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Control, the Chinese Red Cross, the local transportation and police departments have had any meritocracy in the ranks superceded by rank political decision-making at the top.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 5^th, 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

From yesterday –

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

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.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

New Year’s Eve, 2020

My wife is in the other room right now, crying. She has been reading Wuhan stories, those that get through before they are blocked.

Even now, with the panopticon state nearly complete, some individual wechat messages do get through for a while. The stories are too long to relay here. I can only give you a sense of the despair – doctors, nurses, people of Wuhan.

It is The Plague (1). People lined up at hospitals by the hundreds, carrying their x-rays with them, hoping against hope for someone to see them. In most cases, people will not leave the hospital, or their place in line, so they sleep – without food, without shelter – on the floors, outside, anywhere that preserves their intention to see a doctor. People dying on the floors untreated because there are no beds, no medicines, doctors cannot leave hospitals, people traveling – now by foot or bike, since buses are shut down – to five or six hospitals hoping someone will do the final checking that will allow them to be treated. People who are seen by a doctor and deemed not sick enough yet are sent away. There are certainly hundreds of those patients. At least some deaths are not reported as virus related. Masks and hazardous treatment clothing are in short supply. Some other provinces have sent teams of doctors to Wuhan, but it is not nearly enough.

The government in Wuhan comes in for special hate. The provincial governor told everyone two days ago – after the quarantine was instituted – that all is well, don’t worry. In his annual New Year’s speech to residents, the Hubei Party leader made no mention of the coronavirus at all. As of Wednesday, the 22^nd, the first mention of the virus in People’s Daily was a small item on page 4. The first two pages of the paper were all about Xi’s trip to Yunnan. Mr. Xi’s New Year’s Message, reported from Xinhua, made no reference to Wuhan at all.

No hospital is permitted to make announcements about contagious diseases – all such announcements have to come from the government. The crisis leader is an 87-year old doctor who led the SARS crisis treatment (2). Only when he announced that the virus could be transmitted from person to person did the government agree.

All public forms of transportation are shut down to Wuhan and now ten other cities in Hubei. No intra- or inter-city buses. No air traffic or expressway traffic. If your license plate has a Wuhan letter indicator, you cannot cross the border on the expressway without special permission. The only way to get around inside Wuhan is to walk, bike, drive, or take a taxi. You know how many people don’t have cars. People are significantly weakened by fever and lungs filling up with virus. People have to make choices between staying with a sick parent in line or on the floor at the hospital for dozens of hours and taking care of their own children at home. Hospitals have been told to report zero infections among staff, so doctors and nurses who might be infected are not reported.

I haven’t heard this yet, but since the whole city is shut down, there will be food shortages in a day or two. Supplies will certainly be allowed in, but not likely in sufficient supply.

Doctors at hospitals in Wuhan said they expect the total number of infected to be more than 6000. My own personal guess is that is a low number, based on nothing more than the severity of the foreign reporting, the paucity of Chinese government reporting, and the anguished stories on wechat. Doctors are reporting that some of those infected do not show any fever, so using temperature as a diagnostic is not completely effective, and the incubation period for the virus could be up to two weeks. Today, Friday, January 24, at the moment of writing, there were 900 officially reported cases, an unknown number of unreported cases, and reports are that the virus tripled over last weekend and has spread to 32 of 34 provinces. The Wuhan lockdown is unlikely to be effective, first of all because a lockdown of a huge area of 11,000,000 people has never been tried before, and the window for controlling spread of the virus had already closed before the lockdown was announced on Wednesday. Not to mention the number of cases officially not reported.

Thursday, January 23, central government mouthpiece People’s Daily sent out a cheery message. The Chinese people are united in their support for Wuhan. This is unspeakable.

Wuhan, hang in there! You have the support of all people across the country. The more difficult the situation is, the more united the Chinese people are. This has been constantly proven by both history and reality.

人民网评：越是艰难险阻，愈益众志成城

苏秦

2020年01月23日11:18 来源：人民网-观点频道

分享到： “1月23日10时起，全市城市公交、地铁、轮渡、长途客运暂停运营；无特殊原因，市民不要离开武汉，机场、火车站离汉通道暂时关闭。”武汉市连夜发出公告，传递明确信号：武汉正在采取更细致、更深入、更扎实的防控举措，全力遏制疫情扩散蔓延。

非常之时，非常之举。这昭示了一个基本逻辑，为了守护人民群众的生命安全：不怕兴师动众、不怕“劳民伤财”、不怕十防九空！

传染病防治有其复杂性，更有其规律性，必要时候必须采取非常之举，这于情于理于法都有坚实支撑。非常之举，必然要打破常规、影响常态。武汉市民的生活将不可避免地受到影响，我们向武汉市民的付出致敬！打赢这场防疫硬仗，每一位武汉市民都值得感佩，每一名积极参与者都值得我们呈上敬意。

非常之举，更需要政府部门遵循全心全意为人民服务的常理。积极回应民众的合理诉求，最大限度减少应急措施带来的不利因素，也是当务之急。这是对我们治理体系的测试，是对我们治理能力的检验。除了武汉，没有哪一座城市可以作壁上观。这不仅是因为疫情的联动效应，更是因为我们对人民的庄严承诺。

疫情来得迅疾，目前一些地方、一些环节面临挑战，做好药品、消毒、器械等防控物资的储备供应，显得迫在眉睫。需要看到，中国作为世界工厂，并不缺少物质生产力，补上物资缺口并非难事。一些地方出现物资短缺属于结构性的，只是“地域错配”，加上春节工厂放假因素而导致缺货。我们呼吁，口罩等物资的相关厂家能急疫情之所急，开足马力生产；全国各地也能紧急驰援、相互支持。

只要全国一盘棋，统筹安排，协调推进，相信很快就可以解决物资短缺等难题。在这个时候，我们就是要把长期培育的社会动员能力和制度优越性充分释放出来。我们的党员干部在危机面前尤其要发挥先锋模范作用，引领大家增强必胜的信心，打赢这场硬仗！

武汉加油，全国人民支持你们。越是遭遇艰难险阻，我们愈益众志成城。这是被历史和现实不断验证的中国逻辑。

Give Me Liberty! in Hangzhou

There is a saying – with guanxi, you can do anything. Without guanxi, you can do nothing. Sometimes, with guanxi, you can get Liberty! in China. A story about ordering textbooks in China.

In 2009, I began teaching fulltime at Zhejiang University of Science and Technology (ZUST) in Hangzhou. I had a joint appointment with the business school and the engineering school. For the business students, I was to teach micro and macro economics; for the engineers, courses in urban and environmental planning. My students were a mix of Chinese and foreign students, mostly from Africa, a few from the middle east and Indonesia.

This was the era when Chinese schools were looking to form cooperative relationships with school in the US, England, Germany. In the fall of 2010, the president of San Francisco State University came to ZUST and delivered a promotional talk – in Chinese – to my engineering students. The proposal that had been worked out was a 2+2 deal – two successful years of study at ZUST could lead to two, possibly three, years at SFSU and a joint bachelor’s degree in engineering.

This was an excellent opportunity for ZUST students, since a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in China was not worth much outside of China. With the possible exception of one program at Tsinghua, no Chinese engineering bachelor’s degree programs were internationally accredited. This meant that a graduate could not apply to take the professional engineering exam in most of the world without substantial additional study or years of practice. There was no guarantee that the SFSU joint program would receive accreditation, but there was certainly a chance. Basic courses in math and science would be taught in China. The more substantive courses would be in the US. This was not unlike a junior college transfer program into a major American university.

SFSU wanted a couple of core courses taught at ZUST – an American history course and an American politics course. My background is in civil engineering, urban planning and policy, economics and organization. But I spoke English and looked American, so I was tabbed at the instructor. As they say, what could possibly go wrong?

No other teacher at ZUST had ever taken, much less taught, American history. It might be fair to say that this was the first time such a course had ever been taught in Zhejiang Province. It was a historical first.

These were still heady days of openness in the second half of the Hu Jintao administration. I was at ZUST because I had just finished six years of teaching midlevel CCP officials in a graduate program in public administration at IIT in Chicago. I wanted to see what teaching in China would be like, so I went. The director of the international program at ZUST was a student of mine in Chicago. She was smart, open, and interested in making deals with foreign schools and foreign teachers. It is fair to say that I was the face of the foreign program at ZUST at a time when such programs were much desired.

Textbook selection was going to be a challenge. In the US, book ordering need not be more complicated than an instructor sending book details to the ordering department of the school, and a few days or weeks later the book shows up in the school bookstore. Students buy the book, and the course is in business.

I knew that would not be the process at ZUST. There was a book ordering department, but of course that was mostly for Chinese books. There were a few American books used – most notably, the Greg Mankiw Fundamentals of Economics books, but those were published legally in China, so the Mankiw books had already been vetted for content.

The course was to be American history since 1865. No other details provided to me. There were many book from which to choose, and Eric Foner had written more than twenty of them. His Give Me Liberty! is still the most used American history survey course text in the US. For the instructor, the teacher’s edition provided powerpoints, which would save me dozens of hours of work (no one teaches in China without powerpoints). The book was also used at SFSU. I chose the Foner book.

I emailed my book choice to my former IIT student, the head of the international program at ZUST, now my colleague. If she had been drinking tea when she saw my email order, she probably would have done a spit-take. Give Me What?

These were heady days of openness, but come on, there are limits. Give Me History would have been ok.

My former student was the head of the international program, but she was not the No. 1 – that was the Party leader, who was ultimately responsible for all my actions. She could not speak much English, and could certainly not read the book, so vetting fell to my former student.

This is where the guanxi worked. We were teacher and student in Chicago, and we had many chances to talk. She saw me as at least reasonably trustworthy – I was not going to be running down China in the classroom. Give Me Liberty! was the SFSU book. The whole point of the course was to expose these Chinese students to American style courses and teaching so they had a chance to go to the US in their third year.

But still. We had meetings. My former student had to look up the book online, and read what she could from the W.W. Norton website. She had to convince herself that the book was ok, just an unfortunate title. I had to promise her that there were no passages suggesting that China or CCP were implicated in the bombing at Pearl Harbor or responsible for the Great Depression, and that destruction of CCP was not an integral part of American history since 1865. She took me at my word.

There was a more serious vetting process on the ZUST side than I know. My former student was putting herself on the line, and her Party leader, in ordering such a book. She could not order the book herself – that had to be done by someone in the civil engineering department, and that woman was putting her reputation and that of her dean on the line as well. I had more than half a dozen meetings with various of the parties. I sent long emails, with text of my discussions with the WW Norton rep in the US. I don’t know if there were provincial education bureau discussions before the book order could be placed, but I would not be surprised. Liberty was not a censored word, but it wasn’t on everyone’s lips, either. If something went south with the book or me or the course, the jobs of several people could be on the line.

Then there was the money. Students are supposed to pay for books. In the US, the book sold for about $46 at the time, about 300 yuan. Three hundred yuan was the book allowance for one ZUST student for an entire semester. We could not order CD copies – those would have been illegal to ship and WW Norton would not send them anyway- as the rep told me, they didn’t have good IP protection in China. We could not order used copies – Chinese only wanted new, and could only order from the publisher in any case. Illegal copying was still common in China, but the school did not want to engage in that itself, so ordering one copy was out. A real world example – the Mankiw Fundamentals book was about 790 pages. The book printed legally in China was sold for 79 yuan (about $12). In the US, the book cost over $100. But photocopying in China cost 0.1 yuan per page. You do the math. The school was going to have to buy the books, about 9000 yuan, and eat the cost. That was a couple of months salary for some teachers.

I could have put together notes, and taught without a book. But Chinese teachers are expected to use a book (presumably so it can be vetted, and so the school has some assurance that the teacher is at minimum reading something to the students). For my course, a book was most certainly going to be necessary.

There were time constraints. Shipping on a boat would take about six weeks to get to ZUST, and this was after whatever approvals and vetting were needed outside of ZUST. WW Norton did have a relationship with one of the required Chinese book importing companies, so paper copies of the book could be sent to China. But time was getting short. We had been having the meetings and email discussions all through the spring, the school closes down in the summer, and I needed the books by about August 1.

I thought perhaps I could just order the books myself from W.W. Norton in the US – thirty or so copies, wrap them up, put them on a boat, they would arrive in six weeks or so. But that wouldn’t work. The Chinese government still controlled book ordering. Books could only be ordered through one of the designated import agents. If my thirty books had just shown up at Shanghai port, they would have been seized and tossed.

I gave the school a deadline – I needed the books ordered by July 10. My guanxi with my former student worked. Give Me Liberty! was ordered by ZUST. The books got delivered, and we used them – or I should say, the books were in the bookstore. Only a few students purchased the book.

ZUST did not repeat the course. Very few – perhaps none – of the Chinese students wanted to pay the American tuition to SFSU, and they did not respond well to an “American-style” course, with quizzes and exams and papers to write. The students got a taste of liberty, taught American style, and judged it wanting.

I ordered other books from America for other courses. None of those were the existential crisis of ordering Give Me Liberty! in English, for use with Chinese students, with such a provocative title. When the course was over, the unsold books were delivered to me in my apartment. Perhaps they are still there. Anyone interested, contact me. I’m at liberty to make a deal.

浙江科技学院教材预订表

院、部、(盖章) 建筑工程学院院教学主管（签名）：教研所所长（签名）：联系电话：填表日期： 2011 年 6 月日

序号

课程名称

Course name

教材名称

Textbook name

主编姓名

author

出版社

Press name

版次

version

书号

ISBN

价格

price

使用对象

预订数(册)

Order volume

库存

合计

征订人

签名

使用

时间

备注

学生

student

教师

teacher

American

History Since 1865

Give Me Liberty!

Foner

WW Norton

2^nd Edition Volume 2 Paper

ISBN 978-0-393-93256-0

$37.00

William D. Markle

“

Norton Media Library

WW Norton

CD-Rom

free

William D. Markle

“

Instructors Manual and Test Bank

Valerie Adams

WW Norton

CD-Rom

William D. Markle

“

Studentt Study Guide

WW Norton

pdf

free

William D. Markle

注：一份送教务处教材中心，，一份系部留存.

Life in School – and Beyond

November, 2009

note: This was written more than ten years ago, when I began teaching full time in China. Some slight editing and updating. My students were all undergrads in business, marketing, civil engineering, or urban planning. These notes are early observations on student life at ZUST in Hangzhou. I can’t say this email feels inaccurate years later. Life goes on, in and out of school, but the beat goes on, too – stress upon stress, and not stress of one’s own making. Smoking and environmental cancer are big contributors to early death. But stress is also an environmental constant.

The middle class Chinese diet is full of the stuff that doctors in the US tell us we should eat- lots of fish, lots of vegetables, fruit, a little liquor (ok, maybe not a little), a little meat, nuts, grains. But adult Chinese die at about the same rate as Americans, and now, from mostly the same causes – heart, and cancer. Why don’t Chinese people live forever?

One reason is stress. When life is about guanxi (relationship and who you know), then official lines of responsibility mean little. The official lines do matter, but what is more important is the friendships established over a life of school, and work, and after-work events, and weekend trips, and friend-of-a-friend contacts. So it is possible to get many things done that could not get done otherwise, because you Know People. Sort of like being related with the government in any American city. Or, better, being the one high school senior who knows the name of the maintenance guy who can open the gym a little early so the tables for the dance can be delivered on Friday night, instead of waiting for Saturday morning.

Stress Relief in Dalian

A Chinese government friend and I were driving to a museum in Dalian when she got stopped by the police. They were conducting a city sticker search- you know, the annual sticker you buy for $75 or $100 from the local government. Same in Dalian. Her car was brand new- I mean, a couple of days old. She did not have the sticker, since the car dealer is supposed to handle that, and the sticker comes a week or two later. She had the paperwork showing the car was new, and the sticker was applied for, and true to police form (anywhere, I think) they still gave her a ticket for no sticker.

She was miffed. She decided to fight City Hall, instead of just paying the $15 (which I would have done, all day long, and I guess most people in China would have done, also). She didn’t know anyone in the police department- no direct guanxi there- but her job was sufficiently large that when she went to the police station, the guardians of not letting people see the Chief did not want to mess with her. So she got to see the Chief, and pleaded her case, and got the ticket dismissed. She got to see the Chief, she said, when other people would not have gotten that far. Two lessons here- guanxi is based not just on who you know, but also who you are, and does this sound too different from how any American city works? Stress relief is possible, some times and for some little things. But a ticket is just ordinary annoyance stress. Much of Chinese school and business life is pressure, pressure, pressure, all the time.

Relationships can make projects easier, but at a cost

It is possible to get a ticket fixed in Chicago, too (so I have heard). What may be different in China is how extensive the guanxi networks are, and the willingness of everyone to use them as needed. Just like in Chicago politics, you can’t be using your Chinaman for every little thing, and you can’t pull the race card, or whatever trump you have, at every instance. But the networks are the life blood of Chinese government, and business also. Anyone who thinks rule of law in China is just a couple of court cases or law changes in Beijing away from implementation should think again about what 5,000 years of history means. Networks are as deeply ingrained in China as my disgust with Tony Cuccinello for sending Sherm Lollar, the archetype of slow running catchers, home from first base on a double by Al Smith in the second game of the 1959 World Series, and Lollar was out by – oh, about 85 feet- and the White Sox lost that game that they could have won, and they could have gone to Los Angeles 2-0 instead of 1-1, which would have changed the outcome of the series, and life forever after. That ingrained.

In China, the proper power relations can get things done – real estate projects, infrastructure projects that require cooperation across governments, business perks. But along with the ability to get things done comes the stress at relationship maintenance. How many dinners, how much late night drinking, how many hongbao, how much self-denial and relationship sucking up do you need?

Think of the second string baseball catcher, who plays, but not that often, and the team trades for a young catcher who can hit and has gotten a lot of press. Or the number 3 member of the girls’ in-group at high school, and the new girl shows up who is prettier, has more money, a bigger smile, and a more winning way with numbers 1 and 2. Think Mean Girls – The New Queen Bee. New Queen Bee Stress is constant. There is an ex-queen bee, too. What is your strategy in these situations? As the second string catcher, do you talk to the manager more, or the team leader, or just try to play harder, when you do play? What will you do if they put you to third string, or cut you? As the number 3 member of the girls’ group, do you try to get more time alone with number 1, or find some other group to belong to, or just hope the group can expand to four people? You have to keep up the network, or the network will leave you behind. And that means phone calls, and little gifts, and remembrances, and doing for others before they do for you. This is the part that would keep me digging ditches on some farm in China.

You do not have one boss, or one leader. There are usually two or three, and they need not agree. The Confucian model of respect for authority means that you must do what your leader asks, and you don’t object.

So when your leader calls, and asks you to do something, you cannot say no. You may be able to find someone else to carry out the task, but that is your obligation to find. And when the teacher assigns homework, no one says, wait a minute, we all have a test tomorrow. We must do it.

It starts in primary school – or before …

One of my colleagues was worried about his daughter. She is seven, in first grade. His daughter refuses to go to school, and cries every day about going. The reason given is that she must complete 100 addition problems before she can engage with the rest of the class. The daughter is a smart enough kid, but she is wilting under the pressure from the teachers. Teachers pass the stress on to parents, who get blamed by teachers if kids fail to keep up. And, it is China – none of this, “well, you tried your best, you can do better next time” American soft soap. If you aren’t keeping up, you are told so, and berated in front of all your classmates. “Why can’t you do better?” And none of this throwing money at programs for kids who fall behind in class. Teachers will publicly berate parents for not monitoring homework, and not requiring extra work at home. Parental responsibility, seemingly a … well, foreign – concept in the US.

At home in Hangzhou, we have a little kid audio toy, a letter, animal sound, and addition machine that we bought in China. On the addition segment, the kid is asked to push a button for the correct answer. In the US, an incorrect answer is indicated by a raspberry, or a plink or a quick low note. On our machine, a voice tells the kid in Chinese, you are very stupid.

The stress starts in primary school, and extends into high school. The later primary and high school day is generally in the range of ten to twelve hours, from about 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM. There is time included for phys ed, and lunch, and certainly art and music. Chinese high school students, at good schools, are well-rounded. And in college, they learn to sing, and dance, perform, and do art. Maybe not well, but they know the concept. Once, we had that idea in the US – you know, humanities.

I have visited a couple of Chinese high schools, and talked with a number of kids, sons or daughters of friends. My sample size is too small to generalize too much, but let me tell you what I saw. At the No. 2 high school in Fushun, in Liaoning Province, the school building is new and clean and has a big closed campus, with tennis courts and basketball courts and outdoor performance areas and lots of nice landscaping. This is a residential school, which means that most high school students live in the dorms, and only a few are day students, who are picked up and dropped off each day.

The hallway are pasted with big portraits and lists of accomplishments of political leaders and scientists and giants of philosophy. Yes, Mao and Confucius and others (that, pointedly, I do not know), but also Plato and Aristotle and Bell and Einstein and Edison and Fermi and US presidents and Franklin and Kant and Hobbes and Freud. High school. In China. And these students know who these people are, and when they lived, and what they did.

Everybody learns English, starting at various times but generally about age 7. I have seen the English workbooks for high school students and for college students. The high school workbooks, in English, rival what I would expect to see in English in the US. Participles and mood and future perfect and obscure terms and phrases. Long passages to decipher and get the meaning. The college workbooks are harder. Long passages in technical fields, economics or engineering, to decipher, along with differences between US English and foreign English. I am teaching three courses right now- a negotiation course, an economics course, and an environmental course- in English, of course, and the student level of understanding is pretty good. But the technical terms in these three courses are a little daunting for American students, and the only way for Chinese students to keep up is to study, all the time.

… and continues in college …

I just now talked with one of my students, a third year student in marketing. She would like to do fashion design, but as she says, “I cannot do that.” She has obligations to her parents and to the school, now, and to the society. Students in college in China select a major in their first year – or have it selected for them – and stay in that major for four years. There is one chance to switch majors, at the end of first year, but only if you are in the top 15% of your class and the program to which you want to switch will take you. How many majors did you have in college?

Ms. Liu is a smart kid, and her English is very good (although she thinks it is not) and the other students look to her for interpretations in Chinese but also for information about other happenings at school. She is always prepared.

I asked if she had ever been unprepared for an exam in college. “Yes,” she said, in her freshman microeconomics class. “How did you do?” “I got a B,” she said, ashamed. A whole country of Type A people.

But lots of them don’t want to be Type A people. They know that going to university in China is a big privilege, and the society is investing a lot in them, and “from those to whom much is given, much is expected.” But Ms. Liu does not feel free to change her major to fashion design, and she feels that she now has no motivation to do the things that she must do. Now these are not unfamiliar complaints to any of us, and it is easy to use one student as a metaphor for millions. Ms. Liu will certainly do fine, and she will snap out of her funk.

But the story is one I hear repeated over and over again, not only from students but from faculty and government officials and people in business. The sense of obligation to the group, or the greater good, is important and useful to building a society – we have seen that in the last thirty years.

Costs of obligation are passed on to parents, students, employees

But I don’t doubt that the stress, expressed in the form of heart conditions, and blood pressure, depression and lack of motivation are one reason why Chinese do not outlive Americans. When Americans work sixteen hours a day, 7 days a week, they do it because they want to, or because they know it is a temporary condition – get this project completed, and we can go back to normal. But in China, it is a constant sword of cultural obligation hanging over everyone’s head. It is the constant, I must do it. (2019 update – it is now common for companies in the US to demand that some employees be available 24/7 for texts and emails. That is certainly Chinese. But there is now a movement in the US for the “right to disconnect” during a good part of the day. That will certainly not be Chinese).

I have a friend, a Ph.D. from my school here, who is spending nine months at a school in Houston. She is unhappy about her living arrangements, and feels trapped by the situation, and not able – culturally – to do anything about it. She is on a nine-month sabbatical, in school and supposed to be learning some things, but she is in the US and one thing I know is that she should be having some fun. She is not, and all because, as she says, I must do it wo bi xu zuo. An American friend of mine recently returned to the US from a six-month academic fellowship in Scotland. I don’t think he wore a hair shirt for six months.

college and beyond …

Lots of Chinese students apply to college or graduate school in the US. A lot of the Chinese government students I have had in Chicago have a leader, or a friend, with a son or daughter who is 12 or 17 and wants advice about admissions. So far, so good. But too often the parents have given the student a high bar – “if you cannot get into Harvard, or MIT, or Stanford, then your life is a failure, and you are a failure to your parents and family and nation,” or something to that effect.

Now there are parents like that in the US. But I think there are more in China, and not just because of the population difference. This is the meritocracy gone mad, the sense that the perfect is in fact the enemy of the good, and individual achievement and wishes matter less than societal approval and the ability to find a job that will make a lot of money.

Amy Chua, the NYU law professor, is the poster woman for parental stress, passed on to her kids. As a law professor at a major American university, she is not going to display a laid back, devil-may-care attitude. But her Tiger Mother book is a call to arms for parents whose approach to parenting does not intentionally impose severe stress on their kids. It is no doubt true that parental encouragement, even stress, can make kids better at whatever task is demanded, and usually the long term effects seem inconsequential. The question is always for whom the kids are being pressured – for their own long term benefit, or that of the face and glory of the parents? Even for Amy Chua, the answer to that question is not so clear.

And lots of Chinese students do end up in the US, or Australia, or England, or Germany, at small schools and big schools that are not ranked in the top 20 schools in the nation. And everyone seems to survive that diminished status. But the stress and shame are not good things, for the kid, or the family, or China. The suicide rate for Chinese students is far higher than that for American students.

Students- at least at my university- have between 35 and 40 class periods a week, at 45 minutes a pop, so about 25 to 30 classroom hours a week. This is the demand for 10 or 12 courses per semester. On top of that is homework, of which there is quite a lot. Papers and tests and assignments, just as in any college course. I have told you before that fun does not seem to be in the course catalog. I still think that is true. College students seem tired in the US also, but here the extent of sleeping in class (not so much in mine, I am happy to point out) is remarkable. And there seems a general sense- not universal, of course – of simply walking through the motions.

That is supported by ideas about entrance to schools in the US and China. Faculty here tell me that in the US, it is easy to get into college and easy to flunk out. In China, they tell me, it is hard to get in, but once in, you are assured of graduating. College is almost like the reward for the intense work in high school (30 class hours per week, and no sleep, and lots of stress. All effort is focused on the Gaokao, the one-time only college entrance exam taken in senior year. Midway through junior year – “only 335 days until the gaokao!”).

I don’t mean that there are no students playing basketball, or tennis, or ping pong, or singing in the singing contest. All students here just had two days off so freshmen could participate in the annual sports day, which is kind of like the senior class games weekend. Everybody goes to the stadium and there are vendors and student cheering sections and flag waving for some group’s favorite student athlete, and 110 meter hurdles and sprints and broad jumps and other events. China is full of contradictions, so I can’t claim definitive knowledge. But this is what I see, and what I sense.

the system grinds away, through adulthood

Students like Ms. Liu pick a major to study in their freshman year, and for the next four years, the students in that major take all their classes together, study together, and live together in the same dorm and with each other. Four college girls in a room about the size of your bedroom, with their clothes and books. For some students, the school picks the major for them, and that major is where nearly all of them stay for four years. So when Chinese people come to America, and say that they have a college friend to see, they are going to see more than someone they were buddies with for a year or two. These are the lifelong, guanxi networks operating, at long distance and years apart. When was the last time you spoke with your college roommate? One of my government official-students from IIT in Chicago, someone who was in Chicago in 2004, called me from Nanjing. He is at a training seminar for a week, far from his home in Shenyang. He was going to get on a bus, travel for four hours to see me, and take the bus back to Nanjing for more training. While I am flattered that I have such an impact on people, I am sobered by the idea that someone would think such a thing thinkable. But guanxi, and networks, and respect for authority, including teachers, runs deep.

Two days ago I attended the alumni reunion, in Hangzhou, of all the CCP government officials from Zhejiang Province who have been to IIT in the last 6 years. A lot of people came- my guess is over a hundred and fifty. There was the big screen repeating slide show, pics of government officials at IIT, when they were in college, and maybe more recently. And below one of the repeating slides was the reminder, We Are Family. This is not just some pop music line, or a marketing campaign. Far more than in any fundamentalist family in the US, here the family is the primary unit in society. And family extends to CCP as well. The government students in Chicago had a leader then, and he is still a leader in their minds, with lesser status over time obviously, but still a person of respect and honor. Another leader to honor, among the two or three or four that everyone has already. The beat goes on, for good and ill, in everyone’s heads, all the time.

China Reflections

Tag: Health Education Welfare

CCP and Mr. Xi’s Learning Disability

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

Masks of the Red (Cross) Death

Further to “abandon all hope …”

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

Update at January 30

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

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

January 26, 2020 7:00 CST

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

New Year’s Eve, 2020

人民网评：越是艰难险阻，愈益众志成城

Give Me Liberty! in Hangzhou

Life in School – and Beyond

November, 2009