Public Anger Over Coronavirus Is Mounting. Will It Matter?

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Daniel Mattingly, Chenjian Li & more on February 9, 2020

The coronavirus outbreak that exploded three weeks ago in the central Chinese city of Wuhan has prompted the most severe government actions in three decades. Cities are closed down, transport links broken, and tens of millions of people effectively quarantined. The death of whistleblowing doctor Li Wenliang, one of several healthcare workers who attempted to draw attention to the virus at the start of the year, has prompted online rage, while economic growth forecasts have been slashed. At a time when the Party and the leadership claim supremacy over every aspect of Chinese life, when Xi Jinping has been styled “Chairman of Everything” can they avoid blame for the regime’s failure to contain the virus? And how much will it matter to Xi’s future?

Daniel Mattingly

on February 8, 2020

Daniel Mattingly is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University.  He is the author of The Art of Political Control in China (Cambridge University Press, 2020). His current research focuses on the military, technology, and nationalism in China.

Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Chenjian Li

on February 7, 2020

Dr. Chenjian Li is the University Professor at Peking University.  He is on the Advisory Board for China of Cornell University, and the Advisory Committee for China related work for Eli Lilly and Company.

Li attended Peking University for his undergraduate education, and Peking Union Medical College for training in medicine.  He received his Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics from Purdue University and postdoctoral training at the Rockefeller University.  Dr. Li was an assistant professor and associate professor at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, and then Aidekman Endowed Chair at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.  Dr. Li embarked on a new journey to Peking University in 2013.  Between 2013 and 2018, he served as Vice Provost of Peking University, Executive Dean of Yuanpei College, and Professor and Associate Dean of the School of Life Sciences.

Li's scientific research focuses on exploring the molecular and cellular basis of higher brain functions and neurological diseases, and therapeutic development of cancer treatment.  His laboratory pioneered methods of generating transgenic animal models for these studies.  

Li is also devoted to education development and reform, ranging from high school, undergraduate, graduate and medical student education and has won numerous awards for his teaching.

Li studied literature and philosophy before he turned his focus on bio-medicine.  He remains an active writer.  His translation of Richard P. Feynman’s What Do You Care What Other People Think?  published by the Chinese Social Science Publisher in 1999, won a Chinese National Book Award in 2000.

 

Rui Zhong

on February 6, 2020

Rui Zhong is a research and program analyst based in the Washington, D.C. area. She holds an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a B.A. in International Studies from Emory University. She has completed coursework at Peking University and earned a graduate certificate at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in China. Her research interests include China’s role in the East Asian Political Economy and how nationalist interests can impact business, technology, and cultural policies.

The Scientist and the Spy

By Mara Hvistendahl on February 5, 2020

Penguin Random House: A riveting true story of industrial espionage in which a Chinese-born scientist is pursued by the U.S. government for trying to steal trade secrets, by a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction.

In September 2011, sheriff’s deputies in Iowa encountered three ethnic Chinese men near a field where a farmer was growing corn seed under contract with Monsanto. What began as a simple trespassing inquiry mushroomed into a two-year FBI operation in which investigators bugged the men’s rental cars, used a warrant intended for foreign terrorists and spies, and flew surveillance planes over corn country—all in the name of protecting trade secrets of corporate giants Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer. Hvistendahl gives a gripping account of this unusually far-reaching investigation, which pitted a veteran FBI special agent against Florida resident Robert Mo, who after his academic career foundered took a questionable job with the Chinese agricultural company DBN and became a pawn in a global rivalry.

Industrial espionage by Chinese companies lies beneath the United States’ recent trade war with China, and it is one of the top counterintelligence targets of the FBI. But a decade of efforts to stem the problem have been largely ineffective. Through previously unreleased FBI files and her reporting from across the United States and China, Hvistendahl describes a long history of shoddy counterintelligence on China, much of it tinged with racism, and questions the role that corporate influence plays in trade secrets theft cases brought by the U.S. government.

Book Review: 

Claude Peck, Star Tribune (February 7, 2020)

Helen Anne Curry, Science (January 30, 2020)

Bethanne Patrick, The Washington Post (December 31, 2020)

Publishers Weekly (October 29, 2019)

Kirkus Reviews (October 23, 2019)

Karen Thornber

on February 4, 2020

Karen Thornber is Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She is the author of three major international-award winning scholarly monographs, Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Harvard, 2009); Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (Michigan, 2012); and Global Healing: Literature, Advocacy, Care (Brill, 2020). She edited a special issue of Literature and Medicine on world literature and health, co-edited a special issue of the Journal of World Literature on trans-regional Asia and futures of world literature, a special issue of Humanities on global indigeneities and environment (published also as a separate volume), and a volume on The Poetics of Aging in the Japanese Narrative Arts, Thornber has in addition published more than 70 articles on comparative and world literature, East Asian literatures and cultures, the environmental humanities, the health humanities, the medical humanities, the literatures and cultures of the Indian Ocean Rim, diaspora, gender, indigeneities, postcolonialism, transculturation, and trauma. Current projects include books on Asian feminisms; global mental health and inequality; and inequality, technology, and culture in the Pacific Rim.

Thornber has served in a variety of leadership roles at Harvard, including Victor and William Fung Director of the Harvard Asia Center, Director of the Harvard Global Institute Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences Initiative, Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, Chair of the Program in Regional Studies East Asia (RSEA), and Director of Graduate Studies in both Comparative Literature and RSEA. She was Conference Chair of the 2016 American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting, the largest conference ever held at Harvard (3,500 speaker-participants).

Susan Greenhalgh

on February 4, 2020

Susan Greenhalgh is the John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Research Professor of Chinese Society at Harvard University. Before joining Harvard in 2011, she was Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Irvine and, before that, Senior Research Associate of the Population Council in New York City. Her interests lie in the tangled intersections of science/technology, the Party-state, industry, and everyday life in contemporary China.

For some 25 years, she sought to unearth the making, workings, and effects of China’s notorious one-child policy. Her award-winning book, Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China (2008), traces its origins to Chinese missile science and Western cybernetics. Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (with E. A. Winckler, 2005) places the Party-state’s project on population at the very center of Chinese political transformations over 50 years. Cultivating Global Citizens: Population in the Rise of China (2010) reveals the central role of population policies in the creation of the global citizens needed to make China a prosperous, globally prominent nation.

Can Science and Technology Save China? (edited with Li Zhang, 2020) is one of the first book-length studies of science and society in China. Advancing the notion of “governing through science,” it shows how the everyday logics, practices, and ethics of science- and technology-making are profoundly reshaping the country, but not in the ways intended.

Since 2013, Greenhalgh has examined the hidden dynamics by which Western food and beverage corporations have been intervening in China’s science and policy to protect profits. Her work shows how Coca-Cola succeeded in quietly distorting China’s policies on obesity to align with Coke’s message that, when it comes to obesity, what matters is how much you exercise, not what you eat or drink. Two capstone articles on this research were published in early 2019 and a book is underway.

Just One Child was awarded the Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies and the Rachel Carson Prize of the Society for the Social Study of Science. Greenhalgh’s work has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Harvard’s Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship, and the Clifford C. Clogg Award for Early Career Achievement of the Population Association of America, among others.

Jie Li

on February 4, 2020

Jie Li is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Her research interests focus on propaganda, testimony, and the mediation of memories in modern China. She teaches classes on East Asian cinema, Chinese media studies, urban history, and documentary films. She is the author of Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia University Press, 2014) and co-editor of Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution (Harvard Asia Center, 2016). Her next book, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era, is forthcoming with Duke University Press in Fall 2020. She is now working on a new book project about the exhibition and reception of cinema in socialist China, with two forthcoming essays in the journals Screen and Grey Room. She has also published articles about the cinema of Manchuria (in positions: east asia cultures critique), about contemporary Chinese documentaries (in Public Culture Jump Cut), about a Chinese museum town (in Modern China), about Maoist police files (in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures), as well as about radios and loudspeakers (in Twentieth-Century China).