“Beneath the four furnaces, then, lies a more fundamental furnace undergirding the industrial hubs of the world: the evolutionary pressure cooker of capitalist agriculture and urbanization. This provides the ideal medium through which ever-more-devastating plagues are born, transformed, induced to zoonotic leaps, and then aggressively vectored through the human population.”
Analysis of the coronavirus epidemic in China that looks closely at the tangled histories of disease, capitalism, and agrobusiness and the recent history of Chinese development, and clarifies the nature of current responses on the part of local and national authorities.