Caught up in the panic of the moment, the issue of "blame" for this virus keeps coming up. Certain people, including this current administration are using terms like "Chinese Virus" or "Kung Flu" to describe it, thus stapling the blame on Chinese people writ large, or possibly the Chinese government in particular.
I am not intending this thread to be a nation bashing one, but I want to lay out the actual facts as we know them, and address what dangers a 70 year old Chinese government policy has on the world, how we got here, and what we must do to save ourselves from it. The first part is going to be context, skip to below the lines for the thesis statement.
Context Stuff
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If you look up Traditional Chinese Medicine, you will find a lot of claims like this one.This is cancer.gov no less, claiming it is 5,000 years old. Which is utter bullshit, the earliest Chinese civilizations that we have any record of only date back 3,000 years or so, and while there were certainly people in the Yellow river valley before that, we don't know anything about their medical practices, extending this an additional two millennia is absurdly irresponsible. "Traditional Chinese Medicine" has changed at adapted just as much as western medicine has, with earlier versions of it mostly focusing on exorcisms and such. While the ancient roots of TCM are interesting, they aren't really relevant to this conversation, the important takeaway is that it was a nearly completely separate branch of medicine then the Mediterranean/European/Middle Eastern branch of medicine, and it changed a lot within itself in the centuries it was practiced.Originally Posted by Cancer.gov
The real story of "TCM" begins in 1949 (Here is a good article on the whole thing for more context). The Chinese Communist Party had just taken over mainland China, and they were facing a huge problem with their healthcare. Namely that they didn't have any. Mao Zedong was trying to build a modern nation, under near complete embargo from everyone, and there were hundreds of different healing systems, witch doctors, and local traditions all clashing across the nation. What Mao wanted was western medicine, which was exploding in efficiency at the time, due to all the medical tech that had been developed during the second world war. But he didn't have access to any of it. Instead, in 1950, Mao launched a project to modernize Traditional Chinese Medicine, which was supposed to be called "New Medicine", although that name didn't stick. The goal was to create some sort of healthcare, and also drive a nationalistic sense of Chinese autonomy as part of the Cultural Revolution. The outcome of this project is what we now call TCM. It was pure quackery from the beginning, but the propaganda machine drove it hard, and new age "Alternate Medicine" types ate it up from the beginning. It is full of superstition and supernatural cures for everything, some fundamental concepts are "Qi" which is life energy that can be transferred and manipulated, making it functionally identical to Star Wars "The Force", "Ying-Yang" as a medical concept, not a philosophical one, which is basically the old western concept of "Humors" rebranded, and most damaging, and most relevant to this problem, "The Five Elements".
Most people are familiar with the concept of the Chinese Five Elements, (Water, Wood, Fire, Earth and Metal). In the context of TCM, everything ties into one of these elements, and it works basically like a 5 sided game of rock paper scissors. So if you have an aliment that is aligned with Fire, such as a burn, or a fever, then the cure would be something of elemental water that is more powerful then the elemental fire causing your fever. Notably, the most powerful carriers of this elemental power are something with a lot of "Qi" or life force, which often means some sort of animal. All animals are sorted into one of the five categories, so lets pick a Pig, which is aligned with the water element, and a common source of these cures for cheap. Now we need some part of a pig that is also aligned with water, so lets go with a Bladder. So a good TCM cure for your fever will be a Pigs bladder, which will of course have to be fresh to be effective.
Now lets say you take this pigs bladder (Eat it, dry it and wear it, whatever they recommended). One of two things is going to happen, either the fever will go away (Which they usually do inside the recommended time anyway), which will reinforce your belief in the Healer, or it will not. If the later happens, the problem is that you didn't use a powerful enough Water elemental cure! Pigs don't have much Qi, you need something stronger! How about a Dragon? Specifically a water dragon, not a fire one. Lets use an Indian Gharial, a type of fish eating crocodile. They are very large, very powerful, and very rare, so they have tons of Qi. Of course they are very expensive, but they should do the trick!
The Current Problem
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So this is basically how it works in a much condensed form. Lets talk about what all this causes, and why. In order to provide the Pig's Bladders, Crocodile Kidney's, Tiger's Tongues, Rhino Horn and Pangolin scales needed for all this "Medicine", China runs the worlds largest illicit animal trade, which devastates the worlds endangered species. More to the point here, all this culminates in huge "Wet Markets" which are full of living animals that you can shop for, and get those organs fresh (And thus full of the needed Qi). So you have stacks and stacks of pigs sitting on top of dogs and snakes and bats, all defecating and vomiting on each other, because all of these animals are sick and mistreated. Instead of being a healthy place for medicine, they are veritable cesspools of disease, much like western hospitals were a century ago (And some arguably are now), but the specific danger they pose here is being the perfect place for diseases to leap from animal to human populations. With so many humans in contact with so many sick animals, that have been trafficked from all parts of the world, these Zoonotic disease start here all the time. SARS, Avian Flu, Swine Flu, and now Covid-19, and that is just recently.
The entire system was codified and created in the 1960s by a Communist Party that was an international pariah, in order to save face and basically use a nationwide placebo effect. Even Mao was well aware it didn't work. These needs are long gone, China has full access to modern medicine now, and is attempting to embrace it. But the propaganda machine drove it so deep into so many peoples consciousness, we are stuck with a devastating system that destroys our global wildlife populations and spits out deadly viruses in a truly unsustainable fashion. The Chinese government has taken tentative steps to discourage it, but has so far not taken firm steps to educate people and end these practices.
The Bottom Line
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One consequence of this outbreak has to be massive international pressure to end this outdated superstition, and abolish this animal trade forever. It is ineffective, immoral, and extremely dangerous to everyone. I don't particularly care about the Crystal healing, acupuncture, and scented teas, those are harmless (Unless you really believe they are going to cure your leukemia), but this wildlife trade has to end, and end now.
Disclaimers
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This is NOT about nation bashing, please don't post anything attacking the Chinese people here. This is a serious problem that their government started 70 years ago, and has been slow to fix. So it is a policy problem, not a culture or racial problem. This thread also isn't about anything related to the actual spread of the virus, we have other threads for that. This is about something we need to do to stop these things from occurring in the future, and stop a major source of pandemic capable diseases.