The free West cannot suppress coronavirus

It took extreme measures for China to crush Covid. They would never work in a liberal democracy

Towards the end of August, the Chinese city of Wuhan, epicentre of the worst global pandemic in a century, hosted a massive pool party in which thousands of citizens jigged around in the water together, cheek by jowl, to thumping, high-energy, dance music. It was the same in Wuhan’s bars and nightclubs; the city’s youth were out in force, enjoying themselves without apparent restriction or care, and not a face mask in sight.

To many in the West, still only recently emerged from lockdown, it seemed offensive and irresponsible. Yet for the Chinese state, the images were deliberate. They were intended to represent the country’s supposed “strategic victory” over Covid; China had returned to normality, was the message, in marked contrast to dithering Western democracies.

“You were my teacher. But now I am in my teacher’s domain, and look at your system,” Wang Qishan, China’s vice-president, told the US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, at the height of the financial crisis. “We aren’t sure we should be learning from you anymore.” For the second time in little more than 10 years, China’s increasingly assertive sense of a reversal in roles seems to have been confirmed.

Leaving aside China’s shameful complicity in the early, devastating spread of the SARS-COV-2 virus, the country’s success in suppressing the disease within its own borders seems pretty much unarguable. The fact is that Chinese eradication strategies have proved extraordinarily effective, raising some disturbing questions for Western democracies, with their love of individualism, belief in basic freedoms and tolerant attitude to nonconformity and dissent. Regrettably, these characteristics have not been helpful in confronting Covid. We have proved peculiarly unprepared for and unsuited to dealing with a global pandemic. Authoritarian China, on the other hand, seems to have been almost tailor-made for it.

It locked down early and hard in a dictatorial manner widely thought of at the time as likely to be intolerable in any Western democracy; all public transport was suspended and more than a thousand checkpoints were established across the country to ensure compliance with travel bans; outdoor activity was severely restricted in dozens of cities, with citizens effectively imprisoned in their own houses. Perhaps most important of all, a highly effective mass test, track and trace system with state-of-the-art use of surveillance technologies was rapidly put in place. Those who tested positive, even if they were not ill, were taken from their homes and quarantined in hostels, where they were denied all physical contact with the outside world, including family and friends.

Even the smallest level of infection invites an immediate, and by Western standards, heavy-handed response. A recent outbreak in a Qingdao hospital, affecting just 12 people, was countered by mass testing, which saw nearly half the city’s entire population of 9.4 million people tested within 48 hours.

By contrast, Britain and much of the rest of Europe are still struggling to test adequately, even in areas of very high infection – and that’s more than six months after the pandemic began. Would there even have been any point in suppressing the infection via Chinese methods when we still don’t have the rapid detection and response mechanisms in place to keep the virus at bay for when it erupts anew?

But it is not just China that has achieved success with the “suppression so as to return to normality” approach. Other standout successes are South Korea and Japan, both of which have managed to ride the storm with only relatively informal versions of lockdown. Go to Tokyo, and apart from the lack of tourists, you wouldn’t notice the difference from pre-covid days. As in China, the economic harm has been far less severe than in Europe and the US.

In a recent interview, Japan’s finance minister, Tarō Asō, attributed this success to better “mindo”, a faintly racist term that implies ethnic superiority and more refined “cultural standards”. Cleanliness, conformity, deference to authority, and belief in the common good as a higher calling than the rights of the individual, are not characteristics confined to China. They apply in varying degrees to much of South East Asia, where in any case, obesity is far less common than the West – another uncomfortable truth alluded to in Tarō Asō’s remarks.

This is not, however, the American or European way. You cannot help but see a wider authoritarian agenda in those who argue we should mirror the Chinese approach. The fact is that it is incompatible with a liberally minded society. The response we have ended up with, on the other hand, is neither fish nor fowl; it reflects neither the command-and-control characteristics of the totalitarian state nor the laissezfaire beliefs of those of us who think that, as with all past pandemics, we must simply live as normally as we can with the virus for as long as it takes to fizzle out.

Instead we have a kind of halfway house in which we lurch from one economically destructive and socially divisive lockdown to the next in the vague hope of a vaccine. A return to normality looks as far away as ever.