Abstract
What explains the Chinese government’s differentiated response to the COVID-19 pandemic? This chapter argues that the same sources of control in authoritarian crisis response that enable the state to mobilize resources and people hamper the flexibility and nimbleness needed to adapt amid uncertainty. It analyzes how political priorities in a predominantly top-down system and experience with past infectious disease outbreaks shape the public health approach to COVID-19 and examines the response from late 2019 through mid-2022 in three approximate phases: early missteps and institutional impediments, rapid shift in response effectiveness, and top-down control and cracks in zero-COVID. Initial reactions were dispersed and incremental as local officials wrestled with how loudly to sound the alarms on the emergence of a new respiratory virus that seemed to be spreading. Beijing eventually backed a centralized, coordinated effort. The ramped-up response was effective, if authoritarian and heavy-handed at times. Since then, the scale and speed of the state’s ability to assemble testing, tracing, quarantining, and isolating capacity and other measures enabled China to generally enclose inevitable flare-ups in most of 2020 and 2021. But unyielding pursuit of dynamic zero-COVID policy through mid-2022 reveals a fragile flip side of dogged top-down control.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter will often use the term COVID-19 to refer to the novel coronavirus for the sake of clarity and simplicity, and recognizes that, according to the WHO’s technical guidance, the official name SARS-CoV-2 refers to severe acute respiratory syndrome which causes the coronavirus disease COVID-19 (World Health Organization 2020a).
- 2.
See, for example, Economy (2018) and Minzner (2018) on Xi’s consolidation of power. Assessments of a distinct Xi Jinping effect, to be clear, are mixed depending on the issue in focus. The anti-corruption campaign and Belt and Road Initiative mark a distinctive turn since Xi rose to power. Public service provision for migrants, on the other hand, has shown more continuity than change despite centralization of power in a number of other policy areas (Chan 2022a).
- 3.
There is disagreement about the first known case. One often-cited report says that the earliest case is a Huanan Market seafood vendor with illness onset on December 10, 2019 before a now famous case of an accountant whose illness onset was reported as December 8 but was likely December 16 instead (Worobey 2021). The US CDC’s COVID-19 time line online begins with a cluster of patients on December 12, and the WHO’s time line focuses on its own response starting on December 31 when the WHO’s Country Office in the China picked up a media statement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission on cases of “viral pneumonia.” See https://www.cdc.gov/museum/timeline/covid19.html and https://www.who.int/news/item/29-06-2020-covidtimeline.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
For more on the Wuhan lockdown, see Yang (2022) on diaries written by people in the city.
- 7.
- 8.
See Cai et al. (2022) on modeling transmission of the Omicron variant in China.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
See https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality on differences in mortality numbers due to differences in the number of people tested, demographics, health care systems, and other factors.
- 12.
See https://news.sina.com.cn/c/xl/2022-05-05/doc-imcwipii8187652.shtml#/ for a video news report.
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Chan, A.T. (2023). Authoritarian Crisis Response to COVID-19 in China. In: Cafruny, A.W., Simona Talani, L. (eds) The Political Economy of Global Responses to COVID-19. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23914-4_9
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