Stanford Briefs. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. 185 pp. US$14.00, paper. ISBN 9781503630178.
Li Zhang’s thought-provoking book, The Origins of COVID-19: China and Global Capitalism, investigates how the structural conditions of global capitalism both led to the emergence of COVID-19 and shaped the responses to the unfolding pandemic. Building on existing research on the connections between capitalism and emerging infectious diseases, the book convincingly argues that discussions about preventing future pandemics should be broadened to integrate an understanding of how capitalist processes increase the risk of zoonosis and, as a result, of pandemics. Interestingly, Zhang not only shows how the diminishing distance between humans and animals through urbanization and the consumption, trafficking, and farming of wildlife heightens the probability of zoonosis; she also explains that the virus research that was generated by the SARS outbreak consolidated a baneful approach to public health that does not focus on eliminating novel diseases, but instead invests in making these diseases governable and profitable. This approach intensifies the entanglement of state and biomedical corporate interests and leads to investments in virus research that form a risky bridge between China’s hinterlands and its urban centres.
Zhang’s fine book offers a chronological overview of the events leading up to the global COVID-19 pandemic, starting from the first cases of pneumonia reported in Wuhan in late 2019 to the worldwide pandemic in June 2021. The book is organized according to different stages of the pandemic: its emergence, emergency, and surge, victory over the virus, and its persistence. Each chapter offers an overview of important events and shows how the spread of and response to the COVID-19 virus in China has been shaped by entangled processes of state making, scientific and technological development, and global capitalism.
The first two chapters introduce the book’s central argument and explore narratives about the emergence of COVID-19 to show that they fail to recognize how the conditions of capitalist modernity drive the emergence of new diseases. Zhang analyzes online debates about cultural practices (look, Chinese people eat bats!) and discussions about which animal could have been the intermediary for the virus (was it the bamboo rat or the pangolin?). Here, she also explains why a direct spillover from a host animal (bats?) to humans is not out of the question.
The third chapter, “Emergency,” provides an account of the events between late December 2019 and 23 January 2020, when the Wuhan lockdown was announced. How did information about the spread of COVID-19 travel and why was the declaration of an emergency resisted? Doctors who sounded the alarm early on, including Li Wenliang, whose later death caused an Internet uproar, were initially met with punishment and hostility. This chapter explains that the slow initial response to the virus was due to information being repressed at various levels of government and the entanglement of state and capitalist interests.
Chapters 4 and 5—on the surge and the victory—describe how questions about the origin of the virus changed into questions about who was to blame when it spread across the world, leading to the stigmatization of Chinese people abroad. This was when the Chinese state made a huge effort to change the direction of the conversation about the virus’s origin into a celebration of its own successful strategy for dealing with it. The emergence of COVID-19 was framed as a natural and inevitable disaster, while the Chinese state’s efficient and high-tech approach to the virus was a testament to the country’s modernity and supremacy. The contrast between the effects of the Chinese strategy and the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19 in other parts of the world (and particularly in the United States) led to debates about the spread of the virus becoming part of geopolitical struggles and competition.
The sixth and concluding chapter on persistence takes us to June 2020, when an outbreak of COVID-19 in Beijing warned that the pandemic was not yet over, even though at this point in China the virus had become something “foreign” that could be imported into China via people or goods. The chapter explains that discussions among scholars and policy makers about COVID-19 do not focus on how future pandemics can be prevented through societal changes, such as dismantling unsustainable agro-industries and de-concentrating animals and humans from the urban metropolis. Instead, they stress that investments must be made in biomedical science and technology to control the future new diseases that will inevitably emerge. Written with a sense of urgency, this final chapter warns that the deepening entanglement of science and technology with profit interests increases the risk of future pandemics. It proposes that international collaboration, restructuring healthcare, and developing a broad understanding of why pandemics emerge are necessary to curtail COVID-19 and prevent the emergence of new infectious diseases.
The Origins of COVID-19: China and Global Capitalism is a valuable reflection on the role of global capitalism in the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic continues to harrow China in 2022, arguments about the relationship between the emergence of new diseases and global capitalism have only grown in importance. Written in pandemic times, this book is largely based on the analysis of political and scholarly texts and therefore lacks the ethnographic insights of Zhang’s earlier work. Nonetheless, it provides an important and original perspective on a global crisis that affects all of us. I therefore recommend it not only for scholars and students interested in China and pandemic politics, but for everybody affected by COVID-19 and invested in the prevention of future pandemics.
Willy Sier
Utrecht University, Utrecht