It is clear now that Covid 19 originated in Wuhan
China sometime in November or early December 2019. It might have been stopped
if the Chinese Government had taken the necessary steps early enough. Instead
they tried to prevent Chinese doctors from telling the truth about the illness
and repeatedly lied to the rest of the world about its nature, the danger it
posed and the true facts and figures which may have enabled us to protect
ourselves against a deadly illness. A large number of deaths just might have
been prevented and the economic damage, which will kill a lot of people too, might
have been avoided.
Every country has made mistakes. We are fighting
against the unknown. We don’t know the number of people worldwide who have been
infected. We don’t know the true death toll. For this reason, we don’t know
exactly what percentage of people who are infected will die. One of the reasons
we don’t know this is that we can’t trust the Chinese data, because we can’t
trust the Chinese Government to tell the truth.
There is a problem with regard to truth in China. It
is in part a result of China being a one party nominally communist state.
Telling the truth or believing the wrong thing can get you into trouble with
the Chinese state. But this ought not to prevent the Chinese Government from
telling the truth to the rest of the world. Why is it continually trying to avoid
blame by inventing bizarre conspiracy theories? The answer is that more
important to the Chinese Government even that communism is the need to save
face rather than tell the truth.
The Western system of morality is derived from Christianity
and depends on the idea that I have a conscience that tells me that I have done
wrong. It doesn’t matter if I get away with an immoral act, I still feel guilt
and after confessing my guilt and doing penance receive redemption. What
matters is the truth of what I did. I either did it or didn’t do it. God knows
my sin even if I can hide it. For Western morality what is shameful is if do
wrong without confessing it. Getting away with it is the shameful thing. It is
for this reason that in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov cannot live
with the sin of murder, eventually confesses and achieves redemption through
exile.
The Chinese system of morality is quite different it
is not based on the individuality of the Christian standing before God with his
sin. Rather Chinese morality is based on Miànzi [面子] which is usually translated as face. We
don’t really have this concept in the West though you sometimes find something
similar in medieval poetry like the Nibelungenlied.
What matters most for Christian morality is reality.
Did you sin or did you not? Even if you get away with it, God will record your
sins and reveal them on the day of judgement. By contrast what matters in
Chinese morality is appearance. How do I appear to other people?
Good conduct in Chinese society is based not on
Western individualism but rather on the group acting so that no one loses face.
Rather than admit to doing wrong the tendency is for the group to hide the
shame so that everyone saves face.
While people in the West are encouraged to recognise
our faults and to confess them, the Chinese tendency is to hide them. This
means that the Chinese have a different relationship to truth. They say what the
situation demands, so that both parties retain face. For this reason, it is
permitted indeed obligatory to lie if doing so preserves either one’s own or
someone else’s face.
The Chinese Government and the Chinese people in
general are not remotely honest about Chinese history. They do not discuss, the
horrors of the Revolution, the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution.
It as if the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests never happened. This is why the
Chinese Government is so concerned to prevent free access to the Internet. It’s
because it would lose face if the people knew about these things. In turn many
if not most Chinese citizens do not want to know anything shameful about their
country’s past or present because that too would mean they would lose face.
Faced with a devastating new illness the Chinese
Government found it shameful that once more a new threat to humanity had arisen
from one of its markets. Rather than face the truth and deal with the reality,
it chose to save face. But appearance cannot compete with a new illness that
multiples exponentially. But by the time the Chinese Government was forced to
face the truth it was already too late. Covid 19 had escaped from Wuhan, escaped
from Hubei and had flown around the world with the Chinese New Year
celebrations.
We need a new relationship with China that is not based
on saving face, but which instead is based on honesty, truth and an end to
lying, because the reality is that Chinese morality is killing people all around
the world.