Peter Apps -
When the Sars virus spread across China in 2002-3, the government in Beijing reacted with obstruction. This year’s coronavirus outbreak is being tackled very differently — a key test for President Xi Jinping.
One thing is certain: China has been able to respond in a way it’s almost impossible to imagine any other country beginning to be capable of. That means not just a colossal deployment of state resources — up to half a million healthcare workers being rushed to the most affected city, Wuhan, and the wider province of Hubei, and two new hospitals said to be being built in little more than a week. It also means a measure of centralised state control that has effectively locked down not just the immediate area but much of China’s national transit system.
As with all infectious disease outbreaks, how successful those steps will be depends on whether China can change its citizens’ behaviour fast enough to stay ahead of a disease that is very much still being understood. That also means incentivising its local officials to communicate details swiftly and efficiently, rather than covering them up as they did during 2002-3 for fear of official retribution. Much of that will depend on the nature of the virus and how it develops. Xi warned last week that it appeared to be becoming more contagious.
That the Chinese leader himself was taking such a forward-leaning position is itself a major change. Because of Xi’s leadership, along with economic growth, technological change and more, China is now a very different place to the turn-of-the-century, albeit still very much the same highly mobile populations that helped produce that outbreak. Those in charge in Beijing now have much greater ability to monitor and persuade their population, as well as exert direct control over those with authority on the ground.
Already, social media platforms such as Weibo have seen what appeared to be centrally coordinated campaigns using celebrities and social media influencers to push people away from using wildlife markets such as that believed to have been the epicentre of the virus. Transport networks have been shut down with remarkable speed, and within the worst affected areas most of the local population wants to stay inside and limit social interaction.
Such direct control has been simply impossible in most outbreaks elsewhere in the world, such as that of Ebola in West Africa from 2013-16. Then, while regional transport networks also largely ceased, that was largely due to trucking and other firms simply stopping work, with much less central coordination. There’s no doubt many local and regional officials in China still fear the consequences of speaking bad news to power. — Reuters
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