https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/11/china-and-covid-dancing-with-the-devil/
“Markson’s brilliant investigation leaves us confident enough that Beijing did not deliberately release SARS-CoV-2 upon the world. Once the virus was out there, though, and once the regime had regained its nerve, Beijing did everything in its power to turn an international crisis of their making into a victory. That is the phenomenon we are dealing with here. One of the more admirable figures to emerge in What Really Happened in Wuhan is Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, along with several key White House advisers including Peter Navarro. Though all very different in their expertise and character, common to them all is the understanding that engaging in any kind of relationship with the CCP really is akin to dancing with the devil.”
The potential readership for Sharri Markson’s new book increased in June after American television celebrity Jon Stewart shared his views with a left-of-centre audience on the origins of COVID-19: “Novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. What do we do? Oh, you know who could we ask? The Wuhan Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. The disease is the same name as the lab. That’s just a little too weird, don’t you think?” Not too weird, according to Newsweek magazine, for the viewers who pushed back on social media with ripostes such as: “Honestly can’t tell if Jon Stewart was joking or had a senior moment on Colbert”; “Jon Stewart is flying real close to QAnon territory. Expecting him to go anti-vax any moment now”; and, of course, “like wow, way to throw more gas on the fire of anti-Asian hate”. Stewart’s detractors, though unlikely to be aware of it, were essentially conveying the official line of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Why? Beyond everything else, Markson’s book makes a good start at answering that question as well.
In the first instance, though, What Really Happened in Wuhan establishes the high plausibility of the so-called “lab-leak” theory. It is more than a tinfoil-hat conspiracy dreamed up by the Trump administration, white supremacists, xenophobes, the Murdoch press, anti-Chinese bigots, Cold Warriors and so on—or what Hillary Clinton, in another context, would refer to as a “vast right-wing conspiracy”. One of the many intellectual tragedies of the Cold War was the tendency to conflate anti-communism (or anti-totalitarianism) with a
reactionary worldview. A resultant problem was the inability or refusal of self-styled sophisticated observers from the West to grasp the essential despotism of Soviet society, which existed even in what we might now call Late Communism. Revisionist historians, for instance, went out of their way to amplify the non-tyrannical aspects of everyday life in the Soviet empire to argue a broader point: the internal social and political dynamics of a Western society, though obviously different from a communist one, were of a piece.
