Failure to get to the bottom of COVID-19’s origins and spread may not only allow China to evade responsibility, but could also weaken the world’s ability to prevent another global pandemic. Fortunately, there is reason to hope that Donald Trump’s incoming administration will revive the search for an answer.

Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

GENEVA – The COVID-19 pandemic killed an estimated 7.1 million people worldwide, causing global life expectancy to decline by 1.6 years between 2019 and 2021. It disrupted economies, destroyed livelihoods, and strained social cohesion in many countries. Yet no one has been held accountable for it. Will US President-elect Donald Trump change that?

Five years after the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), we still do not know where the pathogen first arose. Did it emerge naturally in the wet markets of Wuhan, China, or did it escape from the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), where studies into bat coronaviruses were underway?

We do know that China’s government allowed what might have been a local outbreak to morph into a global health crisis. After the first COVID-19 cases were reported in Wuhan, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime censored reports about the disease and hid evidence of human-to-human transmission for weeks. Meanwhile, travel to and from Wuhan was allowed to continue unhindered.

Unlike the Muslim gulag in Xinjiang province or naval-base construction in the South China Sea, however, Chinese authorities could not conceal the “novel coronavirus” for long, nor could the rest of the world ignore it once the secret was out. So many people contracted COVID-19 so quickly that many hospitals were soon overwhelmed, leaving many victims to be treated in tents.

China’s government then shifted from concealment to damage control. State media reframed the crisis in Wuhan as a story of successful recovery, while touting unrealistically low mortality rates. Meanwhile, Xi thwarted international efforts to initiate an independent forensic inquiry into COVID-19’s genesis, which he claimed would amount to “origin-tracing terrorism.” The only “investigation” he allowed was a 2021 joint study with the World Health Organization that China controlled and steered.

While Trump, who was president for the first few months of the pandemic, often highlighted the link between China and COVID-19, his successor, Joe Biden, effectively let China off the hook. Less than a week after his inauguration, Biden produced a presidential memorandum urging federal agencies to avoid mentioning the virus’s geographic origins.

Biden’s goal was to stem a rise in bullying, harassment, and hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. The toxicity of America’s partisan politics meant that pushing back against racism – which Trump and his cohort often stoked – also meant shutting down any discussion of China’s role in causing the crisis. Social-media platforms, mainstream media, and some prominent US scientists (who hid their conflicts of interest) also aided the suppression of debate about COVID-19.

The partisan divide over whether to investigate China’s responsibility for COVID-19 persists to this day. Just last month, Democrats challenged a 520-page report – produced by the Republican-controlled US House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic – which concluded, after a two-year investigation, that the virus likely escaped from the WIV, faulting the report’s methodology. So, while some US government agencies – including the Department of Energy and the FBI – have given credence to the lab-leak theory, there remains no consensus in Washington.

Failure to get to the bottom of where COVID-19 originated may not only allow China to evade responsibility; it will also weaken the world’s ability to prevent another global pandemic. But there is reason to hope that the incoming Trump administration will revive the search for an answer. Beyond Trump’s own willingness to point the finger at China, some of his cabinet picks – notably, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services and Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – challenged prevailing narratives about COVID-19 (albeit sometimes in dangerous ways).

An effective investigation will require considerable transparency from the US. The NIH, the US government’s medical-research agency, was funding studies on bat coronaviruses at the WIV as far back as 2014. The NIH knew that the work was risky; it was being done in China precisely because the US has stricter rules governing “gain-of-function” research, which involves modifying a biological agent’s genetic structure to confer on it “new or enhanced activity,” such as increasing a pathogen’s transmissibility or virulence. The NIH continued to fund research at the WIV even after multiple State Department cables flagged the lab’s lax safety standards, stopping only after the pandemic began (when it also removed the description of gain-of-function research from its website).

Making matters worse, we now know that the WIV has been carrying out classified research on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017. A 2021 State Department fact sheet acknowledged that some US funding for civilian research could have been diverted to secret Chinese military projects at the institute.

One rule of thumb in forensic investigations is to “follow the money,” so the Trump administration should start by disclosing the full extent of US funding of coronavirus research in China. But investigators will also have to “follow the data,” meaning that the US will have to disclose the results of the research it funded in Wuhan, which was part of a collaborative US-China scientific program.

Holding China accountable for its role in the pandemic is only the first step. To safeguard humanity’s future, the Trump administration will also have to address a more fundamental issue: dangerous “gain-of-function” research is still taking place in some labs in China, Russia, and the West. The genetic enhancement of pathogens represents the greatest existential threat to humankind ever produced by science, even greater than nuclear weapons. By tightening rules on such activities – or, ideally, prohibiting lab research that could unleash a pandemic – Trump would leave an important positive legacy.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

© Project Syndicate, 2025.

By Brahma Chellaney, The Hill

China and India have sought in recent weeks to ease a tense military standoff along their mountainous frontier. The drawn-out standoff, triggered by China’s furtive encroachments on the icy borderlands of India’s Ladakh region in 2020, has fostered rival military buildups and intermittent clashes along the Himalayas.

An Oct. 23 meeting between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of a BRICS summit highlighted mutual interest in improving relations between the Asian giants. Indeed, an agreement was reached for reciprocal steps toward defusing the military standoff and ensuring peace along their disputed frontier, which is one of the world’s longest land borders.

But can a potential thaw in the icy hostility marking bilateral relations blunt the Sino-Indian strategic rivalry, which is defining Asian geopolitics?

The origins of the tensions go back to the early 1950s, when China imposed itself as India’s neighbor by occupying the then-autonomous Tibet, a large region that historically served as a buffer between the Chinese and Indian civilizations. That annexation led to China’s 1962 border war with India. After Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, the two countries restored diplomatic ties, but, despite efforts to establish a modus vivendi, mutual suspicions and antagonisms never disappeared.

In recent years, India is tasting the bitter fruits of Modi’s initial efforts to appease China. The 2020 Chinese territorial encroachments caught India unawares at a time when the country was preoccupied with enforcing one of the world’s strictest lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Modi came to office in 2014 as a foreign policy novice. He thought that, by resetting the relationship with Beijing, he could help weaken China’s strategic alliance with Pakistan. Pakistan, like China, is a revisionist state that lays claims to sizable swaths of Indian territory. But Pakistan also has employed cross-border terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy.

The China-Pakistan axis has long generated high security costs for India, including raising the specter of a two-front war. Through a “defensive wedge strategy,” in which the status quo power seeks to split a revisionist alliance so as to focus capabilities on the more threatening challenger, India has long sought — unsuccessfully — to break the Sino-Pakistan axis.

The first prime minister from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata (Indian People’s) Party, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, tried to win over Pakistan, famously going there by bus in 1999. Modi, by contrast, focused on befriending China after coming to power, including hosting Xi before any other world leader and opening up the Indian economy for Chinese businesses by delisting China as a “country of concern.”

But Modi’s peace overtures spectacularly backfired. Xi visited India in 2014 bearing an unusual gift — a deep Chinese military incursion into an Indian borderland. This was followed by a bigger Sino-Indian military confrontation in 2017 on the Doklam Plateau, located at the Bhutan-Tibet-India trijunction. And the 2020 Chinese encroachments occurred despite 18 meetings between Modi and Xi over the previous five years.

After taking India on a rollercoaster ride on China, Modi has been injecting greater realism into his policy, including prioritizing military modernization and bolstering border defenses.

As the military standoff has underscored, India, by locking horns with China despite the risk of a full-scale war, openly challenged Chinese capability and power in a way no other power has done in this century. In fact, Xi seriously miscalculated that China would be able to impose the changed status quo on India as a fait accompli without inviting a robust military response.

The standoff has only highlighted Xi’s strategic shortsightedness in turning a once-conciliatory India into a foe that seems determined to forestall a Sinocentric Asia. With Xi accusing the U.S. of “containment from all directions, encirclement and suppression against us,” the last thing China needed to do was to make an enemy of its largest neighbor.

This is similar to how Xi’s muscular revisionism has impelled major shifts in the strategic postures of two other leading Indo-Pacific powers. Japan, by deciding to double its defense spending by 2027, is effectively abandoning its pacifist postwar security policy, and Australia has ended hedging by joining the U.S.-led, anti-China AUKUS alliance.

Today, the Sino-Indian efforts to reduce tensions and pull back forces massed along the common frontier are being driven by different geopolitical factors.

For India, one consideration is to gain greater maneuverability in foreign policy at a time when the once-blossoming strategic partnership with the U.S. has begun to fray, despite President Joe Biden acknowledging that this relationship is “among the most consequential in the world.”

China, for its part, is facing increasing Western pushback against its expansionism. With its economy already sputtering, China is running into long-term growth constraints, including a shrinking and rapidly aging population and slowing productivity increase. By contrast, India — which has one of the world’s most youthful populations with a median age of 28.4 — appears poised to reap a demographic dividend. While India’s economy remains smaller than China’s, it is now growing faster than any other important economy.

Whereas the People’s Liberation Army of China largely relies on conscripts who ostensibly “volunteer” for two years of service at age of 18, India’s all-volunteer military is considered the world’s most experienced force in hybrid mountain warfare. India’s military edge in the high-altitude Himalayan environment, however, could be blunted by China’s superior air power capabilities, including missile prowess.

Against this backdrop, Xi and Modi have sought to defuse the Himalayan military crisis without losing face. While deescalating tensions along the frontier makes eminent sense for both leaders, the Sino-Indian rivalry is unlikely to weaken. In fact, this rivalry promises to shape the Asian and global balance of power.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

Taipei Times, December 2, 2024

US president-elect Donald Trump is inheriting from President Joe Biden a challenging situation for American policy in the Indo-Pacific region, with an expansionist China on the march and threatening to incorporate Taiwan, by force if necessary.

US policy choices have become increasingly difficult, in part because Biden’s policy of engagement with China, including investing in personal diplomacy with President Xi Jinping (習近平), has not only yielded little but also allowed the Chinese military to gain a stronger footing in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.

In Xi’s Nov. 16 Lima meeting with a diminished Biden, the Chinese strongman signaled little interest in softening his aggressive foreign policy or easing China’s coercive pressures on Taiwan. In fact, Xi reportedly singled out President William Lai Ching-te (賴清德) by name and cited not one but four Chinese “red lines” that he said America must not cross if it wanted to maintain peace in the region.

“The Taiwan question, democracy and human rights, China’s path and system, and China’s development right are four red lines for China. They must not be challenged,” Xi cautioned Biden, according to the Chinese readout of the meeting. In other words, the US must not even seek to challenge the Chinese Communist Party-run totalitarian system by promoting democracy and human rights in China.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s sentencing of 45 pro-democracy leaders to long prison terms for a non-violent offense marks the final step in Xi’s crushing of all dissent and snuffing out Hong Kong’s autonomy. Like in the South China Sea, where China has changed the geopolitical map by expanding its maritime borders and building 27 military outposts on disputed islands, Xi’s success in Hong Kong has come without incurring any international costs.

All this increases the dangers for Taiwan. Yet, with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East claiming America’s attention and resources, and draining US stocks of critical munitions and air defense systems, the last thing Biden wanted is greater tensions with China. This explained his conciliatory moves to help ease Chinese concerns. For example, Biden declared while visiting Hanoi in September 2023, “I don’t want to contain China … we’re not looking to hurt China, sincerely.”

The reluctance to tangibly push back against China’s aggressive expansionism, however, has come at the expense of America’s own security and trade interests. It could also make Sino-US conflict more likely in the post-Biden era.

The new Trump administration will have to deal with Xi’s drive to secure strategic dominance for China in Asia, including his willingness to risk conflict to accomplish that.

Xi’s recurring vow to “reunify” Taiwan with China has no basis in international law or history. But it raises the possibility that Xi might make good on his pledge to take control of Taiwan.

In fact, as China takes steps like encroaching on Taiwan’s air-defense zone and encircling the island through large-scale military exercises, it creates the risk of a war that would transform global geopolitics. The military exercises appear to be dress rehearsals for possible aggression, including enforcing a quarantine or military blockade of Taiwan.

While a military blockade would be tantamount to an act of war, an undeclared quarantine of Taiwan to interdict its vital shipments like energy and block access to its ports could be enforced by China’s maritime militias and coast guard — the world’s largest and most militarized — with the People’s Liberation Army playing only a supporting role. In keeping with China’s strategy of camouflaging offense as defense and relying on deception, stealth and surprise to advance its objectives, Beijing could blame aggressive moves by Taiwan or its supporters like the US for provoking China to order “law enforcement” in its “own waters.”

The Trump administration will have to be ready to respond to such a contingency in order to prevent Taiwan’s throttling.

If Trump were to disentangle the US from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, America would be able to focus its attention and resources on the Indo-Pacific region, the center of Chinese expansionism. Trump’s reelection represents a powerful mandate to stop the Ukraine war and, in doing so, help revitalize American power and influence. A majority of Ukrainians, according to the latest Gallup poll, now favor a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible.

The new US administration will need to prioritize safeguarding Taiwan’s autonomous status. This is critical not just to international security but also to America’s continued global preeminence.

To be sure, Trump is likely to demand that Taiwan pay the US for helping defend it from China, just as he is expected to seek higher payments from Japan and South Korea to cover the cost of the more than 80,000 American troops deployed on Japanese or South Korean territories. In his first term, though, Trump stepped up weapons sales to Taipei and sent senior officials to visit Taiwan, including his secretary of health and human services.

Today, the key to Taiwan remaining self-governing is America’s focus on dual deterrence — strengthening US-led deterrence in Asia while bolstering Taiwan’s defenses so that it has the capability to thwart an invasion. A robust dual-deterrent posture will also likely prevent a Chinese quarantine or military blockade of Taiwan.

Such a strategy could benefit from an economic component, given Taiwan’s vulnerability to China’s economic coercion. China (including Hong Kong) accounted for 35.2 percent of Taiwan’s exports and 20.3 percent of its imports last year. A US free trade agreement with Taiwan would help Taipei to diversify its outbound and inbound trade flows away from China.

Taipei also needs more concrete US support to beat back China’s efforts to turn Taiwan into an international pariah. The new US administration would do well to assist Taiwan in enlarging its diplomatic footprint internationally.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).

China has not hesitated to use highly aggressive tactics in its effort to expand its control over the South China Sea and end America’s primacy in the Indo-Pacific region. If the US does not start pushing back, China will grow only bolder – and more dominant.

Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

China has not hesitated to use highly aggressive tactics in its effort to expand its control over the South China Sea and end America’s primacy in the Indo-Pacific region. If the US does not start pushing back, China will grow only bolder – and more dominant.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Chinese dream” of global preeminence depends significantly on achieving dominance in the South China Sea and ending America’s primacy in the Indo-Pacific region, an emerging global economic and geopolitical hub. And China has not hesitated to use coercive tactics in service of these objectives.

In recent years, boats belonging to countries whose territorial claims China disregards, such as the Philippines and Vietnam, have faced blockades, ramming, water-cannon attacks, and even bladed-weapon assaults by Chinese vessels. Offshore energy operations endure regular harassment. Simply fishing in waters China calls its own can expose a person to a Chinese attack with iron pipes. Such violent confrontations have heightened regional tensions and undermined stability in a crucial corridor linking the Pacific and Indian Ocean.

One might have expected the United States to take action to rein in China’s behavior, especially given its mutual defense treaty with the Philippines. And yet, three successive presidents – Barack Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden – have failed to offer anything beyond statements of support and symbolic action. In 2012, Obama allowed China’s brazen seizure of the disputed Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines to go unpunished.

This was hardly the first time the US failed to live up to its defense commitments to the Philippines. In 1995, the Philippines requested US help to block Chinese forces from capturing Mischief Reef, located just 129 nautical miles from the Philippine island of Palawan. US President Bill Clinton, smarting over the termination three years earlier of America’s right to maintain military bases in the Philippines, refused. Mischief Reef is now an important Chinese military base.

The more China has gotten away with, the bolder it has become. Following the capture of the Scarborough Shoal, Xi embarked on a land-reclamation frenzy, creating 1,300 hectares (3,200 acres) of new land in the South China Sea, including seven artificial islands that now serve as forward operating bases. China has built 27 military outposts on disputed islands, which now bristle with short-range missiles, reconnaissance gear, radar systems, and laser and jamming equipment. Its larger islands also feature aircraft hangars, runways, and deep-water harbors. By unilaterally redrawing South China Sea’s geopolitical map, China is ensuring that it is uniquely positioned to project power in the region.

Even as China has gradually eroded the Philippines’ security – including Philippine control of areas within its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) – the US has continued to underscore its “ironclad” defense commitment to its ally. Late last year, the Biden administration affirmed that any armed third-party attack against the Philippine military, coast guard, aircraft, or public vessels “anywhere in the South China Sea” is covered by the US-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty. Yet China remains unpunished – and undeterred.

What explains this yawning gap between rhetoric and action? First and foremost, the US fears escalation, especially when its resources and attention are being consumed by the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Moreover, the US prefers not to weigh in on sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea, where it has no territorial claims of its own. It has not even taken a position on the sovereignty of the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands, which China also claims.

The US has, however, made clear that its security treaty with Japan covers those islands and cautioned against “any unilateral action that seeks to undermine Japan’s administration.” It should do the same for the Philippines, stating unequivocally that its treaty commitment to the country covers any efforts to compel a change in areas currently under Philippine administrative control, including Second Thomas Shoal, which China has been attempting to besiege.

In support of this stance, the US could cite the 2016 ruling by an international arbitration tribunal that China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea have “no legal basis” and that Chinese actions within the Philippine EEZ violated the Philippines’ sovereignty. But China’s open contempt for that ruling should dispel any hope that the South China Sea’s future will be decided by international law, which is why the US must be prepared to back up such a statement with action.

If the US does stand up for its treaty ally, it can take advantage of the nine Philippine naval and air bases to which it has gained access within the last decade, two of which are located just across from Taiwan and southern China. If it does not, China will continue to solidify its dominance over the South China Sea, thereby cornering the region’s rich energy and fishery resources and gaining the ability to disrupt supply chains and punish countries for acts it deems unfriendly.

China will not stop at the South China Sea. Under Xi’s leadership, China has used a similar combination of deception, bullying, coercion, and surprise to expand its territorial control elsewhere, from the East China Sea to the Himalayas, sparing not even the tiny country of Bhutan. As with any bully, the only way to stop China is to confront it with a credible challenger. The US must be that challenger, and it should start by defending the Philippines.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

© Project Syndicate, 2024.