China
reports that new virus cases are declining, but the data may be tied to party
politics.
BY JAMES
PALMER | FEBRUARY 19, 2020, 3:18 PM
China
Reports Decline in Virus Cases
In China,
the death toll from the coronavirus has now topped 2,000, with over 70,000
cases confirmed. But if you follow Chinese state
media, the tone is increasingly optimistic: Victory in the people’s war against
the virus, led by President Xi Jinping, is coming! The official figures seem to
bear this out: New infections outside of Hubei province, the virus epicenter,
have dropped for more than 10 days straight, and the number of new cases inside
Hubei has slowed to under 2,000 per day.
Most of
Hubei remains under lockdown, with residents unable to leave their homes
without special permission. Travel restrictions of varying severity have been
imposed across China, from monitored movement to total quarantine. Taken at
face value, the government’s containment strategy appears to be working. But
that raises the question: How reliable are China’s official numbers?
Party
politics. One suspicious element is how consistent the drop in new virus
cases has been. While there was a jump in numbers last Thursday, it was the
result of changes in testing standards in Hubei—moving nearly 15,000 cases from “suspected” to
“confirmed.” The announcement came as Hubei’s top officials were removed from their jobs—and Xi’s close
ally Ying Yong, the former mayor of Shanghai, installed as the province’s party
boss. As often happens, it seems the new boss wanted to blame the bad news on
the old one.
Meanwhile,
the central government is pushing for reopening businesses, but there is a
conflict emerging. Local officials don’t want to be scapegoated if an outbreak
emerges in their domain, and their fear is outweighing the economic damage of
the virus. But there are reports from Zhejiang and Guangdong of lockdowns being
lifted, with a monitored surveillance system that allows people to leave the
house in areas previously under heavy restrictions.
Downward
trend. The straight decline in new cases of the virus could be good news,
or it could be statistical manipulation. Outside of Hubei, diagnostic test kits
are in short supply, and other provinces haven’t switched to using the
symptomatic diagnosis now accepted in Hubei. The kits are only being used to
test people who came from Hubei and not for cases of transmission, so it’s
unsurprising the numbers are dropping. Chinese doctors report that dozens of
other hospital patients are being quarantined and treated but not officially
diagnosed.
What
We’re Following
U.S.-China
media wars. The United States made a strong move against China yesterday,
reclassifying five state-run media outlets—Xinhua News Agency, the China Global
Television Network, China Daily, China Radio, and People’s
Daily—as operatives of Beijing. The designation makes their operations
inside the United States subject to tighter control. Chinese reporters at home
and abroad have always been tasked with producing neican—internal
reports for the party—and effectively used for espionage on an ad hoc basis.
Now, the
outlets’ reporters could be subject to the same travel restrictions the United States
has imposed on Chinese diplomats. In China, Western reporters already face a
system of monitoring and control that limits their visas, sees them harassed by
police, and prevents them from living outside certain cities.
The U.S.
move prompted immediate retaliation from Beijing, which expelled three Wall Street
Journal reporters on Wednesday. (The excuse was an opinion headline
that described China as “the real sick man of Asia,” a phrase that prompted
state-backed outrage from the Chinese public.) Notably, all of the expelled
reporters were of Chinese descent, part of a pattern of China treating nonwhite
foreign reporters—and especially those with Chinese ancestry—with more
suspicion.
Missing
coronavirus cases? While most of China’s southern and eastern
neighbors have reported coronavirus cases, the countries along its northern
border such as Russia, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan have seen minimal numbers, with
Russia only just reporting its first two cases. The
pattern of cases may just represent the direction of travel before the Lunar
New Year holiday at the start of the outbreak: Migrant workers would be
returning to China from the north, while middle-class vacationers headed south.
What
about North Korea? Meanwhile, North Korea says it doesn’t have any coronavirus
cases, but the country has gone under total lockdown and cut off all transport
ties to the outside world. North Korean state media, meanwhile, has broadcasted information about hygiene
methods and protective masks. If the nation was suffering an outbreak, would we
know?
Tech and
Business
Restaurant
crisis. The restaurant business has been devastated by the coronavirus
outbreak, despite the hardworking delivery people doing their best to keep the
sector alive. The loss of Lunar New Year business and the closure of public
spaces has devastated an industry already teetering on the edge. In Beijing,
which is not fully locked down, only 13 percent of restaurants have stayed
open throughout the outbreak. Jim Boyce, a longtime food and wine
correspondent, has written about how badly the global wine trade will be hit.
Back to
work? The government is trying to encourage people to return to work,
but between travel restrictions and local lockdowns it is proving effectively
impossible. In China’s north, factory owners say they are still paying
above-average wages to get staff and that the vast majority of workers still
haven’t returned to the job. Companies that can are allowing remote work.
Chinese schools, which look unlikely to reopen before April, have switched
to online classes.
Pension
burden. With business hurting from both the shutdowns and the
government-mandated requirement to keep paying employees, Chinese
authorities have announced that companies won’t have
to pay some pension contributions and insurance fees to state-run funds for several
months. That’s a smart move, but it raises the threat of the oncoming pension crisis.
What
We’re Listening To
The World
Unpacked, by the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace
This is a
shameless self-endorsement for my own appearance on Carnegie’s foreign-policy
podcast this week, discussing the coronavirus at length. But it’s also a
general recommendation for the podcast: It’s an excellent and smart weekly
conversation with experts on the issues of the day.
On China
issues, see the episode with Carnegie expert Evan Feigenbaum and a particularly timely interview with former Wall
Street Journal Beijing bureau chief Charles Hutzler.
A Moment
in History - The Asian flu, 1957 and 1968
The first
post-World War II pandemic—the result of the mixing of avian and human
influenza strains—was first detected in Singapore in 1957 but may have
originated in China. While less lethal than the 1918 Spanish flu, the “Asian
flu” pandemic killed perhaps 1 million to 2 million people worldwide. A decade
later, it mutated into the “Hong Kong” flu: Again, it was first detected
in the British colony but possibly originated in China.
Maoist
China had high levels of deforestation and food insecurity, which caused people
to eat previously untouched species, as well as a dire lack of medical
resources. It was perhaps only the country’s isolation and limited freedom of
movement that prevented outbreaks on the scale of SARS in 2003 or the 2020
coronavirus outbreak. It’s also possible that such outbreaks did occur and went
unnoticed among the deaths of the era.
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