Do you remember when
COVID-19 was going to establish China as the world’s dominant power? As late as
mid-2021, my inbox was full of assertions that China’s apparent success in
containing the coronavirus showed the superiority of the Chinese system over
Western societies that, as one commentator put it, “did not have the ability to
quickly organize every citizen around a single goal”.
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At this point, however, China is flailing even as
other nations are more or less getting back to normal life. It is still
pursuing its zero-COVID policy, enforcing draconian restrictions on everyday
activities every time new cases emerge. This is creating immense personal
hardship and cramping the economy; cities under lockdown account for almost 60
percent of China’s gross domestic product.
In early November, many workers reportedly fled the giant
Foxconn plant that produces iPhones, fearing not just that they would be locked
in but that they would go hungry. And in the past few days, many Chinese, in
cities across the nation, have braved harsh repression to demonstrate against
government policies.
I am not a China expert, and I have no idea where
this is going. As far as I can tell, actual China experts do not know, either.
But I think it is worth asking what lessons we can draw from China’s journey
from would-be role model to debacle.
Crucially, the lesson is not that we should not
pursue public health measures in the face of a pandemic. Sometimes such
measures are necessary. But governments need to be able to change policy in the
face of changing circumstances and new evidence.
And what we are seeing in China is the problem with
autocratic governments that cannot admit mistakes and will not accept evidence
they do not like.
In the first year of the pandemic, strong, even
draconian restrictions made sense. It was never realistic to imagine that mask
mandates and even lockdowns could prevent the coronavirus from spreading. What
they could do, however, was slow the spread.
At first, the goal in the US and many other
countries was to “flatten the curve”, avoiding a peak in cases that would
overwhelm the health care system. Then, once it became clear that effective
vaccines would become available, the goal was or should have been to delay
infections until widespread vaccination could provide protection.
… what we can learn from China is broader than the failure of specific policies; it is that we should beware of would-be autocrats who insist, regardless of the evidence, that they are always right.
You could see this strategy at work in places like
New Zealand and Taiwan, which initially imposed stringent rules that held cases
and deaths to very low levels, then relaxed these rules once their populations
were widely vaccinated. Even with vaccines, opening up led to a large rise in
cases and deaths — but not nearly as severe as would have happened if these
places had opened up earlier, so that overall deaths per capita have been far
lower than in the US.
China’s leaders, however, seem to have believed that
lockdowns could permanently stomp out the coronavirus, and they have been
acting as if they still believe this even in the face of overwhelming contrary
evidence.
At the same time, China utterly failed to develop a
Plan B. Many older Chinese — the most vulnerable group — are still not fully
vaccinated. China has also refused to use foreign-made vaccines, even though
its homegrown vaccines, which do not use mRNA technology, are less effective
than the shots the rest of the world is getting.
All of this leaves Xi Jinping’s regime in a trap of
its own making. The zero-COVID policy is obviously unsustainable, but ending it
would mean tacitly admitting error, which autocrats never find easy.
Furthermore, loosening the rules would mean a huge spike in cases and deaths.
Not only have many of the most vulnerable Chinese
remained unvaccinated or received inferior shots, but because the coronavirus
has been suppressed, few Chinese have natural immunity, and the nation also has
very few intensive care beds, leaving it without the capacity to deal with a
COVID surge.
It is a nightmare, and nobody knows how it ends. But
what can the rest of us learn from China?
First, autocracy is not, in fact, superior to
democracy. Autocrats can act quickly and decisively, but they can also make
huge mistakes because nobody can tell them when they are wrong. At a
fundamental level there is a clear resemblance between Xi’s refusal to back off
zero-COVID and Vladimir Putin’s disaster in Ukraine.
Second, we are seeing why it is important for
leaders to be open to evidence and be willing to change course when they have
been proved wrong.
Ironically, in the US, the politicians whose
dogmatism most resembles that of Chinese leaders are right-wing Republicans.
China has rejected foreign mRNA vaccines, despite clear evidence of their superiority;
many Republican leaders have rejected vaccines in general, even in the face of
a huge partisan divide in death rates linked to differential vaccination rates.
This contrasts with Democrats, who have in general followed something like New
Zealand’s approach, if much less effectively — restrictions early on, relaxed
as vaccination spread.
In short, what we can learn from China is broader than the
failure of specific policies; it is that we should beware of would-be autocrats
who insist, regardless of the evidence, that they are always right.
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