Jensen Huang, CEO of American computer chip giant Nvidia, attracted favorable attention from Chinese state media on Friday by visiting a “wet market” in Shanghai – the very same type of unsanitary open-air meat market that was blamed for launching the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic that went on to ravage the entire world.
“Chinese experts said Huang’s visit is aimed at projecting a ‘China-friendly’ image and boosting morale among local employees, while also seeking to engage Chinese authorities and key clients in an effort to secure large buyers capable of making prompt payments for H200 chips,” gushed China’s state-run Global Times on Sunday.
According to the Global Times, Huang “was seen visiting the Rushan Road local vegetable market in Shanghai’s Lujiazui area, where he sampled and bought fruits and handed out New Year red envelopes to several vendors.” Chinese New Year arrives on February 27 this year.
Huang reportedly bought some oranges at the wet market to be “handed out to employees at the company’s annual gathering.”
Various Chinese analysts told the Global Times that Huang has been making frequent visits to China, donning “Chinese attire,” and “visiting local markets” to convey “a more China-friendly image,” without making overtly pro-Chinese statements that might antagonize U.S. officials who are anxious about “China’s progress in high-tech sectors.”
The Chinese government made a big show about cracking down on wet markets after the Wuhan wet market was proposed as Ground Zero for the coronavirus pandemic. Wet markets are open-air slaughterhouses that have a reputation for selling meat from dubious sources, including meat harvested from protected or exotic animals.
These venues are called “wet” markets for precisely the gruesome reason one might suspect. In addition to the sanitary hazards from blood and seawater sloshing around, wet markets have an unfortunate habit of pushing captive live animals from various species into much closer contact than they would ever experience in nature, raising the risk of disease transmission through their weakened immune systems.
The storyline pushed throughout the early days of the worldwide pandemic was that the Wuhan coronavirus was a “zoonotic” disease that spontaneously appeared in some animal species – bats, or perhaps the pangolin, a scaly anteater whose meat is considered a delicacy in parts of China, and whose scales are valuable to traditional Chinese medicine. The coronavirus supposedly spread to humans who consumed infected meat or other animal products.
China was fervently pushing this storyline at roughly the same time its Wuhan Institute of Virology was reportedly shredding documents and losing records to conceal its possible role in the lab-leak theory of the outbreak, which is now considered the more likely scenario by U.S. intelligence. There was some speculation that both narratives could have been true – the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab, infected some animals, and then passed to humans via the Wuhan wet market.
Whether or not the Wuhan coronavirus passed through the Wuhan market on its way to infamy, the global attention paid to wet markets was not at all flattering, so Chinese officials began talking at great length about shutting them down, or implementing tight controls to ensure they did not sell tainted or illegal products.
All of that talk swiftly faded away once the Chinese Communist Party saw no further need to scapegoat wet markets as the source of the global pandemic, and by April 2020 the markets were back in business – astoundingly, with the approval of the World Health Organization (W.H.O.). In the photos circulated by Chinese state media of Huang’s visit to the market in Shanghai, no one even bothered to wear a sanitary mask.
Once they no longer felt it was necessary to tell tales about coronaviruses magically spreading to humans through filets of bat and pangolin, Chinese officials admitted that the wet markets were too large, and too important to food distribution in China, to be shut down or regulated like grocery stores.
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