Explaining the Intense Diplomatic Battle Between the U.S. and China

The Chinese Communist Party’s ‘Wolf Warriors’ have Secretary Pompeo in their crosshairs right now, but their agenda will outlast the Trump administration.

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During an interview on ABC News’ This Week on May 3, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stumbled when Martha Raddatz asked him if he thought COVID-19 is “manmade or genetically modified.” Pompeo responded: “Look, the best experts so far seem to think it was manmade. I have no reason to disbelieve that at this point.” 

Raddatz quickly pointed out that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which oversees the sprawling U.S. intelligence community (IC), rejected this claim in a statement just a few days earlier. The IC “concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified,” the ODNI explains.

“That’s right. … I agree with that,” Pompeo said, contradicting his response from just a few moments earlier. “I have no reason to doubt that that is accurate at this point.” 

‘The secretary of state’s misstep was unfortunate given the stakes. The U.S. and Chinese governments remain deadlocked in an information war over the coronavirus, its origins, and which parties are most culpable for the pandemic. And the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “Wolf Warriors”—diplomats who brashly defend the Communist party against all critics—are gunning for Pompeo. Along with President Trump, he’s their No. 1 target. As the Los Angeles Times reports, the CCP’s “Wolf Warriors” get their name from popular action movies starring a Chinese commando who battles various foes “led by a villainous American named Big Daddy.”

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  1. Avatar photo
    WKDawson

    I have only visited a few labs in China, and none in any institute of virology. However, I did work for a number of years at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID) in Toyama, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan (near Waseda University campus).

    In the institute, research groups were basically crowded in segments of about say 12' by 30' (4 m x 10 m). with books, desks etc, packed with the PI (principal investigator; i.e., the boss), the secretary, and 5 or 6 researchers. I was a computational scientist, so I didn't work directly with the animals (I kind of didn't like that part when I would think about what was being done), but as far as I can recall, the researchers had to clean the cages themselves.

    This is typical of everywhere I have worked in Japan, though in some places, the boss is separated from the workers. The places I've seen in China are not so different.

    So, frankly, with an incubation time of nearly two weeks and the possibility to infect other people during that period, if China's institute is anywhere like this, which I have little reason to doubt based on other labs I visited, it would mean that the research would have likely infected the other researchers and the secretary, possibly the boss. Since the secretaries tend to gather together for lunch and to chat in a slower period, they would have infected each other, and those other secretaries would have infected the rest of the lab. So the notion that a researcher got sick and infected people in the market really seems hard to believe because the research would have also infected most of the people in the institute.

    Some possibilities for a lab source that remain are that they outsource the job of cleaning the cages. ... or of course, that it came out of some trash from the institute, because some people who are very poor might have picked through some of the garbage for recyclable items. There might be avenues there, but I find it very doubtful that a researcher was infected because of the infection/symptoms cycle of COVID-19.

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    John Bowling

    Great article. It seems to me that the basic idea of "discourse power" isn't really that novel to the Western mind though. In fact, I'd say it's deeply embedded in modern American political praxis. Roots (or germs?) of the idea are present from the time of Plato and the noble lie. Plato envisioned a Republic which only properly functioned because something like a false narrative greasing the gears.

    Many later political philosophers weren't so bold as to "say the quiet part out loud" as someone likes to say (don't remember if that's a Jonah Goldberg line?), but the idea is clearly operative among many media figures and politicians.

    The only difference, I would argue, is that China is now learning to adopt the jargon of Western discourse. That is scary, because the CCP doesn't have the same boundaries or scruples as many in the west. They don't have strong internal ideological opponents the way America's political parties do. They can and will wield the stick, as well as the carrot, in a way that seems taboo to us.

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      Gene Godbold

      I wonder if using the "language of democracy" won't start to undermine the mental landscape of those who internalize it--even for the sake of subverting it. Language is a tricky mental technology.

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      Nick H

      It's true that our politicians are quite willing to forego the truth, and we've stopped expecting otherwise. I think what's different with the "discourse power" is that the Chinese expect that the powerful won't just get away with being dishonest, but that what they say will become the "truth", regardless of the facts. It's a complete redefinition of what the word "truth" really means.

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        John Bowling

        Maybe you're right. I interpret those sorts of claims without much metaphysical baggage. For instance, when people in the West use language along the lines of "Speak your truth!" or "Just share your truth." This way of speaking about truth usually doesn't have much metaphysical baggage undergirding it. (There is also among westerners a shallow form of post-modernism or relativism which has a little metaphysical baggage, but is applied selectively (and unreflectively) primarily to prop up values associated with cultural pluralism.)

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    Frank Vergden

    I actually watched "Wolf Warrior 2" once. It really is as silly as Tom makes it sound.

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  4. Token Liberal

    Sounds like an opportunity for the US to win with facts. Oops!

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    Nick H

    It sounds at first like the idea of "discourse power" is one that will be hard for most of us in the West to accept. The idea that the truth of a statement depends on the power of the person or country making the statement instead of on objective facts is contrary to how we work, or at least we like to think that it is. The past few years have made me reconsider that. Too many people seem to be willing to accept that what their "side" says is true and the other side is false, regardless of the facts. It's especially unfortunate that the attitude starts at the top. If we want to keep the CCP from winning the diplomatic war, it would help if we could get back to the idea that politics stops at the water's edge.

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      Gene Godbold

      Well, that certainly is a more natural boundary for tribalism than, say, a political allegiance or a sports team.

      I thought the Chinese take on discourse power was pretty interesting. They're obviously recognizing the valence that some terms like "liberty", "individual rights", "freedom", and "democracy" have in the democratic countries and how they feel they are handicapped when they come to the table.

      I'm all for starting a United *Democratic* Nations in which it takes at least two viable national political parties to join (like representatives from those parties actually have to win elections with regularity). That should resolve the ugly specter of having Saudi Arabia or China or Russia sit on the "human rights" council to suppress stuff. I'm not advocating dissolution of the regular UN, but there needs to be a place where like-minded countries can come together and see what can be done between them.

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    Pat Riot

    This will end up being an *enormous* boost to China and their standing in the world as they will have gotten through the virus with minimal disruption and the USA will have virtually destroyed itself.

    And the USA will show itself to be a paper tiger because for all of Trump's bluster he won't dare lay a finger on China right now because the global supply chain is not something that can be unwound in a decade let alone some number of minutes to fit inside of Trump's attention span.

    This is a classic case of, "if you shoot, shoot to kill". We're not even going to hit China *at all* but just fire some shots into the air. It's the worst case scenario.

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      Gene Godbold

      FWIW, I disagree. I think the CCP has squandered a couple decades of goodwill. The mostly liberal scientists I work with want nothing to do with Trump but they have been actively antagonized by what appears to be Chinese (government) obstruction. (Just because Trump is an idiot, doesn't mean the CCP aren't bad actors.) I think a lot of people (academics and industry) in both Europe and the Anglophone sphere are going to modify their activities in the next few years in ways that will not benefit China. War talk is foolish, but I bet there will be seemingly innocuous conversations about "resilient supply chains" and "redundancy" that will result in billions of dollars shifting away from China to places like India, Vietnam, Mexico, and even Europe and the USA.

      I also want to emphasize what I have said before. The Chinese scientists on the ground appeared to do all that might be expected of concerned humans to do to get to the bottom of the problems posed by the virus. This isn't about them, it's about the CCP.

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        WKDawson

        Xi Jiping seems basically a narcissist like our president, but quite cunning and intelligent, which partly makes up for that flaw. I think the biggest problem behind their screw up was that he wants to project the "we're one big happy China" image, and so everyone in any position of authority is afraid to ever make a call saying "Houston, we have a problem".

        I think COVID-19 may have finally taught us a very hard lesson on how we need to maintain diversity in our supply chains. Just like engineers (if they are encouraged to think and are genuinely listened to) try to consider all the possible ways something can go wrong and think of ways to wiggle out of them, we should also think that way with economies also. The models typically only assume a supplier and who can make it the most efficiently. So maybe, in a way, the free market has punished those who over-leveraged their production too narrowly, and the economic beating they are taking now for that will help them remember that next time.

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          Gene Godbold

          Yeah, XJ is, like, a *competent* authoritarian.

          I suppose that, *if* you agree with their agenda, then a competent authoritarian can be a good thing. I myself distrust the authoritarian impulse. Leadership is wonderful but I think that it can be distinct from authoritarianism and *needs* to be distinct from authoritarianism in a democratic republic like ours. In our case, the "leadership" needs to exist all the way down the chain with no servile functionaries.

          Wayne, I don't know if you like fantasy fiction but, if you do, I recommend "The Knight" and "The Wizard" by the late Gene Wolfe. They are wonderful stories but the protagonist exemplifies what I'm fumbling around at representing with words. They are also some of the best books I've ever read.

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        Pat Riot

        China's problem is not that they were initially secretive about some information about this virus, their problem is that they are a totalitarian dictatorship who use trade to export for that slavery to the rest of the world.

        We need to *fundamentally* change our relationship with them, not let them pull an Artie Fufkin and let us kick their ass, symbolically, because of this minor boo boo.

        The answer to China is the TPP: create a joint trade agreement with all of the free countries to gang up on China so we can cut them out of the loop and/or force them to make *actual* changes to their system (which would be done very slowly).

        Unwinding China from the global supply chain will be very complicated, will take a long time, and most importantly, will *cost a lot of money*: nobody is twisting anybody's arm to trade with China, we do it because it's cheaper.

        Biden is in favor of resurrecting TPP and Trump is against it. (That is why China would desperately favor a Trump victory in November but they play a long game and would never mess with our elections like Russia did). TPP is a good first step but it's a long road.

        But Trump's meaningless bluster will be *good* for China because they will (surprise surprise) going to spend a few billion shutting down their wet markets (because, as we know, that's the *only* way a new bug like this comes into being har har) and they will let a few million of their people starve a little as well to show they really mean it, and the $trillions in trade will keep flowing like never before.

        Or better yet, China takes the lead in the world (because we are no longer able to) and creates world-wide standards for animal safety, virus reporting and transparency, procedures for outbreaks, and so on.

        And China claims to be the one to do that since *they* were successful at containing the virus and the US is the #1 screw up of the world in this regard.

        So China spends a few billion and they are the heroes. And the trade keeps flowing...

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          Pat Riot

          Sigh... In writing that, it reminds me just how catastrophic it is that Trump is burning the CDC to the ground right now...

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            Gene Godbold

            I've done work with the CDC in the last two years. Trump did not "burn the CDC to the ground". They are hiring and modernizing and working on interesting projects. But their leadership at a variety of levels has been unusually *ineffective* in this crisis--for which they supposedly exist. When Julie Geberding (Director of CDC under GWB) publicly wonders what the heck is happening with your organization, something is seriously amiss.

            The CDC has always seemed to be playing catch-up to the NIAID as long as I have been paying attention (~1997). I don't know why.

            I pay attention to international standards for biosafety and biosurveillance and there is *no possible way* that the Chinese can ever become "leaders" in these areas. That's just crazy talk. Why? Because they honestly don't even want to know the truth about what is going on in their own country. A similar sentiment came out of Trump's mouth recently: our ability, limited in scope as it is, to track endemic disease apparently "makes us look bad". (It's freaking unbelievable what comes out of his mouth and fingers!)

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