Trump was the first world leader who precisely pointed out that the Novel Coronavirus came from the PRC. He did the right thing. Thrown at him were wrongful accusations of racism. The CCP crowd really knew how to capitalize on troubled waters.

Going forward, the other shoe may drop. Beware of this gray rhino in the following scenario:

Chairman Xi Jinping is in a bind. Turning a virus outbreak into a man-made disaster beyond imagination, he commands no genuine respect. People from all walks of life question the legitimacy of his absolute power which corrupts absolutely.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Xi is all for “a splendid little war” that he can magnify into a huge personal victory. 

Outdoing Mao, Xi takes Kinmen 金門and Matsu 馬祖 in a blitzkrieg. Along with the PLA, he is riding on the crest of a “patriotic” wave. Anyway, that is what people are told behind the Great Firewall.

Xi does not believe that Trump will risk a war for two tiny islands most Americans have never heard of. He keeps this to himself, of course. Reading from his teleprompter, he signals that he may leave the main island of Taiwan alone:

“As before, the sky looks azure and the sun blazes white. 依舊晴天白日“

In no time President Tsai Ing-wen curtly responds to Beijing: 

“The Republic of China will not go quietly into the night. 中華民國決不俯首自投黑夜”*

A few hours later the whole world, minus the PRC and its satellite states, hangs on President Trump’s every word in his Address to the Nation...

——Lingyang Jiang

Notes:

A gray rhino is “a highly probable, high-impact yet neglected threat”.

A black swan is an event that “deviates beyond what is normally expected of a situation”. 

*“[We] will not go quietly into the night.” This is a line from the 1996 movie Independence Day, which is a paraphrase of Welsh bard Dylan Thomas’s poem title: Do not go gentle into that good night. Here, “night” is a metaphor for death.