New York: A leading expert on China has sounded a grim health warning.
Gordon G Chang, America’s top expert on Chinese affairs, said “something worse” than COVID-19 may hit us if the United States is not careful.
His warning came days after two Chinese scientists were charged with allegedly smuggling a toxic fungus into the US.
Yunqing Jian, 33, and her boyfriend Zunyong Liu, 34, allegedly conspired to smuggle into the US a fungus called ‘Fusarium graminearum’ that causes ‘head blight’, a disease of wheat, barley, maize and rice.
According to the US Justice Department, the fungus is classified as a ‘potential agroterrorism weapon,’ which causes losses worth billions of dollars every year. It causes vomiting, liver damage, and reproductive defects in humans and livestock.
The Chinese couple had earlier researched on the fungus back home.
Referring to the case, Chang told Fox News that the couple’s action was equivalent to waging war against the US. He opined that if the US does not take drastic steps like cutting off ties with China, it may be hit “perhaps with something worse” than COVID-19.
To this day, the origin of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which caused the COVID-19 pandemic, remains a matter of huge controversy. Several experts believe the coronavirus was engineered in a Chinese lab.
“In May 2019, the state media People’s Daily, the most authoritative publication in China, carried a landmark editorial that declared a people’s war on us. We are Americans, so we think we are entitled to ignore the propaganda of hostile regimes. But for a communist party, that phrase has great resonance. What they are doing with their strident anti-Americanism is creating a justification to strike our country. This means the couple, for instance, should be sent to Guantanamo,” Chang said.
“It was an attack on the United States at a time when China thought it was at war with us. Xi Jinping talks about going to war all the time, and he is mobilising all of Chinese society to go to war. So we can lose our country, even though we are the far stronger nation because we are not defending ourselves with the vigour and the determination that is necessary.
“We have got to put this into context. In 2020, Americans in all 50 states received from China seeds that were unsolicited. I think that was an attempt to plant invasive species into the US. And then this year, Timu, the online Chinese retailer, sent seeds to Americans unsolicited.
“The only way to stop this is to sever relations with China. And I know people think that’s drastic, but we are being overwhelmed. We are going to get hit eventually. We are going to get hit really hard, not just with Covid, not just with fentanyl, but perhaps with something worse,” the expert on China advocated.
