Debate Over COVID Origins Continues
Plain sight is right! These “dispatches” were updates posted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s (WIV) homepage on the general news tab. In fact, you can go look through this whole tab here to see mundane entries ranging from a recent day reflecting on the 20th National Congress to a July post about WIV celebrating the 101st anniversary of the Party, to general updates about different trainings and publications related to the institute. Therein lies one of the fundamental problems with this piece-these were not secretive dispatches internal to the Party. These are essentially press releases meant to face outward. Yes, they are laden with mentions of comrades, references to struggles and frontlines, and key Chinese leaders, including Xi Jinping and the recently ousted Li Keqiang. They are, after all, written by Party members in a major facility of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. They are going to have this kind of language by default, especially around times like national congresses and major anniversaries.
To be clear, the CCP does use euphemisms and round-about language at times to describe high-level concepts and goals. In fact, some scholars spend the bulk of their careers conducting political discourse analysis and understanding leaders’ officialease or government-speak. Some do focus on CCP party speak, which has become especially interesting in the Xi years. However, this is definitely not unique to the CCP as one can find scholars dissecting and analyzing any number of world leaders’ speeches and government lexicons. It is also important to recognize that this concept is not some niche or extremely esoteric concept known only to a few in China watching circles. Students studying Chinese politics overwhelmingly have to learn things like “crossing the river by touching the stones” or “socialism with Chinese characteristics” as a Chinese-specific form of Marxism-Leninism throughout the periods of Dengism, Three Represents, Scientific Outlook on Development, and now Xi Jinping Thought. It is core to understanding national agendas throughout different leadership periods.
However, with this comes the understanding that Party documents are laden with this kind of jargon and narrative furthering. This also is not unique to the CCP. In fact, Harry Hodgkinson wrote an entire guide in 1955 on Soviet jargon and unique meanings Communist parties gave to particularly terms. While this jargon and overarching nationalistic narratives offer important context for the WIV posts, they do not represent some in-between-the-lines version of Chinese that “even native Mandarin speakers can’t really follow…” Rather, they help explain why the language in the posts seems so dramatic and nationalistic.
What’s in a Narrative?
In October 1949, Mao Zedong declared the official founding of the People’s Republic of China. With Chiang Kai-shek and the remainder of the KMT exiled to the island of Taiwan and the decades long civil war over, Mao was left to figure out how to actually lead the new PRC. Central to this was narratives of overcoming the century of habilitation, protecting the sovereignty and integrity of Chinese territory, bringing justice for China against those who subjugated, and building a strong, advanced country. These ideas were central to nationalism at the time and drove pushes to modernize like the infamous Great Leap Forward. As Dr. Kerry Brown of King’s College London writes, “That self-designated task of bringing about justice for China was the main justification for the Party’s many mistakes under Mao when the second resolution on its own history was produced a few years after his death in 1981.” Themes of struggle against western imperial powers and self-determination were critical political tools wielded by the Party, even in the face of wildly unpopular, destructive policies.
Though it looks different today, narratives of national struggle and rejuvenation are still important features of CCP rhetoric, even for Party members at a CAS laboratory. Brown discusses the power of narrative in modern China, writing, “For the current dominant leader Xi Jinping, the notion that the Party is a kind of epistemic community, one uniquely placed to carry China forwards to the fulfilment of its great quest for a just outcome to history, is becoming more powerful by the day. Seen in these terms, the Party is not so much about power per se – but power to deliver this historic outcome. That perhaps explains why, despite the many challenges and problems with its practice and its own history, it still remains so dominant in China.” Today, concepts like the Chinese dream, national rejuvenation, and the goal of becoming fully modernized by 2049 are central themes Party rhetoric uses, even in discussing day-to-day work at different lower-level organizations.
In the context of the Wuhan Institute of Virology posts, this is seen in the framing of work at the lab as some kind of grand struggle. In one of the first WIV posts referenced by ProPublica and Vanity Fair (available here in its original format), the authors claim to have found a dispatch that “…referenced inhumane working conditions and “hidden safety dangers.” On Nov. 12 of that year, a dispatch by party branch members at the BSL-4 laboratory appeared to reference a biosecurity breach: “These viruses come without a shadow and leave without a trace.”
However, as a number of Mandarin speakers and China watchers have pointed out online, this was actually a very general post about how the facility went from humble beginnings at its founding to now being a training hub and “fighting fortress” of China’s research and public health. It is written not unlike other fictional and non-fictional works describing BSL-4 facilities in other countries (The Hot Zone, anyone?)-hours are long in these space suit-like positive pressure suits, the pathogens are unimaginably dangerous, and those doing the work are brave, hardworking, brilliant scientists.
Much of Toy Reid’s interpretation of this post depends on a misinterpretation of “每当这时” (Měi dāng zhè shí, “whenever”) in the context of a description of Party members leading by example whenever handling BSL-4 pathogens. Reid instead took this as “whenever there are biosafety breaches,” and not some inspirational statement about Party members. Other portions of the article focus on visits from Chinese Academy of Sciences officials and seminars on the importance of biosafety and commonly noted issues during safety inspections. However, these were updates about high-level visitors and general efforts to ensure the facility maintained safety standards, much like those any organization anywhere might make.
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James Palmer
@BeijingPalmer Follow
a lot of it is like reading a corporate newsletter that says ‘This year, we all remembered that there’s no I in Team!’ and then concluding that this mysterious ‘I’ was removed from the team. What happened to him? What are they concealing? https://t.co/OG6AV9Z5Es
— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) October 31, 2022
Law Boy, Esq.
@The_Law_Boy
so it sort of seems like propublica put out a report purporting to validate the lab leak theory based entirely on the claims of a guy who claimed to know a secret version of chinese
Read the full conversation on Twitter
James Palmer, deputy editor at Foreign Policy and author of Foreign Policy’s China Brief, discussing the normal workplace nature of the WIV posts
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The Wuhan Institute of Virology boasts the PRC’s first BSL-4 (P4) facility, which opened in 2018, marking a major milestone for the country. A boastful post about how it came from humble beginnings but, through the work of very dedicated personnel, is now doing important, taxing work and striving to always be better is very par for the course. There is even a corny word play in the post about how Party members “infect” (Gǎnrǎn, “感染”) others with their practical actions and safety-conscious attitudes. As many have now pointed out, this is just the Party bragging about how dedicated their members are, how far the facility has come, and how personnel are constantly working to better themselves and their organization. In other words, it is furthering the Party narrative, not hinting at secret internal problems.
References throughout the posts cited by ProPublica to General Secretary Xi Jinping and his discussion of technology as a weapon make sense in the context of Party-authored news posts. Xi Jinping has achieved power unlike any previous leader, capturing himself a historic third term after the country removed presidential term limits in 2018. Xi Jinping Thought (“Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”) was also formally enshrined in the Party’s constitution that year, further cementing Xi’s unique power over the Party with the Party describing it as “Marxism of contemporary China and of the 21 century.” With this context in mind, it makes sense for Party members at WIV to frequently reference Xi and his national goals and speeches. However, Reid instead took this as literal input directly from Xi to the lab following the biosafety incident he claims a previous post references.
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Zhihua Chen
@zhihuachen Follow
Issues with the senate minority report on covid origins and the latest vanity fair/prorepublica piece that covers it. Two issues.
1) Bad translation of a sentence in a Nov 12 WIV news release.
2) Bad interpretation of events leading to the Nov 17 safety training at WIV. 1/n
Read the full conversation on Twitter
Zhihua Chen’s thread on translation and dating issues in the ProPublica article
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Finally, even if this was all true-the WIV had a 2019 biosafety incident and Xi Jinping was personally concerned enough to send an urgent message about it to WIV himself-why would any of that be posted on the institute’s website? As was just discussed, the narrative matters a lot in Chinese politics; image is everything and the Party is very secretive as a result. As the country continues to compete internationally in all areas, including the bioeconomy, it does not make sense for the Party to air dirty laundry about a supposed biosafety incident and workers’ concerns in a public space. If the core argument is that China is covering up a lab leak, the question of “Why would the Party allow the facility in question to publicly hint at mismanagement and safety issues on its own website?” must be answered.
Implications
Ultimately, bad faith takes on China, COVID-19, and biosafety hurt us all. There is a fundamental difference between calling for an in-depth investigation, holding the PRC accountable for its failures, working towards making sure we are better prepared for the next time something like this happens, and inappropriately equating mischaracterized and poorly translated press releases to some kind of damning evidence of a lab leak origin of SARS-CoV-2. The US-PRC relationship is in a very dangerous place and, while criticism of the CCP’s handling of COVID-19 is absolutely warranted, this article is likely to become political fodder for the Party. In fact, the Chinese government has already condemned the piece, claiming that it was driven by US politics.
While ProPublica claimed to have corroborated Reid’s work with unnamed “experts” on CCP communications, the swift backlash and ProPublica’s moves to reach out to other translators cast further doubt on the caliber and motivations of those consulted initially. This is in addition to concerns about the experts they claim to have consulted on the WIV’s claims about biosafety and time researchers spend in BSL-4. In the end, one can be both critical of the CCP and its practices while not resorting to an overly hawkish view that leads to finding suspicion in the mundane.
Finally, this points to a need for interdisciplinary collaboration and competent understanding of the political realities of the PRC in assessing issues like biosafety. What may look to someone with little knowledge of Chinese political discourse as alarming messages are pretty par for the course in terms of statements and news updates on an official website. Outside of debates on SARS-CoV-2 origin in the scientific community, scholars in the social sciences and humanities and experts working in all sorts of fields can offer important context that, in this case, marks the difference between recognizing standard Party rhetoric and sounding alarm bells over normal updates on the WIV’s website.
For more on this, including discussions of the scientific debate about COVID-19’s origin as discussed in the Senate report and ProPublica article, check out Michael Hiltzik’s opinion piece on this article in the LA Times and Max Tani’s work in Semafor.
This article is published courtesy of the Pandora Report.
