A new strain of coronavirus emerged sometime in November 2019, and
within weeks a cluster of patients began to be admitted to hospitals in
Wuhan with severe pneumonia, most of them linked to the Huanan Seafood
Wholesale Market. China's seemingly effective containment of the first
stage of the epidemic, in glaring contrast with the uncontrolled spread
in Europe and the United States, was heralded as a testament to the
Chinese Communist Party's unparalleled command over the biomedical
sciences, population, and economy. Conversely, much academic and public
debate about the origins of the virus focuses on the supposedly
"backwards" cultural practice of consuming wild animals and the
perceived problem of authoritarianism suppressing information about the
outbreak until it was too late.
The Origins of COVID-19, by Li Zhang, shifts debate away from narrow
cultural, political, or biomedical frameworks, emphasizing that we must
understand the origins of emerging diseases with pandemic potential
(such as SARS and COVID-19) in the more complex and structural
entanglements of state-making, science and technology, and global
capitalism. She argues that both narratives, that of China's victory and
the racist depictions of its culpability, do not address-and even
aggravate-these larger forces that degrade the environment and increase
the human-wildlife interface through which novel pathogens spill over
into humans and may rapidly expand into global pandemics.
