The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic from within China is more than just a scientific coincidence; it is merely the continuation of a centuries-long pattern in which the Asian country has been a hotbed for some of the world’s deadliest disease outbreaks.
China’s long history of spreading fatal illnesses worldwide dates back to the 19th century’s third bubonic plague pandemic, which scientists are certain began from what now has become the province of Yunnan southwest of China and spread from there to Hong Kong, other Asian territories, and all the way to the United States.
However, some studies have raised the possibility that China may have also harboured the more ancient and immensely more devastating second plague pandemic that ravaged the world during the 14th century and remains to this day the most lethal global epidemic recorded in human history.
In fact, a 2017 study from the University of Hong Kong claimed that the disease responsible for the Black Death outbreak, which wiped out 60% of Europe’s population and between 75 and 200 million lives worldwide from 1346 to 1353, may have appeared first in China before making its way to the European continent through the Silk Road, a Eurasian network of trade routes heavily frequented at the time.
Other research has traced back the origins of the bubonic plague thousands of years ago to East Asia, and despite being disputed, this theory outlines a potential chain of events directly implicating China in giving rise to an illness that literally plagued the world for centuries.
While most of the world eventually took action to finally put an end to the plague, Yersinia pestis — the deadly bacterium behind the disease — remained active in remote regions on China’s southern borders since the 1700s and all the way to the 20th century when it would resurface in different forms and haunt the world once again.
In 1910, it manifested itself in the pneumonic plague outbreak that hit the Manchuria region northeast of China and caused thousands of human casualties.
But it would also make its way to the rest of the world through the highly frequented Hong Kong region, which became ground zero for a series of 20th-century plague pandemics that produced over 100,000 deaths in North and South America alone.
As tragic as those events were, they do not represent the full extent of China’s contribution to the century’s most horrific disease outbreaks, not by a long shot.
Its most notorious viral export of the 1900s came in 1956, when the H2N2 influenza A virus emerged from the southwestern Guizhou province and subsequently spread throughout the country and the rest of the Asian continent before turning into a full-blown global pandemic in 1957.
The disease, referred to as the Asian flu, led to approximately 2 million deaths worldwide in the span of two years, according to the World Health Organisation.
But before the world came to experience the horrors of the H2N2 virus, its much deadlier predecessor H1N1 had already given rise to the Spanish flu of 1918, the 20th century’s most devastating global pandemic and the second in history behind only the Black Death.
And the numbers speak for themselves: the disease had both a gruesome death tally ranging from 20 million to 50 million worldwide and an incredibly high contagion rate that saw 500 million people –or a third of the world’s population– get infected.
While there is no doubt about the scale of devastation that the original influenza A virus brought about, the true origins of its onset are still shrouded in mystery, mainly due to the limited exchange of scientific data in Europe during World War I, the time and place in which the disease first surfaced on a large scale.
However, a journal written by Mark Humphries, a historian at the Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada, suggests that, contrary to popular belief, the Spanish flu may be yet another entry in the long list of Made-in-China global health disasters.
The 2014 publication, entitled “The War in History“, submits the theory that the deadly flu did not originate from Europe, but rather made its way to the continent following the entrance of 96,000 Chinese workers into France and Britain in 1918.
At this point, one would assume that China’s vast experience of launching some of the world’s deadliest pandemics must have provided the country’s leadership with enough expertise to make sure history does not repeat itself in the 21st century.
But once again, the Chinese government’s incompetence was put on full display, at first with the SARS outbreak of 2002 which was initially detected in the Guangdong province south of China before spreading to the rest of the world, infecting over 8,098 people and killing 774 in a two-year period, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Then came the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020, a disease that surfaced in late 2019 from the Chinese city of Wuhan and is caused by a new strain of the same virus that had caused the SARS pandemic seventeen years before, only on a much lower scale.
The virus is believed to have originated from wild animals sold in one of Wuhan’s open-air wet markets, a practice that China had vowed to ban back in 2003.
However, the government failed to maintain its promise despite an early warning issued by a group of Chinese scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology about the potential outbreak of a new Coronavirus from within these markets.
With the objective of locating the source of the original SARS outbreak, the scientific team, led by virologist Shi Zhengli, had spent five years analyzing samples from horseshoe bats residing in a cave located in the province of Yunnan, Southwest China, and eventually found genetic traces of the virus in those same bats.
The findings of the study were published on November 30, 2017, with the conclusion that “the risk of spillover into people and emergence of a disease similar to SARS is possible,” and that “another deadly outbreak of SARS could emerge at any time.”
The study was featured on multiple media outlets and scientific newspapers, including an article by the British scientific journal Nature on December 1, 2017.
This gave the Chinese government ample opportunity to take preventative action two years before the pandemic, but its reckless decision not to listen to its own scientists has cost the world over 2.6 million lives as of March 2021.
Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe that China has learned the lesson of its recent, let alone centuries-old, failures to prevent the onset of future deadly diseases or at least avoid their spread to the rest of the world.
As a result, scientists are already looking ahead to future outbreaks that could emanate from China and turn into global pandemics.
One of the most alarming prospects is the rare Nipah virus, which is found in fruit bats yet had previously been transmitted to human subjects.
With a devastating fatality rate of up to 75% that led some countries to classify it as a bioterrorism agent, a long incubation period that could reportedly reach 45 days according to the WHO, and no vaccine development in sight, the sheer devastation that a Nipah outbreak would bring about could leave the world longing for the good days of COVID-19.
But regardless of which form it takes, the historical trend of China-born deadly pandemics will likely continue under the country’s duplicitous authoritarian leadership, and the entire world will once again come to pay the price.
