July 2024

In August, when I visited Wuhan, I met with a young building-company manager who had worked on the construction sites of various emergency clinics and quarantine facilities during the city’s outbreak. “The pandemic is like a mirror,” the manager told me. “A person can see himself more clearly, both his good qualities and his bad qualities.” This pandemic mirror applied to China as a whole. The first phase of the outbreak revealed many terrible qualities of the system: the lack of a free press, the brutal silencing of whistle-blowers, the tendency of local officials to lie and cover up problems. Later, in 2022, after I’d left China, the system would also show its weaknesses in the way that strict “zero-COVID” policies were maintained long after they should have been abandoned. But in between these two debacles was a long and important second phase that reflected China’s capacity to implement effective policies quickly, using neighborhood committees and other bureaucratic structures to carry out tasks like resident surveys and contact-tracing.