42 China The Economist May 21st 2022
It’sallpolitical
I
t is verypossible that Wu Lienteh, the father of China’s public
health system, saved the world from a pandemic. Sent by the im
perial government in 1910 to investigate a disease raging through
China’s frozen northeast, Dr Wu identified it as the plague. After
conducting China’s first autopsies, he overcame the disbelief of
colleagues to insist that plague was spreading by droplets in hu
man breath, as well as by fleas from marmots and other rodents
hunted for fur. He ordered the wearing of facemasks, the isola
tion of the sick and a ban on outbound travel, enforced by troops.
Patriots revere Dr Wu—born in Malaya to Chinese parents and
educated at Cambridge University—for using Western learning to
prove foreigners wrong. Scorning Dr Wu’s advice to wear a mask,
Gérard Mesny, a French medic expecting to take control of the epi
demic zone, caught the plague within days of arrival and died.
Adaptable, evidencedriven and willing to trample the odd
freedom for the greater good, Dr Wu is a symbol of much that Chi
na’s boosters admire about the country’s system of government.
For four decades the world has gasped at China’s economic rise.
Technocrats get much of the credit. The praise began soon after
Communist Party bosses began to rebuild state institutions after
the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, drawing a line under years of
violent purges and ideological campaigns. Senior officials were
hailed for their professionalism and openness to foreign know
how. Political scientists wrote fat books about systems of perfor
mance review, discipline inspection and meritbased promotions
that are supposed to make Chinese officials responsive and ac
countable, even in the absence of opposition parties or a free
press. Recently Chinese leaders have seized on the election of
bungling populists in the West as proof of the democratic world’s
dysfunction. Notably, since the covid19 pandemic began, they
brag of shielding the vast majority of China’s people from catching
the virus, unlike deathstalked America.
That record leaves outsiders baffled by China’s current ap
proach to the pandemic, which is causing unsustainable damage
to the economy while inflicting pain on tens of millions of locked
down citizens. For foreigners who thought they understood how
the party derives legitimacy from competence and economic suc
cess, these are confusing times. Suddenly, officials do not lookadaptableoropentoforeign knowhow. Instead they are sticking
with bruteforce strategies that worked to crush outbreaks when
the pandemic began in 2020, but which are a deadend when
fighting the vastly more contagious Omicron variant. True, the
ability of rich cities like Beijing to isolate single cases, track their
contacts and isolate all these unfortunates in quarantine clinics is
remarkable. But they are at root a hightech perfecting of tech
niques that Dr Wu used in 1910. Since then, science has moved on.
China’s highest decisionmaking body, the Politburo’s stand
ing committee, defensively declared on May 5th that relaxing con
trols would lead to “massive numbers of infections, critical cases
and deaths”. This is correct, but ignores the extent to which it is
the party’s fault. Abandoning pandemic controls risks disaster be
cause China has a weak hospital system and old people with lots of
chronic ailments. But above all, it is because China has not fully
vaccinated 100m citizens over 60. This grave blunder blocks the
easing of controls. In semiautonomous Hong Kong, which fol
lows some but not all of the mainland’s covid policies, an Omicron
wave led to horribly high mortality rates. In all, 95% of the dead
were people over 60 who had not been fully vaccinated.
Yet rather than set China’s propaganda juggernaut onto an all
out vaccination drive, leaders have wasted months. Resources
have been poured into mass testing sites and what the head of the
National Health Commission ominously calls “permanent” quar
antine hospitals. China has not approved any mrnavaccines, the
most effective kind, essentially because the only two versions
available are Westernmade. At first, this hesitancy reflected na
tional pride and caution about a new technology’s possible side ef
fects. But national security is now a concern, scientific sources re
port, with leaders anxious about dependency on a foreign drug.Self-interest undermines China’s “political meritocracy”
As a rule, when outsiders see Chinese officials apparently bent on
selfharm, a likely explanation is that they are responding to in
centives and priorities that only insiders fully appreciate. That is
true of city or districtlevel bureaucrats extending lockdowns or
imposing more onerous controls than nationallevel guidance
would seem to demand, even as the economy stalls. Such officials
are in fact juggling contradictory orders from on high. Profession
al survival involves weighing which can hurt them personally. If
everywhere has low economic growth, officials need not fear bad
gdpnumbers. As for vaccinating reluctant old people, that may be
good for the country overall. But if an official upsets local families
by forcing a shot on grandparents (and worse, if the old then die of
an unrelated illness) then careerharming protests may follow.
The most menacing order of all is the one threatening to sack offi
cials with an outbreak on their watch. So they build more fences.
The biggest cause of China’s stubbornness on covid is Presi
dent Xi Jinping, who has made pandemic controls into a political
campaign and loyalty test. A new essay on containing the pan
demic in Qiushi, a leading party journal, mentions Mr Xi 13 times,
and the need to vaccinate old people once. At its meeting on May
5th the Politburo’s standing committee pledged to fight “any at
tempt to distort, question or dismiss China’s anticovid policies”.
Like Dr Wu, Mr Xi has proved sceptical foreigners wrong about
pandemic controls. China’s lockdowns broke the country’s first
wave of covid in 2020, despite Western doubts. Mr Xi’s wisdom
certainly must not be questioned now, since later this year,heis
expected to seek and secure a third term as party chief. China’sco
vidpolicy paralysis is driven not by science, but by raw politics.nChaguan
Admirers call China a pragmatic technocracy. Covid shows that politics comes first