In my forthcoming novel, After the Event, different governments respond to an alien virus in very different ways. In this respect I’m finding it highly instructive to watch how the Covid-19 pandemic plays out around the world.
In the middle stages of the original epidemic, when Chinese officials briefly stopped trying to suppress the truth, there was a deluge of reportage coming out of the country. It’s not surprising that this has now reduced, given the tight lockdown, the evacuation of foreign journalists and the media’s shift of attention to the impact of the pandemic elsewhere. Yet if one scans the international media, the coverage of what is happening in China is now so limited that it is hard not to be suspicious.
The official line is that the draconian measures imposed by the government of Xi Jinping have been extraordinarily successful. According to this narrative, China has gone in the space of six weeks from having a runaway epidemic with 60,000 confirmed cases in mid-February, to reaching a plateau of 80,000 at the beginning of March and a recovery to just 1,863 active cases now, most of them caused by people coming into the country from abroad. There have really only been two stories from China in the past week: a travel ban against foreigners, to prevent a “second wave” of infections; and the lifting of some internal restrictions so that people can re-enter Wuhan and start going back to work.
Really? Even given the omnipotence of the Chinese state and its instruments of control, is it credible that a lockdown could be that successful, that quickly, in a country where tens of millions of people had been moving between regions for the New Year festival during the epidemic’s early growth period just two months earlier? If experience from Italy and Spain is anything to go by, even the most rigorous of lockdowns could not have achieved such a fast turnaround.
The countries that have managed to contain the epidemic, at least for now, did so with a comprehensive programme of testing and tracking. This was also the approach in China: but can we believe that it was achievable on the vast scale necessary there, especially in light of emerging evidence that their tests have a high error rate? Spain and Turkey have found that tens of thousands of the test kits sent to them by China are unreliable (the batch in Spain were accurate only 30% of the time). Meanwhile the Dutch authorities have recalled 600,000 Chinese face masks as being unsafe.
We should also recall that during the epidemic, the Chinese authorities ran a massive programme of censorship against anyone who tried to highlight uncomfortable facts or question the official line. Some of the bloggers involved were forcibly put into quarantine and have not been heard from since. So there is really no other lense through which to view the situation in China today, except that of the government.
Given this background, let me pose some questions about what is really going on in China. Is it possible that the death toll is far higher than the 3,318 officially cited? Could it be that the authorities have suppressed the real number, for instance by ensuring that death certificates cite other causes? (This is easy to do when most people who succumb to Covid-19 die from multiple causes, such as heart failure and pneumonia, or else die without ever being tested.) Perhaps a new outbreak reported yesterday in a region near Hubei is evidence that new infections are still occurring at a higher rate than has been admitted? And is it conceivable that the ban on foreigners has been instituted not just to prevent new infections being brought in, but also to stop the rest of the world from discovering the true situation?
The Chinese communist party can only justify its grip on power if it is seen to be solving the country’s problems and leading its people to a better quality of life. Failure to overcome the Coronavirus epidemic, or a prolonged economic downturn, both hold more terrors for Xi Jinping and his minions than they do for western democracies. In a democracy, even the people who hold power don’t regard losing it as the end of the world. But for members of the Chinese regime, failure could be fatal.
No doubt they will use every trick in the book to manipulate the truth and strengthen their grip, just as they did after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Covid-19, however, personally touches a far larger proportion of the country’s 1.4 billion people. If the recovery being presented by China is a matter of smoke and mirrors, it will be interesting to see how long they can keep up the illusion.
In my novel After the Event, the alien infection is seen by many as beneficial: and efforts to stop it rebound on those who try. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on your initial mindset and whether or not you’ve been infected. You’ll have to wait for the book to be finished to find out just where that leads.
Alan Brunstrom, Author Site 