How China’s political mishandling allowed Covid to spread far and wide
We have long needed a truly independent inquiry into the origins and spread of Covid-19. This blow-by-blow account examines how the global pandemic could have been prevented.
We have long needed a truly independent inquiry into the origins and spread of Covid-19. The virus swept the globe from January 2020, killing an estimated 12 to 15 million people and costing trillions of dollars in public expenditure.
How it started, exactly; why it was able to spread around the world, and how it was handled have been subjects of much controversy. Dali Yang’s Wuhan shows in minute detail how political mishandling enabled it to spread far and wide.
Yang, based at the University of Chicago, grew up in Mao’s China. He has spent his career analysing how the Communist Party governs China and how it learns. His new book is an exceptionally lucid and meticulous analysis of how medical and political authorities reacted when the virus appeared in Wuhan. It is a blow-by-blow account, based on remarkable access to primary sources in China and characterised by the author’s distinctive capacity for dispassionate research and critical thinking.
In 1996, his book Calamity and Reform in China closely analysed, from a cognitive science point of view, how the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward famine (1959-61), which killed tens of millions of people, forced some, at least, of the Communist Party to rethink Maoist ideology and political power. In 2004, he gave us Remaking the Leviathan: Market Transition and the Politics of Governance in China.
Both books were published by Stanford University Press. Both were hopeful. Both were researched and published well before Xi Jinping reasserted dictatorial politics in China. In Wuhan, Yang is feeling his way into exploring the aggravated authoritarianism of the Party under Xi. He is now working on a sequel to this book, looking at the handling of the pandemic during and after the lockdown in Wuhan and the “zero-Covid” policy.
His focus, throughout Wuhan, is on the ways in which political authority inhibited both analysis and communication. They could have headed off the viral outbreak in its first weeks, preventing the virus from becoming a global pandemic. He pointedly does not address the question of where, exactly, in Wuhan, the virus originated. He states, at page 141, that official data about zoonosis at the Huanan Seafood Market was erroneous and misleading, but he concentrates on how authoritarian politics suppressed free flow of information, inhibiting reactions to the virus as such. His objective was not to pinpoint that, but to explore the extent to which authoritarian politics and the suppression of a free flow of information inhibited pre-emptive action to the virus as such.
It cannot be overemphasised that Yang is meticulous in both his documentation and his reasoning. This is not a racy book. It requires slow, patient reading. He lays the foundations with great care, follows the empirical evidence with minute attention as to who, what, where, when and why, then draws explicit and powerful conclusions, without ever, as it were, raising his voice.
It’s striking to compare his style, in these respects, with the two books by Chinese exile Liao Yiwu: Wuhan: A Documentary Novel, and Invisible Warfare. These are more colourful, angrier, more speculative texts than Dali Yang’s. Easier to read, more stirring. But if it is clear understanding you are seeking, read Yang rather than Liao.
To give but one example, Liao speculates that the virus could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and may have been intentionally developed and released as a form of germ warfare. That has been a meme in circulation almost from the start of the pandemic. Yang deliberately leaves the lab-leak theory to one side. What he shows us is how city, provincial and national health and political bodies responded to reports of a SARS-like virus being on the loose.
The unsettling consequence of his careful approach is that the lab-leak hypothesis comes to appear less probable than other kinds of evidence have appeared to make it, because no-one at any level, in his account, shows any awareness of a lab leak, to say nothing of attempting to cover it up as a strategic act. It becomes, as it were, the “dog that didn’t bark”, as in the famous short story by Arthur Conan Doyle, Silver Blaze.
What Yang has done, nonetheless, is more powerful than any conspiracy theory in pointing to what did happen and its implications. The Party’s mantra was “politics first, safety second, science third”. He shows, step by step, in exquisite detail, how this played out. In doing so, he adds to the work of many intellectuals in China, throughout the Communist dictatorship, who have worked hard to set the record straight as against allowing the Party to censor and distort the narrative in its own favour.
In this regard, Wuhan complements the brilliant excavations by Ian Johnson, in Sparks, of heroic individuals and small teams in China, ever since the 1940s and 1950s, who have laboured – mostly at the cost of their liberties and often of their lives – to recover the truth about mass killing, disasters and political repression from beneath the Party’s blatant lies and propaganda.
Wuhan will perhaps lack wide readership, just because it is so scholarly and detailed. That’s a pity, because it is an exceptional work of forensic inquiry and judicious analysis. If you want to know what took place in China in the crucial weeks between mid-December 2019 and mid-February 2020, you must read it. You won’t do better. Keep the origin question on ice for now.
But there is another and broader reason to read Dali Yang. He is a Chinese American and he is scrupulously concerned about how risk and data are assessed, how political (or corporate) authority can cut across both data collection and communication about risk, and what the best research in cognitive science and organisational psychology tells us about human behaviour in regard to risk and communication. We need that kind of thinking across a broad front right now.
Paul Monk is a former senior intelligence analyst and a long-time consultant in applied cognitive science. He is the author of Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2nd edition, 2023) and Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018), among other books
More Coverage
Pop-rock hit at the horrors of social media
Dear Evan Hansen’s pop-rock score is full of attractive songs. The best are sung gorgeously by endearing and optimistic star Beau Woodbridge, despite being pitched treacherously high.
Five shows to watch this week
A silly, sexy, salacious romp called Rivals is based on Jilly Cooper’s famous book, plus South Korea’s dying breed of haenyeo – women divers.