The context in which the Wuhan Biolab was operating

[John Marchioro]

Despite many market reforms over the past 40 odd years, China still
has a planned economy to a considerable extent. This includes not only
SOEs (state-owned enterprises) but of course many related
organizations and institutions, including of course universities,
technical institutes, laboratories, hospitals (many of which conduct
research and development) and on and on.

These institutions and the like have always been incorporated into
China's 5-year plans, and some programs involving them go back to the
late Maoist period (as part of the "Four Modernizations" spearheaded
by Zhou Enlai in the 1970s) or early Dengist period, like the 863
Program. But in the past decade the old programs have been revamped
and extremely ambitious new plans for raising the quality of the
research done at such places, as well as the commercial applications,
to meet or surpass international standards have been implemented at
the national level, with corresponding targets and goals and
objectives and the rest passed down the chain to the provincial and
municipal governments for implementation.

Here are some examples of what I am talking about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan

(Note the word "international" in this article, used repeatedly....
the point is that China is trying to recruit top level Chinese
academic talent to return to China and raise China's abilities in a
wide range of fields to a level that competes with the best in the
West and Japan and places like SK and Taiwan).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Key_Laboratories
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biotechnology_industry_in_China#State_programs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/863_Program
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_973

There are many others, many of more recent vintage. Here is a brief
but by no means exhaustive overview:

http://www.chinaconsulatesf.org/eng/kj/kjjh/

So in essence the Chinese state has been doing to its science and
technology establishment what it and other Leninist/Stalinist systems
long did to their Olympic teams: Demanding Gold Medals.

Now obviously, ever since the Manhattan Project there has been a
similar collaboration in the US between the government, academia and
corporate America when it comes to the development of weaponry and
associated things like satellites and spy gear and the like, and the
range involved is wide. Everyone except Al Gore knows that the
Internet was originally a Pentagon project, and the list of such
things could be expanded very easily. And you can find examples of the
same in Europe and Japan in recent decades. But what is being done in
China is still somewhat different; it is an effort to impose a plan on
the science and technology establishment of a developing country to
achieve first world results in a very very short time frame, and with
the clearly stated goal of making China the world's dominant country
by mid-century if not earlier. That is not me saying that; it is the
Chinese state, over and over again, with accompanying pressure to
achieve it.

This strategy is clearly achieving results in some fields, like 5G.

It appears to have also been responsible for the disaster at the Wuhan
Biolab. That laboratory simply did not have the facilities, the
trained staff, the good practices and the rest to be doing the work it
apparently was being forced to do to compete on the global stage with
companies in the West and Japan. It simply cannot be done based on a
5-Year Plan demanding a list of concrete end results. Over several
decades, perhaps.... but that is not certain either.

it should be added as well that saying that doctors and medical
researchers would never do anything unethical is simply laughable.
Anyone who thinks that should look the story of the development of the
polio vaccine for a sobering example of rampant unethical conduct by
many prominent Western scientists. And that is not the only such case.

This also reminds me of the idiocy that went on in China during the
Great Leap Forward. Unrealistic targets would be set for grain output
from a county, and then a subdivision of that, and then at the lowest
level, the people's commune. The village level officials would report
back (falsely) that the target had been met, because to not do so
meant career oblivion or perhaps worse... And then the state would see
that output had miraculously been doubled.... and set a new quota
demanding that it be doubled again. The result was of course a
disastrous famine that claimed 60-70 million lives.... And the lesson
seems not to have been learned.

I am not saying that China has not benefited greatly from foreign
talent, including Chinese scientists overseas who have been lured back
home by the above programs and corresponding high salaries and honors.
It clearly has. But this is not a smart way to go about building up
national abilities in fields like virus research. The US saw something
like this during the moon race, which resulted in a few disasters
including one that left three astronauts burned to death on the
launchpad. China is doing this across a wide range of fields including
virus research (obviously) but no doubt other areas where such
disasters could well happen if unrealistic targets are set. I have no
idea what those other areas might be, though nuclear-related ones come
to mind. The above context has received almost no media discussion
across the board, but I hope that someone in Washington DC has some
notion of what these problematic areas there might be, and there are
efforts now to get the Chinese to slow down or desist entirely.

In other words, the Wuhan Biolab is unlikely to be an isolated case.
Not given the context above and the way the central state is demanding
world class results in a very short time frame from a science and
technology establishment ill-equipped to produce them. And worse yet
may well if such unrealistic demands are not ratcheted down to
achievable levels, with safety coming first.

[dav...@gol.com]

FWIW, the people who created the ARPANET have explicitly stated that what Al Gore actually said ("I created the Internet") was, in fact, true. It was Al Gore's legislation (joint with some other folks, but Gore pushed it), based on his father's interstate highway system legislation (thus the "information superhighway" bit), that created the _PUBLIC_ internet. Over which you sent this message.

Not that anything else you said is problematic in the slightest. And it ain't just the Chinese. There's a whole class of research ("gain of function") that's looking into how to turn viruses that don't infect people into ones that do. Stupid beyond words, but the people doing it can't see that.

A friend who's a nurse at the MGH says: "We're all going to die".

David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan

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