November 5, 2020 47
How Did China Beat Its Covid Crisis?
Ian Johnson
The Art of Political
Control in China
by Daniel C. Mattingly.
Cambridge University Press,
244 pp., $105.00; $34.99 (paper)
Wuhan Diary:
Dispatches from a Quarantined City
by Fang Fang, translated from the
Chinese by Michael Berry.
HarperVia, 380 pp., $29.99
On January 31 I received a knock at the
door of my Beijing apartment. It was
the manager of lease renewals clutch-
ing a stack of flyers.
“Mr. Zhang, you’re feeling well?”
she asked, using my Chinese surname.
“No fever yet.”
She laughed—foreigners and their
comments.
“I know you don’t have the illness,
but we want everyone to be safe. Here.”
She handed me two copies of the
flyer, one in Chinese and the other in
English.
They were written by the Beijing mu-
nicipal government and offered practi-
cal tips on how to protect oneself from
the coronavirus. It had been eight days
since the city of Wuhan had gone into
full lockdown and seven since Beijing
and other cities across China had de-
clared a public health emergency. The
flyers advised which government web-
sites and social media accounts had
the latest, most authoritative informa-
tion and how to take basic precautions
(wear a face mask, stay at home if pos-
sible), and they listed more than one
hundred hospitals in greater Beijing
that were designated to handle fevers.
In case anything was unclear, the au-
thorities had set up a new hotline with
information in eight foreign languages.
Unlike Wuhan, Beijing wasn’t locked
down, but they were making sure that
everyone was well informed.
The manager was diligent. She
checked with me about my neighbors,
confirming her information that they
had left town for the Chinese New Year
holiday, and asked me if I had a mask.
After a few minutes she cheerfully left
to carry on with her rounds.
At the time, this incident didn’t strike
me as all that important. If anything it
was annoying: yet another pointless,
paternalistic measure by Chinese au-
thorities for what probably wasn’t going
to be a big deal. Couldn’t they ever be
relaxed about anything? Always this
angst, followed by the inevitable knee-
jerk mobilization. How ridiculous.
But since then I’ve come to see that
small incident differently. The corona-
virus was a big deal; it was something
that I (and many other smug foreign-
ers) misjudged but that the Chinese
authorities accurately saw as a public
health crisis. The thought and effort
that went into the flyer were espe-
cially impressive in hindsight: orga-
nizing the hospitals and the hotline,
the quick consensus on measures like
face masks that many other countries,
such as the United States, grudgingly
adopted only much later. Rather than
viewing the Chinese government’s
reaction as a sign of its love of a lock-
down, I now think of it as emblematic
of the bureaucratic élan that underlies
much of China’s rise over the past few
decades, from the largely successful
economic policies that went counter
to the shock treatment advocated by
many Western experts to its rolling out
a national highway and high- speed rail
network—public engineering feats that
Western countries used to accomplish
quickly but that now drag on for years
or decades.Still, the lessons are ambiguous. Some
will claim that China’s successes, es-
pecially in combating the virus, aredue to its authoritarianism. And some
of its responses to the pandemic were
troubling: separated families unable to
reunite for weeks on end because prov-
inces set up travel restrictions, villages
barricaded like medieval fortresses,
and housing compounds run as if under
martial law. The crucial public health
measures, however—the focused lock-
down at the pandemic’s epicenter, the
clear government directives, the masks
and social distancing—were effec-
tive and became standard procedure
around the world.
Even when other countries knew
what measures to take—an advantage
China didn’t have at first—their lead-
ers often failed to take them. The worst
among them, especially Jair Bolsonaro
in Brazil, Boris Johnson in the UK, and
Donald Trump in the US, feared the
measures would hurt them politically.
Critics will argue that Chinese lead-
ers didn’t face that risk. But lockdowns
are unpopular everywhere, even in
China. Nonetheless, the leadership
under Xi Jinping listened to experts
and decided that one was necessary—
probably drawing on their experi-
ences with the 2003 SARS pandemic
and calculating that they would gain
political capital if they successfully
protected citizens from a deadly new
disease. That turned out to be smart
politics, especially after the leadership
tapped the veteran public health offi-
cial Zhong Nanshan to be the public
face of the government’s strict policy.
Like Anthony Fauci in the US, Zhong
is a credible figure, because he wasprominently involved in combating the
SARS outbreak. Unlike Fauci, Zhong
received political backing, and few
doubted his advice about Covid- 19.
That led to another phenomenon
unappreciated by outside observers:
compliance in China was overwhelm-
ingly voluntary. Beijing’s streets were
empty not because people were forced
to stay home (as was the case in Italy
and Spain) but because they mostly ac-
cepted the leadership’s message.^1 The
flyer I got in January was part of a strat-
egy that worked, not because of censor-
ship but because Chinese people weregiven a convincing message that cor-
responded to what they saw unfolding
around them. For every social media
post bemoaning the inconvenience—
and many did complain, as was often
reported in the foreign media—many
more praised the strong, clear response.
The result is that China, the pan-
demic’s epicenter, a country of 1.4 bil-
lion people, has had 4,634 deaths—a
seventh of Spain’s, an eighth of Italy’s,
a ninth of Britain’s, and less than a
fortieth of the US’s. That success has
allowed China to boast that it has a
superior political and administrative
system, one that others might want to
emulate, or at least stop criticizing.
With the US embroiled in yet another
highly partisan election and Europe
weakened by Brexit and its own half-
hearted response to the virus, China’s
leaders appear to be presented with a
historic opportunity. What many of
them probably thought would take
another decade or two of economic
growth and steady military buildup
now seems imminent: the West is im-
ploding, and China’s rise is unstoppa-
ble. That worldview helps explain why
it believes it can now take unapologet-
ically tough positions on Hong Kong,
border clashes with India, and Western
criticism of its economic success sto-
ries, such as that new 5G data networks
built by the tech giant Huawei will
compromise their national security.The question is how long this favor-
able confluence will last. As we head
into the third decade of this increas-
ingly turbulent century, has China
really found a sustainable model, one
that doesn’t just keep the Chinese
Communist Party in power longer than
most people thought possible but raises
the country to the rank of a true super-
power? Or is the Communist Party on
yet another dead- end course like its ad-
ventures in Maoism in the last century,
dizzy with success and prone to over-
reach at home and abroad?Soon after the pandemic struck, nuns
at the Temple of Eternal Creation on
the outskirts of Nanjing began getting
phone calls from regular worshipers
with one question: How could they help
Wuhan? The nuns set up prayer services
for the beleaguered city and began col-
lecting donations. A few weeks later,
they wired a check for 200,000 yuan—
nearly $30,000—to charities there. In
less than a month, Taoist temples in
China had contributed nearly $2 mil-
lion to the relief effort, with other reli-
gious groups contributing another $28
million.^2
To many, this might be a classic ex-
ample of civil society—groups outside
government control rallying to help
fellow citizens. For decades political
scientists have searched assiduously
for signs in China of civil society,
which many observers—from Alexis
de Tocque ville to Robert D. Putnam—
have argued can help build democratic
structures. At the very least, civil soci-
ety is usually seen as being in opposi-
tion to the state because it is not under
government control and allows people
to make their own decisions.
But in The Art of Political Control
in China, the Yale political scientist
Daniel C. Mattingly argues provoca-
tively and persuasively that while civil
society in China can occasionally orga-
nize opposition to the state, more often
it does the opposite. As counterintu-
itive as it sounds, civil society groups
like the Taoist nuns help solidify one-
party control. By organizing citizens,
civil society groups help make them
more “legible” to the state, a concept
that Mattingly borrows from one of
his colleagues in Yale’s political sci-
ence department, James C. Scott, who
developed the idea in his book Seeing
Like a State (1998). Civil society makes
clearer the desires, motivations, and
interests of amorphous masses of cit-
izens, which can help the state devise
strategies to support its policies instead
of spawning resistance.
In the case of the pandemic, many
Chinese lack trust in big state- run
charities because they have been
plagued by scandals. If they provided
the only way to help out, many people
might not bother to contribute, figuring
the government should fix the problem
itself. By contrast, the nuns—and I
know this from having done fieldwork
at the temple since the mid- 1990s—areActors from the People’s Art Theater of Wuhan performing in a drama about
medical staff fighting Covid-19 in Wuhan, September 2020Xinhua/Xiao^Yijiu/GettyImages(^1) See my entry for the NYR Daily’s
“Pandemic Journal,” March 31, 2020.
(^2) See my “Religious Groups in China
Step into the Coronavirus Crisis,” The
New York Times, February 23, 2020.