The Origins of COVID-19: China and Global Capitalism by Li Zhang (review)

Review© 2024 by University of Hawai'i Press Li Zhang. The Origins of COVID-19: China and Global Capitalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford briefs. Stanford University Press, 2021. 185 pp. Paperback 14. 00, ISBN 978-1-5036-3017-8. Li Zhang's book, The Origins of COVID-19: China and Global Capitalism, is remarkable in many ways. It's a well-written book and provides detailed medical accounts of the emergence of the COVID-19 virus in Wuhan and the initial mismanagement by the local authorities, including the silencing of the physician Le Wenliang and his death by the disease, whose pandemic nature he had recognized in November but was prevented from informing fellow physicians about his suspicion and from warning the public. The novelist Fang Fang describes in the daily record of her Wuhan Diary (New York, 2020) the tragic story of this physician and how his death galvanized millions of people who mourned him as a heroic figure. Li Zhang mentions Fang Fang's book but doesn't appreciate the "negative" tone of her narrative. She is even more critical of the overall negative coverage in the West, especially in the United States, of the Chinese origin of the COVID pandemic after initially questioning the live-animal market origin of the virus in Wuhan. These questions about the possibility of an accidental leak from one of the virological labs in Wuhan have not gone away but have recently been revived, yet they have not succeeded in replacing the live animal market explanation that Li Zhang defends. She holds on to this explanation until the end of the Chinese struggle with the pandemic, which she considers to be the triumphal defeat of the impact of the disease in the PRC. Her account culminates in a glowing praise of the CCP: The Chinese Communist Party mobilized its 90 million members to inform the people and enforce public health measures. Down to the village level, Chinese Studies International: Vol. 28, 2024 Review grassroots cadres and influential individuals patrolled the streets, and sometimes even blocked roads or dug trenches at the borders between various villages, cities, and provinces. (p. 94) Liao Yiwu's Wuhan: Dokumentarroman (Frankfurt, 2021) adds an almost comical dimension to Li Zhang's praise because Liao Yiwu, a Chinese intellectual living in the large Chinese dissident community in Berlin, makes the reader appreciate the unbearable impact of the controlling features of the surveillance state during the COVID-19 pandemic, which Li Zhang doesn't consider worth dealing with. She doesn't mention how the pandemic was used by the Chinese government to finally crush the Hong Kong democracy movement and incorporate the city into the PRC, in violation of the 1997 agreement with the UK, which established a fifty-year transition period. She is in awe of the PRC success story of coming to terms with the pandemic. She mentions the low Chinese death toll compared to the one million U. S. casualties and, percentagewise, similar high figures in some European countries and, for example, Brazil and India. Yet she doesn't discuss the well-reported problems with the Chinese accounting of COVID casualties and never raises the question of the strained relationship with the World Health Organization and the China-centric refusal to let the more successful Western vaccines be used in the country. Li Zhang was born in the PRC but teaches as a visiting assistant professor of global and international studies at the University of California at Irvine. This professional identity as a social scientist and growing up in China colors her book. Her main thesis is that the global extension of capitalism, which reached China under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping from 1978 to 1989 and penetrated all spheres of life, is the main cause for societies being vulnerable to pandemics now and in the future. Whether the reader has to understand this indirect critique of Deng Xiaoping as an endorsement of Xi Jinping, whom Liao Yiwu calls throughout his book the "Kaiser" (Emperor), is not clear. Her Marxist identification of global capitalism as the source of most of the modern social ills is clear: The urban growth and industrial development are celebrated as evidence of. . .