A new strain of coronavirus was detected in December 2019, when patients were admitted to hospitals in Wuhan with severe pneumonia, most of them linked to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. China’s effective containment of the epidemic, in glaring contrast with Europe and the U.S., was heralded as testament to the Chinese Communist Party’s unparalleled command over biomedical sciences, population, and economy. However, much academic and public debate about the origins of COVID-19 in China focused on supposedly “backwards” cultural practices of consuming wild animals, and the perceived problem of authoritarianism suppressing information about the outbreak.
In The Origins of COVID-19, Li Zhang shifts the debate away from these narrow cultural, political, or biomedical frameworks, emphasizing that the origins of diseases with pandemic potential must be considered within the more complex entanglements of state-making, science and technology, and global capitalism. She argues that both the narrative of China’s victory and the racist depictions of its culpability do not address, but may even aggravate, these larger forces that degrade the environment and increase human-wildlife interactions through which novel pathogens spill over into humans and may rapidly expand into global pandemics.
This book is a history of the present, a study of the roots of the current pandemic within the context of both China and global capitalism. It is also a warning that the recovery of a capitalist economy will reinforce conditions for the continuing emergence of infectious diseases with pandemic potential.