China Briefing | The coronavirus is no Chernobyl, but a wake-up call for China’s top-down autocratic rule
- Comparisons to the Soviet-era meltdown are far-fetched, though there are lessons to be learned
- Among them, the benefits of transparency, rule of law, vibrant media and a bottom-up approach that harnesses the power of civil society
Back in November 2016 at the 3rd World Internet Conference in Wuzhen of Zhejiang Province, Li Bin, then China’s health minister, told a roomful of hi-tech honchos that information technology was driving development of the country’s health industry.
In particular, she said China had completed the world’s biggest internet-based direct reporting system for infectious disease epidemics and public health emergencies, which would enable epidemic information from the grass roots to reach the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) in four hours, as opposed to five days previously.
In March last year, Gao Fu, director of China CDC, told reporters that a virus like Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) could happen at any time but that in future such a virus would not cause an epidemic on the same scale because of China’s well-rounded infectious disease monitoring network and defence capabilities.
The assured tone of top health officials has made China’s initial failure to take prompt measures to contain the coronavirus all the more telling – and not least because it is from the same family of viruses as Sars.
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases has already passed 74,000 and there have been more than 2,000 deaths – a far greater toll than the more than 8,000 cases and fewer than 800 deaths caused by Sars in the 2002/2003 outbreak.
