Will China Pay A Price?

Across the United States, cities and states are filing suit against China for its failure to halt the novel coronavirus and for damages due to health costs and economic costs that fighting the virus has entailed.

All of those lawsuits will fail.

There are two primary reasons.

First, there’s a legal doctrine called sovereign immunity, which means that in most cases, you cannot sue the government.

This is a modern version of the Middle Ages rule of rex not fit malum — the king can do no wrong.

Second, China will argue, accurately, that it does not maintain “minimum contacts” with the municipalities or states alleging harm, and that therefore the courts in those jurisdictions lack standing to bring China into court.

But will China get off scot-free for its role in the spreading of the virus?

No.

Theories abound as to how the virus got loose in the first place.

It might have jumped from bat to man in a “wet market” in Wuhan, where you can have animals killed to order for your dining pleasure.

It might have escaped a lab in that same city where infectious diseases are studied, either accidentally or when a worker sold infected animals to a contact at the market.

Your theory is as good as mine.

Some believe China unleashed the virus intentionally, as an act of war.

My clients who do business with China doubt that, however.

Yes, China has made clear that it intends to be the primary political and economic force in the world by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the Great March.

But resorting to germ warfare is beyond the pale even of the People’s Republic.

Most likely, my clients believe, China’s culture of secrecy and of shooting the messengers of bad news conspired to keep word of the virus’s effects a secret for so long that, well, a world pandemic resulted.

However it happened, people are angry with China, and rightfully so.

My expectation is that Americans and their companies will boycott Chinese goods and demand that companies that deal with China do business elsewhere.

You could summarize this next step in a hashtag: #QuarantineChina.

The Chinese economic miracle has created a middle class of 300 million in that formerly impoverished country.

Of course, that result has come at a steep price for American manufacturers and American jobs.

In his groundbreaking book, The Walmart Effect, Charles Fishman wrote that Americans have essentially become addicted to cheap goods from China, like a nicely stitched boy’s shirt at Walmart for under $6.

Fishman points out the obvious: there’s no way such a nice shirt could be made and sold for such an everyday low price without the use of dirt cheap labor in horrific factory conditions, or more likely, prison or child labor.

And yet, as more and more American jobs drifted to the Far East, American shoppers loved those bargains.

Maybe we’re finally seeing that a nice $6 boy’s shirt is no bargain.

Not when the price is feeding the beast that is the Chinese economy while starving American manufacturing and destroying American jobs and communities.

Maybe this is the moment when Americans say enough is enough.

Our conscience is in our checkbooks, meaning that you can tell what our values are by what we’re willing to spend money on.

If Americans are willing to pay a higher price for boys’ shirts, and everything else that comes from China, and buy things manufactured only in other countries (including our own), we will punish the People’s Republic in the only place it cares about — its pocketbook.

The Chinese economy is a farce, propped up by intense corruption at every level.

The economy is controlled by two groups: the military and the “princelings,” the children and grandchildren of the veterans of Mao’s 1949 Long March.

The banking system is a sham, lending billions of dollars to builders who put up entire new cities that go unoccupied.

The leader, Xi, has removed any semblance of democracy by installing himself as a leader for life.

China’s “belt and road” system of engineering expensive bridges, roads, and rail systems across the planet is basically a form of payday lending for poor countries, trapping them in debt so that they will owe China loyalty for decades.

That’s how China does business.

And then came the virus, which is everyone’s business.

No, the lawsuits against China are bound to fail.

But a rethinking of our economic relationship to the People’s Republic is long overdue.

We have traded jobs for $6 shirts.

We have destroyed our working class cities and towns for bargains at Walmart.

Maybe that was the first pandemic, an economic virus.

And maybe it’s taken this second pandemic, the novel coronavirus, to cause individual Americans and American businesses alike to ask, why exactly do we do business with China?

Because now we’re experiencing the results of making wealthy and powerful a government and a nation mired in secrets and lies.

The next time you see a $6 boy’s shirt at Walmart, ask yourself, what’s the real price?

Maybe it’s time to ask, can we as a nation really afford cheap shirts, when the real price of doing business with China is a lockdown that’s put 30 million out of work and disrupted the lives of every man, woman, and child on the planet.

You tell me.