In early 1952, the three-year-old People’s Republic of China faced a public relations crisis in the middle of the Korean War. After agreeing to let prisoners of war decide where they wanted to go after hostilities ended, officials were dismayed to learn that more than half of the 170,000 Chinese POWs had opted not to return to mainland China, an embarrassing public rejection of the communist system taking root there.
Desperate to divert the world’s attention from the POW debacle, on Feb. 22, 1952, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, claimed that U.S. forces were waging biological warfare against China.… Seguir leyendo »
The State Department pushed back last week on Chinese statements suggesting that the coronavirus originated with U.S. military personnel in Wuhan — rather than a live animal market in Wuhan. Lijian Zhao, spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, posted statements to this effect on Twitter and Chinese social media, but offered no substantive evidence.
Last week, President Trump called the coronavirus a “foreign” virus. Meanwhile, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has repeatedly mentioned a debunked conspiracy theory that a Chinese bioweapons lab in Hubei created the virus.
As the United States and China apparently ramp up efforts to blame each other for the outbreak, the two governments responded to the coronavirus itself in one surprisingly similar way: Each government’s official response has been riddled with costly communication delays.… Seguir leyendo »
General Secretary Xi Jinping this week made his first visit to Wuhan since the covid-19 outbreak upended all corners of Chinese society. Xi’s trip was designed to reassure the public that their government has the virus contained — and things will get back to normal.
But China’s propaganda apparatus has been in high gear since January. What is the official playbook, and has the propaganda been effective?
Focus on success — and heroism
Studies show modern authoritarian governments increasingly turn to information manipulation, rather than relying on ideological indoctrination or physical repression to maintain rule. They do this to generate an image of competence and increase public support.… Seguir leyendo »
As covid-19 spreads around world, China has touted its efforts to bring the novel coronavirus outbreak swiftly under control under President Xi Jinping’s leadership. Bruce Aylward of WHO’s China mission commended China’s “bold approach”, saying that the “the key learning from China is speed — it’s all about the speed”.
But the real story is more complex. Although China’s national authorities acted decisively after Jan. 23, there were key deficiencies at the outset. Here’s what you need to know:
1. Politics overruled the truth
Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, was getting ready in early January for the Jan. 6-17 “two sessions”, where local and provincial leaders would gather to discuss the state of affairs at the local/provincial levels.… Seguir leyendo »
The official Chinese response to the covid-19 outbreak that began in Wuhan and has now spread across the globe is an almost perfect metaphor for China in 2020. An outbreak that began with local malfeasance in Hubei has become a worldwide crisis.
Like the economy, China’s domestic political challenges have now become globalized. Here’s what this outbreak tells us about the politics and perils of Chinese domestic governance.
Local fragmentation can have a far wider impact
The epidemic shows how the most micro-level domestic fragmentation across functional and regional dimensions of the Chinese political system can affect people all over the world.… Seguir leyendo »
The Chinese Communist Party has always been quick to congratulate itself for how it deals with crises, be they natural disasters or catastrophes of its own making. The coronavirus epidemic is no exception, even now that it has become a global health emergency. The government of China’s first response to the deadly virus, detected in late December, was dilatory at best, willfully negligent at worst, and yet the party promptly lavished praise on the state, particularly on China’s president, Xi Jinping.
“Seeking Truth”, the party’s leading theoretic journal, recently celebrated the fact that the “People’s Leader” had handled the disaster with unflappable confidence, proving himself to be not only “the guiding light of China and the backbone of 1.4 billion Chinese”, but also a “calming balm” for a world whose nerves had been jangled by the outbreak.… Seguir leyendo »
I got a message in the back seat of a black sedan, a car that usually drives local officials: “It’s good you left. There’s a case on the seventeenth floor.” The sender was Ningning, whose family I had stayed with for over two weeks, and whom I had left, clutching a water bottle in hand, back at her family’s complex on Danjiang Road in Shiyan. Her uncle had procured the car for me to take me to Wuhan’s Tianhe airport. She messaged me two hours into my trip away from her, and from quarantine in Hubei province.
I had missed the first British evacuation when my embassy didn’t get me a permit for the checkpoints in time, but I was trying to make the second.… Seguir leyendo »
Todos hemos visto las imágenes apocalípticas de la ciudad china de Wuhan en cuarentena. El mundo contiene el aliento por temor a la difusión del nuevo coronavirus, COVID-19, y los gobiernos toman o preparan medidas drásticas que necesariamente conllevarán el sacrificio de derechos y libertades individuales en pos del bien común.
Algunos acusan a las autoridades chinas por su falta inicial de transparencia en relación con el brote. El filósofo Slavoj Žižek señaló que la obsesión con el COVID-19 manifiesta una “paranoia racista”, habiendo muchas enfermedades infecciosas peores que cada día causan la muerte de miles de personas. Los inclinados a aceptar teorías conspirativas creen que el virus es un arma biológica contra la economía china.… Seguir leyendo »
El pasado mes de octubre, el Informe Global de Seguridad Sanitaria de 2019 incluyó una advertencia clara: “La seguridad sanitaria nacional es esencialmente débil en todo el mundo. Ningún país está plenamente preparado para las epidemias o las pandemias, y todos los países tienen deficiencias importantes que resolver”. Hace apenas un par de meses, surgió un nuevo coronavirus en Wuhan, China –y rápidamente demostró la precisión de la evaluación del informe.
El virus, hoy llamado COVID-19, fue descubierto por primera vez en la municipalidad de Wuhan en China, pero no fue tomado lo suficientemente en serio por las autoridades en las primeras semanas.… Seguir leyendo »
Global health crises are geopolitical events, and the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus is no exception. That incipient pandemic is not simply testing the global health system. It is also an acid test for a Chinese regime that intends, in the words of President Xi Jinping, to “take center stage in the world.”
Much has been made — appropriately — of how China’s authoritarian system has been the taproot of its worst failures in responding to COVID-19. Yet the episode also shows why an authoritarian China will struggle to create a constructive, consensual international order, no matter how much power it wields.… Seguir leyendo »
As the coronavirus spreads around the world, the Chinese government is fighting a war on two fronts: one against the virus itself and one against the truth. Beijing is desperate to protect its own image by shaping the narrative around the virus and its origins. But the time has come for the international community to demand Beijing end its war on the truth so we can work together to contain the epidemic.
Since the beginning of the outbreak, China’s strategy has been to silence critics and minimize reporting about the scale of the threat. In late January, the Chinese government brought massive resources to bear to try to contain the virus’s spread internally, using draconian measures against its own people that it won’t acknowledge.… Seguir leyendo »
China is making headway in the battle against the Covid-19 epidemic. The daily number of new confirmed cases is declining nationwide, including in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, and other cities in the province of Hubei. Suspected infections are being diagnosed more quickly. As of Thursday, out of about 78,800 confirmed cases, some 2,780 people had died and more than 36,000 had recovered.
Treating the people’s lives and health as a top priority, President Xi Jinping and the central government have acted decisively. More than 42,000 medical workers from across China rushed to Hubei. Comprehensive measures have been taken at the community level to track the health situation of the people.… Seguir leyendo »
Antes de que el mundo tome conocimiento del surgimiento del nuevo coronavirus, que hoy en día provoca pánico mundial, Li Wenliang, un oftalmólogo con residencia en Wuhan, notó algo extraño en algunos pacientes, notó que aparentemente dichos pacientes habían contraído un virus desconocido, que se asemejaba al síndrome respiratorio agudo severo (SRAS), el cual coartó a China tiempo atrás, hace casi una generación. Unos días más tarde, después de que Li enviara un mensaje de advertencia a varios médicos en un chat grupal, este médico de 34 años fue convocado por la policía, institución que le obligó a firmar una carta confesando que “había realizado comentarios falsos” que habían “perturbado el orden social”.… Seguir leyendo »
The new coronavirus disease has a name now: COVID-19. That took a while. The virus’s genome was sequenced within two weeks or so of its appearance, but for many weeks more, we didn’t know what to call it or the disease it causes.
For a time, in some quarters, the disease went by “Wuhan pneumonia,” after the city in central China where the first human infections were detected. But guidelines from the World Health Organization, which christened COVID-19 recently, discourage naming diseases after locations or people, among other things, to avoid “unintended negative impacts by stigmatizing certain communities.”
In their botched handling of the tragic death of Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor who sounded the alarm on the Wuhan coronavirus, authorities in Beijing seem to want it both ways.
On the one hand, officials have expressed their sorrow over his death and encouraged people to tell the truth about the outbreak. On the other hand, government censors are hard at work scrubbing online posts that call for freedom of speech in the wake of Li's death.
When millions of people are denied the opportunity to grieve collectively over someone widely regarded as a hero, their trust in government can only further erode.… Seguir leyendo »
The Chinese police have exercised unusual restraint in the face of the coronavirus outbreak.
It seems that just eight people have been detained so far, all doctors who early on turned to work-related chat groups to warn of the dangers of a new mysterious infection. The local police — an honorary, if usually uninvited, participant in every chat group in China — detected malfeasance and pounced, briefly detaining the doctors on grounds of rumor-mongering.
The new coronavirus, for its part, was treated with dignity and respect. When it first emerged, suspect 2019-nCoV appeared to be committing illegal assembly, unwanted touching and incitement to subvert the state.… Seguir leyendo »
The coronavirus outbreak in China poses a tremendous test for Beijing. Beyond the immediate public health crisis, the Chinese Communist Party faces a stuttering economy, growing public anger and distrust, and a potentially heavy blow to its global reputation.
The hesitant early response to the outbreak sheds light on the way the Chinese bureaucracy approaches crises at a time when the party leadership is tightening control at almost all levels of society. At first, officials in Wuhan attempted to censor online discussions of the virus. This changed only after President Xi Jinping’s call for a much more robust approach was followed by a sudden increase in the state media coverage of the outbreak.… Seguir leyendo »
Before Shiyan, a city in Hubei province, went into quarantine, the sum of thirty yuan (about $4) could buy two cabbages, enough spring onions for two soups, a large white radish, two lettuces, a potato, and ten eggs. Not any more. Wanting to record the hiked prices, I took two photos of price cards in my local district’s largest supermarket. Immediately, a shop assistant approached. “You can’t do that,” she said. “Please delete them.” Even after I agreed, she stood peering over my shoulder to see my phone, to make sure that the images were gone. “You could report her,” a local resident told me later: national orders have forbidden merchants to raise their prices.… Seguir leyendo »
La única verdadera amenaza natural que pesa sobre la humanidad es el riesgo de una epidemia viral. Para dejar constancia, recordemos que hace un siglo la llamada gripe española mató a alrededor de cincuenta millones de personas en todos los continentes; la media de edad de las víctimas era de veinte años, y muchos murieron en un día. Una gripe comparable, llegada de México en 2009, mató al contagio a un millón de personas en Norteamérica, con una media de edad de cuarenta años. Estas gripes o neumonías, diferentes a las gripes estacionales corrientes, afectan a los jóvenes en lugar de a los ancianos, porque los más jóvenes, que nunca han estado expuestos a este tipo de virus, no tienen ninguna inmunidad natural.… Seguir leyendo »
The coronavirus epidemic in China is far more than a disease; it is the most serious challenge to the rule of President Xi Jinping and the direction he has taken China since he assumed power in 2012. The stakes are extraordinarily high. It is far too early to predict the beginning of the end of Xi’s political career, but the epidemic clearly is shaking China and Xi’s way of governance to its core.
Since the Chinese revolution of 1949, the central tension inside the country’s Communist Party has been between “reds” and “experts”, between ideology and know-how. This tension has real world significance.… Seguir leyendo »
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