David Pratt: China ostracised and facing scrutiny as coronavirus death toll rises

This weekend as the Chinese authorities reported the highest death toll so far in a 24-hour period since the outbreak of the coronavirus, the disease has stoked a wave of anti-China sentiment that has spread faster than the virus itself.

As of Friday the death toll from the epidemic that originated in the central Chinese city of Wuhan had risen to 259, with another 1527 people in a serious condition, the country’s National Health Commission confirmed.

China has another 15,238 suspected cases, while 102,427 people who have had close contact with infected people are being monitored.

The devastating human toll aside, the impact of the coronavirus is impacting China’s international standing overseas almost as much as it is the country’s communist rulers at home.

In times of such crisis, distinguishing between understandable global fear and discrimination can be tricky. But there’s little doubt China is being subjected to near global ostracism right now, partly fuelled by social media.

Much of what is being disseminated online about the coronavirus, it will doubtless come as no surprise, is misinformation. In Australia, a fake post circulating on Instagram warned that shops in Sydney containing items like fortune cookies, rice and “Chinese Red Bull” were contaminated.

The Reuters news agency has reported that hoaxes have spread widely online, promoted by conspiracy theorists and exacerbated by a dearth of information from the cordoned-off zone around Wuhan, where the outbreak began.

According to the US-based fact checking website PolitiFact, misinformation about the virus online included hoaxes about its source, its spread, and how to treat it, as well as false conspiracies about its connection to biological warfare and the Chinese government. In a rare

departure from its usual approach to dubious health content, Facebook said in a blog post that it would remove content about the virus “with false claims or conspiracy theories that have been flagged by leading global health organisations and local health authorities,” saying such content would violate its ban on misinformation leading to “physical harm.”

Facebook’s move, though, is at odds with other major US-based social networks like YouTube and Twitter, who Reuters say have confirmed they do not consider inaccurate information about health to be a violation of their policies.

It’s worth noting though that the resonance with which such hoaxes, “fake news” and misinformation over the virus have hit the mark, has only been exacerbated because information in China has been tightly controlled.

Even today 17, years after the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) virus, suspicion still lingers over accusations that Beijing initially covered up news of the outbreak.

Though during the initial stages of the current coronavirus the Chinese authorities were almost immediately forthcoming with the international community, at home it was a very different story. Early on Chinese state media reported that police in Wuhan had detained eight people for spreading rumours about a “local outbreak of unidentifiable pneumonia.”

A prominent Chinese respiratory expert, Wang Guangfa, head of the department of pulmonary medicine at Peking University First Hospital in Beijing, who originally told Chinese state media that the coronavirus was under control and preventable has admitted that his choice of words was inappropriate.

In many ways Dr Wang, who has been widely criticised for his reassuring early statements, has come to symbolise how slowly China recognised the urgency of the outbreak. Dr Wang himself later contracted the coronavirus, apparently during a visit to Wuhan.

Officials, too, initially said the virus came from animals and could not be spread among humans, something that later proved to be incorrect. According to the Financial Times the virus wasn’t even front-page news on the Wuhan Evening News, the city’s best-selling newspaper, from January 6 to January 19.

During this period, reports suggest that the city was hosting annual meetings for top municipal and provincial officials.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Dali Yang, an expert on Chinese bureaucracy at the University of Chicago, said this was most likely a key element in determining the authorities response.

“This is a major factor that the authorities in Wuhan city sought to project an air of calm and most likely delayed taking action to stop the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus,” Yang said.

News of the outbreak began to leak out and as the virus began to make national headlines, more and more journalists began to describe being detained or threatened with arrest by Chinese authorities while reporting on the virus.

The Hong Kong news outlet TVB reported as early as January 14 that a group of journalists, including one of its reporters, were detained for hours while covering the story at a Wuhan hospital that has been treating patients.

Time magazine reporter Charlie Campbell recalled a similar incident while reporting at the seafood market identified as the source of the outbreak.

He said he was “repeatedly threatened with arrest while observing the scene from the street”.

Given now what appears to have been widespread suppression of information inside the country by the Chinese authorities, analysts contend that this most likely only made the situation worse.

CHINA has now placed almost 60 million people on lockdown. Such a lockdown has never been carried out in the country before, not even during the 2003 Sars outbreak.

The cost of it is staggering, not just in terms of manpower or cash, but also the knock on effect this will have on the wider Chinese economy

In Beijing, the Politburo Standing Committee, the Communist Party’s top body, headed by president Xi Jinping, has taken direct control of the response, as the world’s most powerful state apparatus grapples with the crisis.

That some officials will be punished in the weeks ahead is beyond doubt, especially after Wuhan Mayor Zhou Xianwang admitted on state TV that the city’s warnings “were not sufficient” and the infection rate will likely continue to climb.

For the moment though this will be of little consolation to many ordinary Chinese caught in the outbreak’s epicentre. It’s unlikely also to reassure many beyond China’s borders where the country has found little sympathy and in some cases downright hostility over the coronavirus outbreak.

Some of the responses to the outbreak by both neighbouring countries and others further afield can of course be seen as rational and calculated concerns based on the risk of infection and spread of the disease.

It’s only natural that certain countries will want to distance themselves from the source of the virus.

But as Motoko Rich, the Tokyo bureau chief for the New York Times, observed a few days ago, some responses come at a time “when China’s rise as a global economic and military power has unsettled its neighbours in Asia as well as its rivals in the West”.

To that extent, contends Rich, the coronavirus is feeding into latent bigotry against the people of mainland China. Already as far afield in the region as Hong Kong, South Korea and Vietnam, businesses have posted signs saying that mainland Chinese customers are not welcome.

In some ways this is nothing new given that the Chinese and Asians in general were subjected to similar xenophobic reactions during the Sars epidemic of 2003. These days, though, the numbers of Chinese travelling abroad are massive. According to China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Chinese travellers made about 150m overseas trips in 2018, up more than 14% from the previous year.

But across the world the idea of a temporary “do not enter sign” to visitors from China referred to the by a Filipino politician last week is catching on.

Singapore on Friday announced a sweeping ban on Chinese visitors and other foreigners who had been to China in the past 14 days, in an escalation of travel restrictions by the south-east Asian transportation hub. The city-state will also stop issuing all forms of visas to people holding Chinese passports.

Mongolia, a landlocked country between China and Russia, said on Friday that it would close its border with China until March 2 in an effort to prevent the virus from being imported. Even in far off Trinidad and Tobago a two-week travel ban on Chinese visitors has been imposed.

While in China the major concern remains containing and eliminating the virus and saving lives, even when that is achieved the country stands to suffer in the long term.

Crass as it might be to talk of economics when people are still dying, there’s no doubt Beijing and indeed the rest of the word is preparing for the economic pain that seems likely to come with the epidemic.

Chinese travellers alone are the top spenders in international tourism, making 150m overseas trips worth $277 billion in 2018. At home the tourism hurt will be felt too, especially given that the outbreak coincided with Lunar New Year celebrations.

The simple fact remains that China can ill afford any kind of economic hit given that it was already under economic pressure before the first reported cases of the coronavirus.

Facing tensions from the trade war and sluggish demand at home, its

official GDP growth in 2019 was the slowest since 1990. As the country contended with rising debt and the fallout from its trade war with the US, Beijing’s communist rulers were more worried that social unrest could be its “black swan” problem, an improbable but chaotic event officials feared could be spurred by rising unemployment.

Then along came the coronavirus and if China’s economy hurts then the pain is inevitably felt elsewhere, for the world’s most populous nation has become integral to nearly every sector of the global economy.

That much is apparent in the brand names alone that are responding to the outbreak. General Motors and Honda, which manufacture vehicles in Wuhan, announced that they are trying to determine when to reopen.

Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, said last week that the iPhone maker was looking for alternative suppliers to “make up for any expected production loss”.

The CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, meanwhile, called the outbreak a “concerning development” and said the oil giant is preparing for a “tough and uncertain” economic environment.

IKEA too has shuttered all of its mainland China stores, and KFC and Pizza Hut have closed thousands of branches. Starbucks has closed about half of its 4100 shops in the mainland and McDonald’s temporarily shuttered stores across five cities in Hubei province, where Wuhan is located.

Forty years ago China might have been an impoverished nation, but today it alone accounts for roughly one-sixth of global economic output, and is the world’s largest manufacturer.

“One way to count the cost of the Wuhan coronavirus is by how many people catch it, and then how many die. Another is the direct financial cost of public health measures to treat those infected and contain its spread. Yet another is the wider economic cost,” observed Professor Ilan Noy, an expert in the economics of disasters at Victoria University of Wellington.

Even if the Wuhan outbreak directly affects relatively few people, compared to past pandemics, it could yet still “pack an intense punch in a more interconnected global economy,” explained Noy in an article in The Conversation, an online platform for academics and researchers.

Using the 2003 Sars outbreak as an example Roy says that even if the public-health impacts of the coronavirus prove to be relatively limited and short-lived it can still have significant long-term economic impacts.

With Sars, though, fewer than 10,000 people were directly infected, tens of millions of individuals changed their behaviour out of fear of catching the virus, affecting businesses and trade.

A month ago, few outside China may have heard of Wuhan, yet the city, and a small market within it, has managed to impact countries the world over. It’s a sign of just how connected we all are in a globalised world.

For the moment saving lives is what matters most. Where the coronavirus leaves China in the future is still to be reckoned with, but for now this vast country remains locked down and increasingly locked out.