Should the Chinese government be made to pay?

[Likethebattle]

Amig had been suggested that the Chinese government covered up the seriousness of covid19 to begin with and delayed alerting the WHO. They apparently let thousands of people leave the country knowingly infecting the rest of the world with a deadly virus.

If this is true can they be held accountable and made to pay damages to other countries? We face a recession due to their actions.

I have learned over the years not to engage with certain posters

Pity you didn’t learn how to formulate an argument in the meantime.

Case in point.

Some of our manufacturing is exported to China. I know someone who works in a paper factory and that’s where the bulk of it goes. It is a two way street. I’m not sure we have a government that’s going to put principles over profit, particularly given the economic climate, but we’ll see.

CendrillonSings BSE

Who's going to make them pay? As I posted on the other thread about China, they have spent decades making themselves indispensable to the rest of the world. They have huge soft power in the developing world through their aid packages, they own western debt, they know the rest of the world is reliant upon them for cheap manufacturing. They hold pretty much all the cards and they know it, especially in a time where the USA's grip on the world seems about to crumble. There's a huge shift in the balance of power waiting to happen and the Chinese are ready for it. I don't think they'll have any worries about being "made to pay".

BSE

BSE killed hundreds of thousands, crashed the world economy, and put billions into lockdown? I must have missed that news item.

Lets not bend over so far backwards to be fair to the Chinese government that we forget the magnitude of what they have allowed to be unleashed on the world.

Case in point.

That you can’t argue? Yes, I already got that.

But do tell us all more about wild boar and venison. I’m sure it’s very interesting

Wot, no c'n'p opinion poll Cendrillon?

Tell us, just how badly would Corbyn have done it?

They apparently let thousands of people leave the country knowingly infecting the rest of the world with a deadly virus

How could they legally prevent non Chinese citizens from leaving? Can you imagine the out cry?

Just because people were allowed to leave China doesn't mean other countries had to let them in. At least not without quarantine.

Regardless of whether or not China is a goodie or a baddie or inbetween. We should never put all our eggs in one basket. It's dangerous and stupid to rely solely on one country for essential goods.

Well said MrsT

I guess if you think that UK should be fined for infecting other countries with second waves by not taking the threat seriously enough...

I mean other countries with a smaller gdp per capita than UK are doing better In terms of infections/deaths. These countries know they don’t have much clout to impose restrictions and fines on a big country like China. They are not going to risk their economy more by doing that. They just acted quickly to impose travel rather than trade restrictions.

Plus there is the whole brexit thing. How are we going to get a good deal out of the EU if we annoy a potential alternative trading partner?

It's up to individuals to stop buying Chinese goods. I try not to buy things from China anyway, due their appalling human and animal rights abuses.

Well they’re certainly using it to their advantage now. They’re making serious attempts to push Australia into recession (although to be fair that’s what you get for getting into bed with them in the first place).

They are a horrible government in so many ways, knowingly allowing coronavirus out (if they did) is fairly minor as far as their crimes against humanity go. They should have been subject to a trading embargo by all decent governments years ago.

@GreenTulips they could have screened them for covid before letting them go or at least notified other countries that they needed to impose quarantine. Instead they put pressure on the WHO to tell off countries that did this. Only the countries that know China well enough to read between the lines have been able to escape major epidemics.

Only the countries that know China well enough to read between the lines have been able to escape major epidemics.

So Canada and New Zealand 'know China' well enough but the US, UK and Russia don't? Ummmmmm. What?

@GreenTulips and @covidicusrex - isn’t that what UK is doing at the moment? Do they screen people leaving the country to go to countries with v low rates?

They apparently let thousands of people leave the country knowingly infecting the rest of the world with a deadly virus

We knew there was an issue long before Chinese New Year. Some countries acted swiftly and decisively to close borders, some didn't. The UK government was extremely slow to act. The UK people are paying the price for this.

I think a trade war with China is not what the world needs right now. The economic fall out from covid-19 is going to last a long time.

It's exactly as 3cats says.

Seeing as the who weren't saying it was transmissible human to human until I believe later in January and advised borders didn't need to be shut but posters on mn knew this was going to happen, next time they should come here to get their advice
New Zealand and Canada had less people travelling than Europe especially New Zealand as it's quite far from most countries and they had even more time
No we can't make them pay but in the future any health emergency's all details should be reported ASAP and not delayed
Regarding colonisation you realise it was a very different world when all this happened , it's really not comparable lots of countries would have some kind of non positive history , stop apologising for things that happened way before our time

@MrsTerryPratchett the U.K. has no idea. The Trump administration have no idea who they’re fucking with either (or indeed any idea of anything really). The history between Russia and China is complicated to say the least but suffice to say that the Russian government doesn’t care much about its people. Russia has never had a government that cares about its people. I’d imagine they were too preoccupied with falling oil prices to really cares bout covid. But many countries in the Asia Pacific region that have learned to tiptoe around the sleeping bear acted swiftly and decisively. Just look at Vietnam.

@CendrillonSings that BSE didn't cause hundreds and thousands of deaths is nothing more than dumb luck, unless you think we carefully crafted a scenario whereby we knew the likely outcome of what we were fucking up in the food chain and assessed it as acceptable collateral damage. Which wouldn't exactly paint us in a good light either. We didn't know what we were doing then and we are all extremely lucky BSE didn't turn into something worse.

Nikhedonia

The descendants of those Planters live there today. Just like the descendants of the colonial English live here today. You asked, I answered. You just didn't like, or expect, that there was an answer to your question. 🤷‍♀️

China did what authoritarian dictatorships do, deny the problem and incarcerate dissent.

Until governments start realising this and isolating China, they will continue. Their strategy is buying up assets and becoming strategically important to democratic countries for assets such as 5g. Why on earth we didn't follow the 5 eyes countries beggars belief.

We need to reduce trade and gradually remove dependence in them. Hurting them economically is what will have some impact.