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MANILA, Philippines – An open society and international cooperation are keys to address the coronavirus pandemic, said an expert on Asia during an interview with Rappler CEO Maria Ressa.
In a Rappler Talk on Friday, April 24, political economist Nicholas Eberstadt said an open society “is necessary to combat the coronavirus.”
Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and serves as a senior adviser at the National Bureau of Asian Research. His work focuses on international security in the Korean peninsula and the rest of Asia.
“Because if information is suppressed, we know what’s going to happen. The best responses will come from societies that have the most open and free communications. Restrictions on press freedom and personal communications are going to be part of the threat,” said Eberstadt.
On the other hand, he worried that with the risk of “economic nationalism” due to the coronavirus, there might be “a lot less international coordination between governments.”
“If everybody is trying to save themselves without any attempt to work with others, it’s not going to turn out as positively as if we can have some sort of international solidarity,” he argued.
“I would say that populations and governments should try as best they can to check their nationalist impulses when recognizing…that one and one makes three, with international cooperation. So the sum is more than the totality of the parts,” he continued. “And it’s easy to say that, but it’s very, very, very hard to do. But we shouldn’t forget about it.”
China’s response ‘Orwellian’
Also in the Rappler Talk, Eberstadt criticized China’s response to the pandemic. The coronavirus was first reported in Wuhan, China. Within the first 4 months of 2020, it has infected nearly 3 million people worldwide and killed more than 200,000.
He said the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “has a completely malign influence in this crisis” because it “has the ethos and the ideology of a totalitarian dictatorship.”
“Because the Chinese Communist Party’s interests are not the health of the people, but rather the health of the regime, its response to the crisis was Orwellian,” referring to the dystopian themes of some novels by George Orwell, like 1984 and Animal Farm.
He argued that the Chinese government “tried to silence the truth tellers in China who were trying to blow the whistle and sound the alarm on the outbreak. They misrepresented what was going on. They stalled the world. They stiff-armed international researchers and health experts.”
The CCP, he continued, has “infected the international governing institutions that we rely on.”
“We’re going to have to think very hard – and it’s not going to be fun – about what we have done inadvertently in globalizing the Chinese Communist Party’s reach into the world economy and into global governance,” he said.
With the coronavirus also greatly affecting China on top of other controversies it has faced in recent months, Eberstadt assessed that the CCP “is in the midst of a deep crisis, that we see the powerful facade that has been built for this party, but we do not see the inner rot and weakness.”
“I don’t think we know yet how this is going to play out. But I would not believe the storyline that the regime is trying to promote, that they’re the all-powerful ones who have reacted successfully to this crisis, and they’re the model, and you better get out of the way or join on board or you’re going to be in trouble,” he added. “I think that big problems are coming in China, possibly not that far in the future.” – Rappler.com
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