Since The Pandemic Began, there Have been Three Outcomes from which We Haven’t Learned Anything.
Unfortunately, we haven’t learned anything from the pandemic in terms of having too much reliance on countries that don’t like our guts and where extreme authoritarianism reigns supreme, and we should be ashamed of ourselves for failing to find other markets where we could make our products, create new supply chains, and not rely on neo-Fascists for our survival.
I am saddened that we in the West, and much of Africa for that matter, haven’t learned anything from the epidemic in terms of our reliance on China for pharmaceuticals ranging from antibiotics and blood pressure drugs to cancer medications. We are also overly reliant on China to safeguard our tropical forests, which is a tremendous error in my opinion because the Chinese government doesn’t even care about the environment in their own nation — how can we trust them to enact climate change policies? Are we delusory or naive? Even before the pandemic, we let China…I mean what I say: we’ve let China get away with intellectual property theft?
As a Frenchman of Congolese origin, I perceive myself as coming from a Western country; from this vantage point, I regard China as a threat to our way of life, and our core values, due to its economic and military might. As a person of Congolese descent, I believe that China has created a debt trap for my country of origin and other African countries that are unable to repay China because the country has extensively invested in its infrastructure. I will go into further detail in this blog on how stupid most African societies are and what they could have learned from China, but for now, I must accept that Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are concerned that China may one day invade their countries; rightfully so because China doesn’t respect their existence either.
Many Southeast Asian countries viewed China positively until the country launched the South China Sea disputes against countries such as the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and others: their opinion of China as a peaceful country has evolved into an imperialist bully. I’m not claiming that every Chinese individual is a threat to the West’s survival; the problem is primarily with their government and those who do its propagandist bidding. I acknowledge that China is the world’s second-richest country by nominal GDP and the world’s largest factory, but China under Xi Jinping is not same China you and I knew under the administrations of Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao: Even China was still a dictatorship, the three past presidents of the People’s Republic of China were significantly more open to the West, and Western businesses were not treated with suspicion, just as they are now under Xi Jinping and his government. When Xi’s predecessors were in power, China’s economy more than quadrupled, a clear majority of Chinese people’s standard of living rose significantly, those administrations were not hesitant to address something that could pose a threat to world security, and so on. I also admit that the wealth divide in the country widened, but things were much worse in China under Mao Zedong; they’re not getting better under Xi Jinping who wants to be the new Mao Zedong.
The only thing I can say about Xi Jinping and his three most recent predecessors, except Mao Zedong, is that he at least wants to improve his country: can someone please tell me which African politician or administration from any African country (mostly Sub-Saharan) has succeeded in transforming their nation’s economy to the same level as politicians like Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao?
All they do is act like idiots who keep enriching themselves, and when the West, China, India, Brazil, Iran, and other countries call them out for oppressing their own citizens, both those African governments and the vast majority of their populations cry “Imperialism,” “Colonialism,” “Slavery,” “Racism,” “Oppression,” “Discrimination,” and this is why citizens from the vast majority of Sub-Saharan African countries are mocked everywhere we travel in the world because of the quantity of BS we choose to tolerate. We (Sub-Saharan African countries) should be booed for the things we continue to settle for that aren’t helping our societies or us as individuals: If I’m completely honest, I aim to call out my fellow Africans for our trash because we have no standards; we have no objectives. WAKE THE FUCK UP; SHUT THE FUCK UP, AND RISE TO NEW HEIGHTS, AFRICA! ENOUGH WITH THE FUCKING BLAMING COLONIALISM FOR BEING IDIOTS! I felt the need to say this because African standards are on the freaking floor.
Now that I’ve called out most of Sub-Saharan Africa for our shit, let’s concentrate on our naiveté when it comes to the current Chinese administration: The Chinese government has implemented policies that may be perceived as a threat to cultural preservation under the Xi Jinping administration, such as banning the Mongolian language in schools, and the government has not made efforts to educate their people on how to behave in the rest of the world when they travel as tourists, given that many tend to carry traits that are perceived as rude, dreadful, or unacceptable. What the Chinese government fails to recognize is that what their tourists do abroad reflects poorly on China as a country. China is willing to engage in financial intimidation and use its position as the world’s second-largest economy and the world’s largest manufacturer to weaponize its control over key supply chains; if we can’t see that and do a lot to protect our countries’ economies, we deserve what we’re getting from China.
We depended on China for our facemasks; we still do now.
When COVID-19 first debuted, it was difficult to obtain facemasks; there were occasions when the product was unavailable for months. According to a Voice for America journalist, there aren’t enough crucial medical supplies, such as facemasks, because China has stopped delivering them to the rest of the globe. According to the journalist, in the fight against the coronavirus, facemasks have become the most prominent sign of the fatal pandemic, worn by millions of people worldwide every day. This is when the Chinese government started sending goods to countries like Iran, South Korea, Japan, and Italy. Before Covid-19, China was responsible for half of the masks we have at our disposal worldwide.
Unfortunately, we have not been wise enough to use those tragic events as a wake-up call to relocate many of our mask factories back home and some of our facemask factories to countries such as India, which shares our values, and countries such as Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and others. It irritates me that many Western corporations manufacture their facemasks in China — what in the world do they know that I don’t? We never, ever learn, do we?
We still depend on China for our medicine.
According to Rosemary Gibson and Janaradan Prasad Singh, the authors of “China RX: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine (Prometheus Books), “we have failed to find solutions to resolve the weaknesses of the drug shortages we’re experiencing: this is not just a problem in the United States, it’s a problem throughout the rest of the Western world; I would even go so far as to say that drug shortages are an epidemic.” I don’t want to sound alarmist, but this is a major concern: if China ceased making active ingredients for our medicines, or just stopped exporting them, the price of our medicines would skyrocket, not just in the context of the United States, but the rest of the West and even the whole world.
The United States would have only two months before the country ran out of the pharmaceuticals on which our patients rely. For years, I’ve been wondering how our business leaders, and some of the world’s wealthiest people, who come from our countries, can be so cocky that they lack the cognitive awareness to understand how we got ourselves into this situation as countries. How could we have been so clueless as to fail to recognize that if we love our country, national security should be our priority? How have we not considered the implications of our reliance on China for our military?
We haven’t drawn lessons from the existing supply chain issues in other areas of our economy.
Supply chain issues have been affecting the global economy since COVID-19 began: to make matters worse, Vladimir Putin’s stupor over his decision to invade a sovereign democratic country that was never a threat to Russia’s existence or way of life has exacerbated supply chain issues, resulting in inflation; everyone has a story to tell when it comes to inflation, price rising when it comes to purchasing goods, and when it comes to their standard of living. Unless you reside on Mars, Saturn, Venus, Jupiter, Pluto, Neptun, Mercury, or Uranus, Vladimir Putin decided to send the Russian army into Ukraine, killing nearly 500,000 Ukrainians, or more in the process.
Think again if you believe China is supporting Ukraine in this conflict: China and Russia are allies, and both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have paid trade visits to each other’s nations, given that Russia has faced sanctions from free-market countries as a result of the chaos in Ukraine. Both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping seek to establish a new international order in which their fascist authoritarian philosophies may be imposed on unstable societies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that are anti-Western.
They regard the Western world as a collection of societies that are degenerating due to our values of equality amongst individuals of different races, genders, sexual orientations, religions, political opinions, and so on. We also believe that everyone has the right to make their own choices in life. People like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping believe in the superiority and inferiority of different peoples, and they don’t care about domestic violence and other societal problems, as long as it doesn’t affect their ego — you as an individual from those countries have to suffer in silence and not express your concerns.
These authoritarian leaders; I’m afraid I’d have to include Viktor Orban of Hungary, Donald Trump of the United States, and far-right groups around the world, particularly in the West because these are insecure people who are unable to utilize their common sense: They do not trust their own citizens to form their own opinions because they are afraid of the truth and being called out; this is why those authoritarian leaders and those from Third World countries choose to enrich themselves while keeping their own citizens in the dark, brainwashed and ignorant.
The rational fear about relying on China has been rising in the United States for years; the same can be said for other Western countries; this is one of the reasons we’re seeing the rise of Donald Trump and other far-right leaders in the freedom-loving world. It is critical to divide the need to reduce Western industries’ reliance on China and other distant industrial centers; I wish the corporate community and established politicians in the West and elsewhere had learned this lesson 11 years ago.
solutions I’m willing to put on the table.
We must reimagine local manufacture of everything that goes into the development of our economy’s hugely critical and complicated components, preserving jobs for our people and exporting our greatest products to countries that like our guts. When we rely on extreme authoritarian countries and countries that export religious extremism within our borders, we tend to contribute to the destruction of our societies from within — without our adversaries doing the necessary work because they take advantage of our fragmentation, polarization, and inability to put our differences aside and work together for the benefit of our nations. Creating jobs in our countries is not just about economic growth, it is also about our national security; especially when it comes to our strategic assets, for instance, our pharmaceuticals, PPE, to medical devices.