The ‘Chinese Virus’ Spread Along the New Silk Road

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Western democracies may lose the coronavirus propaganda war, but China certainly won’t win it.
BY SALVATORE BABONES | APRIL 6, 2020, 5:49 PM

A 14th-century painting showing the caravan of Niccolò and Maffeo Polo crossing Asia. CARTA CATALANA/BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
Italy’s ties with China go back to the Silk Road, the overland route used since ancient times by traders exchanging wares. The Venetian traders Niccolò and Maffeo Polo visited Beijing in 1266, becoming one of the first Western Europeans to travel to China. In 1271, they set off for a second time, accompanied by Niccolò’s young son, Marco. Although they arrived on the Silk Road via Central Asia, they eventually returned to Italy by sea, visiting Sumatra, Sri Lanka, and Gujarat along the way. A map of their voyages looks not unlike one of those Belt and Road Initiative maps pumped out by Chinese state media today. This initiative, which is sometimes, appropriately, known as the New Silk Road, consists of a planned network of transportation infrastructure financed by China and linking it to Europe, Africa, and the rest of Asia.


Barely 50 years after the Polos’ return from China, an outbreak of bubonic plague traveled those very same routes to the West, where the disease became known as the Black Death. It is believed to have been spread by both land and sea, originating in China and following the trade routes to Europe and the Middle East. Both routes ultimately converged on Italy, where the plague killed up to 75 percent of the population in some areas. Northern Italy’s thoroughly internationalized merchant traders probably played a key role in transmitting the disease onward to the rest of Europe.

Just like the Black Death, the coronavirus has now killed many more people outside China than inside. European countries such as  Italy, Spain, and France—even wealthy Switzerland—have proven unable to contain the virus. The U.S. response has been disjointed and at times  chaotic. It looks like New York City is quickly turning into the next Wuhan.

Yet as the coronavirus ravages the West, China has successfully spun the propaganda narrative to its own advantage. China has sent masks, respirators, and even specialist doctors to the country of Marco Polo—at a time when Italy’s European Union partners were largely ignoring  its calls for help. (That has changed since, with Germany sending equipment and airlifting Italian coronavirus patients to German hospitals.) Its efforts have earned China  predictable plaudits from the Italian government, which includes populists with a predictably pro-authoritarian streak. Perhaps inevitably, Chinese President Xi Jinping suggested that the aid could lay the basis for a “health silk road” connecting Europe and China. He seemed to have forgotten that China already declared a health silk road three years ago at a Belt and Road Initiative conference in Beijing.

[Mapping the Coronavirus Outbreak: Get daily updates on the pandemic and learn how it’s affecting countries around the world.]

With so many silk roads to keep track of, who’s counting? When Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte led Italy into China’s Belt and Road Initiative around this time last year, he was probably hoping for a wave of Chinese investment to boost Italy’s moribund economy. In the end, he has had to contend with a different import from China: COVID-19. New Silk Road indeed.

No one knows for certain how COVID-19 originated, but the disease seems to have first spread at a so-called wet market in Wuhan where live animals were kept in unsanitary conditions and sold for human consumption. More than 700 years ago, Marco Polo marveled at these markets with their “ample supply of every kind of meat and game.” These same markets gave rise to SARS in 2002—another respiratory disease, like COVID-19, that has been linked to bats.

The danger posed by live animal markets wasn’t the only lesson that China failed to learn from the SARS epidemic.
The danger posed by live


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