A former senior partner with the consulting firm McKinsey & Company excused Thursday the Chinese government’s harsh measures in containing the coronavirus and said that the Chinese people are “just not wired” to be concerned about every injustice committed by their country’s communist dictatorship.
“[China] is a collectivist society … That difference between collectivism and common good is a huge disconnect with the U.S. We regard and always have been proud that every human life is sacred and therefore any unjustice or injustice is something we ought to be railing against and they are just not wired that way,” Peter Walker told Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
He also obliquely compared Chinese concentration camps to the United States’ internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
When asked if he was referring to a genetic difference between the Chinese and other countries, Walker responded, “No, it really goes back to Confucian values … I know there’s been a lot of negative press on Confucian institutes, but if you just go back to Confucian values, one of the things you will learn is family first, society second. Individual way down the totem pole.” (RELATED: Chinese Ambassador Applauds Hillary Clinton For Spreading Chinese Propaganda)
Speaking of the coronavirus that many now believe was released into the local community by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Carlson noted that “credible reports suggest that Chinese authorities locked people in their apartments and left them to die … snatched people off the street and threw them into police vans … That’s the quarantine that you think they deserve high praise for. Why?”
Walker said the actions were justified. “I think, Tucker, if you just look at the results, there will always be questions about what the numbers are but I think the harsh action that they took given the scale of China and a number of big cities was exactly what they needed to do to be able to prevent the outbreak from going any further … It’s heartbreaking, every single one of them is. But they had to do it; otherwise, if you can imagine the scale of China, if that blew out in large numbers to other cities the numbers would be off the charts.
When asked if it was an acceptable form of quarantine to “lock people in apartments until they die,” Walker responded, “Look, there are a lot of things about it that I don’t like and those specific actions were I think overly harsh, were insensitive.”
Carlson called that answer “a pretty handy way to excuse putting a million people in a concentration camp … Listening to you it seems like a pure apology for fascist behavior.”
“Well let me go back to what I said before, Walker explained. “Do I agree with putting a million people in internment camps, absolutely not. In the U.S., we went through this, too. We did the Japanese …” he started before being interrupted by Carlson. (RELATED: Peter Navarro Says China Used ‘The Three Kills To Attack America Through The Coronavirus Pandemic)
A woman wearing protective gear adjusts her glasses in Wuhan, Hubei province, the epicentre of China’s coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, March 30, 2020. REUTERS/Aly Song
When asked how much money he has earned over the years for his consulting activities with China, Walker instead told Carlson that he had “probably spent a quarter of my time in China over the course of roughly a dozen years, something like that.”
Critics accuse China of covering up evidence and testimony related to the coronavirus after the sickness broke out in the city of Wuhan. The Communist Party leadership is suspected of gagging physicians who tried to warn the world about the potential devastation of the COVID-19 virus, and reports suggest the regime has been systematically lying about the number of people killed by the disease.