Tag: Fear

Everything old is new again – Inner Mongolia

If you’ve gotten tired of depressing news from Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong, there is a new oppression to watch in Inner Mongolia. As in the other provinces comprising mostly non-Han people, the new policy requires forced language change and erasing of traditional culture.

It’s a new oppression with an old mode of operation, same as used in the other provinces – forced acculturation, sterilizations, threats to school kids and old people and everyone else, threats of loss of job for parents whose kids don’t conform, disappearances and torture and jail sentences for “picking quarrels and provoking troubles,” the usual charge against dissidents, lawyers, writers, journalists, and activists of any stripe who fail to meet CCP standards of obeisance.

Also included are the standard threats, disappearances, and roughing up for foreign journalists reporting on local events.  Alice Su, Beijing Bureau Chief for the LA Times, is the latest victim, presumably while researching her article in the Times China cracks down on Inner Mongolian minority fighting for its mother tongue.

It is remarkable how well CCP follows prescriptions outlined in 1984 and Animal Farm.  Double-think is a prerequisite. An example – we know from the Chinese Constitution that all nationalities are equal …

Article 4. All nationalities in the People’s Republic of China are equal. The state protects the lawful rights and interests of the minority nationalities and upholds and develops the relationship of equality, unity and mutual assistance among all of China’s nationalities. Discrimination against and oppression of any nationality are prohibited; any acts that undermine the unity of the nationalities or instigate their secession are prohibited. The state helps the areas inhabited by minority nationalities speed up their economic and cultural development in accordance with the peculiarities and needs of the different minority nationalities. Regional autonomy is practised in areas where people of minority nationalities live in compact communities; in these areas organs of self- government are established for the exercise of the right of autonomy. All the national autonomous areas are inalienable parts of the People’s Republic of China. The people of all nationalities have the freedom to use and develop their own spoken and written languages, and to preserve or reform their own ways and customs.

 … but quite clearly, some nationalities are more equal than others.

From Alice Su’s article –

“All ethnic groups must embrace tightly like the seeds of a pomegranate,” read a slogan from Chinese President Xi Jinping printed in Mandarin on the wall.

So we are in the realm of doublethink already, if Mongolians are being forced to abandon their language and culture.  But the Constitution always has an out – read article 4 above, again, and note – . The state helps the areas inhabited by minority nationalities speed up their economic and cultural development in accordance with the peculiarities and needs of the different minority nationalities.  Sort of in the same realm as, “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

Alice Su, again –

Bao said her grandson had to come back to class because his parents’ workplaces threatened to fire them otherwise. “We had no choice,” she said. “We want our grandson to go to school, of course, but not to forget his mother tongue.”

“It’s too outrageous,” her husband added. “What century are we living in? They’ve snatched away our rights.”

Now you might think promotion of “rights” in China is a western concept that would make one subject to arrest.  But remember these sections from the Constitution –

Article 35. Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.

Article 36. Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief. No state organ, public organization or individual may compel citizens to believe in, or not to believe in, any religion; nor may they discriminate against citizens who believe in, or do not believe in, any religion. The state protects normal religious activities. No one may make use of religion to engage in activities that disrupt public order, impair the health of citizens or interfere with the educational system of the state. Religious bodies and religious affairs are not subject to any foreign domination.

Article 37. The freedom of person of citizens of the People’s Republic of China is inviolable.

The people of Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia have equal rights with other Chinese.  Its just that … well, you know.  Animal Farm. 

Bill Bishop at Sinocism has more.  Before we get too high-hat about this, the US has its own terrible history with racial and ethnic minorities.  But when Chinese media and foreign representatives go on about conditions in the US, remember that most of the time the American government has worked to protect rights of minorities.  The Chinese government works to define their rights away.  Too often, we forget that with rights come responsibilities.  In China, the responsibilities include those of obeying CCP. 

What do you think of western civilization?

The question to Gandhi is now being asked again, this time by educated, sophisticated Chinese of each other.

This was the topic of a four-hour phone call a few nights ago between Chinese PhDs, both with extensive American experience and important midlevel career positions. 

In a word, their conclusion was the same as Gandhi’s – it would be a good idea. 

Their argument below is depressing, as if you need any more of that. I am paraphrasing in spots and retelling in what follows.  My own Chinese language skills couldn’t have kept up. 

For my colleagues and for many educated Chinese, the US and the west have been the model of civilization – educated, smart, democratic, highest technology and culture, in a word, modern. Human rights were honored, even if not always observed in the breach. This, coming from Chinese who know that historically, Zhongguo was always considered the center of the universe. 

A little background

That the west was the center of modernity was an idea nurtured over a long span of time, probably going back to the era of treaty ports in the mid-nineteenth century.  Out of the humiliation of the 19th century came the May 4th movement, which sought to replace millennia of deference to authority and superstition with “Dr. Science and Mr. Democracy.” 

Ancient Chinese culture was … well, ancient and feudal.  Chen Duxiu, founder of the Chinese Communist Party, saw modernism and personal independence as the conditions necessary for growth.  This was in 1916.

The US remained the modernist pole star for the next hundred years.  The term for the United States, meiguo, means beautiful country. But by 2010, many Chinese believed in the American dream and an American miracle more than did many educated, sophisticated Americans.  Chinese were not ignorant of American deficiencies – racism, poor schools and health care for poor people, a developing oligarchy, gun nuts and chaotic politics – but democratic values seemed able to pull victory from the claws of every looming defeat, and all that was necessary was a little money to get world class schools, education, health care, and a peaceful life. John Dewey had been a popular figure in China, and above all, America was seen as pragmatic.

That was then, this is now

That was the image, and it is no more, my colleagues said in the wechat call.  America has been the standard, but they also considered western Europe, and found it wanting as well. America – and the west – seem in thrall to an ideology, not one my interlocutors could identify, but it was definitely not pragmatic.

This democracy thing – perhaps more precisely, individualism – has met its match.  The covid-19 virus is only the latest and most clearly defining symptom.  Democracies, they said, seem unable to do basic things that improve the lives of most people.  A hundred thousand dead is an acceptable level of loss?  Policies that pit states against one another to obtain PPE? The interlocutors on the phone call couldn’t get to evolving deficiencies in laws, regulations and institutions that were the subject of Why Nations Fail (Acemoglu and Robinson).  Nor had they read How Democracies Die (Levitsky and Ziblatt).  The sense was the American promise was now – well, if not a lie, at least more marketing than substance.

I have many Chinese government friends and associates, some of whom have made moves to purchase real estate in the US for retirement or for their kids to go to school here, or just in case.  Those days seem over, and not only because of the egomania of the leaders Xi and Trump.  The America that was promised is now an uncertain risk.  Who knows what part might fail next?  Metaphorically, the American car used to be new and shiny and had the latest gadgets.  It was safe, everything worked, and the warranty was sound. Now the American car is a used car, and if you look under the hood, it gets pretty scary.  The warranty is barely worth the Constitution it is printed on. 

This jaded view of the US and the west is not new.  Chinese university students in America have been coming home to China for a decade, unimpressed by the lure of freedom of speech and democracy that comes at the cost of guns and mayhem and ridiculous health care expense.  Now world news and opinion is flush with incredulity and alarm about the US. 

There is little sense of individual responsibility and little concern for the other, said my colleagues.  Freedom to die is apparently the mantra for those now rushing to bars without masks or distancing.  Chinese would say, good luck to them.  And, they say, the Cortland County New York wallet card should be made mandatory in Wisconsin, Georgia, Florida – anywhere the stupid people congregate. 

The comparisons with China are easy and superficial, and my colleagues were speaking only in personal, offhand remarks. Their feelings about the Chinese government in January and February were very negative. Now, looking at the rest of the world, they have a different idea. China bungled badly in the first six weeks or so of the virus time, but with testing and lockdown, distancing and quarantine and tracing, it basically beat the virus in two months.

There was no expressway driving allowed.  If people were infected, they were isolated away from their families.  Temperatures were taken going in and out of residential complexes.  People’s level of cooperation was very high.  It didn’t matter if you were young or old, rich or poor, lives were treated as more important than the economy.  Now that cases have shown up again in Wuhan, the plan is to test all 11,000,000 residents in the next couple of weeks.  We can discount real implementation of that plan as fanciful, but nevertheless, the government will test and isolate and trace, and that will work.  Individuals bear no cost for treatment of Covid-19, from testing to ventilator. There is no point in staying away from the hospital if you are sick because you can’t afford it.  All things considered, including that the virus started there, they said, China had about the best possible response.

One can quibble.  This was their considered evaluation. 

In the US – well, you know the news stories.  The rate of new daily cases has still not fallen in two months, to May 23. And that was with two-months notice before shutdowns began. On the phone call, my Chinese friends were appalled at the ignorance and sheer stupidity.  The Michigan legislature shut down rather than confront gun wielding freedom-to-die fighters who deny medical expertise. If I don’t wear a mask, and I infect you, so what?  Leaders tell old people to die for the sake of the economy, and everyone should drink bleach. Neither Dr. Science nor Mr. Democracy are in evidence. Who are these people?  Left unsaid, I think, was the question of whether these can be real humans at all, but there certainly was a sense of the inmates running the asylum. Over the next few months, will we really accept 2000 deaths a week as the cost of doing business?  Is this what human rights comes to?

My colleagues used Marx for reference.  The first stage of capitalism was certainly ugly.  Marx said that every pore on the skin of the workingman was filled with blood or dirt.  But wealth bought respectability and human rights talk, and this worked pretty well until the real control and desires of the capitalist class were exposed in 2020. The political leaders and a lot of citizens are in thrall to the economic oligarchs. 

A story about a woman named Peggy Popham from North Carolina summarizes the views of my colleagues that a good portion of Americans are just … well, nuts – The coronavirus pandemic created the perfect environment for apocalyptic Christianity to fuse with antigovernment libertarianism, New Age rejection of mainstream science and medicine, and internet-fueled gullibility toward baroque conspiracy theories about secret cabals ruling the world through viruses.  About twenty percent of Americans have said they would not take a vaccine when available.

The rejection of science and rationality, they said, means the US can no longer be considered modern. Other Chinese agree. In a recent article, Wu Haiyun, editor at Sixth Tone, echoed the feelings expressed on the phone call, but she was referring to Chinese now in their late thirties and early forties – Trust in Science Saved China. Practicing It Will Keep It Safe. 

This Chinese view is not itself isolated

Edward Luce at Financial Times writes about the world’s view of America now, and it is not pretty –  William Burns, most senior US diplomat and now head of the Carnegie Endowment – America is first in the world in deaths, first in the world in infections and we stand out as an emblem of global incompetence. The damage to America’s influence and reputation will be very hard to undo.

The Guardian suggests that the world looks on in horror at the US response.

And Fintan O’Toole writes in the Irish Times – Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

Another colleague of mine whose tax clients are mostly foreign nationals remarked that part of what he had done for forty years was enable people to live, work, or make a living in the US.  Now, he says, he is dealing with the converse – people wanting to move assets or themselves out.

What is to be done?

Now, if you have choices about where to live in the world, where to go? If you have kids, what is a safe and humane place with expectations of solid education in which to bring them up?  Where will a kid be more easily cultivated as a right-valued person?  The virus seems the last straw.

For my colleagues, this democracy thing has come to mean not that citizens are empowered to obtain information and make educated choices, but that “my ignorance is just as good as your expertise” and more to the point, “every man for himself.”  No democratic founder in Athens, the Colonies, or political philosophy in any era would support that view.

This is what the American image has come to.  Evaporation of American soft power cannot be far behind. The vaunted American Dream has become a version of Is that all there is? Robert Frost considered whether the world would end in fire or in ice.  Neither, it turns out.  The world as we know it ends in willful ignorance and stupidity.  The scientist, the doctor, the researcher, the humane and rational end up looking like navigators on Plato’s Ship of Fools. “Fake news,” is what my Chinese colleagues said about this alarming American discrediting of science – but they meant that people could not distinguish science from lunacy.  Good luck to those Americans, is what they said at the end. 

Moral Freedom

In Moral China in the Age of Reform, Ci Jiwei, Professor of Philosophy at Chinese University of Hong Kong, explains that Chinese do not have moral freedom.  His detailed explanation should be required reading for all China observers.

 What does it mean that Chinese don’t have moral freedom?

 Ai Fen is a doctor in the emergency department of Wuhan Central Hospital.  She was the first medical person to tell the world about the virus.  She got the nickname whistle blower for being the first to tell other hospital doctors – including Li Wenliang, one of the first doctors to die.  Her story is in some detail here.

In interviews, she talked about being threatened by the hospital party leader and head of the jian cha ke, the hospital version of the jiwei, the feared CCP Discipline Inspection department.  The leader said that she lost face in Wuhan city government meetings, because of what Ai Fen had said publicly.  The party leader accused Ai Fen of hurting the overall development of Wuhan City, and destroying all the improvements the hospital Party leader had made over the prior years.  According to Ai –

After the interview, I suffered an unprecedented and very severe rebuke.

At that time, the leader of the conversation said, “We can’t afford to raise our heads when we go out for a meeting. The director of XX criticizes our hospital.

Ai was threatened with spreading rumors, for which she could go to jail.  The party leader, incidentally, refused to let doctors and nurses wear masks early in the epidemic – she would lose face and she said, masks would scare patients.  She did not appear in the hospital emergency department until mid-March, when there was a big showy meeting with leaders.  She wore full protective equipment then.  More than 200 – some say, 300 – of the hospital staff are still in treatment for the virus. 

Ai Fen’s story in her own words is at Science Integrity Digest.

Ai Fen walked out dazed and shaken from this criticism meeting with her leaders.  She had never been threatened before.  She is a medical doctor, with many years of schooling and she is, as they say in China, a really excellent person.  But after this warning, this threat, she remained quiet – until her later public interviews.

Two questions – why did Ai Fen – clearly a smart, well educated, thoughtful person – think that these wild accusations about harming the GDP of Wuhan were any of her affair, or even remotely her doing?   Why could she not respond to the Party leader – figuratively, of course – with a personally directed expletive?

A couple of ideas – Ai Fen is an excellent person.  All her life, she was told how to be a good daughter, a good student – primary school, high school, university, medical school – the emphasis was always on being the best.  On the one hand, nothing wrong with incentive and initiative.  But “being the best” also meant being a good soldier, a good Party member, do what you are told and – in one of my most hated phrases in Chinese – meiyou wenti – no questions.  One could not advance in school without learning to mouth the right answer.  Her salary, advancement, stature would depend not only on her excellence, but on her relationship with leaders.  Obey authority is the idea.

What meiyou wenti means is that Ai Fen could not develop the courage to make choices for herself about moral questions – what is right, what is wrong, truth, falsity.  She was always told the correct answer, and there was no room for debate.  Wo bi xu zuo –  I must do it.  Making these judgments requires experience, and she did not have it.  Her reaction, though troubling to her, was to obey.

When presented with the virus diagnosis in December, she did the professional thing – circulate information to her colleagues.  This is science at its best – share information, seek the truth. This, however, was a political error – in CCP terms, an error in moral judgment.  When confronted by the leaders, she then chose to remain silent.

When confronted with power, she could only be in fear of what could happen to her personally from her inexperienced action. As a doctor, she always concentrated on her studies and her work. She was always shielded from the world of real power.  She is young, with two small kids, one a year old.  Jail?  Simply disappear?  She warned her husband after the severe reprimand –

I went home that night, I remember quite clearly, and told my husband after entering the door, if something went wrong, you can raise the child. Because my second treasure is still very young, only over 1 year old.

Most Chinese never have to deal with issues of moral freedom.  They have the luxury of living life, going to work, going to school, going shopping without having to confront issues of right or wrong, truth or falsity and making considered moral judgments – even voting or choosing what can be said or printed. That is what CCP wants.  Others – journalists, writers, artists, social scientists, intellectuals of all stripes – confront lack of moral freedom in some way every day.  In Wuhan, moral freedom came for Ai Fen.  With the interviews, Ai Fen found courage. She rose above CCP, and gained moral stature- not in CCP, but in eyes of the world.

CCP and Mr. Xi’s Learning Disability

Two full months into the Covid-19 crisis, we see where Mr. Xi’s crackdown on communication and openness has taken him.  He is himself in no danger, but CCP runs into a conceptual wall with free flow of information. That is a disability – a learning disability – for CCP and China now.

CCP has always shown itself to be flexible and adaptable.  That has been a strength.  But with a modern middle class society, and an arteriosclerotic governing structure, the crisis points out two things – limits of CCP tolerance for free flow of information in the Xi era and people’s anger, anxiety, and disgust at censorship of their heartfelt emotions. 

Disability manifests in three ways –

There is no tolerance for officials who stray from CCP hierarchy –  Officials who know better dare not speak out. Xi has reintroduced centralization of authority in Beijing, and consolidated power in himself. Historically, there is no truth until the senior leader announces it. But a crisis demands openness, receptiveness to new knowledge and local initiative in response.

Without local initiative, we see the failure of CCP under the most powerful leader since Mao to have operable crisis management plans to dull or halt the spread of the virus.

Even during the crisis, Hubei officials have been slow in coordinating transport and lodging for thousands of doctors and nurses from other provinces, come to assist in Hubei.  No one could do logistics without an ok from Beijing.

China provide plenty of training for government officials and managers, but no independent decision-making experience. Isaiah Berlin was right in his essay On Political Judgment.  Good political judgment is a skill – it is practical wisdom.  Vetting and prior experience are important, but good judgment comes from exercising it, not suppressing it.  Vetting in an authoritarian system prepares one only for authoritarian values.

A political response is considered far more important than effective disaster response. The Centers for Disease Control, the Chinese Red Cross, the local transportation and police departments have had any meritocracy in the ranks superceded by rank political decision-making at the top.

To be sure, there are plenty of Chinese party members and local government officials who are ready and able to learn. I know this because I taught scores of them – vice mayors, organization department leaders, political liaisons, police officials, urban planners and maritime law judges — over the last seventeen years, in university programs in Chicago and in China. Many now are long-term friends. I know, firsthand, that many CCP members, mid-levels and above, are smart, committed, and generous people.  They can rightfully claim an elite status based on merit.  They are now caught between “serving the people” and serving political masters.

Chinese friends and colleagues remind me how risky it is for local leaders to act until their own leader has acted –  and that trail goes from a district health official all the way to Beijing.  The (former) mayor of Wuhan said as much the other day – he had information, but he could only report to his leaders.  He did not have the freedom to release what he knew.

There is no tolerance for open communication – You know about the death of Li Wenliang, the doctor who tried to warn others about the new virus, and was punished for doing so. A window of wechat openness has shut down, as Mr. Xi is starting to claim victory over the crisis.  But CCP limits on open communication damage social trust. Suppression of information accelerates local and worldwide panic about the coronavirus. The flu in America kills tens of thousands each year; we don’t panic about flu.  No one trusts the Chinese government – not Chinese, not foreign governments. When there is no trust, and information is in great demand, the market supplies rumor and anxiety and hoarding. This is Mr. Xi’s legacy, to promote this corrosive disability.

People’s anger is palpable – Truth dies in a rigid hierarchy with heavy censorship and punishment for those who speak out.  “No one should comment unless they know all the facts” – this meme has permeated Chinese culture for decades.  Since no one can ever know all the facts on any topic, this serves as a warning for people to say nothing. The wechat posts may only last an hour or two before deletion. But the followup posts spread like a virus online. “Trust the leader” has long been a political premise in China.  Now, with online calls for officials to resign, or die,  Mr. Xi has destroyed this meme.

What result for CCP and Mr. Xi

Alexis de Tocqueville, Friedrich Hayek and James Scott told us about the importance of local knowledge and experience.  In a strict hierarchy, top leaders are truly masked from exposure to information.  They are disabled.

The international brand of China and CCP is certainly damaged in this crisis. World leaders, perhaps even business leaders, will be less willing to show obeisance to Xi.  The image of China as having a meritocratic and superior form of governance is certainly destroyed. The Chinese government response in this crisis will hasten the exit of foreign businesses and foreigners from China that began with the trade fiasco.  Failure of government response in SARS in 2003, the ongoing swine fever crisis from 2018, and now Covid-19 are more than just a series of unfortunate events.  They are the product of silence.

Xi will need to crack down harder on dissent. To facilitate delivery of food and monitor those with fevers, local governments have used the recently rejuvenated grid system, a fine-grained watching network of volunteers.  This innovation was Mr. Xi’s idea for instilling patriotism and anxiety in the people.  After the virus crisis subsides, it may become more of a standard means of observation and control.  People watching is no leisurely pastime.

Xi recently claims to be in full control of the response to the crisis, which is a tricky position for him. He wants credit for success without responsibility for failure.  We remember the old adage, applying all the way down the chain of command – authority without responsibility is tyranny; responsibility without authority is chaos.

In 2013, Chinese officials were reading deTocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution, by way of understanding how to avoid losing the autocracy.  The French old regime tried to reform, but eventually reverted to a powerful central government. Mr. Xi must have missed the quote about the French kings when Louis XVIII restored the monarchy after Napoleon: “The Bourbons had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” 

Mr. Xi seems to find himself in a similar situation.  After the disasters of the Mao years, even his own sent down experience, he is trying to take China to a 21st century version of the old regime.  He can’t get there from where modern China begins. 

For leaders, information does not want to be free – lessons from Wuhan

(Note: update at February 13 – Hubei has changed the manner of identifying virus infections, and the new system overnight adds about 15,000 people to the total.  The number of deaths is also changed, but obviously the government will not go back and change death certificates from the last month.  I have no access to the statistics, only reports from Chinese of illnesses and deaths, but an increase in the total of cases seems necessary.  There were just too many stories, too close to home.  The new count coincides with the change of the Wuhan and Hubei CCP leaders.  Politically, it will now be possible to identify the crisis with the former leaders, and the end of the crisis with changes made by Mr. Xi.  This is the China wechat meme of the moment.)

We should not waste the coronavirus crisis.

Whether or not it turns into a full-fledged pandemic, surprises and lessons already have emerged that demand attention and need to be learned by Chinese — also by America and the rest of the world.

There is no chance that lessons will be learned in China. The lessons are mostly anathema to CCP.  But the crucial lessons are there for us, too — lessons that we must not ignore, lessons about openness to experienced advice and telling the truth. This post is mostly about China, but one can see the parallels in American politics now.

Our own recent political processes have nascent signs of copying CCP.  I comment on the China model below.  See how well it matches some political developments in the US. 

CCP leaders know the lessons.  I taught scores of them – vice mayors, organization department leaders, political liaisons, policemen urban planners and judges in Chicago, over a span of seven years.  Many are long term friends.  I know firsthand that many CCP members, midlevels and above, are smart, committed, and generous people.  They can rightfully claim an elite status based on merit. But they are caught in a system that does not value telling the truth until the leader announces it.  We are seeing that despicable system in American politics as well.  No one on the GOP side dare counter the leader. 

The operating governance model in China works for all the people – up to the point at which the values of openness threaten CCP.  We see this now in the US political system as well.  The GOP can entertain truth, until it becomes politically unpleasant. Then, the system can’t help but close in around leaders.   

That system of smart committed people in government in China is frustrated by political correctness at every level.  There is no truth, there is no openness until the senior leader announces it. For effective response in crisis, openness must permeate the government and the society, so that no one need fear retribution for speaking the truth.  We see how lack of openness failed the people in China, as it failed the people in New Orleans at Katrina or the people of Puerto Rico at Hurricane Maria.  You remember “heckuva job, Brownie.”

It is easy to trash government response in crisis.  Crises are by definition long tail events.  But the political side of government cannot hold itself out as the only purveyor of information, the only purveyor of truth or experience, particularly in a crisis.  It needs the local knowledge, local voices, local actors from within government and from outside.  The coronavirus teaches us that.  China cannot learn the lesson for political reasons.  In America, we must learn it, for, as the Washington Post tells us, democracy dies in darkness.

There are surprises coming from this crisis  – on the negative side, there is the failure of CCP under the most powerful leader since Mao to have operable crisis management plans and an effective response early enough to dull or halt the spread of the virus.  So much for meritocracy at senior levels.

On the positive side, there is the willingness of Chinese to volunteer to help. Contrary to political doctrine (and somewhat to Chinese culture), the people showed signs of learning how to depend on each other, and not the government.  And distinct from other crises, like Sichuan earthquakes, this time volunteers have their own health and lives at risk.

The lessons stem from observations –

  • A stark view of the isolation of Chinese leaders from the rest of the population by virtue of wealth and benefits.
  • Clear evidence of the perils of closing access to alternative voices – voices in the hospitals, in the local health agencies, in government agencies, in the society 
  • Clear evidence of the perils of hierarchical and rigid management in a modern society. From Confucius, heaven hears as the people hear, sees as the people see.  Heaven hears all the voices. The political side of government needs to hear them too. 

The China model

On isolation – a CCP mantra is that they Party members serve the people.  But Hubei and Wuhan citizens looking at the performances – that is the word – of the governor and mayor learned that these leaders had little sense of the severity of the nascent crisis.  They seemed as isolated from the crisis as they were from having to eat the same food as commoners or drink the same alcohol.  A people’s leader doesn’t have to read from a speech when bemoaning the deaths and exhorting people to take heart.  At the very top, Xi Jinping was absent from public view from January 28 to February 5.  He appeared on the 5th, disappeared again, and then made a public announcement about legal controls to silence dissent or public voice during the epidemic.  The silence is not Trumpian, though the uncaring certainly is. China Law Blog has a good summary of Mr. Xi’s plans.

On meritocracy – Those who have promoted CCP as a model of political meritocracy should be chastened.  The US could stand a little more meritocracy in its leadership, but Isaiah Berlin was right in his essay On Political Judgment. Good political judgment is a skill – it is practical wisdom.  Vetting is important, prior experience is important, but good judgment comes from exercising it, not suppressing it. Vetting in an authoritarian system prepares one only for authoritarian values. On the home front, real estate is an authoritarian model business. The developer is far more powerful than the buyers or renters, and meritocracy never enters the picture. 

As it turns out, the political system in China spawned the Chinese Red Cross, widely thought to be corrupt.  The Red Cross is the government preferred vehicle for donations of money and supplies, but it was woefully unprepared for the crisis.  Volunteers in Wuhan tried to help distribute masks, gowns, gloves and supplies, but they soon left, discouraged at incompetence. 

A crisis, and crisis planning, demands good local information. Without crisis planning, we get the result in Hubei, modeling the old adage – authority without responsibility is tyranny; responsibility without authority is chaos.

There is disaster planning in China; there is extensive training for officials at all levels.  But the learning is blocked by the necessities of hierarchy and power maintenance.  A political response is considered far more important than effective disaster response.  Within organizations, within departments, effort is then put into not learning: preventing learning, suppressing it, corrupting it or breaking up the organizations themselves. The training can then become pointless, a version of “just do it.” 

A good Chinese example is an article published just recently in the Chinese journal Management World, titled Crisis Management in the Internet Era (original in Chinese; reprinted in English at China Journal Review).  The article tells us that crises are usually predictable and the best way to prepare is to identify potential threats in advance. Ok.  That is valuable information. This was written by State Councilor Xu Xianping. 

In the US, the current version of this lack of meritocracy in crisis management is to simply deny that a crisis is possible, or to simply defund agencies. A good American example – Trump recently defunded the Global Health Security program, which provided funding to some of the world’s poorest countries to assist in health crisis research and planning.  Heckuva job, Donnie. 

It is in no particular leader’s interest to act until their own leader has acted, and that trail goes from a district health official all the way to Beijing.  The mayor of Wuhan said as much the other day – he has some information, but he can only report to his leaders.  He did not have the freedom to release what he knew.  At the same time, no one with authority wants to take responsibility.  The doctors and nurses and researchers are willing to be responsible, but they have no authority.  And no one can speak out of turn, for fear of real punishment.

On hierarchical management in a modern world – The Wuhan Center for Disease Control isolated the virus in December.  But per requirements, it could only report to its Beijing leaders.  At least a month was wasted in fumbling and denial and punishing communication, and by then the virus was well established.  When Beijing informed the World Health Organization of the new virus on December 31, it was still keeping Chinese in the dark about existence. We will see how many of the five million people who left Wuhan before it was closed down on January 23 at the beginning of Spring Festival will become ill. Alexis deTocqueville , Frederick Hayek and James Scott told us about the importance of local knowledge and local information and warned about the dangers of high management attempting to implement grand plans.  In a strict hierarchy, top leaders are truly masked from exposure to information.  Fear of the leader accomplishes the same task – looking at you, US Senate Republicans and their enablers.

On political priorities – Part of the delay in reporting to the public was the desire to not interfere with Spring Festival –a reasonable initial take. But leaders also did not want to muddy the political waters with the provincial People’s Congress meeting and the planned two meetings in Beijing in March. Now, the ham-handed approach to late remedial action – closing all movement in and out, banning private vehicles on the streets, restricting household movements to one a day – means that now people are running out of food, out of medicines for all illnesses, out of emotional reserves.  I have friends who are frightened, depressed, and feel there is nowhere to turn.  It is the realization of Camus’ The Plague.

In a hierarchical system, even simple logistics problems can become political problems.  At least a thousand doctors and nurses from other provinces, come for emergency aid to Hubei hospitals, were stuck at the Wuhan airport for three or four hours without food and without transportation.  The management decision to provide buses and food had to come from the newly organized crisis management team, formed in Hubei and in each city.  The management team would consist of political leaders, for sure, and perhaps a few other officials.  But all would defer to a direction from the party leader, and if the party leader did not express an opinion, underlings might be afraid to make a decision.   In the US, we see that the independent voices in federal agencies – it is particularly obvious at the State Department and EPA – are fleeing, to leave unqualified and political replacements in charge. 

On information management –  Dr. Li Wenliang, one of the first doctors to try to warn others of the coronoavirus outbreak, and who was punished for doing so, has died.  There is widespread outrage at his martyrdom in a just cause.  His wife, now about 8 months pregnant, is also sick, along with his parents.  At first, the Chinese media deleted all stories about his death.  CCP could learn the importance of whistle-blowers even for an authoritarian government. In one of his last statements, Dr. Li noted that there should be more than one voice in a healthy society.  His evidence is submitted to a candid world. 

Now no one knows how many people are only a little bit sick, and are sent home or never got to the hospital.  No one knows how many of those a “little bit sick” will develop the virus, or whether they just have a cold. No one knows whether sequestering those who are a “little bit sick” in large exhibition halls, several hundred to a room, will make some sicker or not.  No one knows how many deaths are not recorded.  There is no such data, and no system in place to collect it.  But recent phone conversations between a crematory director and an inspection group (sent to check on supplies and processes) provide one datum – about 35% of their cremations come from hospitals right now.  About 65% are coming directly from residential compounds.  No one knows how many of those from residences are virus related. But in normal times, one would expect very few deaths at home.  The same crematory director said that on average, they would deal with about 30 cremations a day.  On a recent day, they had about 120 bodies that had to be cremated that day, presumably due to viral infection.  There are eight crematories in Wuhan.  And the number of official deaths don’t match such cremation statistics.  

On training and expertise – CCP does continuous training for officials, both technical and political.  This is a bit of a deficiency in American government, compared with that in other countries.  But the training in China cannot obviate differences in provincial education quality and local political priorities.  At least some of the difficulties in Hubei and Wuhan could be attributed to lesser quality of both leaders and officials, compared with those in more sophisticated places like Zhejiang, Jiangsu, or Shanghai. The Wuhan mayor does not have an academic university degree, only a Party School degree.  Education is not everything, but Party schools do differ, as much as a University of Michigan differs from a local junior college. In the US, only a third of the Trump cabinet and high official appointees have had public sector experience.  Most seem chosen for their conservative political views and their obvious wealth, and most certainly not because of their education or wisdom.  

The CCP mantra is a good one – serve the people.  Serving the people requires that all voices be heard.  In a rigid hierarchy with heavy censorship and punishment of those who speak out, the truth dies.  “No one should comment unless they know all the facts” – this meme has permeated Chinese culture for decades.  Since no one can ever know all the facts on any topic, this serves as a warning for people to say nothing.  “Trust the leader” has long been a political premise in China.  We have this in the US now, for people unwilling to ask questions. 

CCP could learn the peril of trying to control information in a modern world.  The Party has always been flexible, and adaptable – this is a strength.  But it runs into a conceptual wall with free flow of information.  A communist regime needs to have the Truth about everything.  Years ago, when I asked Party members about the source of truth, they told me what I already knew – the Party has the truth.  But that is a dilapidated concept hindering success in a modernizing state.  Suppression of information is a good part of what has led to the worldwide panic about the coronavirus. The flu in America kills tens of thousands each year; but we don’t panic about flu. No one trusts the Chinese government – not Chinese, not foreign governments, not foreign people. When there is no trust, and information is in great demand, the market supplies rumor and anxiety and hoarding. 

On volunteering – To volunteer is dangerous in an authoritarian state, but when lives are at risk, Chinese will plunge in.  The difference with volunteers in the Sichuan earthquakes, the Wenzhou train disaster, and other recent events is that now volunteers have their own health and lives at risk.

One wants to encourage Chinese volunteers – “The People. United. Will Never Be Defeated.”  But that is probably a bit too socialist, a bit too revolutionary for a Communist party to tolerate.  And the volunteers were never united, could not organize, and certainly would not maintain solidarity, except silently.  Mr. Xi may have to intensify strangling people’s access to information, and Chinese who complain bitterly about it will nevertheless concede.  The US Senate has conceded also, albeit without complaining much. 

Lessons from the China model

There is no chance that lessons will be learned in China. There is no chance that the crisis will destroy Mr. Xi.  If he needs to crack down harder on dissent, well, that option is always available.  Keven Rudd said more or less the same thing in a recent Project Syndicate piece.

The crisis is by far the biggest challenge for Mr. Xi in his term.  His response has been puzzling – he wants to be in charge, but does not want the responsibility, which is being passed off to the provinces and cities.  Mr. Xi will continue to lay low for the next few months, as his response has been underwhelming and citizen anger is palpable all over China.   This crisis is not Hong Kong, or Xinjiang, or Tibet.  It is not blacks or Puerto Ricans or immigrants who can be written off.  Hubei is real Chinese people, and all Chinese know that.

Over the next few months, watch for further efforts to strangle social media and expressions of outrage at the unfeeling manner in which the government is “serving the people.”  While some more expression is being permitted right now, in response to people’s outrage across China, this will end and the mask of disinformation will return. I don’t see how greater social media freedom could be permitted, but if it were to happen, it would begin with local censors, at the permission of some leader, choosing to not delete some wechat posts.  The hashtag #wewantfreedomofspeech# posted response to the death of Dr. Li lasted for five hours before it was deleted Friday morning the 7th. It had more than two million views and 5,500 related posts by that time.  If a future similarly poignant post were to last for 12 hours, or 24, that would be significant.

It is not clear what will happen to the mayor and governor and Party leaders in Wuhan and Hubei.  If they were to be sacrificed, it should have happened by now.  They must all be Xi appointees by now, after seven years of Xi in power, and he may not want to simply dump them.  That might worry other Xi appointees, particularly as we approach the putative change in leadership in 2022.  The international brand of China and CCP is certainly damaged in this crisis, and world leaders, perhaps even business leaders, will be less willing to show obeisance to Xi.  The image of China as having a meritocratic and superior form of governance is certainly destroyed. The Chinese government response in this crisis will hasten the exit of foreign businesses and foreigners from China that began with the trade fiasco.  Warren Buffet reminded us that it is only when the tide goes out that we see who is swimming naked.  Chinese political governance is showing itself every bit as incompetent as the American political response to Hurricane Maria or gun violence or education failure.

The lessons are there for us, too.  Chinese students are taught from early on that positive attitude is the way to end all written schoolwork – something on the order of, “if we all work hard, tomorrow will be better.”  It is a trite formulaic ending to school papers.  What is not valued in working hard is learning to tell the truth.   Such training is unnecessary, since government will always provide the truth when it is needed.

There are two masked lessons for Americans to heed – masked because they are hidden at first glance in media and journalism.  First is that government does contain experienced, thoughtful, smart people who are committed to doing good.  To ignore them, to sideline them, is to put us all on Plato’s ship of fools. We seem committed to that path in the US now. 

Second, government always needs a counterbalancing voice, whether the Church or real political opposition or civil society or free journalism or social media or experienced and wise people in government agencies.  That alternative voice can be the voice of truth and the spur to action. Otherwise, we are all at greater risk of the unforeseen virus.  Remember the last sentence of Camus’ The Plague – paraphrasing – “the plague bacillus never dies out completely … even in happy times, it waits beneath our notice, until it decides to rouse its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”

Viruses thrive when there is only one voice of authority that sees self-preservation as more important than serving the people.  That is the lesson for America and the world from the coronavirus. 

Masks of the Red (Cross) Death

You remember the Edgar Allan Poe story – The Masque of the Red Death

Prospero and 1,000 other nobles have taken refuge in this walled abbey to escape the Red Death, a terrible plague with gruesome symptoms that has swept over the land. Victims are overcome by “sharp pains”, “sudden dizziness”, and “profuse bleeding at the pores“, and die within half an hour. Prospero and his court are indifferent to the sufferings of the population at large; they intend to await the end of the plague in luxury and safety behind the walls of their secure refuge, having welded the doors shut.

As noted yesterday, the Chinese Red Cross has come in for some special attention in social media.  Per reports, the Chinese Red Cross has collected millions of dollars in cash and equipment to assist in the coronavirus campaign.  The money should be used to buy supplies for hospitals. The supplies should get to hospitals without delay.  As you know, masks, gowns, hazardous clothing and medicines have been in desperately short supply throughout Hubei.  But in keeping with suspicions of the last decade, the Chinese Red Cross has not been forthcoming in its accounting for donations and particularly in its distribution of needed supplies to hospitals.

The Red Cross Society of China is not affiliated with the International Red Cross.  It has experienced heavy criticism, and donations have dwindled, since exposes related to the 2013 Sichuan earthquake relief and a 2011 scandal involving a woman flaunting her fabulous car, clothes, and lifestyle who also claimed to be a Red Cross director.  The Atlantic has a brief review of the problems, from 2013.  It appears that danwei donations, some government employee donations, and even student donations, were required to go to the Chinese Red Cross, rather than another non-profit.  Many Chinese openly question whether the Red Cross leaders divert money for their own purposes. 

That was then, and this is 2020. Bureaucratic delays can happen in any situation. Certainly, supplies should be accounted for.  But it appears that logistics for distribution of masks and gowns has gone seriously wrong, with no improvement over past operations. 

Many tons of supplies have been collected from throughout China and even from overseas packages of masks and gowns. The Red Cross initially said it would send supplies directly to hospitals. When the Red Cross only sent two trucks to deliver tons and tons of supplies throughout Wuhan – a city the size of all of northeastern Illinois – the bottleneck was obvious – and potentially deadly.  When the hospitals complained, the Red Cross told the hospitals to come pick up supplies themselves.  The hospitals were happy to dispatch people to do so.

When the dispatch people arrived at Red Cross headquarters, they still could not pick up supplies, because the Red Cross wasn’t ready.  Hospital staff were told to come back the next day – while supplies sat in the warehouse behind them. 

They still could not get supplies the next day, because the Red Cross demanded that hospitals produce a sort of introduction letter in order to obtain supplies.  This appears to be a sort of holdover from 30 years ago, when each danwei had to produce evidence of need and appropriate guanxi to get supplies without exchange of cash. 

At the top level hospital in Wuhan, doctors and nurses resorted to making their own masks from plastic bags and filter paper, and soliciting donations directly from the public instead of going through the government-approved Red Cross.  As punishment, this leading hospital received supplies of only 3,000 masks from the Red Cross.

A hospital that received 15,000 or 16,000 masks is not a hospital at all, but a private fertility clinic, with no fever department at all.  Managers of the clinic said they were donating the masks to people in the neighborhood, rather than the supplies going to the hospitals. One questions whether the masks were given away or sold. There is a related post at u/cheesyramennoddle on reddit, with different numbers. 

Dozens of Chinese volunteered to help the Red Cross in distribution of supplies. The wechat stories are about volunteers who stopped showing up, because of the inability of the Red Cross to make any effective use of their time. 

For donors looking to donate supplies directly, the Red Cross is charging donors a 6 to 8 percent cash fee to take the donations.  Management of the work has a cost, and non-profits need to get those funds somewhere.  Still, it seems a bit … unseemly to charge donors for making a donation. 

There are other avenues for donations of supplies.  The Chinese Charity Federation ci shan zhong wei is a nationwide organization for receipt of donations.  There are provincial and city branches all over China.

An overseas hai wai Chinese tells the story of attempting to donate masks, gowns, gloves, and goggles to Hubei, or Wuhan, or directly to the hospitals through the Charity Federation.  Over the span of about a week, he had to obtain about a dozen different forms for import of the goods, including a manufacturing license agreement MLA, a registration certificate for medical devices, and a report for detecting and analyzing – test report (sort of an FDA report) – these in addition to the normal import forms – logistics company receipts, name of a recipient at the hospital, name of the exporting company (there was no company, only an individual).  One probably can’t expect the Charity Federation to be up to speed on emergency donations from abroad, but his story tells of the disdain that local organizations seemed to have for an attempt to donate necessary emergency supplies. As in always the case in China, no one would volunteer to tell him what other forms might also be needed – in any case, it was likely that no one knew. He finally had to resort to using very special guanxi from Beijing to get approvals for import.  In the meantime, the Beijing, Hubei, and Wuhan branches of the Charity Federation were passing the buck among each other over whose stamp should be on the goods in order to receive them.  In addition, the provincial and city health bureaus were also demanding stamps before goods could be shipped from Shanghai port.  The Chinese donor in America finally did get his donations released and shipped, but there was quite clearly no emergency on the receiving end.  His comment was that it would be easier to ship illegal drugs into China than emergency medical supplies. 

Some supplies from abroad did get in before air flights were shut down.  Six deliveries from Japan, South Korea, and Britain did get through. According to my information, that included 4.82 million yuan worth of goods – 691,000 masks, 106,000 gowns, 50,700 pair of gloves, and 5000 pairs of protection goggles.    

The Red Cross logistics bottleneck has been the source of many angry postings from Chinese online. A CCTV journalist went to interview people at the Red Cross, but was turned away. At the same time, hospital staff were waiting in line with their introduction letters to get supplies from the Red Cross warehouse.  In the parking lot, leaving the Red Cross warehouse,  the journalist watched a driver with a Wuhan government license plate go into the warehouse and emerge with boxes of masks.  “For the leaders,” is what he told the journalist and the waiting hospital staff.  Masks of the Red (Cross) death, indeed. 

There is plenty of dishonor to go around in this crisis, but one sort of expects the Red Cross, even the Chinese government-affiliated Red Cross, to operate at a somewhat higher plane. That is not the on-the-ground experience right now. The Charity Federation does not emerge looking any better.  The government officials do have their masks, though, so perhaps the emergency is really over. 

Further to “abandon all hope …”

“Abandon all hope” is how I titled a recent post on the response of Wuhan people to the virus.  The title was based on the stories I was hearing, both live and through wechat groups.

Now, this is the language Chinese are themselves using to describe their situation.  When people lose hope, they lose sense of moral responsibility.  Now, there are stories of people in hospitals attacking doctors, ripping their gowns and facemasks, not to use themselves.  It is what one can do when nothing matters anymore. “If I am going to die, you will die with me.” From the London Daily Mail, video of the crowd in hospital corridors –  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7921709/Shocking-footage-shows-hospital-China-flooded-hundreds-patients-amid-coronavirus-outbreak.html#v-6237968338604408872

There are stories of delivery boys, delivering food to communities (since residents cannot go out or are too afraid to go out), and residents tear the face mask from the boy and spit in his face, to transfer the virus.

In the historical face of privation, corruption, and venality, many Chinese maintain a stoicism about leaders – leaders are doing the best they can, we must think of the pressure they are under.  A good deal of that allowance for error seems to be ended now.  A friend of a friend, whose demeanor was always described as genial and submissive, now has called for leaders to be killed.  Li Keqiang came to Wuhan a few days ago, ostensibly to encourage locals to keep up the good fight.  Li went to the site of the new field hospitals being built in Wuhan, but – per my wechat posts – did not go to any of the hospitals where hundreds still stand in line, doctors and nurses lack masks and gowns, people seeking care get shuffled from hospital to hospital with no available transportation (taxis shut down or refuse to take patients, private cars not available, buses shut down).  Leaders, even national leaders, are now described as animals.  They have no concern for ordinary Chinese.  Even now, the mayor and governor have to read from a script to express their sympathies.  They are most certainly not of the people, nor are they serving them.

Most of this information is coming to me through wechat groups.  I have no first hand knowledge – which in China would not qualify me to say anything at all (no one should comment on anything without knowing all the facts).  But the people doing these posts are friends of mine who are smart, thoughtful, generally loyal, and most certainly not given to extremes in typing.  These friends now have some family members who are sick, some friends who have died.  The circle enlarges even as it closes in.

Per their posts – the virus was identified by the Wuhan Center for Disease Control in early to mid-December.  This government body is a branch of the national CDC, and the Wuhan people report only to the central government CDC.  The Wuhan mayor, the Hubei governor, the party leaders were not part of the chain of authority at that point.  The central government CDC took the samples and data, analyzed it, and the researchers were able to write eight journal articles, submitted to top medical journals in China and one in Britain, before the end of the year.  By doing so, the scientists would gain prestige, promotions, and money.  It is an extreme sign of systemic corruption that scientists compete for salary raises by publishing, and in so doing ignore the people whom they are supposed to serve.  It is reported that the head of the central government CDC is not a medical doctor, but a veterinarian – such is the meritocracy within CCP.  The Wuhan leaders were not informed of the virus, or its spread, until the middle of January, several weeks to a month after the virus was identified in Beijing.  That may be a reason that the Hubei and Wuhan leaders have not been asked to resign – perhaps they truly did not know.

You have seen the Wuhan pictures with no one on the streets.  People are holed up in their apartments, either sick, taking care of someone who is sick, or afraid to go out.  People will have no contact with each other.  Many are isolated, alone, some sick.  Some food deliveries get made, but boxes are left outside a door.  Some wealthy people have tried to stay in hotels, in Wuhan or elsewhere, but the hotels will not take them if they are from Hubei. Some people have stopped wearing masks, even if they are sick, out of despair. One contact reports being at home, and the only vehicles he sees, day after day, are ambulances and funeral cars, come to take bodies. Many sicknesses and deaths are not reported as virus related, because the final diagnosis was never made.  Human contact is dangerous.  This is The Plague.  Read the plot summary, if you don’t remember details of the book.

Medical personnel are breaking down. In many cases, they cannot go home, they cannot leave the hospital.  They are targets even as they try to save lives. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7934751/Shocking-footage-shows-medic-Wuhan-crying-screaming-anymore.html#v-4700359319812852581

The Chinese Red Cross has come in for harsh analysis.  You remember the photo from 2011 of guo meimei, identified as the general manager of the Chinese Red Cross.  She was lounging in front of her very expensive sports car, dressed quite stylishly.  Since then, many Chinese do not want to donate money to the Red Cross, and that continues even today.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/07/06/china.redcross/index.html

Lots of donations are going to a charity run by Han Hong, a famous singer who donates much of her income to social causes in China.  She is trusted, when so much of the government is not.

While the World Health Organization (WHO) has praised China for learning so much from the SARS epidemic in Beijing in 2003, Wuhan people don’t see the learning.  They say Hu Jintao would not have allowed such delay and suffering.  Now, all officials are afraid of Xi Jinping, no one will report outside of their strict authority, and media, once beginning to open to criticism and analysis, is shut down.  Mr. Xi reminded all media several years ago that they work for him.

WHO has finally declared the coronavirus a world health emergency.  WHO praised China for its prompt response in providing information to WHO – in mid-December – of the identity of the virus. WHO has seemed reluctant to make this declaration, perhaps out of fear of offending China, despite the deplorable lack of response within China that has allowed the virus to spread so far and so fast.  This international and irrational fear of “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people,” as CCP so often proclaims, must cease. When the tide goes out, as they say, we see who is swimming naked.  The government has left the Chinese people naked and cold, and sick and dying.  The truth will out – not always, and not always very fast.  But here we see power in its Lord Acton transform.  Mr. Xi has been proclaimed personally the core of CCP, and CCP must lead every industry, every aspect of Chinese life. He has absolute power.  It is as if loyal Party members must proclaim, we have no king but Caesar.

In Chinese dynastic mythology, a natural disaster foretells the fall of a dynasty.  Heaven is not pleased with performance, and Heaven hears as the people hear, sees as the people see.  Xi Jinping has amassed more power than any leader since Mao.  He has personalized power, centralized, and put himself and CCP at the core of all in Chinese society.  Now, Mr. Xi should be worried. Lord Acton and Heaven must be in his mind, because even Mr. Xi knows that pride goeth before a fall, and the coronavirus can infect even those who never get sick.

Breaking – Coronavirus information now under control Tuesday, January 28 10:00 AM

Update at January 30


– regarding the doctor who was disciplined for sharing information on the virus with his wechat group – there are now eight doctors in Wuhan who have been so disciplined.  In at least one case, the information sharing was among a wechat group of doctors involved in treating the infection.  You know the phrase, “No good deed goes unpunished.”  No doubt these doctors -involved as they were in fighting this disease, without break for days – forgot the cardinal rule I mentioned below in the original post – “no one should comment without knowing all the facts.”  Only the government can know all the facts. 

A piece of good news, though.  The director of the local health commission in Huanggang, a city in eastern Hubei province, has been fired.  This director was being interviewed by a journalist, who asked a series of questions along the lines of how many infections there are in Huanggang, how many hospital beds there are, what shortages of supplies there are.  To all questions, the director answered, “I don’t know.”  Answers to all these questions would be part of her portfolio, and she demonstrated incompetence, rather forcefully.  Perhaps she was just waiting for all the facts. 

Breaking – Coronavirus information now under control   Tuesday, January 28  10:00 AM

 From three days ago –

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-01/25/c_138733715.htm

… According to the meeting, Xi has been paying very close attention to the outbreak as he held multiple meetings, heard many reports and made important instructions on the matter, demanding Party committees and governments at all levels and related departments to put people’s life and health as the top priority.

From yesterday –

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-01/27/c_138737735.htm

… Li, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and head of a leading group of the CPC Central Committee on the prevention and control of the novel coronavirus outbreak, extended regards to the medical workers at the frontline on behalf of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council.

In a wechat post from about a week ago, now deleted, a doctor from one of the four leading Wuhan hospitals let members of his group know of the dangers of the virus. The doctor was treating virus patients, and presumably was one of those who were not allowed to leave the hospital, or were unable to leave without transportation.  In his private wechat group, he told people to be careful, not go into closed public areas and wear a mask.  This was about a week ago, before the central government acknowledged the existence of the virus.

Ever watchful wechat censors found the post and deleted it.  Also deleted now, as of a couple of hours ago, is a journalist’s story about the deletion and the fate of the doctor.  He was called into a meeting at the hospital, reprimanded and told to never disclose information about the spread of the disease.

At 1:30 in the morning, the doctor was called by the police, and told to report to the local police station, where he was told to write a confession about his transgressions – no doubt, something along the lines of the standard Chinese crime of “causing trouble.”  He wrote, and signed, and was warned to never do such a thing again.

The doctor is now in the hospital, this time sick with the virus.  His parents are now sick as well, along with his pregnant wife.  He cannot be arrested right now, since he is sick.  No doubt there will be plenty of news coverage of his fate when he is out of the hospital.

Mr. Xi should be pleased.  The people’s life and health are being protected from direct, on the ground information that might endanger people’s sense of trust in the government. And Mr. Li should be please as well. This particular medical worker has been highly regarded by the hospital administrators, the local health bureau, and the police.

There is a self-serving CCP meme about public information that has circulated for decades in China – “no one should comment without knowing all the facts.”  Since no one can ever know all the facts about anything, this serves as a warning for people to keep their mouths shut.  There are Chinese who refuse to respect this warning.  But “serving the people,” another CCP meme, is apparently not what is wanted by the authorities.  And we see the absolute value in the US of whistle-blower laws.

Breaking – Coronavirus information now under control Tuesday, January 28 10:00 AM

From three days ago –

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-01/25/c_138733715.htm

… According to the meeting, Xi has been paying very close attention to the outbreak as he held multiple meetings, heard many reports and made important instructions on the matter, demanding Party committees and governments at all levels and related departments to put people’s life and health as the top priority.

From yesterday –

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-01/27/c_138737735.htm

… Li, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and head of a leading group of the CPC Central Committee on the prevention and control of the novel coronavirus outbreak, extended regards to the medical workers at the frontline on behalf of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council.

In a wechat post from about a week ago, now deleted, a doctor from one of the four leading Wuhan hospitals let members of his group know of the dangers of the virus. The doctor was treating virus patients, and presumably was one of those who were not allowed to leave the hospital, or were unable to leave without transportation.  In his private wechat group, he told people to be careful, not go into closed public areas and wear a mask.  This was about a week ago, before the central government acknowledged the existence of the virus.

Ever watchful wechat censors found the post and deleted it.  Also deleted now, as of a couple of hours ago, is a journalist’s story about the deletion and the fate of the doctor.  He was called into a meeting at the hospital, reprimanded and told to never disclose information about the spread of the disease.

At 1:30 in the morning, the doctor was called by the police, and told to report to the local police station, where he was told to write a confession about his transgressions – no doubt, something along the lines of the standard Chinese crime of “causing trouble.”  He wrote, and signed, and was warned to never do such a thing again.

The doctor is now in the hospital, this time sick with the virus.  His parents are now sick as well, along with his pregnant wife.  He cannot be arrested right now, since he is sick.  No doubt there will be plenty of news coverage of his fate when he is out of the hospital.

Mr. Xi should be pleased.  The people’s life and health are being protected from direct, on the ground information that might endanger people’s sense of trust in the government. And Mr. Li should be please as well. This particular medical worker has been highly regarded by the hospital administrators, the local health bureau, and the police.

There is a self-serving CCP meme about public information that has circulated for decades in China – “no one should comment without knowing all the facts.”  Since no one can ever know all the facts about anything, this serves as a warning for people to keep their mouths shut.  There are Chinese who refuse to respect this warning.  But “serving the people,” another CCP meme, is apparently not what is wanted by the authorities.  And we see the absolute value in the US of whistle-blower laws.

Further on the six-day hospital – what Chinese are talking about

January 26, 2020  7:00 CST

Wuhan residents are cheered a little by reports that military doctors and nurses are being dispatched to Wuhan and neighboring cities.  My report is that all cities in Wuhan are now quarantined. Every province in China has cases of the coronavirus except for Tibet.

The Hubei governor has said now he feels hen tongxin,  great heart-pain, for the slow response of his government.  Wechat users are asking why he is not resigning immediately.

South China Morning Post  reports that even the CCP controlled Hubei Daily published harsh words – for a few minutes, before deleting their own work –

Doctors in Wuhan have been among those calling for health officials to be held to account and, in an unusually blunt statement on social media platform Weibo, a senior reporter from the province’s official Communist Party newspaper, Hubei Daily, said the city’s leaders should be removed “immediately”.

“Like many people, I used to believe that a temporary decision to replace leaders with those less familiar with the situation would not be good for pushing through the [antivirus] work, but based on the worsening situation that is getting increasingly severe, those currently in the role have no capability of leadership,” reporter Zhang Ouya wrote on Friday.

“For Wuhan, please change the leadership immediately,” he said in the post, which was later removed.

A doctor from one of the major Wuhan hospitals wrote that the number of cases grew dramatically after January 12 but officials refused to publish the data –

“These patients were not given proper quarantine nor medical treatment and they could travel in every corner of the city…  Later, when we warned patients and the public to wear masks and avoid crowded areas, they didn’t take it seriously and thought we were exaggerating, and even some medical staff, including surgeons didn’t believe it and were not willing to take basic precautions.”

Hospitals have put out private appeals for masks, gowns, gloves, and other supplies.  Some member of the public have responded.  There are stories of individuals volunteering to drive doctors and nurses to their homes; otherwise, they would be unable to leave the hospitals at all, where they are on 24 hour standby status. 

But let’s get some perspective on the six-day hospital story.  There are still too many Americans who will believe any story, however wild, coming out of China about size, speed, and spending.  A good example is from Next Draft, which reports that “On the outskirts of Wuhan, diggers and bulldozers have begun work to build a new 1,000-bed hospital, which is due to open within days.” No, that’s not a typo. Diggers to digs in days. (In America, it takes six weeks to get a permit to re-hang a shingle.)

Even the New York Times has repeated the story of the marvelous seven day wonder. 

A BBC News story reports –

“China has a record of getting things done fast even for monumental projects like this,” says Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Mr Huang said that engineers would be brought in from across the country in order to complete construction in time.

“The engineering work is what China is good at. They have records of building skyscrapers at speed. This is very hard for westerners to imagine. It can be done,” he added.

According to state media, the hospital will contain 1000 beds; and a second hospital is to be built, this one at the leisurely pace of two weeks.

You’ve seen the photo of the excavators urgently digging next to each other at the hospital site.  What did you not see in that photo?  Any dump trucks for the excavators to put soil in.  So what are they digging?  Moreover, in that disturbed soil, you cannot place foundations for any permanent structure in a few day period.  The settlement of foundations would be immediate, and destructive.  This is true even in China.  Remember Richard Feynman, talking about the Challenger disaster – nature cannot be fooled.  In this case, any structure would begin cracking right away, and be useless in short order. 

Let’s get a grip on this story.  Anyone who thinks that what is being produced is our mental image of a hospital needs to sit down and take a break.  This is not a two or three story facility with intricate mechanical and plumbing systems.  Call it what you will, this is on the order of a field hospital, needed to be sure, and an excellent temporary piece of a solution to the crisis, but only a temporary facility.  The model for this Wuhan field hospital is one built in Beijing during the SARS epidemic in 2003.  
 
From BBC News –  “It’s basically a quarantined hospital where they send people with infectious diseases so it has the safety and protective gear in place,” said Joan Kaufman, lecturer in global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School.
 

China Global Television Network (CGTN) has more, referencing the Beijing field hospital built for the SARS epidemic –

Wuhan’s Huoshenshan hospital is located at the Workers’ Sanatorium away from populated areas and equipped with separated quarantine wards to minimize risks of cross-infection. Health officials overseeing the operation said the facilities can be assembled quickly using portable prefabricated components at low cost. The emphasis is on speed and functionality.

After SARS epidemic in Beijing, According to Mr Huang, the hospital was “quietly abandoned after the epidemic ended”.  

Think MASH, not Northwestern Hospital or Cedars Sinai. And that is fine, and what is needed. 

Let’s remember that in any case hospital rooms in China bear no resemblance to anything we might consider as functional in the US.  Hospital rooms in China are basically hotel rooms but with fewer accommodations. The much-needed facilities will be quarantine rooms, no doubt staffed by army doctors and nurses, and volunteers from across China.  Medicines and masks will still be in short supply, since the calls are currently for three times the normal daily production of these items in all of China, and this is Spring Festival week. 

Good on the government for responding, however late, and good on Chinese for stepping up to volunteer, as they did in the Sichuan earthquake in 2008.  It is hard to get the people’s attention when the government cannot be trusted –  in a meeting yesterday, the governor asked for more help from across China.  In the same meeting, a few minutes later, the Wuhan mayor said everything is fine, and under control. Some truth has worked its way through the censorship and the miscommunication and non-communication, but it is not easy. 

You know the expressways are blocked for people trying to leave Wuhan – and by now, probably the entire province.  People who want to get out can try driving on local farm and village roads.  On Wechat groups, there are reports of village people blocking country roads, fighting with Wuhan labeled cars trying to get out, forcing them to turn back or just go somewhere else.  The reports are that during the Spring Festival, five million people left Wuhan, to places all over China.  The incubation time for the coronavirus is said to be about two weeks.  Some of those people will be sick now, and transmitting the virus wherever they are. 

The government is responding in Wuhan, but the virus is by no means under control.  We may see more six-day hospitals in the next week or two.