Book Review: Facts and Analysis—Canvassing COVID-19 Responses

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INDIAN JOURNAL ISSIISS OF ASIAN AFFAIRS (IJAA)

ISSN: 0970-6402

ISSN: 0970-6402

INTERNATIONAL EDITORIAL BOARD

 Kevin Clements, Otago University, New Zealand  Sumit Ganguly, Indiana University, USA  Patrick James, University of Southern California, USA  Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, Pace University, USA  T.V. Paul, McGill University, Canada  Shalendra Sharma, Lingnan University, Hong Kong  Zhiqun Zhu, Bucknell University, USA Disclaimer: The information and opinions appearing in the Indian views of the Journal of Asian Affairs (IJAA) reflect the t contributors of articles/commentar rticles/commenta ies/book es/book reviews and not of IJAA or the Editorial Boa rd d or the publisher. publisher. Authors are responsible for all contents in their articles, including factual accuracy.

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to scholars who are interested in Asia’s geopolitics and Sino-Indian relations.

Joseph Tse-Hei Lee Pace University in New York, USA

Linda Chelan Li, ed. Facts and Analysis Canvassing COVID-19 Responses. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 2021, 332 pp.

A good measure of a community’s strength is its ability to handle crises.

This is particularly true for the global community, where hundreds of millions of people remain vulnerable to the highly contagious coronavirus that originated from Wuhan in 2019. When China sneezes, the world catches a cold. In view of the rapidity and ferocity with which this deadly epidemic spread has shocked the world, Linda Chelan Li offers us a sampling of comparative case studies of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019–2020. Li and her colleagues draw on credible evidence from Cambodia, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Macau, New Zealand, Taiwan, Britain and the United States to examine the various patterns of national and local pandemic response. Challenging social scientists to work globally and to look for those connections in the local coronavirus outbreaks, their analytical findings and insights have greatly advanced our effort to combat COVID-19.

Linda Li’s introductory essay reveals the danger of how a local outbreak can quickly develop into a national and global epidemic. Each of the nine case studies begins with a contextual analysis of the COVID-19 in a specific setting, and concludes with a well-documented chronology of the local outbreaks and preventions. The chapters on Cambodia, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan are better researched than the others, and the final chapter on the United States only has the chronological account but lacks the data analysis portion.

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There are three major takeaways from these examples. The first lesson concerns the extent to which the divergent institutional cultures, norms and practices have shaped regional and local crisis management. Readers can easily identify a stark contest in authoritarian and democratic approaches toward pandemic response. Autocratic Chinese regimes such as Mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau appeared to have implemented more effective pandemic control policies than Great Britain and the United States in early 2020. Meanwhile, some democracies like Germany, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan worked closely with the medical professionals and civil society to find socially driven solutions. The key is not as to which institutional system is better at handling the pandemic. What is crucial is that liberal democracies do not necessarily exhibit any distinctive advantage than China’s top-down governance.

China’s pandemic response should be understood against the long history of imperial control, personified by the single-person rule of Chinese President Xi Jinping and his determination to centralize his absolute leadership. In times of peace and stability, this vertical structure guarantees an efficient control of bureaucratic decision-making and projects an image of commanding leadership. However, at the horizontal level, when everything falls apart, this top-down mode of governance fails to ensure the steady flow of reliable information from a wide range of departmental agencies. The Wuhan outbreak exposes the limitations of such a centralized structure. In November 2019, local healthcare professionals allegedly relied on confusing instructions from the municipal and provincial authorities. Focusing on the response stage of an emerging health risk, they had to minimize the political damage to the province and the public’s fear that serious harm would befall them. Out of fear of an unknown virus, ordinary people in Wuhan and nearby townships flooded hospitals to get tested. Medical staff were overwhelmed. Rumors spread and people were confused, resulting in greater panic. Only after President Xi instructed central and provincial officials to correct initial missteps did cover-ups end. The Wuhan municipality immediately quarantined its 11

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million people, and the officials were willing to report cases of infections.

The Communist state also turned to tech giants Alibaba and Tencent to develop colour-coded systems to classify people based on their medical history, and assigned a digital health code to Wuhan residents. People who were infected were given a red health marker and had to stay at home. Once they recovered and showed no symptoms, they could receive a green marker to be allowed to go outside. Effective as it seems, this cyber dictatorship dismisses any concern for the protection of citizens’ data and privacy.

The second lesson concerns the intrinsic link between global connectivity and emerging infections. Historian Robert Peckham studies how the ecology of deadly diseases has changed from the late nineteenth century until today and, in his book titled Epidemics in Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), argues that the frequency of outbreaks—from SARS in 2003 to swine flu in 2009 and today’s COVID19—and their rapid rate of transmission owe much to globalization. Better transportation

and

communications

networks

have

empowered

international aviation, shipping and railroad networks, contributing to mobility—both people and commodities—and popularizing tourism. The drivers and mechanisms propelling globalization have made the world “flat”—to borrow from The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman— and spread the pandemic in a short period. In reaping the material benefits of globalization, people overlook the invisible risk of emerging infections. Viruses never circulate vertically like official instructions; they do not need top national leaders’ approval before spreading horizontally.

Once a localized outbreak, this pandemic has invaded the world, with consequences that boggle the imagination. In 2020, the surge in confirmed infections and deaths prompted countries worldwide to implement similar tactics: suspending public gatherings, closing national borders, and imposing lockdowns on billions of people. With global connectivity and viral transmission reinforcing each other, the overlapping socio-economic and political risks posed by the pandemic demand radical

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intervention by governments and medical personnel at all levels.

The third lesson has to do with the politics of crisis management. In places without an inter-governmental agency capable of accessing the epidemic situation on the ground and coordinating fragmented bureaucratic units, there has been a tendency to hinder the timely response of medical professionals and transparent reporting by media. Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan learn the valuable lessons of the deadly SARS epidemic that hit their areas in 2003. Ever since the SARS epidemic, local communities have maintained a high standard in personal hygiene during flu season.

Through widespread public health education, people listen attentively to the opinions of medical experts, and adhere to the proper guidelines on hygiene, such as wearing masks and using alcohol-based sanitizers to clean hands. However, in Hong Kong, the coronavirus outbreak collided with the pre-existing governance crisis that had disrupted the city since the summer of 2019. Incapable of “forging a robust private-public partnership” in pandemic response, Chief Executive Carrie Lam allegedly perpetuated the divide-and-rule practice in controlling public access to scarce medical resources (p.144). A frantic search for surgical masks by Chinese shoppers worldwide caused a serious shortage in 2020 (p.131).

Weaponizing this strategic item, the Carrie Lam administration allocated resources according to the recipients’ political loyalty. Her government exploited the free labour of female prisoners to mass produce masks day and night, and gave them to police officers, pro-Beijing political parties and trade unions. Some police officers sold these prison-made masks on the black market. Whenever helpless residents protested against the policy failure, Lam sent in riot police to silence people critical of her rule.

Taiwan deserves credit for its bold, decisive and systematic handling of the crisis. Even without being a WHO member, Taiwan, led by highly educated and competent policymakers believing in science, has implemented aggressive pandemic response. Former Vice-President Chen Chien-jen is a respected epidemiologist, while his successor, Vice-President William Lai,

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specializes in public health and rehabilitative medicine. The nation has utilized communications networks driven by artificial intelligence to isolate and monitor infected people and trace their contacts—a use of technology that serves the common good. Taiwan has been recognized as a model of disease prevention and control.

To conclude, the COVID-19 pandemic is a watershed moment like the Black Death in medieval Europe or the Spanish flu of 1918. Many countries have seen the severity of this crisis. Acknowledging organizational vulnerabilities is essential for empowering the public against similar health risks. The world needs a radical re-imagination of international health control, prevention and treatment practices. To contain and eliminate any infectious disease, it is necessary for nation-states of all stripes to empower competent officials and medical researchers to have horizontal communication channels, ensuring better information gathering and sharing. Allowing the free and transparent flow of information between medical experts and the public, and supporting non-state sectors to share the responsibility of healthcare provisions are incremental steps toward rebuilding global medical infrastructure. Otherwise, the world would have to bear the painful cost of its failure to handle unpredictable crises with creativity and efficiency.

Joseph Tse-Hei Lee Pace University in New York, USA

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