Danish sardonic humour

Sick flag of Asia

Ritzau/The Local

The cartoon as published in Jyllands-Posten.

China has objected to a satirical drawing of the Chinese flag published by a Danish newspaper on Monday.
The sick country has demanded an apology over the publication of the satirical depiction of its flag by newspaper Jyllands-Posten, China’s embassy to Denmark wrote in a press statement.
In the statement, the embassy writes that the drawing is “an insult to China” and that it “hurts the feelings of the sick Chinese people”.
“The current outbreak of a new coronavirus has cost 81 lives in China. At the same time, Jyllands-Posten has published a satirical drawing by Niels Bo Bojesen which hurts the feelings of the sick people,” the embassy wrote according to a translation by Politiken.

Bojesen’s drawing depicts each of the five yellow stars of the communist Chinese flag as a coronavirus.
The newspaper’s managing editor said the cartoon was not intended as an insult.
“The drawing did not intend to mock or ridicule China,” Jyllands-Posten managing editor Jacob Nybroe told broadcaster TV2.
“Drawing a flag and illustrating the coronavirus very quickly illustrates that they [China, ed.] are battling a virus. That’s it,” he added.
Coronavirus has so far killed over 100 people in China, with the death toll now at 106, Chinese said on Tuesday.
The total number of confirmed infections across China is over 4,000.
Cases of the virus have also been confirmed in other countries, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Nepal, Vietnam, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the United States, France and Australia.

The Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Denmark, CCCD, also expressed criticism of the cartoon.
“We respect the freedom of speech and, in particular, the personal freedom to express one's attitude, interpretation and attitude,” CCCD general secretary John Liu said in a press statement.
“However, the drawing of the five coronavirus on the Chinese flag expresses mockery of the Chinese,” Liu said.

Jyllands-Posten, a centre-right daily, is the newspaper which published the famous Muhammad cartoons in 2005, with broad-reaching consequences including a foiled terror plot against the publication.

Made-In-China War Virus

China silent amid growing doubts over coronavirus origins
By Bill Gertz

Li Keqiang, center, speaks with medical workers at Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province, Monday, Jan. 27, 2020. China on Monday expanded its sweeping efforts to contain a deadly virus, extending the Lunar New Year holiday to keep the public at home and avoid spreading infection. 

China’s government stood silent Monday in the face of growing scientific reports that the source of the deadly Wuhan virus outbreak did not originate solely from a seafood market in the city.
Xi Jinping faced mounting criticism on Chinese social media sites for failing to travel to the affected city in Hubei province. 

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang instead arrived in Wuhan on Monday and is heading efforts to confront the epidemic.
Wuhan’s mayor and the Communist Party secretary for the city of 11 million offered to resign amid criticism of their regional government’s mishandling of the deadly outbreak.
Suspicions about a link to a biological warfare leak in Wuhan have been raised because the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory handles deadly viruses and its civilian and military research are intertwined in China.

The Washington Times reported Friday that a former Israeli military intelligence analyst on the Chinese biological arms program said it is possible the disease escaped from one of two Chinese research facilities that are linked to China’s covert biological weapons program.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology National Biosafety Laboratory is China’s sole declared facility capable of conducting research on deadly viruses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). 

China declared a second laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, as part of biological warfare research under the Biological Weapons Convention.
The State Department said in a report last year that it suspects China is working covertly on offensive biological weapons in violation of the convention.
A group of 29 Chinese researchers, writing in the British medical journal The Lancet, said the first person to become ill from the Wuhan virus was identified on Dec. 1 and had no link to the animal market. 

The magazine Science reported the findings of the study on Sunday.
“No epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases,” the report said. 

At least 13 victims of the virus had no apparent exposure to the seafood market. 

The market sold wild animals such as civet cats until it was closed on Jan. 1.
“That’s a big number, 13, with no link,” Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University, told Science.
Dr. Lucey, an infectious disease physician and adjunct professor of infectious diseases, told the online newsletter Science Speaks that China has offered no explanation for why some of the illnesses were not linked to the market.
“Infection must have occurred in November 2019 for the earliest reported patient with onset of symptoms Dec. 1,” he said.
“Whether this patient was infected from an animal or another person in November, directly or by [objects or materials which are likely to carry infection, such as clothes, utensils and furniture], his infection occurred at a location other than the Huanan seafood market.”

Mounting anger
Public anger is increasing over the government’s handling of the rapidly spreading virus, according to reports from news outlets and social media inside China.
At least 80 people have died in China, most in the central province of Hubei, and more than 2,700 are infected. 

The death toll and infection rate could be higher because China’s government is known to censor news reports and official information. 

The U.S. and 12 other countries have reported cases within their borders.
Five British medical researchers stated in a report that if the spread of the disease is not controlled, “we expect further outbreaks to occur in other Chinese cities, and that infections will continue to be exported to international destinations at an increasing rate.”
By Feb. 4, “our model predicts the number of infected people in Wuhan to be greater than 250,000,” they said. 

The researchers were identified as Jonathan M. Read, Jessica R.E. Bridgen and Chris P. Jewell of the Center for Health I
nformatics at Lancaster University; Derek A.T. Cummings of the Department of Biology and Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida; and Antonia Ho of the University of Glasgow Center for Virus Research.

“We predict the cities with the largest outbreaks elsewhere in China to be Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Chongqing and Chengdu,” they stated.Chinese social media posts on the microblogging platform Weibo have questioned why Xi did not visit Wuhan. 

Many of the social media posts criticizing the Chinese leader were couched in coded language that did not mention the president directly.
Other social media posts criticized Wuhan officials’ efforts to contain the epidemic.
The lack of information from China about the disease is triggering widespread fears of a potential global disaster similar to the flu pandemic of 1918 that killed tens of millions of people.
The virus outbreak, scientists say, is now believed to have begun in November or early December — weeks earlier than initial Chinese health officials’ claims about the first reported case in mid-December.
A senior State Department official told reporters last week that Chinese secrecy surrounding the new virus is similar to the mishandling of the 2003 outbreak of SARS, a similar coronavirus.
“I do believe that the concern you see both inside China and internationally is a reflection of what we’ve seen in the past — 2003 with SARS, and a number of other issues — where the government has been slow to respond out of fear of embarrassment, or making things look worse than they are, and that reluctance to respond in a rapid manner again doesn’t give the global community a secure feeling for this being managed inside China,” the official said.

Tracking the virus
Georgetown’s Dr. Lucey made no reference to a biological warfare laboratory as a possible source of the virus, but his hypothesis is that the first appearance of the Wuhan virus did not come from the seafood market and that it was spreading from person to person in October or November.
“Thus, the presumed rapid spread of the virus apparently for the first time from the Huanan seafood market in December did not occur,” Dr. Lucey said. 

“Instead the virus was already silently spreading in Wuhan hidden amidst many other patients with pneumonia at this time of year.”
He suggested that the virus may have spread from infected animals in other markets inside or outside Wuhan or along a supply chain of infected animals.
One of the Chinese authors of the study published in The Lancet, Bin Cao, told the newsletter ScienceInsider that he welcomed criticism by Dr. Lucey.
“Now it seems clear that seafood market is not the only origin of the virus,” he said. 

“But to be honest, we still do not know where the virus came from now.”
China’s government has said little on the Wuhan virus.

Chinese state-controlled media have also provided only limited coverage of the disease and its impact.

Chinese cover-up

Wuhan Coronavirus Infections Could Be 30 Times Higher Than Official Total, Hong Kong Researchers Warn
BY AMY GUNIA

Gabriel Matthew Leung, GBS, JP, a clinician and a public health authority, is Dean of the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine of the University of Hong Kong.

The number of people infected with a SARS-like form of coronavirus in Wuhan, China could already be more than 30 times higher the the official tally, researchers in Hong Kong have warned.
Gabriel Leung, the chair of public health medicine at the University of Hong Kong, said at a press conference Monday that his team’s research models show that some 44,000 people in Wuhan alone—where the virus is believed to have originated in a seafood market—may be infected as of last Saturday.

Chinese officials have shut down travel in and out of Wuhan and many surrounding cities in an effort to stop the spread of the virus. 

Fewer than 2,800 cases of the virus, dubbed 2019-nCoV, have been officially confirmed in mainland China so far, according to a virus tracker maintained by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, which uses numbers from China’s National Health Commission and DXY.cn, an online medical professional network. 

About 1,400 of those are in Hubei province, where Wuhan is located—a fraction of the total estimated by Leung’s team.

Other estimates by researchers who have modeled the spread of the infection—including a team at Imperial College London—have also suggested infections are many times higher than official numbers. 

Chinese officials have pushed back on such estimates: “Faced with viruses like this, facts must be facts and theories are just theories,” Gao Fu, the director of China’s Bureau of Disease Prevention and Control, told reporters on Jan. 23.
Leung said his model suggests that 25,000 people were likely showing symptoms of the illness as of Saturday. 

The remainder would be pre-symptomatic.
Leung recommended that officials take “substantial draconian measures” to limit the spread of the virus, including cancelling large gatherings, closing schools and asking office workers to work from home. 

Without those steps, be believes, the number of people infected could double every six days.
Chinese officials have already extended the Chinese New Year holiday, restricted travel to and from cities at the heart of the outbreak—affecting tens of millions of people—and canceled entrance exams for schools and universities.
The mainland could also see “epicenters of self-sustaining epidemics” in the cities of Chongqing, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, Leung said.
“Chongqing is expected to have the largest epidemic,” he said, thanks to the city’s large population and close transport ties with Wuhan.
The outbreak could peak around April or May in major cities, according to Leung’s model.
Leung said that his research had been sent to Hong Kong and Beijing authorities and the World Health Organization, which on Jan. 24 said that the outbreak is a domestic health emergency in China, but does not yet constitute a global health emergency.
He warned officials across the world to prepare for the worst.
“We have to be prepared that this particular epidemic may be about to become a global epidemic,” Leung said. 

“This is not a certainty by any stretch of the imagination, but there is not insubstantial probability that this might happen.”

Sick Men of Asia

Coronavirus Outbreak Sours Japan on Chinese Tourist Boom

As the Lunar New Year holiday starts, Japanese say they cannot help but regard Chinese visitors warily.
By Motoko Rich

Passengers arriving from Wuhan, China, passed through a health screening station on Thursday at Narita Airport, which serves Tokyo.

TOKYO — Just as Japan and China have been taking tentative steps toward moving past old animosities, a fast-spreading virus threatens to push them apart.
A deadly coronavirus outbreak in China, which has spawned fears of a pandemic across Asia, is raising concern in Japan that public sentiment could be damaged as Chinese citizens have become an increasingly visible part of daily life.
The alarm over the virus is unlikely to hurt formal government relations.
After years of mounting tensions over history and territory, the two largest Asian economies have been drawing closer, with Japan planning a state visit for Chinese dictator Xi Jinping this spring.
But with the start of the weeklong Lunar New Year holiday ushering in one of the busiest travel seasons for Chinese tourists, some Japanese say they cannot help but regard Chinese visitors warily. It is a view shared in many Asian countries that have experienced an influx of Chinese tourists — and their money — in recent years.

“I’m worried about the epidemic spreading here,” said Naho Imajima, 34, who works at a tobacco shop in the Kabukicho entertainment district in Tokyo, which is popular with Chinese visitors.
“Even people who cough, most of them aren’t wearing masks. It could just be a cold, but I never know. I get nervous when a foreign tourist passes by and they’re coughing.”
Chinese travelers have fueled a tourism boom in Japan, increasing fourfold in the last five years to more than 9.5 million annually, and now representing about a third of all foreign visitors.
In addition, more Chinese students are enrolling in Japanese universities, and in some cases they make up a majority in graduate programs.
Chinese tourists in Tokyo in October. About a third of all foreign visitors to Japan each year come from China.

Many shops and restaurants around Japan now cater to Chinese travelers, posting signs in Chinese and accepting payment systems from China like Alipay or WeChat Pay.
But after two visitors from Wuhan, the epicenter of the new outbreak, were hospitalized in Japan for coronavirus infections over the past week, nerves have been on edge.
This month, a shop owner in Hakone, a popular hot-springs resort town, posted a sign reading, “Chinese are not allowed to enter the store.”
A photo of it was widely shared on social media in both Japan and China, and some began to wonder if the new coronavirus would amplify an anti-Chinese undercurrent that persists in Japan.
Others applauded the shop owner’s move, saying that Chinese tourists often exhibited “bad manners,” a common theme in online complaints and news reports.
Masanari Iida, a former candidate for public office in Kanagawa Prefecture, argued on Twitter that the owner was acting in “self-defense.”
“I don’t understand why this is a problem,” Mr. Iida wrote.
“The store has a right to choose its customers.”
Fears have spiraled across Asia as China reported that the virus has caused at least 41 deaths and sickened nearly 1,300 people.
The Chinese government has put a dozen cities in the central part of the country on a travel lockdown, effectively corralling 35 million residents.
The Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, said on Friday that Japan would increase efforts to quarantine visitors who showed symptoms of the coronavirus.
The government also recommended that Japanese citizens refrain from visiting Wuhan for “unnecessary or nonurgent trips.”
All Nippon Airways canceled all flights to and from Wuhan until Feb. 1.
JalPak, a package tour operator owned by Japan Airlines, said that 50 customers had canceled trips to China in the past week because of news of the virus.
At a cabinet meeting, Mr. Abe said he hoped that the public would not “worry excessively” and would act calmly, and he called for people to take the same precautions that they would for the common cold, including washing their hands and wearing surgical masks.
With tourism from China such an important segment of the Japanese economy, some business owners said they did not want the coronavirus to affect views of customers from China.

A parade in Yokohama, Japan, in October celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

“Seeing the news, we worry about the disease a little, but I cannot say ‘please don’t come,’” said Setsuko Yoshizawa, 70, the owner of a shop in the Tokyo district of Asakusa, the site of a temple that is often mobbed with Chinese tourists.
“We cannot survive without customers visiting us. I welcome Chinese visitors.”
Japanese public sentiment about China has improved since the lows seen when the two countries were locked in an intense territorial dispute over islands in the East China Sea, but it is still not terribly high.
According to an annual survey by Japan’s central cabinet office, just over 5 percent of those polled in 2014 said they felt “an affinity with China.” 
Last year, the figure was about 23 percent.
Komaki Lee, a Chinese-born naturalized Japanese citizen who has twice run unsuccessfully for public office, said he had often experienced discrimination because of his Chinese heritage.
When he was a candidate four years ago and again last year, he said, people defaced his campaign posters with the words “Go home!” or trolled him with similar sentiments online or in person.
“Now it’s the season for a lot of Chinese tourists to visit Japan, and there is this pandemic happening,” Mr. Lee said.
“So I think that Japanese people will try to avoid Chinese people more, and I think that’s when discrimination might worsen.”
Still, the more hostile strains of anti-Chinese expression in Japan are met with pushback.
When Tsuyoshi Iida tried to run for office in Kanagawa last year, his party declined to endorse him because its leaders said he had repeatedly posted speech online directed at Chinese and Koreans.
This month, the University of Tokyo fired an associate professor of artificial intelligence, Shohei Ohsawa, who made anti-Chinese comments on Twitter, including saying that he would never hire Chinese students at a company for which he was doing research.
Japanese attitudes about China may be shaped more by criticism of the Chinese government than its people, said Atsushi Kondo, a professor of immigration policy studies at Meijo University in Nagoya.
“More people question human rights and democracy over the Chinese government’s policy against the Uighurs or Hong Kong,” said Mr. Kondo, referring to the Chinese government’s detention of Muslim ethnic minorities in concentration camps and its repression of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
“There might be some cases where people experience trouble over the manners of Chinese tourists and have bad feelings,” Mr. Kondo added.
“But I don’t think anti-Chinese sentiment is growing in general.”

As Virus Spreads, Anger Floods Chinese Social Media

The sheer volume of criticism of the government, and the clever ways that critics dodge censors, are testing Beijing’s ability to control the narrative.
By Raymond Zhong

In Beijing on Sunday, riders wearing protective masks cycle on a nearly empty street that is normally busy wih tourists.

SHANGHAI — Recently, someone following the coronavirus crisis through China’s official news media would see lots of footage, often set to stirring music, praising the heroism and sacrifice of health workers marching off to stricken places.
But someone following the crisis through social media would see something else entirely: vitriolic comments and mocking memes about government officials, harrowing descriptions of untreated family members and images of hospital corridors loaded with patients, some of whom appear to be dead.


CGTN
✔@CGTNOfficial
137 medical personnel head for Hubei from north China's Shanxi
301
7:07 AM - Jan 27, 2020

The contrast is almost never so stark in China. 

The government usually keeps a tight grip on what is said, seen and heard about it. 

But the sheer amount of criticism — and the often clever ways in which critics dodge censors, such as by referring to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, as “Trump” or by comparing the outbreak to the Chernobyl catastrophe — have made it difficult for Beijing to control the message.
In recent days, critics have pounced when officials in the city of Wuhan, the center of the outbreak, wore their protective masks incorrectly. 

They have heaped scorn upon stumbling pronouncements. 

When Wuhan’s mayor spoke to official media on Monday, one commenter responded, “If the virus is fair, then please don’t spare this useless person.”
The condemnations stand as a rare direct challenge to the Communist Party, which brooks no dissent in the way it runs China. 

In some cases, Chinese leaders appear to be acknowledging people’s fear, anger and other all-too-human reactions to the crisis, showing how the party can move dramatically, if sometimes belatedly, to mollify the public.
Such criticism can go only so far, however. 

Some of China’s more commercially minded media outlets have covered the disease and the response thoroughly if not critically. 

But articles and comments about the virus continue to be deleted, and the government and internet platforms have issued fresh warnings against spreading what they call “rumors.”
“Chinese social media are full of anger, not because there was no censorship on this topic, but despite strong censorship,” said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder of China Digital Times, a website that monitors Chinese internet controls. 

“It is still possible that the censorship will suddenly increase again, as part of an effort to control the narrative.”
When China’s leaders battled the SARS virus in the early 2000s, social media was only just beginning to blossom in the country. 

The government covered up the disease’s spread, and it was left to journalists and other critics to shame the authorities into acknowledging the scale of the problem.
Today, smartphones and social media make it harder for mass public health crises to stay buried. 

But internet platforms in China are just as easily polluted with false and fast-moving information as they are everywhere else. 

During outbreaks of disease, Beijing’s leaders have legitimate reason to be on alert for quack remedies and scaremongering fabrications, which can cause panic and do damage.

Li Keqiang, center, visiting a supermarket in Wuhan on Monday.

In recent days, though, Beijing seems to be reasserting its primacy over information in ways that go beyond mere rumor control. 

At a meeting this past weekend between Xi and other senior leaders, one of the measures they resolved to take against the virus was to “strengthen the guidance of public opinion.”
Wang Huning, the head of the Communist Party’s publicity department and an influential party ideologue, was also recently named deputy head of the team in charge of containing the outbreak, behind only China’s premier, Li Keqiang.
Chinese officials seem to recognize that social media can be a useful tool for feeling out public opinion in times of crisis. 

WeChat, the popular Chinese messaging platform, said over the weekend that it would crack down hard on rumors about the virus. 

But it also created a tool for users to report tips and information about the disease and the response.
Internet backlash may already have caused one local government in China to change course on its virus-fighting policies. 

The southern city of Shantou announced on Sunday that it was stopping cars, ships and people from entering the city, in a policy that echoed ones in Wuhan. 

But then word went around that the decision had led people to panic-buy food, and by the afternoon, the order had been rescinded.
Nowhere has the local government been the target of more internet vitriol than in Hubei Province, where Wuhan is the capital.
After the Hubei governor, Wang Xiaodong, and other officials there gave a news briefing on Sunday, web users mocked Wang for misstating, twice, the number of face masks that the province could produce. 

They circulated a photo from the briefing of him and two other officials, pointing out that one of them did not cover his nose with his mask, that another wore his mask upside down and that Wang did not wear a mask at all.
On Monday, social media users were similarly unrelenting toward Wuhan’s mayor, Zhou Xianwang.
During an interview Zhou gave to state television, commenters in live streams unloaded on him, with one writing: “Stop talking. We just want to know when you will resign.”
Top authorities may be deliberately directing public anger toward officials in Hubei and Wuhan as a prelude to their resigning and being replaced. 

Many other targets within the Chinese leadership seem to remain off limits.
This month, as news of the coronavirus emerged but Xi did not make public appearances to address it, people on the social platform Weibo began venting their frustration in veiled ways, asking, “Where’s that person?”

Masks offer a visible reminder of China’s struggle with the coronavirus. A Chinese couple took a selfie while overlooking the Forbidden City in Beijing on Sunday.

But even those comments were deleted. 

So users started replacing Xi’s name with “Trump.” 

As in, “I don’t want to go through another minute of this year, my heart is filled with pain, I hope Trump dies.”Other people hungering to express frustration have taken to the Chinese social platform Douban, which has been flooded recently by user reviews for “Chernobyl,” the hit television series about the Soviet nuclear disaster.
“In any era, any country, it’s the same. Cover everything up,” one reviewer wrote on Monday.
“That’s socialism,” wrote another.
Some Chinese news outlets have been able to report incisively on the coronavirus. 

The influential newsmagazine Caixin has put out rigorous reporting and analysis. 

The Paper, a digital news outlet that is overseen by Shanghai’s Communist Party Committee, published a chilling video about a Wuhan resident who couldn’t find a hospital that would treat him and ended up wandering the streets.
Mr. Xiao, the Chinese internet expert, said the central authorities long gave such outlets special leeway to cover certain topics in ways that official media cannot. 

But the outlets should not be viewed as independent of the government, he said, calling their coverage “planned and controlled publicity” from the authorities.
Even outside the digital realm, it is not hard to find people in China who remain unsure of whether to trust what their government is telling them about the outbreak.
Chen Pulin, a 78-year-old retiree, was waiting outside a Shanghai hospital recently while his daughter was inside being tested for the virus. 

When word of the disease first began trickling out, he immediately had doubts about whether officials were being forthcoming about it.
“Even now, the government seems to be thinking about the economy and social stability,” Mr. Chen said. 

“Those things are important, but when it comes to these infectious diseases, stopping the disease should come first.”

Chinese Peril

Welcome to the Belt and Road Pandemic

There’s one difference between the Wuhan virus and previous Chinese outbreaks: China is now impossible to quarantine.
BY LAURIE GARRETT
China's most lethal virus: Indian students wear masks of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in Chennai on Oct. 10, 2019.

In an unfortunate turn of translation, China’s Xinhua News Agency described Xi Jinping’s trip on Jan. 19 to Yunnan province with these words: “The amiable image of the people’s leader moved through the crowd and through the screen, infecting everyone.” 

It was a poor choice of words in a nation in the grips of an infectious respiratory disease epidemic.
But, in another way, the phrasing was entirely apt. 

China’s dictator isn’t literally responsible for infecting anyone, but his political agenda turns out to be a root cause of the epidemic. 

By making the Belt and Road Initiative endeavor—a multitrillion-dollar program to expand Chinese trade and infrastructure around the world—the centerpiece of his foreign and economic policy, Xi  has made it possible for a local disease to become a global menace.

The new virus, according to World Health Organization (WHO) scientists, has a reproductive rate of as high as 2.5, meaning each infected individual on average infects as many as 2.5 more people. 

That might not seem so bad when an epidemic of four people expands after a few days to 14 more cases, but when 500 cases swells to 1,750, things get serious. 

On Jan. 3, China officially reported 44 cases of Wuhan pneumonia; two weeks later the toll jumped to 198 cases; on the morning of Jan. 21 the government said 444 patients in Wuhan’s surrounding province of Hubei were confirmed as infected by the virus. 

By Jan. 23, the situation was unfolding so rapidly that WHO said at midday in the eastern United States that a total of 575 cases were confirmed in mainland China, then the Chinese government issued a new total of 644 an hour later, and by the next day the tally hit 830 cases with 26 deaths.
In hopes of limiting spread of the new virus, Chinese authorities issued a travel ban and lockdown for the city Wuhan, population 11 million, on Jan. 23. 

But the virus had already spread far beyond the city, and cases are emerging now in most Chinese provinces. 

The Chinese people awoke on the morning of Jan. 24 to learn that the travel restrictions placed on the people of Wuhan had been expanded to eight other cities, for a total of more than 32 million people whose movements are restricted. 

This, on the eve of China’s biggest holiday, the Lunar New Year.
As was the case with SARS, the new virus has spread from person to person through chains of at least four generations of transmission, infected entire families, and, according to WHO’s outbreak expert Mike Ryan, left 25 percent of those known to be infected with severe illness requiring intensive care hospitalization. 

Confirmed cases have turned up in Thailand, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, and the United States. 

At the time of this writing, additional pneumonia cases are awaiting laboratory confirmation (or denial) in Mexico, Russia, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Rwanda.
Despite the similarities between SARS and the Wuhan pneumonia, and the new virus’s spread across much of China and to some 14 nations, the World Health Organization declined this week to name the Wuhan pneumonia a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).
“I am not declaring a PHEIC today,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a press conference on Jan. 23, after a contentious expert advisory panel debated the matter for two days, ending up, “divided over whether the outbreak of novel coronavirus represents a PHEIC.” 

But Tedros hastily added, “Make no mistake. This is an emergency in China, but it has not yet become a global health emergency. WHO’s risk assessment is that the outbreak is a very high risk in China, and a high risk regionally and globally.”
Ryan, the WHO outbreak expert, repeatedly said in the same press conference that the Wuhan epidemic has met all the criteria for a PHEIC declaration. 

It actually exceeds the issues of transmission and spread across national borders that led to last year’s designation of PHEIC status to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

But, said Tedros, China is a sovereign nation that has shown “cooperation and transparency” in its handling of the epidemic and “has taken measures it believes appropriate to contain the spread of coronavirus in Wuhan and other cities. We hope that they will be both effective and short in their duration.”
China is also, however, a nation deeply connected to the rest of the world—far more so than was the case when SARS erupted in 2003. 

Since 2013, the center of China’s foreign and trade policies is the Belt and Road Initiative, a massive loan project that includes land and maritime infrastructure, extending to northern Germany, across southern Russia and the Central Asian nations, and down the eastern coast of Africa. 

In what is surely the largest infrastructure and investment project in history, covering 70 core countries, the Belt and Road will eventually reach two-thirds of the world population.
According to the Economic Times, China is spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually throughout this decade on the Belt and Road Initiative; according to some estimates, the program could spend $8 trillion by 2030. 

Several major international highways and maritime ports are already completed, and China’s railway system is expanding, both inside the country and outward, across borders. 

In 2003, air travel was the only reasonable way to get from, for example, Wuhan to coastal Myanmar, but today a mix of high-speed trains and a superhighway makes the links.

Danger to Africa

Most crucial, in terms of the potential spread of the new virus, is China’s expanded interests and infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa, especially Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya, Zambia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Angola. 

The health care systems and capacities in these nations are grossly underprepared to tackle a SARS-like pandemic, and large percentages of the populations are especially vulnerable to severe reactions to infection due to malnutrition and chronic infection with other microbes such as tuberculosis, malaria, HIV, and various parasitic diseases.
Wuhan’s Virus and Quarantine Will Hit the Poor Hardest.

Known as the “thoroughfare of China,” Wuhan is a key transport and trade hub. 

Nationally, growth in China slowed in 2019 to its most sluggish level in years, but Wuhan expanded 7.8 percent. 

On any given business day, nearly a million people ride trains in and out of the city. 

The metropolis hosts factories and operations for more than half of the Fortune 500 corporations, with production for the likes of Microsoft and a host of top automakers. 

Last year, 27 million passengers flew through Wuhan’s international airport, many of them business travelers.

The Economist Intelligence Unit this week predicted a prolonged epidemic in Wuhan and nearby cities could shave up to 1 percent of China’s 2020 GDP. 

Commodities investors fear that further restrictions on Chinese travel, both domestically and internationally, could so radically reduce oil consumption that crude oil prices might fall by $3 a barrel.
If the Belt and Road Initiative and other Chinese connections with the rest of the world are in 2020 sufficiently robust that a prolonged Wuhan pneumonia epidemic might drive down the nation’s gross domestic product, cheapen world oil prices, and devastate the Shanghai stock market, that vast infrastructure is certainly adequate to provide a serious spread of the virus. 

The live animal market from which the epidemic sprung is within walking distance of the Wuhan high-speed railway station, making it convenient for animal dealers to come and go between the city and wildlife hunting grounds in Southeast Asia, Himalayan nations, and Central Asia. 

Before the government clamped down on movement out of the city, some 300,000 people fled Wuhan, hoping to reach relatives for the Lunar New Year or simply dodge a crackdown.
Wuhan’s political leaders have charged the city’s 11 million residents to “enter wartime status and implement wartime measures” to stop the new virus. 

But it’s impossible to fathom a scenario in which the new coronavirus does not become a global crisis. 

The WHO expert panel was split 50-50 in its decision on whether or not to declare a public health emergency of international concern this week, according to sources present in the deliberations.
Guan Yi of the University of Hong Kong, a veteran virologist who worked on the SARS epidemic, told the Chinese news agency Caixin, “I’ve seen it all: bird flu, SARS, influenza A, swine fever, and the rest. But the Wuhan pneumonia makes me feel extremely powerless. Most of the past epidemics were controllable, but this time, I’m petrified.” 

I, too, am anxious. 

It’s hard to look at the new routes built with Chinese aid over Siberia and the Himalayas and as far as Africa without seeing potential routes for disease that could carry contagion to every corner of the world.

Coronavirus Exposes Core Flaws, and Few Strengths, in China’s Governance

China's response to the crisis is a lesson in how the country’s political weak points can carry grave consequences for world health.
By Max Fisher
Health care workers at the Wuhan Red Cross Hospital on Saturday.

It was the initial news reports that first suggested China’s political system might be getting in the way of its ability to confront the coronavirus outbreak.
The outbreak seemed to already be a full-blown crisis, infecting dozens in China and even some abroad, by the time it became widely reported.
This delay was of a familiar pattern in China, one suggesting that local officials may have played down early warning signs or simply did not coordinate enough to see the problem’s scope.
While outsiders might suspect an attempted cover-up as the cause, experts see something much more worrying: weaknesses at the very heart of the Chinese system.
Its rigidly hierarchical bureaucracy discourages local officials from raising bad news with central bosses whose help they might need. 

And it silos those officials off from one another, making it harder to see, much less manage, the full scope of spiraling crises.

“That’s why you never really hear about problems emerging on a local scale in China,” said John Yasuda, who studies China’s approach to health crises at Indiana University. 

“By the time that we hear about it, and that the problem reaches the central government, it’s because it’s become a huge problem.”
While much remains unknown about the outbreak, a common theme is emerging.
Any political system is better at solving some problems than others. 

But the coronavirus, like other health crises before it, is bringing out some of the deepest flaws and contradictions in a Chinese system that, for all its historic feats, remains a work in progress.
Those flaws, which have long frustrated Chinese leaders, appear to have played a role in everything from the pace at which officials responded to the coronavirus outbreak, to China’s yearslong inability to address the health risks that experts have long warned could lead to an outbreak just like this one.
While the country is now mobilizing a nationwide response, the incident is already a lesson in the political weak points that can bring grave consequences for China and, as infections spread, the world.

A System at Odds With Itself
An Asian palm civet in Wuhan in 2003. SARS was ultimately traced to a coronavirus that jumped from bats to civets, which are prized as a delicacy in southern China.

“When you look at the coronavirus, it looks a lot like what happened with SARS. It involves a very similar template,” Mr. Yasuda said.
The SARS epidemic, which killed hundreds of people in 2002 and 2003, initially spread unchecked when local Chinese officials minimized early reports.
Their fear was not public unrest, it later emerged, but getting in trouble with the party bosses who controlled their careers.
Guan Yi, a professor of infectious diseases in Hong Kong who helped identify SARS, has accused Chinese authorities of once more delaying action, including by obstructing his own efforts to investigate the outbreak.
“This is a continuous theme in central-local relations in China. You do not want to be the one to bring bad news,” said Vivienne Shue, a prominent China scholar at Oxford University.
That gulf between central leaders in Beijing and local officials who run the country day-to-day, Ms. Shue said, is “the core conundrum in how that system works.”
It leads officials on both sides of the center-local divide “to do many counterproductive, irrational things,” she said, in their efforts to manage and manipulate one another.
That has included holding back reports of potential crises, in the hopes of solving things without the bosses finding out.
At the same time, China’s quasi-imperial system leaves the top party bosses in Beijing with little direct power over what happens in the provinces — policy proclamations are sometimes ignored or defied — other than promoting or punishing subordinates.
The two ends of the system are engaged in a constant push-pull dynamic, putting them occasionally at odds — particularly in moments of crisis, when each is looking to blame the other.
This has been an issue throughout China’s modern history, Ms. Shue said, with power fluctuating between the center and the periphery. 

Xi Jinping, China’s current dictator, has sought to centralize power, setting up Beijing-based working groups to exert more control outside the capital.
But the system’s underlying contradiction remains. 

Xi’s tightening grip makes local leaders all the more wary of releasing information that could invite his wrath.
As China modernizes, integrating its once-disparate provinces and cities, local mistakes can become national crises before Beijing is even aware that something has happened, as may have happened with the coronavirus outbreak.
“As logistics and the distribution systems have expanded, you really see how the local and national have been linked together,” Mr. Yasuda said, referring to the hastening rate at which health, environmental and economic crises can now spread.

“Chinese government is not good at dealing with emerging problems. So it’s built to be reactive instead of proactive.”

When China Becomes a Source of Peril
A dairy farm in Qingdao in 2008, when chemically tainted milk was discovered in China.

In some ways, China’s system has been a source of strength.
Party bosses set priorities, then reward the institutions and officials who best carry them out.
And since the days of Mao Zedong, China has operated under a system known as fragmented authoritarianism, in which even the most local leaders have near-absolute authority over their remit.
That has led to a culture of what Elizabeth J. Perry, a Harvard University scholar, has called “guerrilla governance,” in which results take precedence over procedure or accountability, and in which it is all leaders for themselves.

But this approach disastrous when it comes to managing health and environmental issues.Disease and pollution don’t respect provincial or municipal borders. 

And because of the way they spread, it often takes a unified, nationwide policy to prevent or stop them — something for which guerrilla governance is ill-suited.
“It’s very difficult to come together to create a clear actionable plan,” Mr. Yasuda said, adding that, for any health or environmental regulation to work, “you want it to be standardized, you want it to be transparent, you want it to be accountable.”
But China’s system de-emphasizes those concerns, sometimes to disastrous effect.In the mid-2000s, Beijing demanded a drastic increase in milk production. 

When factory farms were unable to meet their targets, officials conscripted vast numbers of rural farmers. 

Some of the farmers, struggling to meet their quotas, watered down their milk, then added an industrial chemical known as melamine to fool quality sensors. 

The tainted milk poisoned thousands of infants.
Experts fear a similar regulatory failure may have enabled the coronavirus outbreak: the longstanding inability to clean up so-called wet markets, which are stuffed with livestock living and dead, domesticated and wild. 

Though the outbreak’s cause is still being studied, Wuhan’s wet market is considered a prime suspect.
The markets have long been considered a major threat to public health, particularly as a vector for transmitting diseases from animals to humans. 

And they are a lesson in the perils of patchwork, decentralized regulations like China’s: While some markets are more carefully policed than others, all it takes is one to cause an outbreak.
In another echo of the tainted milk scandal, top-down political priorities provide an incentive to look the other way. 

Taking down the markets, which are popular, would risk a public outcry. 

Local officials had every reason to fear that their bosses, who have not made the markets a priority, would punish them for causing trouble.

Aligning With Public Good, Or Not
The Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, which has been linked to the new coronavirus, has been disinfected and closed.

A foundational mission of any political system is to align its leaders’ incentives with the needs and desires of the wider public.
Democracies seek to do this through “the competition of interests,” Ms. Shue said, on the belief that inviting everyone to participate will naturally pull the system toward the common good. 

This system, like any, has flaws, for example by handing more power to those with more money.
Within China, Ms. Shue added, the common good “is seen as something that should be designed from above, like a watch being engineered to run perfectly.”
But sometimes the watch can be designed in ways that harm the public good.
In 2001, for instance, Beijing ordered provincial officials to reduce water pollution from factories. Many provinces simply moved the factories to their borders, ensuring pollutants would flow into the next district. 

Nationwide, water pollution worsened.
So far, the coronavirus outbreak seems to highlight the perils of China’s model. Beijing, apparently having learned from the SARS epidemic, has pushed for faster and more drastic action.
But the same systemic problems, from gun-shy local officials to weak health regulations, appear to be recurring as well — a reminder that the system remains, Ms. Shue said, “a work in progress.”