Anthropologist Friedrich Keck - in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde - talks about the unique historical and health specificity of Wuhan, the second largest city in central China, where the Corona virus appeared in 2019.

In the interview conducted by Catherine Vincent, the director of research at the French Center for Global Research who heads the Social Anthropology Laboratory in Paris, said that the Chinese government wanted to show - since the beginning of the crisis in late December - its willingness to face a new epidemic, after the criticism it received During the severe SARS crisis in 2003.

This is the reason why the Chinese government - according to the researcher - quickly informed the world about the sequence of the new virus, stopped the movement of people between cities, and built hospitals devoted to respiratory diseases, which shows a wonderful will on the part of China to place itself in the heart of the world, and an amazing weakness of the global economy Who is being weakened just because a virus has killed 100 people in China.

The virus appeared in Wuhan, at a time of intense movement of people and goods at the beginning of the Chinese New Year, a city with a population of 11 million with strong industrial and technological development, and this may explain the speed with which the Chinese authorities addressed the problem.

This unique biological incident coincided with a special cultural history, creating exceptional political effects, according to the author, because Wuhan - which served as the capital of the national system during the Sino-Japanese War between 1937 and 1945 - is the result of the merger of three trading centers developed by Westerners in the nineteenth century on the Yang River Zi Qiang.

This city is also the starting point of the 1911 revolution that caused the fall of the empire, and is therefore a very sensitive place in modern Chinese history, as it is the center of the Tianxia Empire, "Everything is under the sky."

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A healthy alternative for Hong Kong

The researcher said that health officials in China were preparing for the emergence of a new virus in this region, after studies showed that the coronavirus responsible for SARS comes from bats in central China, so the Academy of Sciences of China has developed a fourth-level biosafety laboratory, equivalent to an institute French Pasteur, allows to deal with very dangerous viruses such as Ebola, SARS and swine flu.

As this is the only fourth-class laboratory in Asia, it is a very politically sensitive place, and Wuhan has been chosen as its location, and today conspiracy theories are circulating on the Internet that this laboratory may have leaked the new Corona virus, or made it to seek more investment.

The researcher mentioned that Hong Kong, in which Australian microbiologists built a laboratory to monitor flu virus mutations in southern China, played a major role in monitoring emerging diseases in China, indicating that Wuhan may surpass them in the near future.

Hong Kong's choice was due to the belief that the next flu pandemic would come from this ecosystem in China, as happened in 1957 and 1968. This catastrophic scenario was realized in 1997, with the British colony handing over to China the emergence of the bird flu virus, and Hong Kong found a new identity in the "one country, two systems" system, and it was playing the role of guard to alert the rest of the world to the epidemics originating from China.

Today, the situation is different, according to the researcher, because the health crisis facing China after ten months of protests in Hong Kong, which tempts Wuhan as a health guard to replace Hong Kong, in the same way that Shanghai seeks to replace Hong Kong as a financial center.

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Source of the virus

The researcher said that the “wet markets” in downtown Wuhan are linked to the Chinese tradition of consuming fresh animals, and that “strange species” such as foxes, scorpions, and crocodiles may be sold, but it is not certain that the first case of the Corona virus epidemic came from an animal market.

What is certain, according to the evolutionary analysis of the virus is that it comes from the bats that make up the animal reservoir of corona viruses, such as SARS and many emerging viruses, especially the Ebola virus, because the bats have an immune system that allows them to harbor a large number of viruses without being infected, and today they approach urban areas because Elimination of Forests.

The anthropologist pointed out that social anthropology deals with health and political crises with a comparative view of distant societies in time and space, as did French sociologist and anthropologist Claude Levy Strauss during the mad cow crisis in 1996.

He said that this distant view helps to reduce the sense of urgency that controls the authorities when crises happen, pointing out that he studied health crises in Europe and China by describing the experiences of domestic poultry farmers and lovers of wild birds.