Most Western op-eds on China’s Covid status are specious and spurious
- If you want to know what’s going on in China, try calling friends and families there, if you have any. Read Chinese blogs and local newspapers on the web (not everything is censored), if you read Chinese. Or try Google Translate
The incessant Western criticism of China’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic from the beginning to now – and no doubt will continue for a long time yet – should be an object lesson in how not to understand the country.
Before the arrival of Delta and Omicron, the cycle of criticism went through three stages. And with each new variant of the virus, the cycle starts anew. Stage 1: China is really screwed this time. Stage 2: It is faking the numbers, there is no way it could have contained the health crisis. Stage 3: Oh well, it’s a dictatorship so of course it could lock down everyone to get to zero Covid.
Back in early 2020, the criticism was that this pandemic could spell the beginning of the end of the Chinese economic miracle and even Chinese communist rule itself.
“China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia”, written by Walter Russell Mead, a Wall Street Journal columnist and professor at Bard College in New York, was arguably the paradigmatic specimen that launched the whole cycle.
Then, there was widespread disbelief that China could have managed the health crisis successfully. It must be lying and suppressing the real death toll.
What next for China’s zero-Covid policy as Omicron travels the world?
A recent three-part series in Forbes, titled “Beijing Is Intentionally under-reporting China’s Covid Death Rate”, by George Calhoun, a finance professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New York, is a good example.
But the third and last stage of the cycle is, to me at least, the most amusing.
It’s basically: Yeah, China did it but so what! This is the line of reasoning, so far as I can discern, from Niall Ferguson’s latest op-ed in Bloomberg, “China’s Covid Victory Over America Turns Out to Be Pyrrhic”.
Its subtitle is: “The pandemic has revealed Americans to be tacit social Darwinists, while trapping the Chinese in a vast Panopticon.” And he goes into an erudite discourse on 19th and 20th century thinkers – Herbert Spencer, Franz Ignaz Pruner, Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, Charles Henderson, Jeremy Bentham – to explain what he means by social Darwinism.
You would get an excellent education like the good professor if you read up on these heavy thinkers. But if you want to know what’s going on in China now, try calling friends and families there, if you have any. Read Chinese blogs and local newspapers on the web (not everything is censored), if you read Chinese. Or try Google Translate.
