Made in China: Wuhan, Covid and the Quest for Biotech Supremacy
Jasper Becker
Hurst Publishers: 2021
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Type the word ‘Wuhan’ into Google’s search engine, and it will generate almost 75 million results. It is safe to assume that, before January last year, it would have yielded a small fraction of that number. In Made in China, Jasper Becker admits that, on his first visit in the 1980s, the city struck him as such a dismal place he vowed never to return. Having passed through myself earlier in the same decade, I would not disagree, though Chinese doubtless judge it differently. In their eyes, it is probably little different to, say, Kansas City or Coventry, roughly comparable cities in the US and Britain, neither of which, however, could boast the same number of direct international flight connections (twenty-one) that Wuhan had in pre-Covid days, one reason the virus spread so far so quickly. Dismal or not, Wuhan was certainly well connected.

• Tags: China, COVID-19, Issue 24, Jasper Becker, Michael Reilly, Wuhan