A new poll shows that a growing number of Americans believe that China should be held responsible for the global neocoronavirus pandemic and compensated for the huge losses that the epidemic has caused the United States and the world.
According to a poll released this week by the U.S. polling firm Rasmussen Reports, 60 percent of respondents believe that China should at least partially compensate for the huge loss of life and property caused by the new coronavirus.
The firm has previously conducted two surveys among likely voters on the same issue. In the first poll in March, 42 percent of those who thought China should pay for the damage, and in the late July survey, the percentage of those who held the same view rose to 53 percent.
More than 11 million people in the United States have been infected and more than 250,000 have died as a result of the global virus pandemic. The spread of the epidemic has also caused a rapid economic slowdown and massive job losses in an otherwise fast-growing economy.
Previous polls have shown that a majority of Americans surveyed believe the Chinese government is responsible for the spread of the neo-crown virus. A May survey of 1,382 U.S. adults by the nonprofit The Victims of Communism Memorial Fund and pollster YouGov found that about half (51%) of those surveyed believe the Chinese government is responsible for the spread of the new coronavirus. It is believed that the Chinese government should compensate the countries affected by the epidemic.
The Chinese government has insisted that just because the outbreak was first reported in Wuhan does not mean it was the source of the virus, and has strongly denied that China concealed the outbreak in its early stages.
The Rasmussen survey, conducted nationwide on Nov. 15 and 16, found that only 24 percent believe China should not compensate, with another 16 percent undecided.
Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank, said the delay in bringing the U.S. epidemic under control is one factor in the growing discontent with China and the desire to seek compensation from it.
Another factor is that both President Trump and former Vice President Biden criticized China during their campaigns, accusing each other of being too soft on China,” he said. This may also have fueled anti-China sentiment in the United States. ”
Ivana Stradner, an expert on international law at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy, a Washington think tank, says that China’s failure to notify the outside world in the early days of the outbreak is entirely expected now that more than a million people around the world have died from the virus. She said the Chinese government has never been held legally or morally accountable for the 2003 SARS virus outbreak in China.
A lot of people think it’s time for them (China) to pay for their actions, because they’re worried that China could cause a similar tragedy for the world again,” she said.
There are currently at least four private class action lawsuits against China in the United States. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Southern District of Florida by the Berman Law Group, alleges that the Chinese government’s failure to contain the virus in the early stages of the outbreak has resulted in significant loss of life and property for residents of the state. In addition, the Midwestern state of Missouri has filed a civil lawsuit against the Chinese government over the loss of neoconviruses, alleging that Chinese government officials suppressed information and arrested whistleblowers. The state government has said that they estimate that the losses to businesses and residents of the state due to the pandemic could be in the tens of billions of dollars.
On the other hand, however, observers point out that it is unlikely that these lawsuits will actually result in any compensation from the Chinese government. Doug Bando, a former special assistant to former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, said, “I would love to get Xi Jinping to pay, but there’s no way to do it. The problem now is that there’s not an effective way to do it.” He said that while people are blaming China, they can’t imagine any way to get China to pay for any financial losses.
James Kraska, a professor of international law at the U.S. Naval War College, said there are insurmountable legal hurdles to getting the Chinese government to pay, both in terms of international law and domestic law.
China is a sovereign state in international law, and there is sovereign immunity under U.S. law,” he says. We can’t bring lawsuits against sovereign states, so these cases are just going through the motions and are unlikely to have a satisfactory outcome.”
The U.S. passed the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act in 1976, which established the general rule that sovereign states and their property are immune from the jurisdiction of another country’s courts, as part of the world’s system of mutual sovereign immunity.
Even if there are cases that can get around these legal hurdles, Stettner of the American Enterprise Institute says, the Chinese government is likely to ignore the court’s rulings, leaving those cases open to enforcement problems. But she also said that this does not mean that these lawsuits are moot and that the U.S. should still sue China in international courts.
The U.S. can hold China legally accountable for its government’s malfeasance in an international court,” she said. The U.S. should use these cases to point out to people that the Chinese government is not complying with its international obligations and to expose China’s actions, including an investigation into the World Health Organization’s actions to protect China’s interests in the outbreak.”
In a statement about the lawsuit against the Chinese government, the Berman law firm said that countries such as China are generally immune from liability under the doctrine of sovereign immunity, but they point out in their brief that the law includes exceptions for torts and commercial practices that would give U.S. federal courts jurisdiction over the case. An attorney for the law firm said in the statement that China has significant assets in the U.S. and that “there are many avenues to move the case forward, and putting pressure on Chinese business interests in the U.S. is one of them.”
Karaska, a professor of international law at the U.S. Naval War College and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a U.S. think tank, said there is one scenario in which a lawsuit against a Chinese company could stand.
“One possibility is that if there is a Chinese state-owned enterprise that is part of the Chinese government, then the assets of that enterprise could be included in the lawsuit. If the company has assets in the United States, their assets could be included in the lawsuit.”
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