Eleven million people have been de facto quarantined in the central Chinese city of Wuhan since Thursday morning. The number of people infected with the corona pathogen has increased rapidly in recent days. At least 634 infected, 17 dead and many seriously ill – this is the status on Thursday evening.
Beijing had seen no other option but to seal off the metropolis. Similar restrictions now apply to the neighboring cities of Ezhou and Chibi. The train stations in the cities were surrounded by soldiers on Thursday. The restrictions apply to 20 million people – a unique process worldwide.
Wuhan is a central transportation hub in China. About 15 million people should travel to their hometowns across the metropolis during the Spring Festival. The highest volume of travel was expected on Thursday.
The World Health Organization spoke of an unprecedented measure. WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus praised the isolation of Wuhan as a “very, very strong measure”. This shows the willingness of the Chinese authorities to minimize the risks.
Learned from Sars mistakes
Beijing’s crisis management is an example of China’s great progress these days, the state press writes about the government’s tough action. The leadership learned from the mistakes made in 2003. At that time, the authorities had covered up the Sars virus outbreak for three months. Almost 800 people had died and thousands had fallen ill.
Today, this is no longer possible in this form, the press comments. In the meantime, however, there is some evidence that the local government did not immediately pass on all the information, contrary to the claims. The disease control center in Wuhan said on Monday that the virus was not particularly contagious. It now seems clear that the authorities had already known for eleven days that at least one employee had been infected in a hospital – an indication of the high risk of infection from the virus.
Beijing has meanwhile deleted criticism of the authorities’ actions on the Internet. Even in private message chats, messages no longer reach their recipients. The course of action shows that even 15 years after the Sars epidemic, Beijing is still having difficulty managing the crisis with transparency.
Every chat history enjoys more credibility than the reports in the state media.
The week started in China with a remarkable statement. The Communist Party published an appeal to its cadres on the short message platform Weibo on Tuesday. You should now be as open as possible. Anyone who hides infections in his region or places his own political interests above the health of the people must face severe punishments. The government’s credibility suffered as a result of the behavior during the 2003 Sars epidemic. That should not be repeated.
The self-criticism was remarkable for Beijing. However, it should do little to deal with the crisis. In China, there is always a difference between what the party orders and what is actually done at the local level. President Xi Jinping has more power on himself. This has brought the provinces closer – and thus Beijing’s control over them. But that doesn’t mean that local authorities always do what Beijing wants.
Due to the rapid spread and the numerous cases abroad, the country is under international pressure. Illness cases abroad are forcing China to demonstrate its ability to act. The quarantine in Wuhan is not only a signal inside, but also outside. By making the solution to the crisis a top priority, the pressure on local authorities has increased exponentially. Paradoxically, that doesn’t make things better, but more unpredictable. It increases the risk that local governments will try to cover up an outbreak in their region or failure to fight the epidemic.
Xi tries to calm down
This phenomenon can still be seen today in the economic data. Almost half of the country’s provinces have just revised their 2018 earnings down after the central government had their numbers reviewed. They were all too high. Premier Li Keqiang, for example, is known to have so little confidence in the economic data reported that he prefers to look at three factors instead: the level of lending, the volume of goods transported by rail, and energy consumption.
The Li Keqiang index stands for the mistrust of the Chinese tops about its own system. The fact that the authorities in Wuhan did not report the new cases at the weekend is most likely due to similar patterns. The climb couldn’t be, so they didn’t report it.
The panic in the population, which has led to hamster purchases of masks and food, also illustrates the lack of trust among the population in their government. President Xi Jinping’s speech to the nation did not calm many people, but rather increased fear. The media also play a role in this. There is almost no free reporting under Xi anymore. The government has already increased the pressure on the last Chinese journalists who report comparatively freely about the wave of diseases.
The state media, however, are now holding back much more. The most important daily newspaper in China, the “Volkszeitung”, had no line on Wuhan on the front page on Thursday. Hundreds of millions of people therefore find out about the Internet. The deep-seated distrust means that every screenshot of an alleged chat history from a messenger service is more credible than the reports in the state media.
Created: 1/23/2020, 9:22 PM
–
