There Is No Outside Read online

  Because the Chinese pangolin has been hunted to near extinction, most these days are trafficked from Southeast Asia, at the border with Myanmar or Vietnam; in recent years there have even been reports of Chinese markets acquiring varieties from Africa. Local sales of pangolins in Southeast Asia have faded, with suppliers turning their attention to the lucrative Chinese market, a clear illustration of how flexible and market-dependent the taste in wildlife is. By one estimate, some twenty tons of pangolins are shipped into China each year, either alive, frozen whole, or as dried and processed scales. Some of the headline-grabbing seizures include a 14-ton haul of frozen pangolins in Indonesia, 4.4 tons of scales seized in Hong Kong, and an 11.9-ton haul in Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong. For this reason, most headlines from the pangolin trade are centered on the interstices of Southeast Asia and southern China, the crucial boundary zone of the black-market trade.

  It would make perfect sense, therefore, if the coronavirus had broken out in the Pearl River Delta, encompassing Guangdong and Hong Kong, as SARS did. Looking back, the Delta of the early century was the most likely candidate in China for an outbreak on a global scale. At the time, Guangdong was the province most tightly linked with world supply chains and international finance, as Cantonese families had long migrated to Hong Kong and other overseas Chinese communities. With liberalization since 1979, they revived kinship ties in pursuit of business opportunities, as Hong Kong capital introduced the world market to handbag subcontractors in Dongguan. The initial SARS outbreak emerged from a Cantonese man who brought the disease to a massive hospital in Guangzhou. From there, a Guangzhou doctor carried it to a wedding in Hong Kong, and fellow hotel guests then brought it to Hanoi, Toronto, Singapore, Taipei, and Bangkok. In hindsight, the Guangdong/Hong Kong nexus appears as a perfect storm of wildlife consumption and global integration. (Tellingly, in the 2011 Hollywood film Contagion, a pandemic is traced to a Hong Kong chef who prepares a pig.)

  But the novel coronavirus did not emerge from the Pearl River Delta, with all its unique geographical and cultural features. Instead it first appeared in Wuhan, five hundred miles inland from Shanghai and six hundred miles north of Hong Kong. Before 20th-century industrialization, Wuhan served as an intermediary hub between the ocean and inland China, facilitating the traffic in household goods such as rice, silk, furs, and leathers. (My own family briefly worked as petty tea merchants there in the early 1900s.) The most famous local dish is a breakfast of hot noodles in a dry peanut sauce sprinkled with scallions and sold in street stalls; if pangolin sales in Wuhan have risen in recent years, therefore, this likely reflects less the particularities of the Wuhan people than the increased fortunes of the Chinese economy as a whole.

  And though Americans have long nicknamed Wuhan the Chicago of China, the comparison is inapt. Both became major industrial cities by the early 20th century, but Wuhan’s international links were far more modest. Even today, the fifteen thousand foreigners who resided in Wuhan before the outbreak amounted to less than one tenth the figures for ethnic-Chinese metropolises such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Singapore, or Taipei.

  Nevertheless, even Wuhan can evidently serve as the site for a global outbreak in the year 2020. Skimming the headlines of cases provides some clues as to how the novel coronavirus initially spread. The first wave of people who carried it overseas were the middle-class friends, co-workers, and relatives of residents of Wuhan. There was the Chinese woman working in Seoul who had recently visited Wuhan; the Wuhan woman who visited Bangkok; the tourists who traveled to Vietnam; the full-time Japanese resident from China who visited a Wuhan acquaintance; the German employees of a Munich-area supplier with branches in Wuhan; the Chinese technicians and Iranian businessman traveling between China and Qom, Iran; and the Shenzhen man who went home to see his relatives.

  As evacuation stories mounted, so did accounts of global linkages. A Sudanese engineering student at the Wuhan University of Technology successfully avoided the virus and left after six weeks of self-quarantine. The governments of France, Germany, and Japan evacuated their own citizens from Wuhan. Some of these were employees in the automobile sector; companies such as General Motors, Renault, and Nissan have established branches in the export processing zone. And though the source of the Iran outbreak remains unclear, journalists speculate it resulted from the big business between the two economies (China is Iran’s top trading partner), typically Iranian crude oil in exchange for Chinese weapons and capital investment into local infrastructure.

  What all these stories have in common is how unremarkable they are: this is contemporary global interchange at its most prosaic. Travel to and from countless other cities across Asia and Europe for business meetings and tourism follows a very similar pattern. Whereas the SARS outbreak was blamed on the peculiar, outlandish diets of the Cantonese people and then traveled through the elite cosmopolitan links between major Asian cities, the so-called “Wuhan virus” points to the utterly mundane way that countless nodal points around the world, including “second-tier” Chinese cities, are interwoven more tightly than ever across global circuits of commerce, education, and tourism.

  By comparison, during the “high socialist” era of the 1950s through the ’70s, the rapid spread of a Covid-19–like virus from a fishmonger in Wuhan to hundreds of countries in a matter of weeks would have been unimaginable. In 1957, an “Asian flu” diagnosed in January first traveled in predictable fashion from southern China to Hong Kong and Singapore; it didn’t fan out to the US and Europe until many months later, in the fall. Under a trade embargo by the US, the routes of commerce and travel between China and the world were far narrower, slower, and quieter. Notably, it was only during this window of relative isolation that the government officially stamped out the opium trade, before the infamous drug reentered the country with market liberalization.

  But the world has changed. The many ties between Wuhan and the world today suggest a terrifying reality that should be clear to xenophobes and liberals alike. A viral outbreak in any one of these locations, it appears, could easily wind up touching the lives of hundreds of millions of others. Could the next Wuhan be Zhengzhou, Dayton, Bangalore, or Dar es-Salaam?

  2. Market Virus

  The spread of the novel coronavirus has a clear scientific explanation rooted in the virus’s natural properties, about which researchers are furiously trying to learn more. What is known is that the virus’s crown-like shape comes from outer protein spikes that bind to the throat and then spread to living lung cells, which then produce more viruses that spread to new parts of the lungs and to other organs. But of course, the real-life distribution of the virus has also been shaped by historically specific political factors. It is not just a natural disaster but a social one as well. The coronavirus first traveled through animals sold on the Asian black market, first clung to human carriers in a seafood market, and first spread through the mundane routes of regional tourism, foreign business, and foreign education.

  This coincidence between the spread of the coronavirus and the footprint of the marketplace explains why it has been so difficult to contain. As cases began to emerge in the Middle East, Oceania, Europe, and the United States, officials expressed skepticism that drastic measures were necessary to avoid an outbreak. If anything, their comments were focused on potential stock market losses rather than public health risks. It is not that they did not realize the potential health impacts, but that they understood how sickness would prevent people from spending money and going to work. This attitude was crystallized by the outlandish statements of CNBC editor Rick Santelli who said on March 5, “Maybe we’d just be better off if we gave it to everybody, and then in a month it would be over … But the difference is [right now] we’re wreaking havoc on global and domestic economies.” Santelli was rightly pilloried by commentators across party lines, but his comments were also an honest expression of the ways governments and businesses are now being forced to weigh corporate profits against human l
ife to a newly extreme degree.

  In the United States, cases had begun to break out in Washington state and California for weeks before Americans started to take the virus seriously. One turning point was last Wednesday, when basketball player Rudy Gobert became the first professional athlete to test positive for the coronavirus, only days after he had mocked the possibility of an outbreak by wiping his hands over microphones and equipment in the locker room. Within minutes, actor Tom Hanks wrote on social media that he and his wife had also tested positive while traveling in Australia. These revelations seem to have accelerated the American response: within days, all major sports leagues were canceled, schools were closed, and a national state of emergency was declared. The most obvious—albeit imperfect—analogy is the blasé attitude so many Americans had taken towards the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, reversed only when actor Rock Hudson and then NBA star Magic Johnson revealed their own positive diagnoses. In the United States, diseases do not appear real when they spread among ordinary people out of the spotlight. It is only when they affect wealthy celebrities and athletes that they begin to be taken seriously.

  As a result, we are now left with the absurd reality of the richest country in the world wholly ill-prepared for collective responsibility and action. In a society that has systematically dismantled its welfare state for nearly a half-century, where the supposedly “left-wing” political party regularly throws temper tantrums over the cost of health care, and which has literally installed a real estate developer as its President, we face the remarkable situation that pandemic measures are now being shouldered almost entirely by local and private actors, that reliable testing has been secured by the Gates Foundation and the Utah Jazz but not made publicly available by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

  The novel coronavirus initially emerged and spread across the world through market activities, and our ability to tame it now will be decided by the degree to which we can subordinate market logics to our own survival, rather than vice versa. The endless reports of Americans unable to pay for coronavirus tests, unable to work from home, unable to limit their own exposure to public places and gatherings—health care workers, especially—are an index of the general population’s varying levels of market dependence, or, what amounts to the same thing, class. Disparities that have been growing more acute and life-threatening for decades have suddenly become apocalyptic.

  Just last year, a Federal Reserve study reported that nearly 40 percent of Americans would struggle to cover an emergency expense of $400, either due to lack of savings or because their earnings were already earmarked for credit card, medical, and student loan bills. Meanwhile, reports suggest that the cost of a coronavirus test initially ranged $1,400 to $4,000. The coronavirus endangers the twenty-seven million people without health insurance and, in particular, the twenty-three million who live paycheck to paycheck, including those who work hourly-wage salaries in the hotel and food industries, many of whom do not get sick pay and who fall outside the relief package currently in Congress, which, under pressure from McDonald’s and Walmart, exempts large and small employers and only covers ten days of work. All of these people are captive to subsistence wages that make an exit from work—and any disruption—potentially ruinous.

  On the other end of the spectrum are the hoarders. The spread of the virus and its attendant horror stories has been accompanied by articles about the super-rich chartering private jets to fly overseas and to disaster bunkers in Indiana and South Dakota. Gwyneth Paltrow documented her escape to Paris via Instagram, jokingly referencing her role in Contagion (her character was the one who spread the virus from Hong Kong to the US). Elsewhere, billionaires have inquired with private hospitals about early vaccine treatments and exclusive testing kits—and as more athletes and entertainers reveal their test results on social media, the secret medical hotline for wealthy celebrities indeed appears intact and functioning. But there are also more common forms of indefensible excess: the many stories playing out in the news, on social media, and in group chats of suburban parents fiercely raiding grocery stores for home supplies, emptying shelves and stockpiling weeks of food in basement freezers. In Australia, hoarding has gotten so bad that one coffee shop began to accept payments in toilet paper. In this respect, the super-rich and the middle classes have much in common. Both groups are financially secure enough and have enough accumulated wealth to possess the luxury of withdrawing from the marketplace and, by extension, its face-to-face interactions.

  Thus, whereas economic need has forced service workers to remain constantly exposed to the virus, for the well-off, it is their wealth that protects them. What American pundits misunderstand when they brandish “market choice” as a weapon against social welfare, then, is that the social safety net does not extinguish human freedom but instead acts as its very condition of possibility (philosophers have called this the distinction between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom). Indeed, the best safeguard against the novel coronavirus is the ability to voluntarily withdraw oneself from capitalism. Therein lies the problem.

  3. Value Virus

  The irony of the term “Wuhan” or “Chinese virus” is that the most successful and responsible government responses have been in the ethnic-Chinese-majority territories of Hong Kong (four deaths in 256 cases), Singapore (no deaths in 385 cases), and Taiwan (one in 135). Scarred by the SARS outbreak, these governments responded aggressively in January by screening arrivals from Wuhan, implementing travel restrictions (against the WHO’s recommendations), and promoting society-wide policies on school and workplace activity, stringent assessments of hospitals, and regular public announcements. The number of cases in these countries has fallen behind those of Iceland, and the newest ones have arrived from passengers traveling not from mainland China, but from Europe and the United States.

  Though there is no vaccine yet for the novel coronavirus, these governments have provided the most straightforward institutional solution: large-scale testing and self-quarantining. Until a cure can be found, our best hope in the US, according to public health experts, is to “flatten the curve” and distribute cases evenly enough that our private health care system does not become overwhelmed—or as overwhelmed as in the worst-case scenarios. Nevertheless, government agencies and businesses here are refusing to implement these solutions effectively, because—as Rick Santelli made clear—they stand in direct conflict with the commercial demand to constantly produce, sell, and purchase goods.

  The coronavirus has throttled international stock markets and distressed its transnational supply chains, cutting off China’s ability to produce for the rest the world. Because mainland Chinese citizens are the world’s top tourists, overseas restrictions and domestic quarantining have meant that travel has plummeted, a gut punch to Southeast Asia, Japan, and Hawai’i. In manufacturing, China has famously become the latest workshop to the world, providing everything from dried mushrooms to blue jeans to smart phones. Because Wuhan is a center for automobile parts manufacturing, weeks after the coronavirus shut down the city, overseas car plants such as the Fiat-Chrysler outpost in Serbia and Hyundai factories in Korea halted production because their Chinese suppliers had stopped producing. Apple has already announced projected losses for the year, not only because its Chinese factories have closed, but also because so much of its sales rely on Chinese consumers. About 30 percent of global container shipping is processed through Chinese ports, the busiest in the world, but thus far in 2020, over one quarter of shipments to North America have been canceled.

  The slowdown of travel and construction has also tanked the world’s largest commodity markets. China is the world’s top importer of crude oil, shipping in the equivalent of ten million barrels daily, but as Chinese activity and then global travel slowed, oil stocks have piled higher and higher. For the first time since 2009, energy analysts project overall consumption will fall this year. In this shrinking, zero-sum game, Saudi Arabia this past week decided to accelerate
the stakes of competition by announcing an upsurge of crude oil production and lower prices, shredding a 2017 agreement with Russia to limit production. Because it enjoys the cheapest production costs of all countries, Saudi Arabia gambled that it could simply elbow out competitors through rock-bottom prices. Though aimed at Russia, this gambit has caused collateral damage to medium-sized producers like Venezuela and Iran, not to mention American shale companies; when the Dow Jones opened last Monday, it fell 5 percent.

  Metals markets have been similarly hurt. China is the top exporter of steel, aluminum, and key mineral inputs such as manganese alloys and silicon; when the coronavirus outbreak began, the major threat was thus severed supply chains. Instead, Chinese activity has now mostly recovered, but the metal industries are facing the bleak prospect of glutted supplies while the rest of the world’s producers and consumers become paralyzed by the pandemic. Because steel and aluminum plants are too expensive and risky to stop, companies never halted production. The current surplus will already take months to resolve. Chinese inventories for aluminum have doubled since December, and steel inventories are 45 percent higher than a year ago.