutated virus have such strong virulence & stability, to spread & infect world over. How is it that very close to the spot of occurrence there also exists one of the largest Chinese Laboratory conducting Biological Research and Trials. The coincidence is very strange. Is it also a coincidence that there were denials of any virus out break in Wuhan, till an acceptance was there that it was animal related, preceded by a clamp down on the market. It is also known that the market was thoroughly sanitised and all tell tale signs of the occurrences there cleaned and cleared. Was it removal of evidence or pure sanitisation. Presently, this the very dangerous market has reopened and business is as usual albeit with a shroud of secrecy and with a temporary wall around it to keep away prying eyes. Is the danger of an infected animal alluded so fast.
Conflict analysis entails analysis of each bit of information available and then permit collated indicators talk for themselves. These indicators are scanty media reports emanating from the epicentre and its neighbourhood. Media connectivity invariably permits some stray expression to filter out before they are clamped down by the state or removed. Some minor incidents may indicate incidents like harsh enforcement, cover up plans and counters, strange comments, remote expression by victims or disgruntled workers etc etc. All these are noted and analysed. Exaggerations and false reporting will be there but all of these must be taken seriously until fake accusations are separated .
There are scores of such reports but some randomly selected incidents emanating from Wuhan and its vicinity are placed below. All these indicate reasonably that the Chinese are very deceptive and can go to any extent to suppress and hide truth. Not only was the presence/outbreak of the virus hidden initially but even the mode of spread from man to man kept under wraps till beyond control .
Own conclusions require to be drawn form these reports on the veracity and fake differentiated from truth.
Indicator – A.
This is a internet report from a Chinese military intelligence officer possibly disgruntled. Only relevant portions are mentioned and rhetoric removed.
I occupy a high-ranking position in military intelligence & am also a member of the Chinese Communist Party. As a senior official near the top of the Party, I have access to a great deal of classified information and I have been involved in many top secret government projects. I have a doctorate from a leading university.
By now you will be familiar with the recent outbreak of 2019-nCoV. You will have heard that it originated in Wuhan, an industrial city in China, and that it came from an animal — most likely a bat or a pangolin — that was sold in a wild animal market. You will have been told that it is an influenza-like illness that the disease is highly infectious, it is dangerous only to the elderly or to those who have a compromised immune system. The official lethality rate is approximately 2% or so.
Last year, large-scale anti-government protests erupted in Hong Kong. The Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party considered these to be a grave threat to the integrity and stability of the motherland. The U.S. government and the EU both knew that the Chinese were secretly working on a biological agent that was supposed to make the protesters docile and obedient. Without going into detail, I worked on that project. We tried to develop a sort of spray that could be dispersed from helicopters or drones and that would lead to mental retardation and behavioural change.
Naturally, as Hong Kong is one of the most open and international cities in the world, the Party decided that it was too risky to release the agent in Hong Kong without first testing it. For this, it needed a great number of human guinea pigs. Two groups were identified for this. First, we rounded up a large number of so-called “Uighur Radicals” in Xinjiang Province and took them to what we called “training camps” We had already been using these camps for human experimentation for several years, but the Hong Kong protests meant that we redoubled our efforts. We exposed the inmates to various “alpha” experimental agents. As these were odourless and invisible, the subjects were not aware that they were taking part in medical trials.
Once the initial experiments had yielded a “beta” agent, it was transported to Hubei Province, where it was deployed in a special military testing facility near Wuhan. This was not even a particularly well-kept secret: the existence of this facility has been reported in international news. Even the fact that it is located close to the wild animal market is a known fact. Initial results were encouraging, as we saw significant cognitive decline and reduction in higher mental processing facilities. Essentially, our undesirables were becoming mildly mentally disabled, which is precisely the effect we wanted to produce in order to pacify the restive population of Hong Kong
Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that the Agent also had other uncontrolled serious effects. We decided that our Agent was unusable. It was far too destructive for our purposes. So the case was shelved.Our American friends got to know of the agent. They hinted that they wished to use it to resolve certain difficulties in Venezuela. The CIA was convinced that we had developed something very powerful and wanted to keep it to ourselves. They offered a great deal of money to one of our researchers. Foolishly, he agreed to sell them a specimen. We found out just in time for the handover and tried to stop it from happening. In the ensuing shoot-out, several dozen people were killed. The shoot-out took place at the wild animal market, which has been reported as the location of the “animal-to-human” transmission that started the outbreak. But, of course, there was no such transmission. it was just the location where the CIA was supposed to receive the sealed vial containing the Agent. The vial shattered when it was dropped by the traitor who had agreed to sell it to the Americans.
Once we realised that the Agent had escaped and would start to spread, we swiftly put all of Wuhan into lockdown. I was one of those tasked to manage the fallout of the contamination.Of course, we could not keep such a huge undertaking secret, so we decided to order our state media to report that a “coronavirus” had broken out in Wuhan. It was one of my colleagues who came up with the genius idea of pretending that people with the common flu suffered from the coronavirus. This allowed us to hide the true nature of the disease. Let me explain. It is currently flu season in China. When we realised that we could no longer control the spread of the Agent, we sent our men to all the hospitals and instructed all doctors to diagnose every case of the common flu as “coronavirus”. We came up with a new name — 2019-nCoV — and handed out “fact sheets” that described a made-up illness. The result of this decision was that tens of thousands of individuals who were simply suffering from a cold or flu were now diagnosed as having a mysterious coronavirus that, although infectious, was not often lethal. While this frightened the public, it allowed us to push the narrative that the disease was not that deadly; it also gave us time to prepare for the catastrophe that was sure to come by imposing a lockdown on Wuhan and other cities in Hubei Province.
Indicator B.
The Chinese President has been reported to be moving around in Wuhan wearing simple mask and walking freely talking to patients. The media pick up as below & reveals another story which must again be analysed independently.
if you look at the world news, you will see that Xi Jinping, our President, disappeared for approximately one week after the outbreak, before being seen again with the leader of Cambodia. You should know that the person who met the Cambodian leader was not President Xi. It was a body double who had, for many years, been trained to look and sound just like our President. President Xi is of course not careless enough to risk his own death. He is safely ensconced in a secret bunker underneath Zhongnanhai, the headquarters of the Party in Beijing. Nor was he the only leader who is in hiding. In fact, I can assure you that over half of all senior Party members are currently being imitated by trained actors who are following instructions given to them via special implants. Do you really think that our Prime Minister would risk his life by going to Wuhan?
Indicator C.
We are aware through media that Wuhan has a large laboratory involved in testing bio agents.
The report below is a third indicator that something is amiss there.
China till date has not actually admitted that the virus now devastating large swaths of China had escaped from one of the country’s bio-research labs. But subsequently, evidence has emerged suggesting that this is exactly what happened, as the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive titled: “Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced virus research” It sure indicates that China has a problem keeping dangerous pathogens in test tubes where they belong”.
What has not been told is that some Chinese researchers are in the habit of selling their laboratory animals to street vendors after they have finished experimenting on them.
Instead of properly disposing of infected animals by cremation, as the law requires, they sell them on the side to make a little extra cash. Or, in some cases, a lot of extra cash. One Beijing researcher, now in jail, made a million dollars selling his monkeys and rats on the live animal market, where they eventually wound up in someone’s dinner plate.
Indicator D
Fang Fang is definitely not the most famous living writer in China, but she is revered by hundreds and thousands of Chinese as the literary voice of COVID19-stricken China. She has now become famous for her Wuhan Diary posted on social media. Her fans in China are already proclaiming her to be the conscience of Wuhan.
She writes: On the night of February 7, Dr. Li Wenliang, who was reprimanded for warning about the coronavirus on social media, lay dead in the quarantine ward of the Wuhan Central Hospital. The same day, the first page of the Wuhan Diary was put up on Fang Fang’s WeChat account, and disappeared within hours. But before being taken down by China’s cyber censors, her Wuhan Diary had gone viral with thousands of re-posts. Fang Fang already enjoyed 3.5 million followers on social media even before she began chronicling her life during Wuhan’s quarantine. Wuhan Diary first appeared on day 14 of Wuhan’s lockdown. The latest page of the diary (as of this writing), entitled “Let’s see if you scare me!” was put up on March 20, on Day 57.
“Dear internet censors, you should let Wuhan people speak,” Fang wrote recently, as quoted by Kiki Zhao in the New York Times. “If you don’t allow us to express our anguish or complaints or reflections, do you want us to go really mad?”
Interestingly, throughout nearly two months of lockdown and three months since the central authorities confirmed and publicly announced the coronavirus outbreak, each entry in Fang’s Wuhan Diary has been consistently deleted by Beijing’s censors within an hour or so of it being posted on Fang’s social media page. Yet each post has gone viral before being struck down, being shared by millions of WeChatters within China and abroad.
But each Wuhan Diary post has also inspired hundreds of her supporters and eliciting comments from them. One comment reads: “Dr. Li Wenliang and Wuhan Quarantine Diary are ‘flowers of thought’ and ‘flowers of Wuhan’ that bloomed in the blood and tears of Wuhanese people during the epidemic period. Blooming in spring in early February, she is destined to be ‘cold and crystal clear’ and eye-catching. I hope she is always blooming.”
The controversial and at times acrimonious debate over Wuhan Diary touches on a wide range of issues – political, social, cultural. But a fundamentally disturbing aspect of the debate invokes the specter of the Cultural Revolution. A few days ago, an “open letter” written by a 16-year-old boy challenging Fang Fang, not only sent shockwaves through China’s netizens but it shook everyone who had experienced the 10 chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution – including Fang Fang.
The reason for the shock, according to Li Yongzhong, China’s leading anti-corruption scholar-expert, is that “our generation, including Fang Fang, always thinks that the Cultural Revolution has gone, at least our generation will never see the Cultural Revolution again.” But the open-letter by the high school student rekindled the memories of the nightmare that teenager Red Guards unleashed to commit violence, especially targeting intellectuals.
Thus readers of Fang Fang, and perhaps even some of her detractors who were wounded during the Cultural Revolution, profusely thanked her for her befitting reply to her teenage provocateur in March 18’s Wuhan Diary entry: “Son, all your doubts will be answered sooner or later. But remember, those will be your answers to yourself.” And hundreds and thousands of Wuhanese and people all over China continue to impatiently wait for her next Wuhan Diary page.
Indicator E
There are Chinese military facilities for Bio Warefare in our region and these could have escaped. i am very sure it was not released on purpose. Not even the dictatorial leadership of modern China which resembles the ancient empire more and more would do such a thing to their own people I hope. There are so many questions about this virus, not just the numbers of those infected and dead, but also about its origin.
As many have pointed out, the BL4 lab in Wuhan is not far from the market the virus is supposed to have originated from. This lab probably had a leak of a bioweapon. There are serious questions about the research labs in China and the security of the viruses they are studying.
Recently two researchers at Harvard: the head of the Chemistry Department, Charles Leiber, and a Chinese national, Zaosong Zheng, doing research in pathology at Harvard’s lab at Beth Deaconess Medical Center were arrested for possible espionage ties to China. Zheng was arrested for trying to smuggle biological research items out of a Boston lab and into China, aboard a commercial flight.
The kind of genetic research Zheng was doing can be used for medical and vaccine purposes but also for bioweapons research. It seems clear that China was actively trying to bribe U.S. researchers, and to infiltrate their labs to steal research that could be very dangerous if not handled properly.
It is worth asking questions about the level of security and safety of Wuhan’s BL4 lab, the viruses there and all of Chinas labs, especially when one of the top Chinese research scientists is trying to smuggle biological matter into China for testing in his lab, by hiding it in his socks. If we are not investigating the origins of the virus and these espionage incidents, then more pandemics will follow
Indicator F
The very first person who manifested the coronavirus hardly went near the markets where the exotic meats were sold, suggesting that the source could’ve been somewhere or something else.
(Why China is emerging as ground zero for new, mysterious diseases Coronavirus: China to Ban Trade in Wild Animals and Tighten Grip … Illegal wildlife trade goes online as China shuts down markets …Coronavirus: From bats to pangolins, how do viruses reach us …)
Indicator G
There is the BL4 lab in Wuhan and when the virus outbreak became public a very senior army official was put in charge of the lab. People’s Liberation Army’s top expert in biological warfare,Maj. Gen. Chen Wei, was dispatched to Wuhan at the end of January to help with the effort to contain the outbreak. But the lab is not used for developing bio weapons. The facility, known as the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, is housed within the Chinese Academy of Sciences and was specifically designed to help Chinese scientists “prepare for and respond to future infectious disease outbreaks,” This is collaborated by a 2019 report published by the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”
Without direct evidence we can only speculate.
Eating diseased bats is more likely. Wild meat, and bush meats produce health problems. “And then there is this little-known fact: Some Chinese researchers are in the habit of selling their laboratory animals to street vendors after they have finished experimenting on them.” So a lot of finger pointing to the Wuhan lab?
The End
The end is no-where in sight. The world continues to buckle and crackle under the Wuhan Pandemic. ‘Unrestricted War’ has literally unleashed itself. The virus strain is appearing unstoppable and the graphic spikes and coverage of the infections are increasing by the day. The economy around the world has crashed loosing trillions & wiping out many corporates and businesses and the stocks have plunged as much as 40 – 50 % with recovery no-where in sight, inspite of major economic boosts given by various governments. But the results of the spoils are starting to show. China shamelessly appears to have reached the economic pinnacle. Fortune 500 statistics are the proof. It has now clamped down on all travel into its country inspite of issued visas. Flash back to when it had admonished the nations who closed their borders to prevent virus spread, is shamelessly now doing the reverse blockade.
‘When China Rules the World : The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order’ is a book of 2009 by British journalist Martin Jacques. Jacques concludes that China’s future economic strength will heavily alter the political and cultural landscape of the future world. Martin Jacques argues that China will ‘fight’ for not becoming an appendage of a western-style society. China’s rise will signal the end of the global dominance of the west and the emergence of a world which it will come to shape in a host of different ways and which will become increasingly disconcerting and unfamiliar to those who live in the west. What he had not imagined was the blatant unethical events that may lead to this end.
Chinese Industry after initial hiccup of the internal clamp down, is back into production mode mainly from Beijing and Shanghai. What was once shortage of masks and respirators, are now being exported. BMWs, Teslas, Foxcon etc having production lines in China are all now in firm Chinese control and producing. Local industry is revetting up production and the stock market is appearing to bounce back. Chinese spree for acquiring distressed assets world wide at largely discounted market rates, is now a global phenomenon with billions of dollars flowing in from the Chinese Government as investments. So much so that Australia has set up a trade/ property barrier to thwart Chinese attempt to acquire assets in the continent. Many others will follow. China in other words has used its ‘unrestricted warfare’ to first export a curse and is now is in a position to apply balm to the world, literally on its knees, as also acquire lucrative assets across the globe steadily but shamelessly and unrelentingly increasing its economic influence world wide.
This conflict is also certain to set off another round of discussion on the merits of Democracy versus Authoritarianism. The irony is abundant. It was actually the authoritarian characteristic of the Chinese system that initially allowed the virus to spread but some democracies — notably South Korea, India and Taiwan — have done remarkably well in its initial response to the outbreak. Yet, the fact that China ruthlessly handled the internal epidemic by enforcing a draconian lockdown, while the world’s leading democracies dithered in its own response, will be used by proponents of authoritarianism to argue that their system is best equipped in emergency responses. USA, its main adversary and most of EU is reeling under pressure and have acutely outstretched medical resources with the government unable to decide wether to save its economy or its citizens. While large democracies like India is finding it strenuous to enforce lock downs due to opposition at religious and social levels. The best medical systems in the world are over loaded and in distress. But the unfolding scenario has shamelessly put China in the pole position of the economic world.
World Reaction
Events have literally taken China also by surprise. It failed to assess the aftermath of the invisible conflict. Missile, Guns, Warships are deadly but effect target area for few minutes causing immediate casualties. A Bombs in Japan had immediate primary effects for a few hours but the secondary fallout and consequent radiation lasted for years. America had then also not visualised the collateral damage fully. The Wuhan Virus strain similarly appears uncontrollable and untreatable, till now no ante-dote or a vaccine has been reported. Speculations are there, that China may have a protective antidote but China facing outrage around the world will find it difficult to announce / market it for fear of being nailed and castrated further.
At the same time, due internal public opinion, Japan, US, UK, India and most of the world is already expressing desire to draw away from trade dependance on China. Leaders of the world community have also reacted to Wuhan Virus and Occurrences there. The Trump administration and the Boris Johnson government – both countries affected profoundly by the novel Wuhan virus, have hit out at China, with President Trump terming Coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” though he later refrained from the adage and the Johnson Government officials alleging China of downplaying the infection by 15 to 40 times. Japan too has got disoriented towards Beijing, even as the number of Coronavirus cases in the country have witnessed a sudden spike after the Tokyo Olympics 2020 got postponed to next year recently. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe too has said that the country is on the brink of a major jump in the number of cases and the situation could escalate any time soon. (China-Japan relations have always been embittered with the memories of the Second World War when Tokyo’s germ assaults on China had caused widespread damage in the country). Japan however has become more direct in its criticism of both the World Health Organisation (WHO) and China. The Japanese Deputy PM Taro Aso has even gone on to say that the World Health Organisation might have to change its name to “Chinese Health Organisation”, during a speech in Japanese Parliament wherein he lent support to a petition terming UN head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus unfit for the role of the WHO chief.
Wuhan Virus & not China Virus, in line with the request the Chinese minister mad to his Indian counterpart recently, has till now claimed 48,000 deaths worldwide and infected over 10 lac people. As the impact of the Pandemic increases, so does the outrage against Beijing. Beijing on the other hand is trying all out to salvage its image internationally, by request, by coercion and by threat claiming that China was the first victim party to the virus. China meanwhile has a tough task at hand to salvage its deteriorating image before it can claim world leadership status. What will further dictate its emergence will be the path USA takes to reestablish itself. There is a long way to go for that.
In conclusion, one would say that in future now, military strategy for political and economic objectives will dictate the development of technology to suit the strategy. Nations who fail to learn and move with time will always be at the receiving end.At the same time it also dictates that “ If war was ever too important to be left only to Generals, modern conflicts are now far too important for it to be left only to the ignorant — whether in or out of uniform”. More than military leaders – political , economic and social leaders now have to grasp the nuances of “ Invisible Conflicts” and prepare to lead unto victory .
