China's long shadow

Chinese President Xi Jinping appears on a screen during an event marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China in Shanghai on June 4.ALY SONG / Reuters

Confused in rich Europe by the mirage of the combination of the advance in vaccines and the hot light of summer that we long for, we believe we already see the oasis of the beginning of the end of the pandemic nightmare. Happily the arrival of a new glorious and unbridled 1920s has been forecast. We forget that the exit from the long tunnel will only occur when the entire planet is vaccinated. The images of Ceuta with African babies and minors in the water coming out of the tunnel to reach the European oasis bring us back to reality.

It is prudent to admit that we live in dangerous times and not only because of the global and mutant threat that the coronavirus projects on health. The increase in inequality; the lamination of the middle classes; the rise of populisms and autocracies; the withdrawal of democracy; Putin-induced destabilization of Europe; the

(a term coined by Freedom House) exercised by the last European dictator against a commercial plane to arrest a dissident. State terrorism in the case of the young Belarusian journalist, Roman Protasevich, who was flying from Athens to Lithuania. The capacity for international pressure is limited because for Putin, Comrade Lukashenko is one of his own, from the KGB school.

Loss of security, increased uncertainty. "You are not sure. You are never sure. Not even if you are in a democracy; not if you have political asylum or even if you are sitting in a commercial airplane at thousands of meters of altitude. " Journalist and historian Anne Applebaum, author of

.

, Debate. You feel less safe if you are an opponent of Putin, Navalni poisoned, the Saudi critical journalist, Khashoggi, tricked out of the US and killed by dismemberment at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

And the great question of our time: the ever-lengthening shadow of China's rise, the competition for world supremacy. Beijing tightens Hong Kong by reducing the remnants of democracy bequeathed by the British, rearms, and shows its superiority in the 5G communications network, competing well in semiconductors, Artificial Intelligence and robotics, after reaching Mars. Washington tries to contain Beijing's technological advance.

Biden gives his intelligence services 90 days to elucidate with new data if the coronavirus started in nature, by the transmission of a bat to humans, or escaped from the advanced Wuhan Institute of Virology that carried out sophisticated research practices about a virus. An accident? Then covered up by China? Both possibilities are plausible, but the second is far from proven, although enough data is lacking to rule it out altogether. Xi Jinping firmly rejects the politicization of the pandemic and accuses the US of embracing the conspiracy theory, but the gap between the two pieces of evidence is narrowing. How the world can prepare for a future pandemic when it doesn't know for sure where the current one came from, wonders

. How little we know.