China’s coronavirus epidemic shows strengths, flaws of one country, one system

The system allows Beijing to mobilise vast resources and take steps that would be unthinkable in the West

But critics say the top-down system encourages cover-ups and repeated missteps in the face of a crisis

Reading Time:6 minutes

Published: 7:30am, 28 Feb 2020Updated: 2:30pm, 28 Feb 2020

Beijing has long said that the Chinese system of one-party rule and top-down decision-making has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and is the most effective form of governance for the world’s most populous country.

When faced with the brewing public health crisis brought on by the Covid-19 epidemic in the central Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019 that same system acted in ways unheard of under democratic forms of government.

They included the shutdown of a city of 11 million people, almost three times the population of Los Angeles, spread over an area five times the size of London. And that was just for starters.

It does not take much of an imagination to speculate that such measures in either of those Western cities would have resulted in public uproar and protests on the streets.

In South Korea, for example, thousands of protesters on February 22 defied a ban on public gatherings implemented by the government after a jump in infections in that country.

That did not happen in Wuhan nor in the rest of Hubei province, where the measures were extended to envelop almost 60 million people.

China’s coronavirus epidemic shows strengths, flaws of one country, one system

The system allows Beijing to mobilise vast resources and take steps that would be unthinkable in the West But critics say the top-down system encourages cover-ups and repeated missteps in the face of a crisis

The system allows Beijing to mobilise vast resources and take steps that would be unthinkable in the West

But critics say the top-down system encourages cover-ups and repeated missteps in the face of a crisis