Book Review: "The Great Manchurian Plague of 1910-1911 - The Geopolitics of an Epidemic Disease," by William C. Summers

"In 1911, another epidemic swept through China. That time, the world came together."

Thus (complete with the same glorious absence of capitalization) reads a headline by CNN's Paul French in an April 2020 article. The article, from a "journalist" who does not even bother trying to feign impartiality (which was pretty much the hallmark of the American media did not during the four-year anti-Trump crusade which preceded the American Neo-Maoist Cultural Revolution of the Biden Era) is meant to contrast the gloriously harmonious, united (and of course Chinese-led) response to the 1911 plague (a plague which originated in China, as a result of their illegal wildlife trade, and threatened to cause a global catastrophe) with the fractured, petty, response of a modern divided world (divided by American xenophobia, as we're so often reminded) to Chinavirus-19.
Of course, the article is complete hogwash, but coming from the Communist News Network, what else is new?
The truth of the 1910-11 epidemic of Bubonic Plague (a frequent face in China) is that it foreshadowed Chinavirus-19 rather eerily, as this book by William Summers shows in startling detail, from China's attempts to cover up the outbreak (p. 51), to the staggering damage done by China's primitive medical system (p. 53, 59, 65 & 70), to the way visionaries in the West favored locking down travel from China but soft-hearted liberals opposed it (p. 61), to the way the Western world bafflingly assumed "because it's happening in China, the Chinese must be the experts" while China desperately sought Western expertise (p. 94 & 102) to the way China tried desperately to pat themselves on the back for a "job well done" once the rest of the world was finished cleaning up the mess they caused (p. 151). What's even creepier is that this book about the 1911 plague, which reads almost like a play-by-play account of the Chinavirus-19 crisis, was written in 2012.

A Product of its Time

One must remember this was written during the Obama years, when the self-debasing American academic community believed the first rule of academic discourse was "China good, foreigners bad, America worst." The dripping Sino-sycophancy shines through in the descriptions of all foreign motivations in China as "imperialist" and the perpetual portrayal of China as the victim, never mind that China itself was engaged in colonial operations of its own in Tibet, Thailand, Vietnam, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan and Korea (p. 132) at the time of the book's events. The first section, which describes "the Geopolitics of the Plague," has such a pro-China spin that one suspects the author's research was funded by the Confucius Institute. This must be borne in mind while reading it.
However, this does not prevent the book from presenting the facts in startling clarity.

Deja Vu

Some interesting facts pointed out by this book are...

• The 1911 Plague broke out in a railway hub (p. 54), around Chinese New Year (p. 75), making containment damned-near impossible, just like Covid.
• The plague enabled rising Imperialist powers, namely Russia and Japan, to further their interests in third-world plague-ravaged China (p. 152), just as Imperialist China is using their own plague to further their interests in plague-ravaged third-world countries today.
• International conferences where much was said and little was actually done, gave China a feeling of prestige on the world-stage by making it appear they were the saviors of the plague when they were truly its source (p. 151), just, like, Covid.

And of course, lest the accusation should be made that the author was deliberately trying to spin the facts to establish a resemblance between the 1911 plague and Covid where none exists, I remind the reader that this book was written 7 years before Covid first came into existence in Wuhan.
The similarities in terms of the geopolitical benefits derived from the plague are so clear that it makes one think the Chinese could have read this book and stroked their chins, thinking "gee, it would be so useful to us if we had an outbreak like that right about now. Hmm..."

So Who Should Read It?

For those who suspect (as I do) that Covid-19 was artificially created by the Chinese (or, at the very least, that it was manipulated by the Chinese once it broke out) for their sinister purposes, this book provides century-old "proof of concept" that the Chinese were aware of what a rising revisionist power could do with a plague, as well as what could be gained by prancing around on the world stage and pretending to have saved the world from it.
For those who do not suspect this, this book will challenge you to rethink your position, if for no other reason than the number of eerily similar circumstances.
At a mere 162 pages, it won't take more than a week of your time, so what have you to lose?

Works Cited (excluding primary object)

French, Paul. "In 1911, Another Epidemic Swept Through China. That Time, the World Came Together." CNN. 19 Apr, 2020. Web. 22 Apr, 2021. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/18/china/great-manchurian-plague-china-hnk-intl/index.html