person. They laughed about Trump—
in many people’s eyes, he wasn’t to be
taken seriously. As the spring wore on,
conversations often included a standard
conclusion: the pandemic showed that
Chinese value life over freedom, whereas
Americans take the opposite approach.
I disliked such simplifications, which
failed to consider the initial Chinese
coverup of the virus, or the govern-
ment’s policies in Xinjiang and Hong
Kong, or the fact that any number of
democracies were handling the crisis
much better than the Americans. (Also,
the U.S. doesn’t have state-owned to-
bacco firms that engage in mask ’n’ Marl-
boro promotions.) I tried to convey the
idea that the current American failure
doesn’t narrowly reflect national char-
acter or values but, rather, a collapse of
system: a crisis of leadership and insti-
tutional structures.
And many aspects of the Chinese
strategy could never be adopted in Amer-
ica or in any other democracy. The strict
policy of isolating individuals who test
positive is also applied to children, who
are separated from their parents even if
they are asymptomatic. In June, a year-
old Pakistani arrived on a flight and tested
positive. For more than a month, the
baby was held for medical observation.
Such dramatic examples tend to dis-
tract from more useful elements of the
Chinese approach. The Chinese epide-
miologist in Shanghai had also worked
for many years in the U.S., and I asked
if there was anything that Americans
could realistically learn from China.
“Community engagement,” he said im-
mediately. “We don’t have the neigh-
borhood-committee structure in the
U.S., but it’s important to find some al-
ternative.” He noted that public-health
services might have served this purpose
if the American system had been prop-
erly funded. Jennifer Nuzzo, an epide-
miologist at the Johns Hopkins Cen-
ter for Health Security, told me that
contact tracing is something of a lost
art in the U.S. “We did a study of the
measles outbreak in 2019, and they were
doing minimal contact tracing,” she said.
“It’s so incredibly resource-oriented, and
public health has been decimated.”
From my perspective, there are also
issues of education and effort. Despite
the political indoctrination involved in
Chinese schooling, the system teaches
people to respect science. Hard work is
another core value, and somehow soci-
ety has become more prosperous with-out losing its edge. Nearly a quarter
century ago, I taught young people who
were driven by the desire to escape pov-
erty; these days, my middle-class stu-
dents seem to work at least as hard, be-
cause of the extreme competitiveness
of their environment. Such qualities are
perfect for fighting the pandemic, at
least when channelled effectively by
government structures. In comparison,
the American response often appears
passive—even enlightened citizens seem
to believe that obeying lockdown or-
ders and wearing masks in public is
enough. But any attempt to control the
virus requires active, organized effort,
and there needs to be strong institu-
tional direction.
Instead, the flailing American lead-
ership seems more interested in find-
ing scapegoats, sometimes with a racial
tinge—the Kung Flu and the China
Virus. Throughout the spring, the Chi-
nese government periodically responded
by lashing out at the U.S. and other for-
eign countries, but such tensions had
little impact on my life in Chengdu.
Daily interactions remained friendly,
and people often made a point of tell-
ing me that the problems between gov-
ernments had nothing to do with our
personal relationships.
But I worried about my daughters,
who were the only Westerners at a school
of some two thousand students. Our iso-
lation increased throughout the spring:
most of my American acquaintances had
left, and it became rare to see a non-Chi-
nese person on the street. At the end of
May, the twins told my wife, Leslie, and
me that a boy in their class had made
some anti-American comments, but we
didn’t say anything to the teacher. Vir-
tually all of the girls’ classmates treated
them warmly, and, with everything on
the news, it seemed inevitable that there
would be scattered instances of anti-
American sentiment. That week, George
Floyd had been killed, and the Ameri-
can death toll from the coronavirus was
approaching a hundred thousand.
The teacher, though, responded
quickly. The following Monday, she stood
before the class and told a story that, in
the Chinese way, emphasized science,
education, and effort. She talked about
Elon Musk, and she described how his
California-based company had success-
fully launched a manned rocket into