Posted by The Wall Street Journal got into some trouble with the publishing of this article “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia.” “Its financial markets may be even more dangerous than its wildlife markets.” It is an article loaded with the same old tropes I have been seeing for over two decades from ignorant writers in the West predicting the demise of China. “We cannot know when or even if a catastrophe of this scale will take place, but students of geopolitics and international affairs—not to mention business leaders and investors—need to bear in mind that China’s power, impressive as it is, remains brittle. A deadlier virus or a financial-market contagion could transform China’s economic and political outlook at any time.” This point of view is hard to argue against because you could basically put any country’s name in place of China and it would still make sense.
The Coming Collapse of China, a 2001 book by Gordon Chang pretty much made the same point and I was forced to comment on it ad nauseam by fund managers asking me what I thought about it nearly two decades ago. “According to Chang, however, a Chinese-American lawyer and China specialist, the People’s Republic is a paper dragon. Peer beneath the veneer of modernization since Mao’s death, and the symptoms of decay are everywhere: Deflation grips the economy, state-owned enterprises are failing, banks are hopelessly insolvent, foreign investment continues to decline, and Communist party corruption eats away at the fabric of society.”
This is what Chang said 10 years ago in an article in Foreign Policy, “The Coming Collapse of China: 2012 Edition” “I admit it: My prediction that the Communist Party would fall by 2011 was wrong. Still, I’m only off by a year.” Or this 2017 Huffington Post article, “The Revenge of Gordon Chang and the Coming Collapse of China?.” China specialist? Yeah right. Chang is a moron who got it so incredibly wrong in 2001 which was almost two decades ago, and continues to get it wrong to this day. Chang is my second favourite failed prognosticator after Francis “End of History” Fukuyama – and those two have a lot in common other than their Asian ancestry – they continue to double down on their failed theories even after history has proven them to be wrong. As this opinion piece titled, The collapse of ‘the coming collapse of China’ theory put it, “[Chang] then repeatedly called the same lunatic shot in 2006, 2011, 2012, 2016 and 2017, and they were so painfully wrong that the humiliation in public has already dwarfed the credibility he still had left.”
The best thing about making the same prediction over and over again is eventually you will be right. You call for a recession in the United States every year, you will some day be correct; only that it is meaningless unless you are reasonably accurate in your predictions on a consistent basis. I know this game well having seen it used a lot in my previous life as a stock analyst. I have long refused to play this game as I wrote in my piece of Canada’s housing bubble three years ago, “We have a dangerous housing bubble in Canada and it is not one we can extricate ourselves from easily given how dependent the economy is on this bubble at this point in time… The oil and gas industry is in the toilet still and manufacturing just isn’t what it used to be. So are we doomed? Probably. Will it be in 2017? Maybe. But I doubt it. It’s just as plausible (and I think more likely) that the bubble just gets a little bigger this year given interest rates are still low and the Canadian dollar is weak. Don’t forget everyone was screaming about this five years ago (see graphic above). Like I wrote previously, forecasting the end of a property bubble, like predicting tipping points for climate change, is a mugs game. Eventually, you will be right but anyone who put off buying a home in Vancouver in 2012 because all the pundits were screaming that it was all going to come to an end soon is probably regretting that decision right now.”
Time to return to the original point of this article which is the Wall Street Journal article which resulted in the expulsion of three of its reporters. “China Expels Three Wall Street Journal Reporters. China’s Foreign Ministry says move was punishment for a recent opinion piece published by the Journal.”
The WSJ’s take is that “This opinion piece was published independently from the WSJ newsroom and none of the journalists being expelled had any involvement with it,” Mr. Lewis said. “Our opinion pages regularly publish articles with opinions that people disagree—or agree—with and it was not our intention to cause offense with the headline on the piece,” Mr. Lewis said. “However, this has clearly caused upset and concern amongst the Chinese people, which we regret.”
I have no issue with the article or its content. I may not agree with all the points made or the conclusions (which is just a little bit too Gordon Chang like in its predictions and its arguments). My issue is with the title that, despite the WSJ’s protestations towards innocence, was likely coined by its editorial staff and not the author. In a failed attempt to be clever (by juxtaposing the historical term Sick Man of Asia with the Coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak in China), the WSJ editorial staff created a tone deaf headline – a fact that they don’t attempt to deny. This means that the WSJ, despite its attempts to hide behind a facade of openness and independence, is actually responsible because it is not the article or its content that China and the Chinese mostly have an issue with – its the headline that the WSJ editorial staff picked.
I have previous written many times that I am not a fan of censorship and not very keen on crying racism or using politically correct terms. I wrote about it in “Yellow is not code for white“, “Since emoji’s originated in Japan with NTT DoCoMo, I would guess that, if anything, yellow emojis are probably a code for us Asians (instead of being a code for white)… Why am I so blasé about racism? Other than the deep held intellectual belief that we can’t eliminate something we can’t even define and even if we could, we are hard-wired to make new distinctions in any case… well I guess that’s justification enough.” I wrote about it in “The pendulum swings right… finally” when I commented on the “my culture is not your prom dress” moral outrage. “But in all the faux outrage spouted online and in the media in America, lets see what the ‘real Chinese’ think of Daum’s prom dress. Yeah, you guessed it. The overwhelming majority of netizens in China support her use of the qipao and have no problem with it. So why do Americans think it is evil and cultural appropriation when the actual people that it is being ‘appropriated’ from don’t give a toss? Shouldn’t their opinions matter more? Wishful thinking in this day and age of political correctness run amok.”
So when even I take exception to the WSJ choice of words for its headline – it is not being over sensitive or from a lack of historical knowledge of the roots of the term. Let me be very clear on this – calling China (and by association Chinese) the Sick Man of Asia is extremely offensive – especially if you use the Chinese version of the words (東亞病夫 Dōngyà bìngfū which should be more accurately translated as sick man of East Asia) as graphically illustrated in Bruce Lee’s movie Fist of Fury (the thumbnail of this article) when he eventually smashes the sign with the words written on it.
So when Robert Hormell writes in the comments for the original article “if the title were ‘USA is the Sick Man in the Americas’, would that be racist? Should Americans take offense to that headline? Or ‘France is the Sick Man in Europe’? Would that be racists to all French? Should the French petition the UN to force an apology from the WSJ?'”. It smacks of a massive lack of understanding and appreciation of the cultural and historical reasons why that term is so massively offensive. There is little or no historical or deep seated cultural root to calling America or France the sick man of their respective continents – there is in China.
To be fair, the WSJ did print this opinion rebuttal by Qi (Harry) Zhang, “Headline Echoes the Worst of Old China’s Exploitation.” “I was horrified to read the headline ‘China Is the Sick Man of Asia’ on Walter Russell Mead’s column (Global View, Feb. 4). At this critical moment for millions of Chinese who are suffering from the coronavirus, this headline triggers the extremely miserable memory for the Chinese since 1840 when the First Opium War broke out. I respect the First Amendment but in a civilized society we should not tolerate this discriminatory opinion while humanity is under siege.” His reviews reflect mine and the vast majority of Chinese who wrote in to comment on the article. In essence, if you do not understand or realize just how offensive that phrase is to the Chinese, you have no business commenting on racism and chastising others on similar topics.
Update 1 (25 February 2020): Well even the WSJ journalist staff realizes how wrong that headline was. Reporters Ask WSJ to Apologize for China ‘Sick Man’ Headline. ” ‘This is not about editorial independence or the sanctity of the divide between news and opinion,’ they wrote in an email to paper brass. ‘It is about the mistaken choice of a headline that was deeply offensive to many people, not just in China. We find the argument that no offense was intended to be unconvincing: Someone should have known that it would cause widespread offense. If they didn’t know that, they made a bad mistake, and should correct it and apologize.'” Given that most of the signatories of that letter were WSJ in mainland China and Hong Kong, it is not surprising that there exists a huge gulf between what some white editors and publishers in New York think and what their own Chinese staff think.
For those who are still hiding behind a neo-intellectual facade of “press freedom”, or trying to be clever in comparing it to historical references to the decaying Ottoman Empires as the “sick man of Europe” – get your blinkers off and smell the coffee. This has nothing to do with the content of the article, just the phrase itself and it is highly offensive. If it makes it any easier to place it in context, I personally find the phrase “Sick man of Asia” to be as or even more offensive than another term that was popular in Western reporting and literature in the same time frame (19th century and early 20th century) – the “Yellow Peril“. If you have never heard of this term, it is because it is not used precisely because it is so racist and offensive. And so is “Sick man of Asia”.
Update 2 (15 March 2020): I’m getting good at reading subtle clues in language usage to spot underlying bias in reporting. Such is the case in this article in the SCMP, “Clash of the titans: how the coronavirus became the new China-US battleground“. There are two parts in this article that tries, and fails miserably, to present itself as a balanced view on the thesis Beijing and Washington have decided to continue to fight a war of words and propaganda instead of cooperating to help overcome the current Covid-19 pandemic crisis.
The first is this line that, “Over the past week, Beijing has called out US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s ‘despicable practice’ of calling the pathogen ‘the Wuhan virus’ despite objections from China and the Beijing-friendly World Health Organisation (WHO).” Let’s be clear — I think Pompeo should change his name to Pompous because that’s what he is. He is a shadow of Trump with all the arrogance and vitriol but without the fame and gravitas. Nobody calls it the Wuhan virus anymore except this idiot. His pathetic attempt to keep using a politically loaded term that even the media has stopped using highlights it as a clear and inept attempt to single out China for blame to deflect from his and Trump’s own failings. We all know that Pompeo is a moron; what is not so cleverly hidden is the bias of the author of the article, Shi Jiangtao, when he uses the phrase Beijing-friendly World Health Organisation (WHO). Really? Why would you characterize the WHO (which basically the international health arm of the United Nations) as being Beijing-friendly unless you are trying to discredit them as being a biased source. If it was an unbiased article, it would have simply state WHO instead of adding the conditional “Beijing-friendly” which is an assertion that the author doesn’t even attempt to justify or support — he just throws it out there as if it were an obvious statement of fact. The WHO is a global heath institution under the aegis of the United Nation and is mostly apoliticial; you can call them incompetent and useless but to characterise WHO as being particularly Beijing-friendly is a massive stretch of credulity.
The second gratuitous bias is this throwaway quote from George Magnus, a research associate at Oxford University’s China Centre. “It would have been ‘nice but unrealistic’ to expect the China-US relations to change for the better as a result of the coronavirus crisis. ‘In the West we refer to German measles and Spanish flu, and this is not taken as insulting. Referring to the Wuhan virus isn’t an insult but a description about origin,’ he said. ‘Because China is sensitive to this and the West resists China’s rhetoric that the virus may have emanated from outside China, you can see why trust relations are at a low ebb.'”
This is such a load of horse shit I had to add it to the original article about “Sick man of Asia.” First of all, I don’t think I have heard it called German measles since I was a child in the early 70s. We long ago just started calling it just measles and, until the stupid anti-vaxxer movement came about, it was a historical statement anyways because measles was eradicated in the developed world so nobody really talked about measles except when your kid got his MMR shot.
As for Spanish flu, that’s precisely the reason WHO says don’t call diseases by place names because, as a quick search of Spanish flu turns up, “Historical and epidemiological data are inadequate to identify with certainty the [Spanish flu] pandemic’s geographic origin. Different hypotheses have been made about it, with the three main ones being northern China, a British army base in France, and Kansas in the United States.” See Spain anywhere in that list? Didn’t think so. “To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. Papers were free to report the epidemic’s effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII). These stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit, giving rise to the pandemic’s nickname, Spanish flu.”
So yeah Mr. Magnus. It is not about being insulted nor is it about it simply being a description of the place of origin. To assert that being against calling it the Wuhan virus is simply being thin-skinned is asinine because there are real world repercussions to this word usage.
“In 2015, the WHO issued new protocols for naming diseases. The updated guidelines prohibit any references to geographic locations and animals (“bird flu”) or groups of people (“Legionnaires’ disease.”) ‘We’ve seen certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, create unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade, and trigger needless slaughtering of food animals,’ said Keiji Fukuda, then the WHO’s assistant director-general for health security. ‘This can have serious consequences for people’s lives and livelihoods.’ After the coronavirus outbreak began in December, it took weeks for the WHO to find a name that would adhere to the new criteria, and also be easy to pronounce. ‘I’m sure you have seen many media reports that are still calling this, using the name Wuhan or using China,’ WHO epidemiologist Maria van Kerkhove explained, according to Reuters. ‘We wanted to ensure that there was no stigma associated with this virus, and so we’ve put out this interim name.’
I think this New York Times article got it dead right. “Politicians’ Use of ‘Wuhan Virus’ Starts a Debate Health Experts Wanted to Avoid“. “Some conservative politicians and officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, are using ‘Wuhan virus,’ a term that proliferated on news sites and in political commentary, mostly before the virus received an official name. Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, has frequently used the term on the Senate floor, and on Monday evening, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House minority leader, drew criticism for calling the disease ‘the Chinese coronavirus’ in a tweet…”
“This is the consequence they didn’t want by calling it the ‘Wuhan Virus,’” Frank Snowden, the Andrew Downey Orrick professor emeritus of history and history of medicine at Yale University, said in an interview. Of the politicians who are using the term, he added: “I think that’s actually quite an aggressive thing and politically charged, and I imagine that people that are still calling it that are using it in a very loaded, ethnic way, and I believe it’s mainly associated with people on the political right. That shows exactly the wisdom of trying to refer to something scientific and factual.”
The concern now is that despite the official name, history — complete with name-calling, rumors and misinformation spreading — may be repeating itself in a fractured political and media environment. “There’s no reason to add any fuel to the fire during an outbreak when people are already on edge and inclined to blame the problem on other people,” Dr. Schoch-Spana said.
Amen to that.