2020年2月29日，中国上海，一名行人走过一个公共汽车站，屏幕上显示了一段中国习近平主席戴着防护面具的视频。
第一次中国支持的候选人被任命为世界卫生组织总干事时，美国总统还有其他的想法。就在几年前，中国对流感样疾病的爆发反应拙劣，先是掩盖事实，然后隐瞒结果。没关系。总统希望与北京保持稳定的关系，他的政府中没有人对世卫组织最高职位的选择提出任何特别的反对意见。
2006年11月9日，来自香港的医生陈冯富珍(Margaret Chan)获得了世界卫生组织(World Health Association)的大多数支持，被任命为世卫组织总干事，这是她第一个五年任期。就在两天前，乔治·w·布什的共和党在中期选举中遭受重创，自1992年以来首次失去了国会两院。伊拉克战争正在迅速向南推进，作为回应，布什将有争议的国防部长唐纳德·拉姆斯菲尔德推到了一边，承认伊拉克是一场灾难。谁将掌管世界卫生组织？在华盛顿，答案很简单:谁在乎？
五年后也是如此，当时奥巴马政府袖手旁观，支持北京的陈(她在任期间任命了一批支持北京的官员)被重新任命为下一任总统。当现在备受争议的世界卫生组织总干事特德罗斯·阿德诺姆·格布雷耶苏斯在2017年春天竞选时，特朗普政府并不在意。正如特朗普在2016年竞选期间明确表示的那样，谈到中国，他的议程完全是关于贸易的。“当时没有人特别关注[和世界卫生组织”，一名未经授权的国家安全委员会工作人员说。
得到北京大力支持的埃塞俄比亚人特德罗斯轻松赢得了董事职位。他是第一个当选的非医生，在最后一轮投票中以133票对50票击败了名义上得到华盛顿支持的英国人大卫·纳巴罗。这纽约时报报道了一个平淡无奇的故事，聚焦于特德罗斯是第一个成为世界卫生组织总干事的非洲人。
中国对发生在中国中部大城市武汉的COVID-19疫情的隐瞒和不透明，是一个丑闻，其影响将持续数年。正如前食品药品委员会委员斯科特·戈特利布上周末所说，“有一些证据表明，直到1月20日，中国官员仍在说没有人与人之间的病毒传播，而世卫组织直到1月14日才证实了[的说法，这在某种程度上使得中国的说法变得模糊不清。”
周一晚上，特朗普明确表示，华盛顿对世卫组织漠不关心的时代已经结束。他宣布，美国对该组织的资助将停止60至90天，“同时进行一项审查，以评估世卫组织在严重管理不当和掩盖冠状病毒传播方面的作用。”政府想知道:世界卫生组织知道什么，它什么时候知道的，北京告诉它什么？
考虑到在大流行期间切断对世界主要公共卫生机构的资助，这一举措将会引起争议。但是世卫组织确实有问题要回答，特别是当它真正知道病毒何时在人与人之间传播时。12月31日，台湾政府与世界卫生组织取得联系，称武汉的这种神秘疾病与非典(中国试图在2003年掩盖的一种疾病)有相似之处。由于台湾政府认为台北是一个叛离的省份，中国拒绝台湾成为世界卫生组织的成员。非典，像COVID-19一样，是人传人。
2008年8月10日，美国总统乔治·沃克·布什在中南海会见中国国家副主席习近平主席时握手。布什于8月8日出席了2008年北京奥运会的开幕式，并于8月10日出席了在北京举行的一场教堂仪式，借此机会向世人传达了他的信息:中国的共产党领导人对宗教信仰没有什么可害怕的。
在这场灾难中，美国及其在发达世界的盟友在让北京在该组织中变得如此有影响力方面扮演的角色没有得到很好的理解，其后果现在看来是毁灭性的。冠状病毒灾难是过去20年来美国和其他发达国家遭受的第二次大规模“中国冲击”。第一次是在北京于2001年在美国的热情支持下加入世界贸易组织后的几年里，以慢动作展开的。接下来的15年，用美国国家经济研究局三位美国经济学家在2016年进行的一项里程碑式的研究来说，是“世界贸易模式的划时代转变”
在一个又一个行业中——我们现在了解到，包括制药和医疗设备行业——大型企业受中国极其丰富和廉价劳动力的吸引，将供应链从美国转移到中国。整个工业都被掏空了，尤其是在铁锈地带，整个城镇都被摧毁了。
美国政治和经济机构下的赌注是直截了当的:随着中国的繁荣，其威权政府风格将会变得成熟，或许有一天会步韩国或台湾的后尘，拥抱民主。因此，从这个角度来看，美国蓝领工人阶级的成本是值得的。
历届美国政府，先是比尔·克林顿政府，然后是布什政府和奥巴马政府，处理中国问题的方式都深深植根于这一希望。克林顿在任的最后一个月，设法让国会将“永久正常贸易关系”扩展到中国，这是加入世贸组织的关键一步。第二年，中国加入世贸组织，中国经济奇迹开始出现。奥巴马的财政部长蒂姆·盖特纳对经济参与的观点与他的前任、前高盛首席执行官汉克·保尔森没有什么不同。这对奥巴马来说很好，尤其是在他的第一个任期。
与北京相比，奥巴马的首要任务是气候变化。中国爆炸性的经济增长使其成为世界上向大气排放二氧化碳最多的国家。如果巴黎协议要有可信度，他必须有北京作为签署国。2016年4月1日，他如愿以偿，北京和华盛顿发表联合声明，表示双方都将加入该协议。
奥巴马的助手，如他的副国家安全顾问本·罗德斯，承认在他的第二个任期内，奥巴马对中国不满。除了其他贸易问题，中国几乎没有兑现遏制知识产权盗窃的承诺。奥巴马政府最终对中国提起了16起世贸组织申诉——在任期间平均每年两起——但损害已经造成。上一次世贸组织诉讼是在2017年1月，也就是奥巴马执政的最后一个月，是代表美国铝业提起的，该公司辩称，北京方面在非法补贴中国出口。奥巴马2009年1月上任时，美国有14家活跃的铝冶炼厂。八年后，有五家。
奥巴马和布什对北京的总体外交战略都是“战略接触”这意味着允许中国在世界卫生组织等国际机构中获得更大的影响力。人们的想法是，北京的经济崛起应该得到这些回报。但更重要的是，这种影响力将有助于北京融入现有机构，让它成长为“负责任的全球利益相关者”，正如前布什政府贸易代表罗伯特·佐利克(Robert Zoellick)所称。
2015年9月25日，在DC首都华盛顿，中国习近平主席和美国总统奥巴马在白宫进行正式国事访问期间举行会晤。
美国及其盟友将允许中国代表——或者像特德罗斯这样的北京盟友——管理世界卫生组织、国际民用航空组织、国际电信联盟、粮食和农业组织以及联合国工业发展组织等组织。他们认为这不会有什么害处。“这是良性的忽视，”斯坦福大学公共政策项目的政策研究主任陈兰熙说。一些现任和前任美国官员认为，华盛顿的政策远远超出了善意的忽视。在提到中国在包括世界卫生组织在内的多个联合国机构中增强的影响力时，五角大楼前中国国家主任约瑟夫·博斯科说，“我们鼓励了它。”
随着习近平升任北京最高政治职位，美国政界和商界的伟大中国梦开始破灭。他作为中国共产党总书记的铁腕统治使得中国将很快步台湾和韩国的民主后尘的想法看起来很可笑。
第二次中国“休克”——冠状病毒——世卫组织——北京丑闻——使这一点变得显而易见。它显示了美国和盟国先前对中国的假设有多昂贵。有人认为，允许北京操纵其青睐的候选人进入世卫组织的董事会风险很小，这可以说是一种致命的误判。戈特利布说，如果世卫组织早些时候坚持北京与外部世界的医学研究人员共享该病毒的活毒株——迄今为止没有证据表明是这样——那么诊断测试可能会发展得更快。如果中国人“对[12月份发生的事情更加坦诚”，这可能是一个完全可以避免的世界事件
外交影响才刚刚开始。停止资助，即使是暂时的，也会引起世界卫生组织的注意。美国政府每年对世界卫生组织的捐款占总额的22%，是北京的两倍多。如果把盖茨基金会和制药公司等慈善组织投入的巨额资金加起来——这个数字远远超过华盛顿的捐赠——美国的总捐赠几乎是中国的十倍。
斯坦福大学的陈认为，假设美国的资助在某个时候重新启动，按照美国国会资助联合国的做法，有条件地调整资金是明智的。公共卫生官员说，从坚持更大的透明度开始。陈表示，该集团网站上发布的月度董事会议记录很粗略。例如，12月会议的总结简单地说，在武汉人与人之间传播COVID-19的证据是“不充分的”该组织过去的回应是，更详细的会议记录会扼杀科学辩论，但这种说法站不住脚。“它把科学放在它的头上，”陈说。“科学方法需要广泛传播数据和假设，这样才能将它们区分开来并加以改进。这就是重点。"
美国及其盟友很可能无法在泰德罗斯2022年任期结束前将他赶下台，特朗普也没有说他寻求立即下台。但现任和前任外交官及公共卫生官员表示，在特德罗斯任期结束时，美国必须召集其盟友，利用其经济影响力，任命一位不听命于北京的新的世卫组织总干事。“这需要老式的讨价还价、游说和外交手段，但这是必须的，”华盛顿美国企业研究所亚洲研究主任丹·布卢门塔尔说。
特朗普政府官员不会对他有任何异议，他们希望特朗普政府官员在2022年仍然存在。今年1月下旬，美国国务卿迈克·庞贝(一名白宫官员称其对中国“感到厌倦”)任命职业外交官员马克·兰伯特(Mark Lambert)担任一个新职位:一名特使，其工作是对抗中国在联合国和其他国际机构的恶劣影响。他会得到帮助的。据报道，英国首相鲍里斯·约翰逊和日本首相安倍晋三都对北京和世界卫生组织感到愤怒。日本副首相麻生太郎表示，世界卫生组织应该改名为中国卫生组织。
反击北京的想法有两个问题，一个是非常真实的，另一个是潜在的。首先，很难赢得发展中国家的支持，这些国家越来越依赖对中国的援助和贸易。2017年，特德罗斯的大多数选票来自发展中国家。现任和前任外交官表示，美国需要在外交和经济上积极地重新参与进来，以收复失地。
2017年11月9日，美国总统唐纳德·特朗普在中国人民大会堂与中国的习近平主席一起亮相。
第二个潜在问题是美国政治:特朗普目前在大多数民调中落后于前副总统乔·拜登，如果美国经济全年都处于由医疗引发的衰退——这种可能性很大——拜登可能会胜出。基于拜登迄今为止的竞选，北京将松一口气。《财富》500强中那些真的不想将供应链移出中国的高管也是如此。在整个竞选过程中，拜登一直淡化北京作为经济和地缘政治对手的地位。他的言辞直接出自20世纪90年代。“中国会吃我们的午餐吗？”他在小径上的某个地方吼叫。“来吧，伙计...他们不是我们的竞争对手！”
拜登可能意识到了现实。事实发生两个多月后，他的竞选团队悄悄发表声明称，这位前副总统实际上支持特朗普1月份做出的切断中国航空旅行的决定。(他最初指责特朗普“排外”世卫组织对冠状病毒的处理是迄今为止最清楚的迹象，表明北京的道路是多么危险:对世界来说是危险的。在过去的20年里，一些领导人溺爱中国——热切希望它能成长为和我们一样的国家——而另一些人则向即将成为主导力量的中国俯首称臣。
那个时代已经走到了尽头。有人告诉乔·拜登。
HOW BUSH AND OBAMA CEDED THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION TO CHINA, INCREASING RISK OF PANDEMICS LIKE CORONAVIRUS
A pedestrian walks by a bus stop screen showing a video clip of of Chinese president Xi Jinping wearing a protective mask on February 29, 2020 in Shanghai, China.
The first time a China-backed candidate was named Director General of the World Health Organization, the president of the United States had other things on his mind. China had just a few years earlier botched its response to the outbreak of a flu-like disease, first covering it up and then underreporting the results. No matter. The president wanted stable relations with Beijing, and no one in his administration raised any particular objections to the selection for the top job at the WHO.
On November 9, 2006, Dr. Margaret Chan, a physician from Hong Kong, was appointed to her first five year term, having garnered majority of support from the World Health Association—the nations who vote on top appointments to the WHO. Just two days earlier, George W. Bush's Republican party had been hammered in midterm elections, losing both houses of Congress for the time since 1992. The Iraq war was heading south quickly, and in response Bush threw controversial Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over the side, an acknowledgment that Iraq was a debacle. Who was going to run the WHO? In Washington the answer was simple: who cares?
The same was true five years later, when the Obama administration stood by as the pro-Beijing Chan—who appointed a slew of pro-Beijing bureaucrats during her tenure—was reappointed to another term. And when Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the now-controversial WHO director general, stood for election in the spring of 2017, the Trump administration paid little mind. Trump's agenda when it came to China, as he had made clear during the 2016 campaign, was all about trade. "No one was particularly focused on [the WHO] at the time," says a National Security Council staffer not authorized to speak on the record.
Tedros, an Ethiopian strongly backed by Beijing, easily won the directorship. The first non-physician ever elected to the post, he defeated David Nabarro of the UK, who had been nominally supported by Washington, 133 votes to 50 on the final ballot. The New York Times ran a bland story focusing on the fact that Tedros was the first African ever to become the WHO's director.
China's dissembling and opacity about the COVID-19 outbreak in the huge, central city of Wuhan—aided and abetted by the WHO in the critical early stages of the outbreak—is a scandal whose reverberations will be felt for years. As former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said over the weekend, "There is some evidence to suggest that as late as January 20, Chinese officials were still saying there was no human-to-human transmission of the virus, and the WHO was validating those claims [as late as] January 14, sort of enabling the obfuscation from China."
On Monday evening, Trump made it clear the era of Washington's indifference to the WHO is over. He announced that U.S. funding of the organization will stop for a period of 60 to 90 days "while a review is conducted to assess the WHO's role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus." The administration wants to know: what did the WHO know, when did it know it, and what did Beijing tell it?
The move will be controversial, given the optics of cutting off funding to the world's primary public health agency in the midst of a pandemic. But the WHO does have questions to answer, particularly as to when it really knew when the virus was spread human to human. On December 31, the government of Taiwan, which China blocks from being a member of the the WHO because it regards Taipei as a renegade province, got in touch with WHO to say that the mysterious disease in Wuhan bore similarities to SARS, the disease that China tried to cover up in 2003. SARS, like COVID-19, was transmissible human to human.
US President George W. Bush shakes hands with Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping (L) during a meeting in the Zhongnanhai compound in Beijing on August 10, 2008. Bush, who attended the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games on August 8, attended a church service in Beijing on August 10, using the occasion to drive home his message that China's communist leaders have nothing to fear from religious faith.
Less well understood in this debacle is the role that the United States, and its allies in the developed world, played in allowing Beijing to become so influential in the organization, with consequences that now appear to be ruinous. The coronavirus catastrophe is the second massive "China shock" to hit the United States and the rest of developed world in the last 20 years. The first unfolded in slow motion, in the years after Beijing, with the U.S's enthusiastic support, joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. What followed over the next decade and a half was, in the words of a landmark 2016 study by three U.S. economists for the National Bureau of Economic Research, "an epochal shift in patterns of world trade."
In industry after industry—including, we now learn, the pharmaceutical and medical equipment industry— large companies shifted their supply chains out of the United States and into China, lured by the extraordinarily plentiful and cheap labor available there. Entire industries were hollowed out, and in the Rust Belt in particular, entire towns were devastated.
The bet that the U.S. political and economic establishments made was straightforward: that as China prospered, its authoritarian style of government would mellow, someday perhaps going the way of South Korea or Taiwan and embracing democracy. The costs imposed on blue collar, working class America would thus, in this view, be worth it.
The way successive U.S. administrations, first Bill Clinton's, then Bush's and Obama's, dealt with China was fundamentally rooted in that hope. Clinton, in his last month in office, managed to get Congress to extend "permanent normal trade relations" to China, a critical step on the way to WTO membership. The next year China joined the WTO, and the Chinese economic miracle was jump-started. Obama's Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's views on economic engagement were little different than those of his predecessor, former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson. That was fine with Obama, particularly during his first term.
Obama's priority vis-a-vis Beijing was climate change. China's explosive economic growth had made it the world's largest emitter of CO2 into the atmosphere. If the Paris accord were to have any credibility, he had to have Beijing as a signatory. On April 1, 2016, he got his wish, when Beijing and Washington issued a joint statement saying they would both join the accord.
Obama aides such as Ben Rhodes, who was his deputy national security adviser, acknowledge that during his second term, Obama soured on Beijing. It had done little to live up to promises made that to rein in intellectual property theft, among other trade problems. The Obama administration ultimately filed 16 WTO complaints against China—an average of two a year while in office—but damage had been done. The last WTO suit it filed in January of 2017, Obama's last month in office, was on behalf of the U.S. aluminum industry, which argued that Beijing was illegally subsidizing Chinese exports. When Obama entered office in January 2009 there were 14 active aluminum smelters operating in the U.S. Eight years later, there were five.
The overarching diplomatic strategy toward Beijing for both Obama and Bush was "strategic engagement." That meant allowing China to gain more clout in international institutions such as the WHO. The thinking was that Beijing's economic rise merited those rewards. But more important, the influence would help Beijing immerse itself into existing institutions, allowing it to grow into a "responsible global stakeholder," as former Bush administration trade representative Robert Zoellick famously called it.
China's President XI Jinping and US President Barack Obama hold a meeting during an official State Visit at the White House September 25, 2015 in Washington, DC.
The U.S. and its allies would allow Chinese representatives—or allies of Beijing, like Tedros—to run organizations such as the WHO, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the International Telecommunication Union, the Food and Agricultural Organization, and the U.N. Industrial Development Organization. They believed little harm could come of it. "It was benign neglect," says Lanhee Chen, Director of Policy Studies at Stanford University's public policy program. Some current and former U.S. officials believe Washington's policy went well beyond benign neglect. Referring to China's enhanced clout inside a variety of U.N agencies, including the WHO, Joseph Bosco, former China country director at the Pentagon says, "We encouraged it."
The U.S. political and business establishment's great China dream began to die with Xi Jinping's ascension to the top political office in Beijing. His iron-fisted rule as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party makes the idea that China would soon follow in the democratic footsteps of Taiwan and South Korea seem farcical.
The second China ''shock''—the coronavirus-WHO-Beijing scandal—makes that obvious. It shows just how costly previous U.S. and allied assumptions about China can be. The belief that allowing Beijing to maneuver its favored candidate into the directorship of the WHO carried little risk was, arguably, a lethal misjudgment. If the WHO had insisted early on that Beijing share live strains of the virus with medical researchers in the outside world—and to date there is no evidence that it did—then a diagnostic test could have been developed much sooner, Gottlieb says. And had the Chinese "been more forthcoming about what was happening [in December] this might have been an entirely avoidable world event."
The diplomatic fallout is just beginning. The cessation of funding, even if temporary, will get the WHO's attention. The U.S. government's annual contribution to the WHO is 22 percent of the total: more than double Beijing's contribution. When you add in the massive amounts of money that philanthropic organizations like the Gates Foundation and pharmaceutical companies throw in—a sum far greater than Washington's donation—the overall U.S. contribution is nearly ten times that of China.
Assuming U.S. funding restarts at some point, it would be wise to tailor the money with conditions, as Congress does in funding the U.N., suggests Stanford's Chen. Start by insisting on far more transparency, public health officials say. The accounts of monthly board meetings published on the group's website are cursory, says Chen. A summary of the December meeting, for example, simply says evidence of human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 in Wuhan was "insufficient." The organization's response in the past has been that more detailed accounts of its meetings would stifle scientific debate, but that argument doesn't hold up. "It stands science on its head," says Chen. ''The scientific method requires widespread dissemination of data and assumptions so they can be picked apart and improved. That's the whole point."
The U.S. and its allies will likely be unable to remove Tedros before his term ends in 2022, and Trump didn't say he seeks his immediate ouster. But at the end of Tedros's term, current and former diplomats and public health officials say, the U.S. must gather its allies and use its economic clout to install a new WHO director general who isn't beholden to Beijing. "It will require old- fashioned horse-trading and lobbying and diplomacy, but it has to happen," says Dan Blumenthal, Director of Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
He'll get no argument from Trump administration officials, who hope they will still be around in 2022. In late January, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—said by a White House official to be "fed up" with China—named career foreign service officer Mark Lambert to a newly created position: a special envoy whose job it is to counter China's malign influence at the U.N. and other international agencies. He'll have help. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe are both reported to be furious with Beijing and the WHO. Japan's Deputy Prime Minister, Taro Aso, has said the WHO should change its name to the CHO: the China Health Organization.
There are two problems with the idea of pushing back on Beijing, one very real, the other potential. The first is, it will be hard to win over countries in the developing world that have become increasingly reliant on aid and trade with Beijing. The majority of Tedros's votes in 2017 came from the developing world. The U.S., current and former diplomats say, needs to re-engage aggressively, diplomatically and economically, to claw back lost ground.
President Donald Trump is pictured during an appearance with China's President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People on November 9, 2017 in Beijing, China.
The second potential problem is U.S. politics: Trump right now trails former Vice President Joe Biden in most polls, and if the economy remains in a medically-induced recession throughout the year—more than a possibility—Biden is the likely winner. Beijing, based on Biden's campaign to date, would breathe a sigh of relief. And so too would all those Fortune 500 executives who really don't want to move their supply chains out of China. Biden has consistently downplayed Beijing as an economic and geopolitical rival throughout the campaign. His rhetoric is straight out of the 1990s. "China's gonna eat our lunch?" he bellowed at one point on the trail. "C'mon, man...they're not competition for us!"
Biden may be waking to reality. More than two months after the fact, his campaign quietly put out a statement saying that the former vice president actually supported Trump's January decision to cut off air travel from China. (He had originally accused Trump of "xenophobia.") The WHO's handling of the coronavirus is the clearest indication to date of how dangerous a path Beijing was on: dangerous for the world. In the previous two decades, some leaders coddled China—in the eager hope it would grow to be just like us— while others genuflected to the soon-to-be-dominant power.
That era has come crashing to a close. Someone tell Joe Biden.
