This kind of analysis I'm seeing everywhere is so misguided. The reason the local government didn't report on the situation accurately and even punished some journalists for speaking about it is a flaw of how their country is run and how their command structure incentives are poorly set up. This isn't a new problem and it's why we have converged to a different system in most of the West.
The government coming in later after the situation is already out of control and responding aggressively is only a sign of their failure, given that it wouldn't be necessary for this to happen in a country that wasn't so authoritarian. This should be a wake up call to people in the West who think that banning "fake news" and "misinformation" is a good idea, given that the local government used this exact same excuse to punish journalists speaking about the outbreak early, when it could have been controlled properly.
I actually don't disagree with you. But I'm of the opinion that the authoritarian nature of the Chinese central government is both a blessing and a curse. As you've correctly pointed out, central authoritarian governments seem to end up with local administrations that are fairly incompetent and corrupt as their measure of success if not in good local governance, but by pleasing the central authority. On the flip side, when the proverbial "Eye of Sauron" of a central government decides to do something without reservation, this style of governance can get a lot of stuff done very quickly.
Ultimately the problem for these series of epidemics is the poor conditions and practices of many Chinese citizens that results in unsanitary conditions, especially around food animals. It's easy to look at China as a whole, take a point sampling for a given location and time, and come to a negative evaluation of the entire place. What's harder to do is to recognize that in absolute terms, China today is in much better shape than it was before the '78 reforms. China today is in much better shape than it was before 2000!
The structural problem within China, with respect to how local governing happens, is most certainly a problem. However, I think it's very easy to lob complaints across the Ocean when the West is certainly not in a present state of good order at the moment.
While I'm not saying you're wrong, I think it's worth pointing out that the reason the 1918 flupandemic was called the "Spanish flu" for many years, was that Spain was the first nation to admit that there was a problem. They weren't the first, or even second or third nation to get it, just the first to admit it. So the problem of not admitting the seriousness of the situation, is not a new one.
Which is not to say that it's not a bad thing, just that it's not in any way unique to China, or even to non-democracies.
You're right, it's not an argument, it was a thing to point out, that this problem is not specific to non-democracies. The reason the example is from 100 years ago, is that we haven't really seen as serious a threat as that since then.
The closest we've had in the western world since then, was AIDS in the 80's, and I don't think the response was all that top-notch in the first few years. But then, the disease speed of mortality was much slower. We haven't really seen what a western democracy would do in a case like this, since 1918.
"it is a flaw of how their country is run" and "it's why we have converged to a different system in most of the West."
The parent is making some kind of argument that China is uniquely susceptible to this kind of situation. Saying "no this isnt unique" isnt whataboutism, its refuting the claim being made.
I am noticing a trend where people claim whataboutism any time a counter example or analogy are used, despite them being directly relevant to the premise.
> Which is not to say that it's not a bad thing, just that it's not in any way unique to China, or even to non-democracies.
You would have a point if the debate was about the relative moral standing of China. It's not, as much as the Communist Party wants to call opponents racist or anti-Chinese which is pure deflection. From an objective point of view, Communist China's authoritarianism is putting the whole world at risk.
Shortsighted politicians exist everywhere, but the political system determines what their short-term goals focus on.
In a centralized top-down system like China's, politicians advance their career by currying favor with their superiors by demonstrating plan fulfillment, and if they fail they'll try to fake the numbers to make it look like they succeeded. This affects mostly nationally visible metrics like GDP, poverty rate etc. I guess epidemics also fall into that category.
In a localized bottom-up system, politicians advance their career by currying favor with voters by distributing handouts, like farming subsidies, tax cuts or artificially low prices. The Flint water crisis was at least partially caused by politicians not wanting to improve the infrastructure, because the cost would have to be recouped by raising the water price, which would have been unpopular.
That's true, but my point is that the "Emperor is far away" problems can be found in any type of governing model. Some may limit it, but even then, there are tradeoffs.
One advantage of a centralized top-down system is that when an issue becomes sufficiently prioritized at the top, everyone below falls in line. The primary advantage here is speed and the ability to see through long-term plans. You see this in China's rapid rise in certain industries/technologies, and of course, in their response to the 2019-nCoV epidemic.
> In a localized bottom-up system, politicians advance their career by currying favor with voters by distributing handouts, like farming subsidies, tax cuts or artificially low prices.
I agree with this statement, generally, but there are many exceptions. Speaking only about politicians the US, at a certain level, further career advancement is also very dependent on currying favor with superiors (sometimes, even more so than currying favor with constituents, especially if one has national and not just local ambitions). This is equally true at the national level--see: the internal politicking within the DNC and RNC in terms of fundraising, toeing the party line, etc. to receive endorsement and campaign funds--as it is at the local level--see: "machine" politics like in Chicago, where advancement is equally, if not more, predicated on currying favor with your local party leadership and senior city politicians than it is with voters. Or course, this problem (in the US, at least) might also just be the results of our two-party dominated system, where party-endorsements trumps almost everything else when it comes to getting votes. To your point though, this can be overcome if you curry enough favor with the local voters (Trump himself vis-a-vis the RNC is a good example of this).
You're getting knee-jerk downvotes, but I think your reply is more thoughtful than some are giving you credit for. My original comment more or less agrees with you. However, I'd also temper it by saying that one of the downsides of a highly central government is that it falls prey to the negatives of the "Eye of Sauron". This means that where the relatively few people at the top can focus, and for however long they can focus, incredible things can be accomplished -- sometimes far in excess of what might otherwise be expected.
But due to the lack of a distributed or delegated authority, it greatly limits how many important topics can be focused on at once as the apparatus of government is designed around pleasing the core power holders, who can only focus on a few things at a time. This results in massive efforts like raising armies or building spaceships or whatnot being possible, but efforts that aren't worth the time of the central power keepers (e.g. minding hobbits) fall entirely off the radar.
If the Chinese government can ever arrive at a good solution to local, delegated authority (and I'm not hopeful it will), these smaller issues can be attended to. But as a practical matter they simply get ignored until they become national problems with national priorities.
> But due to the lack of a distributed or delegated authority, it greatly limits how many important topics can be focused on at once as the apparatus of government is designed around pleasing the core power holders, who can only focus on a few things at a time.
A little off-topic, but this is an interesting point. Made me wonder if our corporations fall prey to the same problem as well, since they're basically authoritarian states in structure. But I guess it's because they have such one-dimensional goals that this structure is so effective, as you said.
> If the Chinese government can ever arrive at a good solution to local, delegated authority (and I'm not hopeful it will), these smaller issues can be attended to
Do you think it's possible for delegated authority to exist under an authoritarian system at all?
Maybe? I think military systems are interesting to look at when thinking about this question. The German military was famously centralized in WW2 leading to all sorts of chain of command issues while many of the Allied militaries like to push decision making authority down to more local units while providing overall strategic direction.
However, in governance, its much harder to measure "effectiveness" -- and every measure ends up becoming a target/goal of those being measured. Is it GDP? Sentiment analysis of social media for indicators of social discord? I don't really know, and neither does anybody else.
So some authority simply sets some desired set of strategic goals (2% GDP growth, 3% increase in high school graduations, average household income up by 2.3%, etc.) and then works to create conditions such that those are met.
But with more of a diversity of goals seems to require a diversity of executors of those goals since human attention is limited. This implies again an ability to delegate and so on and I'm not really sure if authoritarian governments can spare the attention to make sure each of the delegated executors can work on such a plethora of goals.
In business, the number of direct reports to the CEO, COO, VP and so on seems to indicate the number of strategic goals an organization can pursue at once. In most companies it seems to be only a handful as the ability of the CEO to direct many reports diminishes as there are more of them.
In the U.S. this need to spread focus works in the executive branch by appointing department heads (cabinet secretaries) who basically have a single overriding raison d'être for their existence (e.g. commerce, housing, transportation, etc.) with a set of strategic goals that those executives can focus on. In the U.S. that's something like 15 departments (plus a very large number of independent "establishments and corporations) which are more or less treated like a company might treat a subsidiary rather than a department. [1]
China also has a complex system as well, much more complicated than I think outsiders give it credit for. It's not a surprise though, the ancient Chinese practically invented the idea of a bureaucracy [2]. I think the primary structural problem for China is not the simple notion of authoritarianism per se, but the parallel bureaucracy of the party structure.
> In a localized bottom-up system, politicians advance their career by currying favor with voters by distributing handouts, like farming subsidies, tax cuts or artificially low prices. The Flint water crisis was at least partially caused by politicians not wanting to improve the infrastructure, because the cost would have to be recouped by raising the water price, which would have been unpopular.
The flint water crises was caused by state emergency powers being abused to take the action of switching to a more acidic water source. The corrosion inhibitors the state-appointed emergency manager neglected to install were necessary because of the lower quality of the new water source. If the water source hadn't been changed, I don't know of any evidence that the corrosion inhibitors would have even been needed.
In other words, your counterexample to a centralized top-down system is in fact centralized top-down corruption of a localized bottom-up system.
It’s not a matter of uniqueness, but scale and frequency. People are still people in any system, and no system is perfect, but that doesn’t mean some systems aren’t clearly far, far better than others.
Let’s take the Australian bush fires. The response of the PM has been widely criticised and the fire chief and regional governments have taken the lead and been very effective, even heroic in their efforts.
In an authoritarian system it would be impossible for the most effective and organised arms if government to push in and get things done, even if I’n theory they lack the ultimate authority. Competence and public support matter. In an authoritarian system the only thing that matters is authority. Competence doesn’t even get you a seat at the table.
Great point. The Original Comment seems to have forgotten that journalists were getting locked up for spreading "rumors" less than 2 weeks ago during a vital time in the spread.
It seems to me that China can only make wrong in your eyes.
If it takes time to act it is because the system causes this failure.
If the government acts swiftly, it is because they are in panic.
If it does not solve the situation, of course because they have a terrible oppressive culture.
If the problem is fixed. Of course, because these are one of the few advantages of having an authoritarian system.
No matter what China does, you will say something bad.
I know this makes me sound like CCP shill, but I am not. I only want to read an assessment made with the same level of rigour and sympathy, if, instead of China was Denmark or Australia.
This is the first comment I've made on this forum about China, so whoever you're speaking to is clearly not me but a collective "you" instead. Responding as myself, I simply added balance to the comment above me. Many people are making the exact same argument the person I responded to is making, and while that argument isn't false, it's clearly misleading.
China does get credit for responding to the situation as they did after the central government got involved. However, we must remember that the situation would likely not have occurred in the first place if the people speaking out about it early on weren't punished, which wouldn't happen in most western countries as local governments have way less power and way less incentives to make that kind of thing happen. This situation is a good example of the problems of their authoritarian system, and a good reminder of why we value (or why we should value) the things we value in the West, like free speech.
> However, we must remember that the situation would likely not have occurred in the first place if the people speaking out about it early on weren't punished, which wouldn't happen in most western countries as local governments have way less power and way less incentives to make that kind of thing happen.
I'm not saying the Chinese government doesn't have problems, nor am I saying free speech is bad, but I have no idea how you could come to this conclusion that free speech would somehow limit the spread of this disease. We have free speech in the US and that's literally led to the rise of anti inoculation advocacy.
Restricted spread of information caused about of month of delay for proper action, as facts were concealed and suppressed by local authorities. If proper action could have been taken in mid-December instead of mid-January, then the spread of the infection could be heavily limited back before it had grown to such large scale as it has now.
Exactly. I read on twitter around Dec 31 that there was such a virus spreading in Wuhan. Around Jan 1, the Wuhan police dep publicly condemned 8 person (the origin of the twitter news) for spreading this information and called it a rumour. Then the gov did everything to hide info and did nothing to prevent its spreading before around Jan 2x. They behaved even like they want to spread it as much as possible because just about two to five days before they made the announcement of the virus outbreak, the Wuhan gov organized a so called 40k family new year banquet -- around 40k Wuhan local families were concentrated together to have a banquet to celebrate the coming Chinese new year. All the events I cited here can be found on China's own newspaper and tv recordings.
Anti-vaccination advocacy exists because some kids do get problems from vaccines. I'm not an anti-vaxxer but it's an inherent feature of how vaccines work that a very small percentage of kids will have some serious things happen as a result of being vaccinated. When you have a big population and the Internet, this small percentage of parents will logically come together to cope with their problems. The fact that those people exist and they can talk about it is evidence that our system is working, not that it isn't.
That is a very charitable portrait of the anti-vaccination movement. No, they aren't parents of vaccine-allergic children banding together "to cope with their problems". They are people spreading serious misinformation about vaccines, advocating that they are risky and best forgone, and causing real damage by doing so. I think silencing these people is wrong, but that doesn't change the fact that their speech is clearly making the world a worse place.
> I'm not saying the Chinese government doesn't have problems, nor am I saying free speech is bad, but I have no idea how you could come to this conclusion that free speech would somehow limit the spread of this disease.
In this particular instance, early warning would have gained precious days if not weeks to study and respond to the disease. In an emergency, every second counts, but the saving face mentality of the Communist Party cost weeks.
> We have free speech in the US and that's literally led to the rise of anti inoculation advocacy.
Even if you were right, that would have absolutely no bearing on the situation at hand.
... and also the widely held belief that anti-vaxing is quackery. I’d argue that free speech actually combats this type of mindset, rather than encourage it. Maybe the Chinese govt. can use it’s authoritarian tools to dispel the bullshit beliefs behind traditional medicine and bizarre “bush-meat” consumption in China that likely caused this mess.
How would the situation have played out in the west? The symptoms are flu-like. Would the situation have been contained on the theory that people will self-diagnose after watching the evening news or hearing about it over Facebook?
Also, if any situation explodes, would the west be as capable in quarantining a huge urban population or building a quick hospital?
Would emergency aid be tossed around like a political game?
Considering the rapid efficient response to Katrina in New Orleans and the Hurricane Dorian in Puerto Rico (catastrophes which, unlike a new virus, are completely unpredictable in their timing of appearance and scope of impact) it's pretty clear that the US would have rapidly deployed infrastructure and supplies exactly where they needed to prevent any casualties.
I think the point is that the Chinese government didn't act swiftly, arrested people who initially spread information about the disease in Wuhan, failed to contain the situation, and has now allowed it to become a global problem.
Due to the way China's government has lied in the past, I am hesitant to believe their numbers or their narrative until it can be confirmed by outside parties.
Then does the fact that they're responding much more quickly and much more heavily this time mean nothing at all?
You say "didn't act swiftly". What is swift to you? A month went by since the first case before they started getting their act together, true, but how quickly do you think other nations could have acted? Compared to SARS, where it took them months, 1 month is a major improvement. It's still not good enough because the virus is that ruthless, but Rome isn't built in one day. I have reason to believe that they've learned a great deal from how SARS was handled, and that they'll respond even better in a future outbreak event.
Are there any government whose narrative you trust? It seems to me that never trusting anything a governments because they have once [0] lied is a little extreme. In fact, I'm not sure I can name a country whose government hasn't lied in recent times.
This would then extend to academia as well, since most research is in some way funded by the state.
[0]: I know they have lied more than once. I'm not sure what a more appropriate word would have been.
I would trust the CDC’s numbers because I know of no incentive for them to lie and their numbers have generally been truthful in the past. In addition, any doctor at the CDC is free to say “these numbers are fraudulent” publicly without worrying they will be arrested.
I would not trust a political party’s economy numbers without external verification, however, because a party has an incentive to lie.
So it is the US Gov bribing the CDC to "hurt" China? No. While the CDC is tarnished by the events surrounding the 2015 scandals, and the US is in opposition to many Chinese initiatives, these things are not related. Hurting China via misinformation about a legitimate contagion hurts the world. There are levels of trust and Chinese officials are about as reliable as US candidates running for office (ie I have 0 trust).
> Are there any government whose narrative you trust?
I can only speak for my country (France), but the precedent of the AIDS epidemic and particularly that of contaminated blood transfusion makes it pretty clear that any government official caught having lied in such a situation would be in deep trouble. And I'm pretty sure they're all keenly aware of that.
> because they have once [0] lied is a little extreme
But it is not that they have once lied that it is a problem. It is instead, that just right now, a couple weeks ago, china was arresting journalists for this stuff.
If you want to say that we should ignore bad behavior from 20 years ago, because it is no longer relevant, thats fine. But we are not talking about stuff from 20 years ago. We are instead talking about behavior that china does all the time, right now.
The reason people don't trust governments is because of a constant, never-ending stream of lies. They didn't lie once. They hardly ever not lie. This applies to China, the US, and other governments. A more appropriate phrase is "continually lying" rather than "once lied." The difference is huge enough that you don't even have an argument to stand on. And for the record, I wouldn't trust then even if they did literally only lie once. And neither would most people as most people value trust. One lie or a million, either way the trust is broken. The insane thing is that so many people trust governments even when they continuously prove over and over and over again that they can't be trusted. Lying continuously is only one of many ways they do that. Trusting governments is illogical, unreasonable, and frankly bordering on insane. What other person or entity that constantly lies and breaks trust would be trusted?
Denmark is nothing like china besides being a country. If china wants to be compared favorably to other contries, the need to act favorible to most countries. Full stop.
This sort of what-about-ism doesn't address the core point. That top-down command and control systems are vulnerable to precisely this type of outcome. Providing a single western example of a much milder localized circumstance doesn't address anything except deflect attention from the main point.
Flint was a local event. This is consuming all of China.
The government coming in later after the situation is already out of control and responding aggressively is only a sign of their failure, given that it wouldn't be necessary for this to happen in a country that wasn't so authoritarian. This should be a wake up call to people in the West who think that banning "fake news" and "misinformation" is a good idea, given that the local government used this exact same excuse to punish journalists speaking about the outbreak early, when it could have been controlled properly.