China is rapidly redefining itself as a rogue nation, too dangerous to stay in bed with as an integral part of the world economy.  Reuters, no ally of the anti-globalists and populists shaking up politics in the U.S., the U.K., and elsewhere, reports:

Chinese President Xi Jinping warned top officials last week that efforts to contain the new coronavirus had gone too far, threatening the country's economy, sources told Reuters, days before Beijing rolled out measures to soften the blow. (snip)

After reviewing reports on the outbreak from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and other economic departments, Xi told local officials during a Feb 3 meeting of the Politburo's Standing Committee that some of the actions taken to contain the virus are harming the economy, said two people familiar with the meeting, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

He urged them to refrain from "more restrictive measures", the two people said.

Translated: Don't worry about spreading this plague across the globe; the Communist Party needs the economy to be robust, so keep the factories open, along with the subways and busses needed to get workers to their jobs.

China's trading partners see the matter rather differently.  The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party have proven themselves willing to sacrifice the lives of tens of millions of their citizens in order to achieve their political goals, as the politically induced famines under Mao Tse-tung prove.  And reports leaking out of China seem to show a brutal disregard for human rights and lives in China's response to the coronavirus.  See this, this, this, and this (hat tip: Monica Showalter).

James Woods has tweeted out a very disturbing video that appears to show people being shot by armed hazmat-clad staff:

Twitter video screen grab.

Has anyone either verified, or conversely, debunked this video from China? What actually is happening here? Does anyone actually know? pic.twitter.com/WSeHtoYy34

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) February 13, 2020

Repeated lies by Chinese authorities have so destroyed all credibility that, whether the video above is what it seems or not, it is reasonable to suspect that it is real.  China's coronavirus response, by willingly exposing the rest of the world to the danger of a catastrophic spread of a highly communicable disease, is torpedoing the globalists' agenda.

The industrialized world's political economy has been transformed by the rise of China, accompanied by the domestic political ascendancy of the globalist class in the advanced economies.  Crudely put, globalists in the U.S., the U.K., France, and other developed countries have profited from shipping their manufacturing industries to China, sacrificing the interests of their domestic working classes in order to profit from the immense scale of the globalized economy, where the financial, information, entertainment, and other "scalable" sectors of the economy dominated by the educated classes enjoy the fruits of China's partial opening of its own economy.

For almost two decades, ever since China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, manufacturing jobs have evaporated in the advanced economies, while the educated classes in the sophisticated finance, entertainment, education, and hi-tech sectors have enjoyed access to China's markets.  The election of Donald Trump had everything to do with a popular revolt against this transformation, and so did the election of Boris Johnson and the revolt of the yellow vests in France.

China has masqueraded as a nation that is transforming itself into a normal political economy, one that can be relied upon as a source of manufactured goods and a partner in the existing world order, one willing to live within the norms of acceptable behavior.  This was always a fraud, because China aims to become the world's hegemon, a role it occupied for millennia within the East Asian sphere of commerce and politics.  For completely understandable reasons, considering China's humiliation at the hands of the Western powers ever since the Opium War, vengeance — or at least a restoration to its natural status of preeminence —- beats in the heart of China's national consciousness.

The mask now is slipping, powered by the instinct for self-preservation in the face of a potential plague with its origins in "wet markets" (or is it China's bioweapons program?).

Maybe the coronavirus will be contained and turn out to be less communicable than is feared.  But China now is widely understood by all to be unreliable liars about anything that threatens the interests of the Communist Party, and still the brutal and oppressive tyranny it has always been, willing to sacrifice not just its own people, but the world's population, to its goals.  Unsafe to be closely tied to.