China's "systemic" failures
March 1, 2020
There once was a virus from China
That some first explained was just minor.
They said it’s from bats,
And then fiddled the stats,
And now it is even maligner.
I GET a note from a right-wing think tank entitled “The Xi Jinping Virus”, which blames everything on the Chinese President’s dictatorial nature.
This feels like another one of those examples where we go to great lengths to blame allegedly unique characteristics of Chinese governance, Chinese culture, or Chinese history for problems that are commonplace throughout the world.
Part of this is insider bias: we favour explanations that rely on our complicated and sophisticated insider knowledge. Part of it, too, is a quite natural hostility to an authoritarian state.
I then see a paper published by the Fujian Medical University, which points out that China brought SARS under control far more quickly than MERS. I take note of the dwindling numbers of infections. It is worth addressing the possibility that Beijing is doing rather better than we would care to admit, and that the authoritarian choice is now the utilitarian choice.
My attention is also drawn to an article written by an expat living in Shenyang who says China has actually been treated unfairly by the media during the coverage of this coronavirus outbreak. The expat, who describes himself as an “author, speaker, artist, entrepreneur”, seems to be saying that whenever anything untoward or unfortunate happens in this vast country, it is used as an opportunity to berate the government, whether it is justified or not. Everything sooner or later becomes a motif or consequence of authoritarian misrule. We forget that 300,000 people died of swine flu, and no one is castigating the United States for mishandling the crisis.
He has a point. While reporting on the Yangtze river porpoise last year, I originally wanted to explain that there was something in the Chinese political mentality, something in the philosophy, something honed by Confucianism and Maoism that drove an unassuagable desire to conquer nature.
It took a conversation with an American zoologist to realise that extinctions happen everywhere. River cetaceans in the United States are also in a state of peril but no one talks about the way the unique qualities of American culture have driven so many species to extinction. Sometimes, we simply cannot attribute every evil in the world to the specific characteristics of the Chinese Communist Party.
I once wrote:
China’s failures are always seen as a unique legacy of the Stalinist planned economy system, and when it changes its system and opens up its economy, it is accused of prioritizing economics over everything else. China is polluting the environment? It’s growth gone mad. Sheer, untempered greed brought about by, erm, abandoning the planned economy system. China tries to set targets to improve air quality and efficiency? They don’t have any chance of meeting them because the system is fundamentally flawed. They do meet the targets? But just look at the human cost.
And also:
Does the recent arrest of two serial killers in the provinces of Henan and Hebei have anything to say about the corruption, the decay, the decadence of the Chinese Communist Party? Apparently it does, if you believe what you read in the press. The fact that there are murderers in this massive country shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, but when you write about China, everything - of course - has to be about something else, must somehow be referenced to the era of Chairman Mao, and should ideally provide some tenuous indication that the nation is about to disintegrate into chaos.
In this case, it is about the government being able to keep the people safe. Running Dog is trying to recall if the case of Fred and Rose West was treated so portentously, or whether the nefarious activities of Dr. Harold Shipman were ever connected to the frailties or failures of the ancien regime of Jim Callaghan.
The Chinese government's authoritarian rule means that everything that happens within China is then attributed to them, and the choice for most hacks is whether it is a sin of omission or commission. Thus, an uneducated drifter named Yang who embarked on a long killing spree across Anhui, Henan and Shandong, killing 65, seriously injuring 5, and raping 23 before finally being arrested earlier this month, somehow becomes exemplary. He reflects the lack of morality in Chinese society, or at least a decline in the moral and correctional reach of Beijing..
In any case, many foreign reports, including one in The Guardian, suggested that these killings reflected badly on the Communist government, and so were downplayed in the local press. Matthew Forney, in Time Asia, focuses on a gruesome serial killing in Shenzhen, and after giving due attention to the ease with which "predatory transients" can now travel through the country, also suggests that the lack of transparency has put more people at risk.
Still, this current crisis seems to be exposing all the underlying hostility to the government, providing a little outlet for a lot of discontent that has been suppressed for decades by the Communist Party’s propaganda and censorship apparatus.
The dissident writer Ma Jian, for example, has written a coruscating attack on the Chinese Communist Party for the Guardian, blaming everything about this outbreak on a tyrannical top-down political system and saying the Party’s habits of power and their tactics of deception and concealment have not really changed since the Cultural Revolution.
“Xi Jinping’s mishandling of the coronavirus epidemic must now be added to the party’s shameful list of crimes,” he said.
He also says the official propaganda is now filled with disgusting military language. Society is being mobilised into a “people’s war” in order to distract everyone from the government’s failings.
But I am becoming increasingly less inclined to blame COVID-19 on the “systemic” failures of the Chinese government.
Jonathan Quick, former chair of the Global Health Council, told the Observer that the Chinese government have done a pretty good job to contain this virus, though the outbreak of this disease happened at the worst place - the teeming, musty, overpopulated metropolis of Wuhan - and at the worst time - as millions of people planned to travel for the Chinese new year.
In his prescient book, The End of Epidemics, Quick argued that the enemy is not just the infectious disease itself, but also our lack of will. Just like NASA “reimagined the impossible” to get its astronauts on the moon, public health officials must show more ambition when it comes to eradicating contagions.
What I learn from books like this is that all types of government, all cultures and all countries are always ill-prepared. I am all in favour of blaming this on the opacity and thick-headed intransigence of an authoritarian regime, but I don’t think the argument quite holds water. I take note of what Randy Shilts wrote about a the mishandling of a different epidemic in another country some forty years ago.
There was no excuse, in this country and in this time, for the spread of a deadly new epidemic. For this was a time in which the United States boasted the world’s most sophisticated medicine and the world’s most extensive public health system, geared to eliminate such pestilence from our national life.
Shilts, of course, was talking about AIDS. “The story of these first five years of AIDS in America,” he wrote in the seminal And the Band Played On, “is a drama of national failure, played out against a backdrop of needless death.”
As far as China’s resilience is concerned, Quick said it has done well at containment but it isn’t quite as good at prevention. What China will say, after all this is over, is that its finely-tuned system of hypersecurity and hypervigilance and hypercontrol stretching from airports, highways and train stations and all the way down to community-level residential committees is in fact perfectly suited to the requirements of hygiene, quarantine and lockdown. Is it a price worth paying? Time will tell.
