Qin Hui, "Globalization after the Pandemic"

Qin Hui, “Globalization after the Pandemic:  Thoughts on the Coronavirus”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Qin Hui (b. 1953) was, until his recent retirement, Professor of History at the prestigious Tsinghua University, and one of China’s most prominent liberals and public intellectuals.  He began his career with many careful studies of the history of China’s peasantry, arguing that the “peasant wars” that mark China’s history were not the result of “class struggle” against rapacious landlords but rather “righteous anger” directed at an oppressive and unaccountable state.  While never abandoning his commitment to rigorous scholarship, Qin later widened the scope of his interests considerably, tacking subjects as varied as globalization, South African apartheid (which he compares—favorably—to China’s treatment of its “migrant workers”), and China’s Republican period (1911-1949).  His 2016 book on this latter topic, Leaving the Imperial System Behind 走出帝制, a major challenge to recent New Confucian scholarship arguing that the 1911 revolution was a mistake because China was already on its way toward “constitutional monarchy,” was banned in China (for a taste of Qin’s arguments click here).    
 
To my knowledge, the text translated here has not been published in China or in Chinese, or at least googling the title does not lead me to a link.  Over the course of the spring of 2020, I noted an online announcement that Qin was going to give a public lecture of the topic, and wrote him asking if he had a draft I could read.  My memory is that the talk was cancelled, but there is a youtube recording (without images) of a talk with the same name from some time in May, so perhaps not.  In any event, Qin emailed me his text on October 16, 2020, asking me to translate it, and it appears here in published form for the first time (my first scoop, and surely my last).  In the current climate in China, it may not be possible to publish a probing, critical treatment of a sensitive topic.
 
Qin’s text is a stunning reflection on the successes and failures of fighting the coronavirus in China and the rest of the world, but his principle focus is on China and the West.  As always, his goal is to cut through the rhetoric, the finger-pointing, and the chest-thumping to get to the simple, if chilling, crux of the issue:  China used its “low human rights advantage” to impose coercive lockdowns that rapidly got the virus under control after the disastrous outbreak in Wuhan, while the West, handicapped by its “high human rights (dis)advantage,” stumbled badly, and continues to stumble.  Yet the point of Qin’s text is not to sing China’s praises, but instead to wake the West up to the flaws in its institutions revealed by the failure to get the virus under control, the sad fact that Western concern with human rights has—understandably if tragically—increased the number of cases of illness and death.  Qin asks us to imagine the scenario in which the conspiracy theories asserting that the coronavirus had been engineered by a Chinese laboratory or by the American military were to come true, and the world found itself in a state of biological warfare using contagions vastly more lethal than the current virus.   What are the chances that Western democracies would win?  Or even survive?
 
Qin very much wants democracy to survive and prosper, in the West and eventually in China as well.  His text is thus an even-handed and objective criticism of both China and the West, a rare bird in such polarized times. 
 
His criticisms of China are fairly straightforward.  Allow freedom of speech and leave whistle-blowers alone, which would have expedited the management of the initial crisis in Wuhan and perhaps spared the rest of the China—and the rest of the world—the pain and loss of the subsequent pandemic.  Stop bragging about China’s superior performance in fighting the virus.  The “medieval” methods employed were not invented in China but came from the West, and the reason for China’s success was their “low human rights advantage” which facilitated the imposition of coercive measures.  Be vigilant that the heightened powers seized by the state during the emergency not become permanent additions to what is already a potent arsenal.
 
Qin’s criticisms of the West are more complex and indeed often difficult to follow.  This makes sense because here we have a Chinese champion of democracy and human rights essentially telling the West that human rights concerns have blinded them to the greater importance of human life in the event of an emergency.  Clearly exasperated by those who claim the human right “not to wear a mask” (as well as by their opponents who refuse to recognize that they indeed have this “right” even if exercising it in the moment is inappropriate), Qin offers a long disquisition on the confusion that occurs when we conflate rights with values. 
 
A right is the ability to do, or not to do, a certain thing, and hence equivalent to a freedom.  Such rights are not absolute (you cannot scream “fire” in a crowded theater because you have freedom or speech), nor is the exercise of a right always a good thing (I have the right to tell my boss exactly what I think of him, or to pick my nose on a first date).  The right to bear arms is treated as God-given and absolute in the United States, but not even the NRA defends the right to bear nuclear arms.  Some rights—such as the right to smoke cigarettes or market opioids—have serious consequences for public health.  Some rights—such as the right to whistle on a crowded bus—are simply stupid (and not easily taken away). 
 
If we stop and think about it, it is immediately obvious that “give me liberty or give me death,” however inspiring, in no way describes how we live our daily lives (we wait in line, we take turns), to say nothing of the calculations necessary in times of emergency.  Qin Hui has spent much of his life writing about the fundamental importance of human rights, and it clearly pains him to say to the West that “rights discourse has gotten out of hand.”  But he says it, and without attacking “political correctness,” as are many of his fellow liberals in China (for examples, see here and here).  Rights, Qin insists, are one element of community and political life, and should not absolutized or decontextualized.
 
Next, Qin tackles the related question of dictatorship, reminding Westerners that historically, the first dictators were Roman military figures who received a special and temporary mandate in times of war, when democracy was suspended.  In other words, this institution is part of the West’s heritage, even if in modern times it has been associated with the scourge of communism and thus seen as the antithesis of democracy, instead of a temporary interruption (Qin notes for good measure that Lenin’s—and China’s— “democratic dictatorship” makes no sense in historical or logical terms).  Qin is clearly aware that democracy has indeed been “interrupted” during wartime more than once in modern history, but is frustrated by the hesitation of Western democratic leaders to use the powers at their disposal to fight a different sort of “war.”  (Qin being Qin, we also have several paragraphs on the differences between waging war against a declared enemy and fighting a non-human virus).
 
Qin also cites the example of the Titanic where everyone followed the captain and rallied around the principle of “women and children first,” defending the weak and vulnerable even at the cost of their own lives.  Clearly, “rights discourse” gave way to something else in this case of emergency.
 
And there is much, much more to the essay:  the rise and fall of serfdom after the Black Death; revelations concerning little-known pandemics that occurred in the People’s Republic; the invention of the practice of quarantine in medieval Venice; the history of leprosy; the Siracusa principles, established in 1984, which attempt to establish how to deal with human rights under states of emergency.  The text is long and fascinating if at times a bit obscure, in part because Qin often returns to arguments developed in other contexts without informing the reader, in part perhaps because he does not want to be too clear in certain criticisms addressed to China’s leader.  But to my mind, the best way to view the length and difficulty of the text is it to see it as a reflection of the difficulty of the question Qin is trying to answer.  How do we save democracy when one part of the organism—rights discourse—has metastasized out of control, endangering the survival of the organism itself?

Qin's text is very long.  For those who prefer to read it as a book, I am pleased to announced that the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press has just published a translation.  You can order here.
 
Favorite quotes
      
“The facts of the epidemic in both China and the West show that it is not appropriate to shut down the whistle-blowers, but this is not adequate in and of itself.  The Western experience in the West has shown that not shutting down whistle blower does not cause panic, which means that it unreasonable for China to use the prevention of panic as a reason for doing so. But the absence of panic does not in itself prevent epidemics. Suppressing the whistle-blowers indeed spread the coronavirus, but when that spread is a fait accompli, it doesn't really matter what you do with whistle-blowers, it matters whether you can effectively lock down a city.”
 
“But what is sobering and frustrating is that, when a serious epidemic occurs, the soft-heartedness of democracies towards their citizens is not helpful in fighting the epidemic, while China's ‘ruthlessness,’ the harsh quarantines and tracking, has proven to be effective.  In fact, this is not difficult to understand.  Logically speaking, there are only three ways for humans to deal with virulent infectious diseases: if you are already infected or are inevitably are going to be infected, you have to use antibiotics or other means to destroy the germs in your body, which is curing the disease; if you cannot eliminate the disease, you have to rely on a vaccine, so as to avoid infection even if you come in contact with the pathogens, which is preventing the disease; and if you do not have a vaccine, then cutting off the spread of the pathogens is the only way forward.”
 
“The fierce criticism of the early days of China's ‘Wuhan lockdown’ has almost disappeared now that the effects have become clear. Knowing what we know now, if we could turn back the clock, I think European and American governments would have chosen to copy China's ‘lesson’ at the beginning of the epidemic (of course, this in fact would have meant reviewing the ‘lesson’ from their own medieval experience).  Whether the democratic system would allow them to do so is another question. But today, as the second wave of the coronavirus hits already devastated economies, the dilemma of choosing between ‘dying from the virus’ (where continued laxism worsens the still spreading disease) and ‘death by starvation’ (where renewed control leads to the collapse of an already weakened economy) is all the more painful.

This raises an acute question:  in what kind of emergency can human rights be ‘limited’ or ‘derogated from’ and to what extent, and can these limitations or derogations be imposed ‘efficiently’ enough to be effective? Must democracies be so incompetent in the face of an emergency? ‘Live free or die” is certainly timeless and of universal value as a slogan for freedom, and as a choice for some individuals can be admirable. But for human society, survival is more important than freedom (especially high levels of freedom, such as the freedom of getting together to have fun during an epidemic), and jeopardizing public safety for one's own freedom is contrary to universal values (not just ‘Asian values’). Of course, the current coronavirus epidemic may not be the most serious challenge we will face; after all, the death rate is not very high. But what if the death rate had been like that of the Black Death, and there were still no antibiotics or vaccines available?

It is also possible to imagine an even more extreme scenario: what if the ‘conspiracy theories,’ which are now commonplace in both China and the West, were to prove true in the future: democracies and totalitarian states would unfortunately really be engaged in a ‘virus war’ against each other, with each viciously attacking the other with ‘contagions.’ Don’t tell me that it's technically or humanly impossible, and making logical deductions on the basis of the current pandemic, what are the odds of democracy surviving? Are they greater than for totalitarianism? Obviously, if we support democracy, not necessarily seeking to develop it further, but supporting it simply in terms of the sustainability of its achievements so far, we cannot avoid this serious question: can the survival of the democratic system depend solely on the goodwill of others, including its enemy?”
 
Translation
 
Part I:  What if “Human Rights” Means “No Humans Left”?[2]
 
The great coronavirus pandemic that broke out last winter has finally calmed down in China, after the bungling occasioned by the silencing of the whistle-blowers, the iron hand of the lockdown, certain changes in the virus itself, and the painful price paid by the Chinese people, particularly the Chinese people of Wuhan—although the epidemic could of course return.  But beginning in March, the disaster spread abroad, and at present there is no end in sight. 
 
Discussions of the changes the pandemic will bring to China and the world, together with stories from the past about how “plagues changed history,” are a hot topic everywhere.  Given the recent world situation, most of the discussion has followed the rubric of the rise and fall of great powers, with everyone happily talking about who is at risk in the post-pandemic world, and who stands to gain, and what will the new international order be, and whether there will be a new “number one.”  Which leads to discussion of the “civilizational change” linked to the influence of economic culture tied to these historical musings.  We await the pundits' pronouncements.
 
My goal in this essay is to discuss one central theme:  the impact of the pandemic on institutions.  From the point of view of the history of mankind, the rise and fall of the great powers is a blip on the radar screen; the fate of institutions is much more important to our common destiny. Over the past century and a half, the world's most powerful nation has changed from the United Kingdom to the United States, which was really no big deal. As the Qing-period Chinese novel Unofficial History of the Scholars puts it, “the river flows to the east for thirty years, and then to the west for thirty years,” it is simply a question of changes in the wind and the water. If the change had been from Britain to Nazi Germany, then it would have been dangerous, because in that case it would not have been a simple question of who is number one and who is number two, but instead a question of civilization and barbarism for the whole human race.
 
From the perspective of history, certain plagues have brought about institutional changes, but, as I have stressed many times before, while the standard of human progress may be universal, specific historical processes are inherently uncertain. The “cause" of a plague and the “outcome” it delivers may be different, or even the opposite, depending on certain conditions. The famous example of the Black Death and the rise and fall of serfdom in the late Middle Ages is one example.
 
Globalization and the Rise and Fall of Serfdom after the Black Death
 
In Western Europe, one of the most significant consequences of the Black Death was that it caused or at least hastened the disappearance of serfdom. Prior to the plague, serfdom in Western Europe was already showing signs of decline. After the plague, population declined, land was abundant, and labor was in short supply. This, coupled with the fact that death and depopulation were more severe in the cities than in the countryside, due to the high population density and contagion rate of the epidemic, plus the fact that there were more urban employment opportunities during the recovery period, led peasants to migrate to the cities.

Under these circumstances, feudal lords competed for labor and were forced to offer better terms to peasants, reducing feudal obligations, improving their legal status and income, removing physical constraints, and encouraging farmers in their territories to start families and increase the population. Some lords even changed their economic strategy, moving from labor-intensive agriculture to capital-intensive sheep farming, abandoning serfdom and contracting out land to tenants. As a result, serfdom died away in Western Europe, especially in England. And free peasants, whether they were initially tenant farmers or hired laborers, benefited from rising wages due to the scarcity of land and falling land rents. The freeing of the serfs and the increase in the incomes of free farmers led to the flourishing of family farms, the so-called late medieval "agricultural revolution" in Western Europe, and to a boom in handicrafts, the commodity economy, and cities, as well as the rise of civil society.
 
Of course, it was not necessarily smooth sailing for Western Europe from that point forward.  There were still bumps in the road between the era of the Black Death and the pre-modernization period, and no one would “attribute” modernization entirely to the terrible plague. However, most scholars today who look at history from the perspective of the longue durée acknowledge that the changes that occurred in Western Europe after the Black Death, especially the elimination of serfdom, played a huge role in the modernization of the region, which was the first to emerge from the Middle Ages.
 
We know that the unprecedented bubonic plague entered Europe from the Middle East and then swept across almost all of Europe from south-west to north-east, skipping a few "islands," such as south-eastern Poland and Milan, Italy. But in the Middle East, the source of the infection of Western and Southern Europe, and in Eastern Europe, which was infected by Southwestern Europe, the social changes following the Black Death were the exact opposite of those in Western Europe:  serfdom in the Middle East remained intact, while in Eastern Europe, where serfdom had not previously existed, the practice became increasingly widespread, even replacing free small farmers in the centuries following the Black Death, in what was called "late-developing serfdom" or the “second edition of serfdom” in Eastern Europe. In the context of Europe as a whole, It is also known as the "second serfdom" (Western European serfdom being the first).
 
What is interesting is that this strengthening of serfdom in Eastern Europe and the Middle East has been attributed to the same factors that led to the disappearance of serfdom in Western Europe:   the scarcity of people and the abundance of land in the aftermath of the plague that created a labor shortage.  E. D. Domar (1914-1997), the prominent Russian-American economic historian, argued that because of the scarcity of labor, feudal masters, fearing that the peasants would flee, bound them more tightly to the land, turning free peasants into serfs. Under conditions of labor surplus, there are always many fish in the sea, and there is no need to bind the peasants to the land.[3]  This is known as the Domar Theory of the relationship between abundant land, population scarcity, and feudalism. This theory seems to be confirmed by the fact that in China, in the chaos following the fall of the Han dynasty, the population declined drastically, and forms of serfdom such as buqu and sishu[4] were prevalent.
 
Why did the Black Death, which led to depopulation in both regions, cause the demise of serfdom in Western Europe and the rise of serfdom in Eastern Europe and the Middle East?  From a purely economic perspective, people holding things in short supply should be in a better bargaining position than people holding things that are in surplus. Thus it was logical that labor scarcity should have favored the worker. But this only works under conditions of competition.  In Western Europe, the feudal lords competed for scarce manpower by offering advantages to the peasants in the form of  lower rents, higher wages, freedom, and so on.

But as a young scholar at Stanford recently pointed out, the feudal lords of the Middle East and Eastern Europe were able to avoid such competition,  because the period following the Black Death saw the rise of centralized, authoritarian empires: the Turkish Ottoman Empire and the Russian Tsarist Empire.  These empires obviated the need for competition among the nobility to recruit serfs, because the monarchy could simply allocate serfs to the nobles and help them capture runaways, so the feudal masters did not have to "sweet-talk" the peasants in order to hire them.  Instead, sweet-talking the emperor was a better way for feudal lords receive even more serfs, and their “allocation” required that their status be changed from peasant to serf, for which the emperor’s power was useful.  Given these conditions, it would have been a wonder if serfdom had not flourished.
 
At the time he constructed his theory, Domar did not consider these political factors. However, he did mention another economic factor, in addition to the scarcity of labor, which stimulated the development of serfdom in Eastern Europe: after the demise of serfdom in Western Europe, a market economy and civil society began to emerge, and economic development and consumption levels surged ahead of those of Eastern Europe. The demand in Western Europe for agricultural products, whether as direct consumer goods or as industrial raw materials, increased greatly as a result, leading to the emergence of a thriving export-oriented agriculture in land-rich, sparsely populated Eastern Europe. In this context, small, self-sufficient, free farmers were indeed inferior to feudal estates in terms of productivity. 

Relying on its “low human rights advantage,” the Russian estate economy, which exported grain to Western Europe, had its beginnings in the 16th century and reached its peak in the 18th century with the industrial revolution in Western Europe. The export capacity of the feudal estates made the Russian economy the model high surplus economy among the major powers of the time, and the Russian Empire, which had absorbed large agricultural areas such as Poland and Ukraine, became the "breadbasket of Europe" and indeed one of the breadbaskets of the world, just as China has become the “factory of the world” over the past few decades. Western Europe, advanced and free, was running a trade deficit and exporting capital to the late-developing but increasingly feudal Russian empire, which might be seen as one of the first signs of globalization and its contradictions.
 
Political Institutions and Epidemiology
 
Today's coronavirus is certainly not the same thing as the medieval Black Death. But in terms of their impact on mankind’s institutions, we can identity parallels between the two. 
 
The first period of the epidemic played out mainly in China, and the second period moved abroad, especially to Europe and the United States. Both halves have produced a certain number of “maxims.”  Regarding China, we have:
 
 “They started by shutting down the whistle-blowers, which led to locking down the city.”
 
"Without the shameless 404 (i.e., the Internet code for ‘page not found’), there would be no lamentations on April 4 (the date on which Wuhan's collective Qingming funeral was held)."[5]
 
"They shut down a few whistles and the mourning flutes blew sadly throughout the country (another reference to Qingming)".
 
"First they hid little things that became large things, and then they concentrated their forces to take care of the big things."
 
And finally, "The system first shat on the world, then showed the world how good it was at wiping its ass."
 
The maxims about Europe and America were even funnier:
 
 “Quarantine, no human rights, no quarantine, no humans left.”[6]
 
Then there’s the Chinese-English pun:  “Quarantine, I see you, no quarantine, ICU!”
 
And this one comments on both China and the West:  “China's way of fighting the pandemic relied on two things: the first is that the people are really obedient, and the second is that they are really afraid of dying; the outbreak of the pandemic in Europe and the United States also relied on two things: the first is that the people are really disobedient, and the second is that they are really not afraid of dying.”
 
Whether or not they are accurate, these maxims touch on institutional questions that are worth thinking about. The facts of the epidemic in both China and the West show that it is not appropriate to shut down the whistle-blowers, but also that this is not adequate in and of itself.  The Western experience illustrates that not shutting down whistle blowers does not cause panic, which means that it was unreasonable for China to use the prevention of panic as a reason for doing so. But the absence of panic does not in itself prevent epidemics. Suppressing the whistle-blowers indeed spread the coronavirus in China, but when that spread is a fait accompli, it doesn't really matter what you do with whistle-blowers, it matters whether you can effectively lock down a city.
 
Of course, some commentators are also avoiding institutional issues, in two typical ways.  One is through conspiracy theories, which blame the whole thing either on China’s plotting to bring down the United States or the United States’ plotting to bring down China, i.e., the old story of "the gang leader fighting with his rival." The other is the "culture theory," which says that Chinese culture is able to accept mask-wearing and isolation, while Westerners experience “cultural resistance" to mask-wearing masks and isolation. There are two possible motives behind this latter argument: some Chinese are bursting with "cultural confidence"[7] and believe that Chinese culture is superior in all ways to Western culture. Others are trying to avoid the awkward dilemma posed by the way in which the existing democratic institutions in the West have dealt with the pandemic, and prefer instead to talk about "culture."
 
In fact, it is true that in both China and in the West, the average person rarely likes to wear a mask under normal conditions, and it is also true that people's perceptions differ when faced with a serious threat. Yet there are only two differences that count: first, how much institutional pressure is exerted to make the wearing of masks compulsory? Obviously China exerted more pressure. Second, even if you are willing to wear a mask, can you get one? In fact, during the first period of the pandemic, which occurred in China, China consumed most of the world's masks, and many European and American cities had none to sell, so that even if many people were willing to wear a mask, there was none to wear.  Preventing panic buying in times of scarcity and giving priority to the infected and to health care workers instead of pressuring the general public makes sense, but this has nothing to do with the “culture of refusing to wear a mask.”  In fact, as I argue below, the wearing of masks and face covering (of course in their primitive form) to prevent infection, like the dual quarantine system, may well have been pioneered by Westerners, as far as we can see.
 
So how have the two systems fared in pandemic?
 
It should be said that China’s centralized system is a double-edged sword, capable of doing great good things and great bad things.  Solely in terms of infectious diseases, during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong “concentrated power to do great things,” at a moment when the public health system was challenged by the “movements” of the Cultural Revolution, Mao also encouraged students to travel throughout the country and make revolution.  This led to an unprecedented outbreak of contagious meningitis which killed 168,000 people, mainly teenagers, in late 1966 and early 1967, in an unprecedented meningococcal epidemic.  At the time, Shaoshan, Jinggangshan and other "sacred sites of the revolution" were full of traveling students who died during the outbreak, which led to Red Guards being buried in mass graves.  Some affected families became opponents of the Cultural Revolution, and there were even cases of execution.
 
According to my limited research, this catastrophe, which is rarely mentioned because of the suppression of information, qualifies as the most deadly bacterial epidemic in the world after World War II. Bacterial infectious diseases like the plague, typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, and leprosy were in the past the deadliest types of diseases, but in the 20th century mankind has made greater progress against bacteria than against other pathogens such as viruses and protozoa, and the controllability of bacterial infectious diseases has greatly improved in the second half of the 20th century. During this period, with the exception of tuberculosis, which is a chronic disease that kills a certain number of people every year with no obvious outbreaks, I have not found any single instance of a bacterial infectious disease epidemic that killed more people than the nearly 170,000 deaths recorded in the Chinese epidemic of the winter of 1966-67.
 
However, the disaster has received little attention in international statistics on the subject. As a typical example, Wikipedia lists hundreds of global and local outbreaks in the category of infectious diseases (epidemics), which includes 59 instances over the course of the twentieth century, including the current coronavirus, counting even the plague in India, which killed 56 people in 1994, and a typhoid outbreak in Croydon, England which killed 43 people in 1937.  For cases of bacterial meningitis, Wikipedia notes an outbreak in West Africa, which killed 931 people in 2009-2010, but there is no mention of the unprecedented meningitis epidemic the Cultural Revolution in China. In addition to its epidemiology page, there are related pages devoted to meningitis, meningococcus, etc., but none of the 21 entries on these pages mentions the Chinese case, although there is a separate entry for the meningitis outbreak in Ghana that killed 32 people in 2016. Outside of praising China for practicing "collaborative medicine," the international ignorance of the health situation in China during this period of the "Iron Curtain" is truly astonishing.
 
In addition to meningitis, but again because the “concentrated strength of the Cultural Revolution to do great things” posed a challenge to disease prevention, south China also had the most serious outbreak of malaria since 1949. When the Chinese researcher Tu Youyou (b. 1930) received the Nobel Prize for purifying artemisinin, the media said she was "helping Vietnam in its fight against the United States" by developing anti-malarial drugs for Vietnam, but in fact it had nothing to do with Vietnam and instead with the malaria outbreak in South China. 

I myself experienced the epidemic and contracted malaria, and also participated in the six-year-long "anti-malaria war." In Tianlin County, Guangxi Province, where I was sent down during the Cultural Revolution, there were 1,480 malaria cases per year on average in the 17 years prior the Cultural Revolution, but the chaos of the period led to a malaria epidemic in 1969, with the number of cases soaring to 15,148 the following year, more than ten times that the previous 17-year average, and 14 % of the population of this county, with a population of only 110,000, suffered from the disease. Of course, the subsequent "great war against malaria" also demonstrated the advantages of the Chinese "national system," but it was 1983—the beginning of the Reform and Opening period—before the incidence rate was brought back to the pre-Cultural Revolution level.
 
In the current coronavirus epidemic, the mistakes made by the Chinese system in the early days were also serious, and go far beyond "admonishing" a few "whistle blowers," nor can they be explained away as due to a "lack of awareness of a new disease" or as necessary "to prevent panic." Leaving aside the controversial "Fang Fang Diaries"[8] and other people disliked by the authorities, Professor Hua Sheng (b. 1953) is clearly a prominent academic, close to the government, whose series of studies in the early days of the coronavirus epidemic have been accused by some of having been a case of “lending a hand” to China’s top authorities who were scrambling to save face, a claim that the authorities have hardly bothered to refute.  A netizen on the popular Chinese discussion site Zhihu commented: "Many voices have been suppressed, but one person is speaking out very 'boldly,’ which is absurd in itself." This represents the thoughts of many of those skeptical of Dr. Hua Sheng. 
 
But Hua Sheng’s accusations give one pause: "Wuhan City's series of deliberately designed traps…did not hesitate to use all kinds of serious violations of law and discipline…to cover up the truth, suppress and crack down on doctors and insiders who told the truth…Having amassed mighty powers, they ignore Party discipline and the laws of the country, ignore the people’s health and livelihood, believing that the punishing people is normal and that running roughshod over them is the same as competence.  As long as they can maintain their glamorous appearance and powerful position, once they have grasped power, they will issue commands left and right, stopping at nothing to deceive their superiors and hiding things from the people, with absolutely no legal and moral bottom line.”

As commentators said, these words "cut to the quick," and their revelations about high officials (though only in Hubei and Wuhan) are more revealing than what pro-government Internet trolls called the "traitorous remarks" of Fang Fang’s diaries.  In fact, Fang Fang only wrote about the misery of the people at the bottom, and did not openly take stabs at high officials. As has already been pointed out on the internet, if what Hua Sheng is true, then those high officials should not simply be removed from their posts but imprisoned as criminals or even executed for evasion of responsibility.  And whether or not Wuhan officials are completely responsible for the matter, the responsibility is extremely heavy.[9] 
 
Think about it.  Is this kind of crime imaginable in a democratic country? The US fight against the pandemic has been a disaster, and Trump has taken a drubbing in public opinion.  But what are they accusing him of?  Simply that he only cares about his reelection, that his measures against the pandemic are too sloppy and lax, too Zen 佛系, and that his idea to get back to work while the pandemic is still in course is too risky.  As for his reelection, we all know that in countries like the US, this requires doing your utmost to please the largest number of voters, which is synonymous with following “popular opinion.”  Can a lax attempt to fight the pandemic truly please the people?  If not, what does this do to the argument that Trump is only thinking about his reelection? If it does please them, it can only mean the American people have themselves taken the road to ruin. In that case, those who oppose democracy can indeed say that the people are ignorant and unworthy to rule, and that His Majesty should make up his own precious mind without bothering about the voters. But this is not a criticism of Trump, and instead a criticism of democracy.  The anti-Trump people are mostly Democrats; is this what they are saying?
 
I personally detest Trump, and give him very poor marks for many of much of what he does, including his policies to fight the pandemic.  However, it seems that no one in the United States will accuse Trump of "a series of deliberately designed traps," of "covering up the truth, suppressing and cracking down on doctors and insiders who told the truth," and "having grasped power, stopping at nothing to deceive their superiors and hiding things from the people."  Data on the pandemic in the United States is independently collected, compiled, and published by a fully autonomous, private, purely academic institution—Johns Hopkins University.  Neither Trump, nor the government, nor the Congress can interfere, so can he really “cover up the truth?” 
 
It is well known that Trump hates the American media, but his spats with the media are at worst unseemly.  What publication has he shut down, what editor has he had fired?  What government office in the United States can "admonish" doctors and "suppress and crack down on those who tell the truth"? Trump has had disagreements with the CDC and has shared his views with the public on television. It's true that it is improper for a president to make false statements on such professional issues, but does he have CDC and public health agencies in the palm of his hand in the way that Hua Sheng described the Wuhan officials’ “series of deliberately designed traps?” Trump is crude, impulsive, with many scandals that are said to be pending investigation, and in my view, as a politician, he does not measure up. But even if the portrait of someone "having grasped power, stopping at nothing to deceive their superiors and hiding things from the people," is one that might appeal to him, in the American system it is not available to him.
 
Trump is certainly not blameless for the pandemic mess in the U.S., but the problem is really more due to of the weakness of conventional democracy in the face of things such as pandemics, and is not simply a matter of a "bad president." This is something we democracy advocates must seriously face up to.
 
Democracy indeed has Weak Spots: Behind the Reversal of the Pandemic Drama
 
In the opening innings of the coronavirus epidemic, China suffered heavy losses, and the harsh closure of the city plunged Wuhan into misery for a time. In addition to the foreseeable costs, other events, such as the Red Cross’s decision to give priority to cadres in the allocation of masks, the closure of buildings and households in such way that there was no exit, resulting in non-epidemic deaths or collateral deaths that should not have occurred, also made the disaster worse for the afflicted area.
 
But later on, as the coronavirus became an unstoppable global pandemic, China's success was also unquestionable. By mid-May, the first wave of the epidemic in China had basically ended, while the epidemic in Europe and the U.S. was spreading like wildfire.  After May, China experienced two successive crises, a Russian-imported case and a local epidemic in Xinfadi, in Beijing, but they were quickly brought under control by imposing strict controls. Yet in the United States and some European countries, when the epidemic seemed to weaken and work resumed, there was a resurgence in mid-June, which was clearly more serious than the mild outbreak Beijing suffered. Although China raised the number of reported deaths in Wuhan by exactly 50% in April, triggering criticism of "hidden reporting," still, compared with Europe and the United States, both the number of confirmed cases and the number deaths told very different stories, and the gap continued to grow over the next two months.
 
As of 27 June, China's official cumulative total was 85,151 confirmed cases and 4,648 deaths, while outside of China, the cumulative total was 4,019,768 confirmed cases and 489,423 deaths. The percentage of Chinese coronavirus deaths among all such deaths in the world had fallen from more than 90 per cent in February to less than 1 per cent by the end of June, and even if we take into account differences in statistical measures and data inaccuracies, or even if we increased China’s numbers several times for a variety of reasons, a large difference will remain. Japan and South Korea seem to have been more successful than Europe and the United States in fighting the epidemic, but the number of confirmed cases and deaths per population are still higher than that of China. So far, the only Asian countries where the number of coronavirus confirmed cases and deaths is lower than that of mainland China, not only in absolute terms but also in terms of average population size, are Viet Nam and Thailand, as well as some small underdeveloped countries and poor landlocked countries where serious statistics are hard to come by and population mobility is very low.
 
The overwhelming majority of the developed democracies have suffered heavy losses, even if they had to “come from behind.” The epidemic in Japan and South Korea came later than in China and soon became worse (on a per capita basis); the epidemic in Western Europe came later than in Japan and South Korea and soon became worse; the epidemic in the United States came later still than in Western Europe and soon became worse; the cumulative number of confirmed cases in the United States reached 2.55 million on June 27, with 127,000 deaths. In per capita terms, this is more than in most Western European countries. The U.S. population is 23% of China's, yet the cumulative number of coronavirus deaths is 27 times higher than China's, and even almost 50% higher than China's cumulative number of confirmed cases. Even insisting that China is “hiding information” will not explain away a contrast this great. Of course, there are also claims that as the virus mutates, the tendency is for it to become more infectious and less virulent, possibly culminating in an intractable but low-mortality "flu"-type epidemic. This may explain the "coming from behind" phenomenon described above.

This does not deny that the democracies were less effective than China in the second part of the epidemic, but it does call into question the claim that "East Asian cultures" were more effective in fighting the epidemic: Japan and South Korea suffered less than the United States, probably because they contracted the epidemic early, when the infectious power of the virus was relatively low. But their epidemic was worse than China's, which can only be attributed to the "low human rights advantage" of the Chinese system.
 
Among places generally recognized to have a democratic system, it would seem that only Taiwan, with a cumulative total of 447 confirmed cases and 7 deaths so far (at the end of June), achieved results far lower than mainland China in terms of both total and average population. This is truly miraculous and worthy of further study, but one of the factors may also be the serious deterioration of relations between Taiwan’s current DPP government and the mainland, where mainland sanctions have led to a significant contraction of cross-strait contacts. If an epidemic like today's had occurred when the policies of the "Three Direct Links" and "free travel" were in full bloom some years ago, one wonders whether Taiwan would have been able to pull off today’s miracle. Perhaps the mainland's sanctions turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
 
Counter-measures employed in democratic countries against the pandemic vary between two poles.  At one extreme we find “laid-back” cases like Japan and Sweden, which rely more on conscious public prevention and control and herd immunity (natural immunity), and at the other extreme we have the examples of Italy and Spain, which rely more on official measures such compulsory quarantine (some call these measures “iron-fisted”).  Many countries have tried both, with varying degrees of control. The United Kingdom, for example, began by declaring that it would stay away from compulsory measures, and then moved to tougher controls when the epidemic grew so fast that even the Prime Minister was infected. India did the same thing in reverse, starting out with relatively strong controls, then relaxing them to allow for resumption of work due to economic pressures.

The United States, on the other hand, has been alternately laid-back, and has imposed and diminished controls, and policies vary considerably from state to state in a federal system. In general, however, democratic countries generally do not accept being highly regulated, and if a more relaxed posture is at all possible they try to regulate as little as possible. Even when they do, they are unlikely to be as forceful as China.
 
It has been said on the Internet that northern Italy has had "harsher" lockdowns than China during the epidemic. It is true that the parliaments of democracies may agree to draconian closure laws, but China did not stop with locking down cities.  At the beginning of the epidemic, after some Chinese officials made the big mistake of "stopping at nothing to deceive their superiors and hide things from the people " and blocking information, they then jumped to the other extreme by “stopping at nothing” and forcibly locking down the city. In comparison with later lockdowns in the United States and Europe, China in fact not only locked down cities, but also locked down streets, villages, districts, apartment buildings, residential units, and even individual houses.  During Xi Jinping’s inspection of Wuhan in mid-March, two police officers were stationed on the balcony of each house he passed by to prevent family members from approaching. What democratic country can do this?
 
China's attitude towards its own expatriates and international students abroad is also unimaginable to democratic countries. At the beginning of the outbreak in China, when China locked down Wuhan and some foreign countries closed their doors to China, both China and the WHO protested this unfriendly approach. Then the epidemic reversed itself and China itself closed its doors to foreign countries even more tightly. Actually this is all normal. What country isn't afraid of an epidemic coming in? But other countries simply denied entry to foreigners, and not only recognized the right of their own citizens abroad to return, but also did what they could to help, even if they had to quarantine again when they returned home.  Even at the peak of the epidemic in China, when the West was calm and had closed its doors to China, they were still actively trying to bring back their own citizens who wished to return home from China. But China doesn't play that game, and when it closes its doors to the outside world, it also locks out Chinese abroad. The ambassadors’ condemnation of those who wishing to return was harsh, and the penalties for violating the law and slipping back into the country merciless. This is something that even those countries whose laws on locking down cities are said to be "stricter than China's" cannot do.
 
Of course, China's draconian controls rely not only on police and the omnipresent state "organization," but also, in unprecedented ways, on high technology. In its fight against the epidemic, China is also using mobile phones to exercise "big data" control, tracking people in an extremely invasive way. Particularly in May and June during the "small outbreaks" in Heilongjiang and Xinfadi, some places upgraded residents’ ordinary passes to a tracking health code on their smartphones, and then to nucleic acid testing with big data and full trip monitoring. The tracking capability is very powerful, and of course also reflects China's high-tech development in recent years. But these technologies did not originate in China, and the West has them too, but their use is constrained by privacy protections.

Yao Yang, director of the National Development Institute at Peking University, pointed out last year that "China's relatively weak protection of personal privacy provides an advantage to China's AI technology development in some respects. It is nonetheless important for technology companies to be vigilant and prevent the emergence of a Leviathan-style state." This “low-privacy advantage” is part of the "low-human-rights advantage" that I've referred to many times in recent years, and it's also being put to good use in the fight against the epidemic.
 
But what is sobering and frustrating is that, when a serious epidemic occurs, the soft-heartedness of democracies towards their citizens is not helpful in fighting the epidemic, while China's "ruthlessness," the harsh quarantines and tracking, has proven to be effective.
 
In fact, this is not difficult to understand.  Logically speaking, there are only three ways for humans to deal with virulent infectious diseases: if you are already infected or are inevitably are going to be infected, you have to use antibiotics or other means to destroy the germs in your body, which is curing the disease; if you cannot eliminate the disease, you have to rely on a vaccine, so as to avoid infection even if you come in contact with the pathogens, which is preventing the disease; and if you do not have a vaccine, then cutting off the spread of the pathogens is the only way forward.
 
Antibiotics have been invented for most pathogenic bacteria, and vaccines have been invented for most germs and some viruses. But antibiotics are usually ineffective against viruses, and a vaccine against the coronavirus has not yet been invented, so isolation is all we have.
 
But isolation entails the temporary restriction and elimination of some human rights, which, to put it bluntly, is tantamount to being imprisoned for no crime, in the public interest. So in simple terms of the ability to enforce isolation, low human rights countries do have an advantage, while high human rights countries have a disadvantage.  This is what the logic dictates, and there’s no way around it.  Today's developed democracies are racking their brains to fight the epidemic, trying both “Zen” measures as well as iron-fisted control.  Caught between the “left” (survival) and the “right” (human rights), between “dying from the pandemic” (rejecting isolation means the spread of the disease) and “dying of hunger” (long-term isolation means economic collapse), pure ideological differences no longer matter.  Social Democratic Sweden and Trump, the socialism-hating American president, both went “Zen,” while the high welfare countries of southern Europe and libertarian Switzerland chose “iron-handed” lockdowns.  Yet as long as their practices remain democratic, they cannot be as “iron-fisted” as China, and while we cannot say that the two ways of fighting the pandemic completely failed, it is nonetheless true that, as of today, they pale in comparison to China’s achievements.
 
In fact, shortly after Wuhan was locked down, I made a very "politically incorrect" but absolutely logical deduction: if a system could turn an infected area into an Auschwitz and send all the sick into the oven, then any infectious disease could be eliminated within its incubation period! Of course, in reality, no one would be so heartless. But is it not true that the closer you are to such a system, the more "superiority in fighting epidemics" you have? Is there an optimal solution to this problem under the conditions that preserve the democratic system? That, I am afraid, is a thought that cannot be avoided in the wake of the terrible price paid by people around the world during this epidemic.
 
The Lesser of Two Evils: A "Medieval Approach" to Combating the Epidemic?

​In the past, I have used the concept of "low human rights advantage" to explain the phenomenon of certain low human rights countries taking advantage of the markets, investments, and innovations of high human rights countries, together with their own low costs, to achieve faster economic growth in the context of economic integration. Since I do not believe that economic growth justifies low human rights, I put "low human rights advantage" in quotation marks. However, in the fight against epidemics, where human lives are at stake, the low respect for human rights required for mandatory isolation may be an advantage that does not require such a qualification.
 
When Wuhan was first locked down, the West, still largely untouched by the virus, was shocked by the strength of China's forced quarantine. They said that China was adopting "medieval methods" to fight the epidemic. But China's later success largely quieted such accusations.
 
However, the "medieval" argument is not unfounded. From the perspective of values, it may be true that compulsory isolation temporarily diminishes certain human rights in ways that are necessary, but from a factual perspective, it is also true that compulsory isolation, especially the dual isolation system now widely used in China, traces its origins to Western medieval practices, helped along in this instance by modern technology. And it should be said that, in the absence of vaccines and effective antibiotics, "medieval means" are more important than modern science and technology in stopping the spread of the epidemic. This is why Western developed countries have been more passive than China in the face of this spread, despite their higher level of modern science and technology.
 
As a result, Chinese public opinion is quite pleased with itself, and a popular saying has it that it is now time for the West to learn a “lesson” from China.  Given that existing democratic institutions are not as effective as institutions with a low human rights advantage in combating the existing pandemic, is this true?  Should the West “copy” China?
 
Of course not.
 
As a matter of fact, it’s not as if "high human rights" have been around forever, in the West or China. Not only were there periods in Western history when human rights were very low, but anti-epidemic measures based on low human rights had already been developed as well, many “lessons” of which, strictly speaking, have been handed down to the present day. It's just that Westerners are now very reluctant to copy these medieval lessons. China, however, has been very successful. And as it turns out, until we have a better method, these medieval lessons represent the lesser of two evils and might be worth revisiting. It is true that modern man is sometimes too conceited, not only in his arrogance towards "nature," as many have pointed out, but also towards the "old society." China has done a good job of reviewing these lessons, and the West should reflect on this. But China really has nothing to brag about.
 
China's success in fighting the epidemic has been technically based on two main factors: first, the mandatory wearing of masks, and second, mandatory physical isolation, especially the mandatory parallel practice of medical isolation and quarantine. The other things, such as big data tracking, nucleic acid testing, etc., either provide the conditions making the coercive policies possible, or require the coercive policies to function themselves.  The West has these things—indeed they came from the West—but they are not mandatory there, which is why that have not been as useful as in China. 
 
And both, according to current historical evidence, should be said to have originated in the Western Middle Ages.
 
Research into the history of masks reveals that the first person to wear a mask to ward off an epidemic was a "Dr. Schnabel," who appeared in Paris in 1619 and whose image can be seen in a 1656 painting ("The Roman Plague Doctor") by Paul Fürst. This is considered to be a typical image of the physician during the Black Death. At the time, the beak-shaped mask's "beak" part was also filled with aromatic drugs believed to ward off the plague, and is thought to be a distant ancestor of the modern practice of including layers of sterilizing substances in masks. By 1858, masks that closely resembled modern masks were already appearing in American textbooks.  In 1910, there was an outbreak of plague in northeast China, and Wu Liande, a doctor from Cambridge University, originally an ethnic Chinese from the British colony of Malaya, was hired by the Qing government to manage the campaign against the epidemic.  In so doing he made improvements to medical masks, adding layers of disinfectant cotton to improve its protectiveness, and it was known at the time as “Dr. Wu’s mask.”  This marked the first wide-scale use of masks in China to fight an epidemic.
 
At the time, the international medical community was not yet able to distinguish clearly between glandular plague (spread by rats or fleas) and pneumonic plague (respiratory transmission), so some foreign physicians (such as Wu’s colleague, the French physician Felix Mesnil) opposed Wu’s plague masks—medieval "beak" masks were indeed later on proven to be ineffective in the prevention of the glandular plague. Some Chinese texts today describe the incident in terms of the Chinese “inventing the mask and rubbing the foreign experts’ faces in it.” In fact, although he was a second generation citizen of British Malaya, Wu Liande was hardly "Chinese," and when he came to China he spoke almost no Chinese. He did love Chinese culture and served the Chinese people for a long time, but he was ignored by China after 1949, and until the 1990s, his existence was almost unknown to the Chinese medical and microbiological community and even to the successors of the institutions he founded in China, although he was well-known in Southeast Asia. However, shortly after his death in Malaya in 1960, his English-language book History of Chinese Medicine was chosen by the mainland as a target for criticism of "pandering to foreigners," because of his knowledge of "Chinese medicine" was said to be abysmal.
 
At that time, Wu Liande and Mesnil, together with the famous Sir Robert Hart and others, were "foreign experts" employed by the Qing government, and the academic differences between them cannot be said to be “rubbing someone’s face” in anything. Although Mesnil's opinion was incorrect, he caught the plague and died in the line of duty, which means that he too deserves to be remembered by the Chinese rather than insulted. The fact that Wu Liande did not believe in "rat-flea transmission" and correctly understood that it was "droplet transmission," and insisted on wearing masks, was certainly a brilliant idea and indeed worthy of the pride of Chinese people around the world. However, the use of masks as medical protection had already emerged internationally, and the mandatory use of masks as an emergency public health measure had already been practiced in various countries. During the Spanish Flu at the end of World War I, many countries, including the United States, required the mandatory wearing of masks. Wu Liande understood that the plague in China’s Northeast was a respiratory infection and introduced and improved the mask (the built-in germicidal lining is considered to be the forerunner of modern N95), which was an outstanding contribution, but he was not the inventor of the medical mask, and that’s all there is to it.
 
All peoples seem to have discovered social isolation, or even forced isolation, early on in their history. While ancient people may have had limited knowledge, understanding neither how diseases develop nor their basic causes, they could still easily observe that one person's illness was transmitted to the whole family and that contact with a sick person led to illness. This, coupled with the fact that "low human rights" was a common phenomenon in ancient times, made it easy to enforce compulsory isolation, which is why it was practiced almost by all peoples from very early on. This was especially true of virulent diseases like the plague and visible diseases like leprosy. In the Old Testament, “Leviticus” chapters 13 and 14 contain Moses's provisions for mandatory isolation of those with infectious skin diseases (generally considered to be leprosy) for 7 to 14 days, depending on the case, with continued isolation (perhaps for life) if no cure was apparent after 14 days. Similar provisions are found in chapter 5 of the “Book of Numbers.” In fact, the chance of a 14-day recovery from leprosy under ancient conditions was slight, but Moses still allowed for the possibility of short-term quarantine, which must have been a merciful rule (whether it was effective is a different question). Later quarantines were often much more severe.
 
China’s Qin dynasty built “pestilence areas,” or leprosy quarantine spaces, within large-scale projects to punish prisoners (i.e., the equivalent of prisons or labor camps). In the “Legal Questions and Answers” section of the Shuihudi Qin bamboo texts, we find the following passage: "A is guilty of a crime punishable by being forced to build the city walls and has not yet been sentenced, but now A is suffering from leprosy. Should be relocated to a leprosy quarantine zone; others say that he should be cast into the water and drowned." In other words, prisoners suffering from leprosy were either put into isolation or executed while in isolation, which is a terrible type of “isolation.”  In the Hanshu’s “Chronicle of Emperor Ping,” we find: "people with an epidemic disease should be left in an empty residence and supplied with medicine," which most people take to refer to epidemic prevention via quarantine,” but a more human type of isolation that that practiced by the brutal Qin.  In addition, the Persian medical sage Avicenna (980-1037) also mentioned the isolation of those suffering from infectious diseases in his Canon of Medicine.
 
In the past, there was a tradition of quarantining “dirty diseases” in the ethnic minority areas of China, and in the early 1960s, there was a popular ethnic minority movie called "Moya Dai," which told the story of a "feudal tribal leader" who used quarantine to persecute people. In the Dai regions, there is a tradition of isolating "pipa ghosts," “pipa” being very close to the Thai word for "dirty disease," which is generally taken to mean leprosy. The film used the theory of class struggle in vogue at the time, and depicted the tribal leader as a landlord who labeled the Dai people who would not submit to his oppression “pipa ghosts” and arrested them on that basis.  They were only liberated with the arrival of the Chinese Communist Party. Isolation is made out to be a terrible thing in the movie.
 
In fact, because isolation is coercive, it is sometimes used as a means of political persecution by despotic rulers under authoritarian conditions, resulting in the abuse or overuse of isolation. In the Western Middle Ages, there were cases of forced isolation in which "the suspension of personal liberty provided an opportunity for the use of special laws to suppress political opposition," in the words of one scholar. During the Cold War, Soviet dissidents were "isolated" in psychiatric hospitals, and in the current epidemic, "isolation" was used as a means of "preventing" political opposition. The citizen journalists Chen Qiushi[10] and Fang Bin are also suspected of having suffered this fate in Wuhan because of having “spoken their conscience."
 
Nonetheless, in an age when antibiotics and vaccines are unavailable, forced isolation, as the lesser of two evils in terms of anti-epidemic measures, cannot be dispensed with. Although the film "Mayan Dai" makes the quarantine of "pipa ghosts" sound reprehensible, in fact, China’s "new society" has been unable to do without such measures. As late as the Cultural Revolution period, we read in memoirs of educated youth sent down to Xishuangbanna that when they joined the army, the practice remained that when they contracted leprosy there were sent off to the leper’s village, never to see their families again.  But there were also people who suffered the same fate without having contracted leprosy. When I was in a Zhuang village in the Yunnan-Guizhou border region during the Cultural Revolution, I heard that there were still "leprosy villages" in the area.
 
The System of Dual Mandatory Isolation:  Who is Copying Whom?
 
However, all of references above refer to the confinement of the sick person, which in English is called “isolation” (I prefer the term “medical isolation”). Isolation of patients diagnosed with highly infectious diseases is usually uncontroversial or minimally controversial. However, there is another important kind of isolation practiced in modern large-scale infectious disease prevention, namely the complete blockage of normal traffic, at the expense of work and productive activities, and the indiscriminate implementation of a compulsory quarantine—under observation—for outsiders who cannot be ensured to be uninfected or those who leave the infected area, until the expiration of the prescribed quarantine period, which is only lifted when it has been determined that there is no more infection. As a turning point in the fight against the epidemic, China’s compulsory “urban lockdowns,” as well policies such as “quarantining all outsiders for 14 days,” are still being implemented in many areas even after the absolute “urban lockdowns” have been lifted. In English, this is called quarantine rather than isolation.  The "China lesson" that many of our people are so happy to recommend to foreign countries is, in fact, mainly a reference to the highly coercive use of this technique. Some Chinese like to mock other countries for not being tough enough, or for deregulating too soon, as if a strictly enforced quarantine were a Chinese invention.
 
In fact, the opposite is true.  Isolation is just as ancient in China as anywhere else, but not only are there no records of quarantine in ancient China, it also looks to have been rare in other non-Western traditions. As far as I can tell, quarantine is really a “lesson” from the medieval West.
 
Today, most international medical historians believe that quarantine dates back to the time of the Black Death, specifically to the case of Ragusa, a commercial city-state founded by Venetian Italians on the Adriatic coast (today's tourist attraction, the Croatian port city of Dubrovnik). In ancient times, there was little population movement in agricultural areas, and it was not unheard of for people to simply close their doors and villages in times of crisis.  But for a commercial city-state, prolonged isolation was tantamount to suicide, and epidemics could not be avoided. On July 27, 1377, in response to the threat of a contagious epidemic disease (the Black Death), Ragusa issued the "Green Book", declaring that "veniens de locis pestiferis non intret Ragusium nel districtum" (those who come from plague-infested areas shall not enter Ragusa or its district), which was seen as the only way to prevent the plague. The three uninhabited outer islands of Mrkan, Bobari and Supetar were set aside for a 30-day quarantine period, or "trentina" (Italian for 30 days), where foreign vessels—including people and merchandise—were required to dock. 

People from Ragusa were are also forbidden all contact with the islands other than appointing people to deliver food and provide basic services. Later, Ragusa decided that overland travelers posed a greater risk of infection as they passed through their towns and villages, and imposed a 40-day (“quarantina” in Italian) isolation on overland visitors, which is where the term "quarantine" comes from today.  Although the quarantine period was not necessarily 40 days, everyone "copied Ragusa's lesson" and this is why we use the term today.
 
In addition to quarantine, the chief physician of Ragusa at the time recommended the construction of isolation hospitals outside the city walls to treat sick citizens (or those suspected of being sick), which became known as isolation or medical quarantine. Thus was born the first dual quarantine system in history, consisting of quarantine and isolation.
 
These two segregated areas are collectively known as lazaretto, which is derived from the biblical story of St. Lazarus: poor Lazarus, covered with sores (alluding to leprosy), falls to the ground before a rich man's door, and both he and the rich man die. But while Lazarus was treated well by Abraham in the underworld, the rich man suffered the torments of purgatory. The rich man appealed to Abraham for help, and Abraham said that this was their reward for the respective happiness and pain the two had known in life, and added, "There is an abyss separating us from you, and it is impossible for us to go to you from this side or to come from you." Lazarus was later revered as the patron saint of lepers, and the so-called “abyss of isolation” became a metaphor for anti-epidemic isolation. The Italian pronunciation of Lazarus, Lazaretto, then became the name for the quarantine areas and, along with quarantine, entered other European languages, including, somewhat later, English.
 
In 1403, inspired by the quarantine system of its colonial state, Ragusa, the Venetian government converted an island monastery in the southern part of its large lagoon into a quarantine hospital and named the island (Old) Lazaretto.  In 1468 (some say 1423), another island in the northern part of the lagoon was converted into a quarantine site, and was named New Lazaretto. The old and new Lazaretto, one north of Venice and one south, were separated by the sea from the city of Venice. New Lazaretto was larger (9 hectares), and both outsiders and boats were quarantined there; Old Lazaretto was smaller (2.5 hectares), and housed both local patients and quarantined patients transferred from New Lazaretto if they fell ill. The former was similar to today's "centralized quarantine point" and the latter to a "modular hospital". The mortality rate in plague hospitals under those conditions was high, and the archaeological findings on Old Lazaretto show a large number of graves, but not on New Lazaretto. This shows that the functions of the two were strictly differentiated.
 
This "Venetian system" became the model for other European countries. Over the next century, this system was adopted in Genoa, Pisa, and Ancona in Italy, and Marseilles in France, and was gradually copied by other European countries. In North America, the practices of quarantine and epidemic prevention were already in place during the colonial era, and large lazarettos appeared around the time of the founding of the United States: one was built on Bedloe Island (where today's Statue of Liberty is located) in 1738 in New York to combat smallpox and yellow fever epidemics. In 1793, also because yellow fever epidemic, Philadelphia, then the capital of the newly established United States, built a lazaretto on the banks of the Delaware River, 10 miles to the south, a structure that still stands today.
 
Such quarantine measures were first introduced into the Persian Gulf by Iranians in 1772-1773, during the Iranian plague pandemic. Thereafter, these "lessons" have been copied to varying degrees outside of Europe, including by China. But today, even though China the student has surpassed its teachers in applying what gradually became the European system of dual quarantine and isolation, there is still no equivalent in the Chinese language for the two terms, and both are translated as “isolation 隔离,” so if you don’t pay attention to the context (as happens with machine translation), the English translation of the terms in Chinese disease control literature will often be incorrect, because it is impossible to distinguish between the two. 

However, the two are actually quite different: quarantine is for anyone suspected of possible infection, usually travelers, and is for a fixed period of time (although not 40 days; we have set 14 as the maximum for the coronavirus), and they must be isolated from both confirmed cases as well as those who are free of the disease or assumed to be free of the disease, otherwise there is a risk of cross-infection. Medical isolation, on the other hand, is only for confirmed cases and the length of time is indefinite (depending on recovery and contagion factors). Why is there no distinction between the two in Chinese ? This is because the dual isolation system is a lesson we only recently learned, and we haven’t yet perfected the terminology.
 
Part II: "Human Rights Derogations" during States of Emergency, and the Definition of Human Rights
 
Medical Progress and the Advancement of Human Rights:  The Decline and Return of Forced Isolation
 
This dual system of quarantine played an increasing role in the fight against epidemics in the West during the 17th and 18th centuries, and into the 19th. Isolated infectious disease hospitals and quarantine sites, many of which are now tourist attractions, were common across Europe at the time. There were several important reasons why forced quarantines were popular:
 
First, this period in the West marked the rise of "sovereign statehood" and "nation-state construction," in which the public functions of the state developed greatly. Many of the things that in the past had not been done by kings, but instead by lords, churches, and city-states, were now taken over by the state, which had the power, will, and resources to implement them.
 
Second, modern medicine had not yet developed fully at this time, and bacterial infectious diseases (plague, cholera, typhoid, leprosy, etc.) continued to pose the main threat to human life and health; there were no vaccines for most bacterial infectious diseases, to say nothing of antibiotics, which had not yet been invented. Viral infectious diseases were a lesser threat, but with the exception of the early history of smallpox vaccination, there was no vaccine for other viruses, and no drugs that were "anti-viral" in the same way that antibiotics would be "anti-bacterial". For this reason, compulsory isolation remained the main means of infectious disease prevention and control, and the role of the dual quarantine system could not be replaced.
 
Third, the progress of human rights in Europe during this period was still at the stage of fighting the nobility on the home front and Papal authority on the international front; the "alliance of citizens and kings" was still the main form of nation-state construction and most Western countries were still authoritarian states (or "absolutist" states).  The resulting low state of human rights was also conducive to the implementation of forced isolation.
 
But by the end of the 19th century, and especially as Europe entered the 20th century, the situation changed drastically. First came tremendous progress in medicine, including the discovery of vaccines to prevent major bacterial infections and antibiotics to treat them, while smallpox, originally the worst of the viral infections, was gradually brought under control by vaccines, and the importance of compulsory isolation declined.
 
Second, although forced isolation had been indispensable in the past, modern medicine’s understanding of pathogens made it seem ineffective. For example, the bubonic plague was mainly transmitted by rats and fleas, and even if isolation limited the contact between people, as long as rats and fleas were everywhere because of filthy living conditions, the disease could still spread largely unchecked. Therefore, despite the dual isolation system and the primitive "bird beak" masks of the Middle Ages, the spread of glandular plague could not be effectively eliminated. Thus in the late 19th century, things moved to the other extreme, and public health authorities stressed only rodent and flea eradication, and not isolation and wearing masks. This is why Mesnil and the other doctors opposed Wu Liande’s use of masks. They did not know they were up against the pneumonic plague, which can be transmitted by droplets, and it was their loss. The ability to discriminate between the different types of plague and their appropriate responses came much later.
 
Third, the "low human rights advantage" of the time did not have enough high-tech support to facilitate close surveillance. Moreover, the hardships of forced isolation were likely to frighten the sick into desperate flight, which would spread the disease even further. This is one of the reasons why quarantines were abandoned.
 
Last and certainly most important, with the progress of liberal democracy since the nineteenth century, authoritarian nation-states and "absolutist" states, increasingly became a thing of the past, and human rights claims increased. The rise in dissatisfaction with the violation to human rights caused by forced isolation, and, in particular, the growing criticism of the misuse of isolation by authoritarian regimes for political persecution, also put an end to the "low human rights advantage" that facilitated the imposition of forced isolation and has led to a growing reluctance on the part of democracies to impose such measures, and the taboos against massive and intense physical isolation have continued to grow.
 
The classic quarantine islands of Lazaretto in southern Europe, which had been popular for centuries under the "Venetian system," were abandoned one after the other. Venice’s New Lazaretto was converted into a military fortress during the Napoleonic era, and the one in Dubrovnik (then Ragusa), considered the birthplace of the quarantine, was also turned another kind of public health facility during the same period. Many lazarettos were abandoned or converted to other uses during that period, not unrelated to the changes brought about by the French Revolution.  In the words of the Italian historian Eugenia Tognotti: "The intensified use of quarantine and isolation went contrary to the establishment of civil rights and the growth of personal liberty fostered by the French Revolution of 1789. In Britain, liberal reformers challenged quarantine and mandatory smallpox vaccination…This phenomenon affected many European countries."
 
Dissatisfaction with forced isolation was particularly evident in the case of leprosy. Unlike acute infectious diseases such as plague, where death rates are high and survivors recover quickly, “quarantine” for leprosy—a chronic disease—was tantamount to a life sentence. In addition, the traditional understanding of leprosy was easily "expanded.” In contrast to many ancient traditions of outright discrimination against people affected by leprosy, medieval Christian attitudes toward leprosy were ambivalent and somewhat reminiscent of what we saw with the lockdown of Wuhan during the coronavirus outbreak.  On the one hand, the image of Wuhan was praised to the skies, and the media blathered on endlessly with talk of a "City of Heroes" and cries of "Go Wuhan! "On the other hand, each individual Wuhan person was regarded as a "source of contagion" and discriminated against, and "Wuhaners" outside of Wuhan were like rats scurrying across the street, reported on and arrested everywhere.

It was the same in medieval Europe, where St. Lazarus, the patron saint of the lepers, was considered more holy than the rich and favored by the gods, but where actual lepers were worse off than prisoners. With the invention of effective treatments in the 1940s, the threat of leprosy infection has been almost eliminated, and there are movements championing the rights of those who suffer from leprosy, with quarantine sites in developed countries being largely eliminated and even campaigns launched seeking apologies and compensation for victims of previous quarantines.
 
A typical case is Japan, where leprosy quarantine laws were not formally abolished until the 1990s, and the West, which had eliminated such quarantine practices in the 1960s, considered the Japanese case an "unprecedented violation of human rights," even though Japan made progressively less use of the quarantine laws. In 2001, nearly 2,000 former leprosy patients sued the Government of Japan. An independent court ruled that the Government must pay compensation to more than 100 former patients. The then Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, issued a statement in which he "formally apologized to the leprosy patients who had suffered years of systematic discrimination by the state." However, with regard to compensation, the Government decided to appeal the court's decision, fearing that it would set a precedent that would lead to numerous attempts to settle historical debts.
 
As a result, in 2002, patients issued another rights report, which included a new round of claims for compensation. In fact, some of these claims went back several generations.  For example, the former patients claimed that "for at least 30 years prior to the 1950s," hundreds of patients had been sterilized in Japanese leprosariums to prevent what authorities called “possible hereditary transmission.” This was described as "the deliberate killing of hundreds of imprisoned lepers' babies by medical staff." The 1,500-page long rights report also called out the doctors at the leprosarium, accused Japanese courts of having helped the Japanese government maintain its leprosy policy, and criticized the Japanese media for failing to report on their suffering.
 
Under pressure from public opinion, the Koizumi Government finally decided not to appeal and announced a series of measures, including the enactment of a law to compensate all victims, the provision of a special pension for all persons affected by leprosy, the raising of public awareness of the disease, and the elimination of discrimination and prejudice against persons affected by leprosy.
 
The Existence of the Medieval "Lesson" and its "Limitations to and Derogations from" Modern Human Rights:  The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and the "Siracusa Principles"
 
The problems caused by leprosy quarantine were in fact a microcosm of all of the ills that could result from forced isolation. Encouraged by increases in freedom and human rights, and with the growing confidence in medical progress, people came to believe that they could be freed from reliance on forced isolation. As a typical example of this, the entry for "quarantine isolation" in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911) stresses that this "former system of health prevention through detention" had become "a thing of the past."  While the United States has always had regulations concerning the dual quarantine system, they have not been used at the federal level for a century, from the time the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1919 down to the current coronavirus pandemic. The same is broadly true of European democracies.
 
In fact, however, people soon discovered the limits to medical progress. Some previously treatable infectious diseases began to develop resistance to drugs, and the treatment of viral infections has lagged. In particular, some of the newly discovered viral epidemics—a typical example being the coronavirus—still have neither antibiotics nor vaccines, and forced isolation is the best way to deal with them. 
 
The era of globalization has also increased the risk that an uncontrolled epidemic in one country may spread to the whole world more quickly and easily than in historical times. Thus, in the wake of the epidemics of SARS and influenza A, the Italian historian Eugenia Tognotti noted in 2013:
 
" A new chapter in the history of quarantine opened in the early twenty-first century as traditional intervention measures were resurrected in response to the global crisis precipitated by the emergence of SARS, an especially challenging threat to public health worldwide.  SARS, which originated in Guangdong Province, China, in 2003, spread along air-travel routes and quickly became a global threat because of its rapid transmission and high mortality rate and because of the lack of protective immunity in the general population…In China, police cordoned off buildings, organized checkpoints on roads, and even installed Web cameras in private homes. There was stronger control of persons in the lower social strata (village-level governments were empowered to isolate workers from SARS-affected areas). Public health officials in some areas resorted to repressive police measures, using laws with extremely severe punishments, against those who violated quarantine."
 
The reference to "in the past" and "the resurrection of traditional interventions" actually refers to the return of the "low human rights advantage" of the medieval fight against epidemics. " In the face of a dramatic health crisis, individual rights have often been trampled in the name of public good…This feature, almost inherent in quarantine, traces a line of continuity from the time of plague to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic." From today’s perspective, however, both SARS and H1N1 are trivial. It was only in March of this year, during the Italian "lockdowns" in Italy, that Tognotti really saw the return of the medieval "Venetian system" she had studied in the past.
 
“As an epidemiological historian, I have tried to imagine the reactions of men and women who had experienced devastating epidemics. But I never imagined that I would find myself living in history as the lockdowns spread throughout Italy…But COVID-19 has once again emphasized the fact that epidemics are not a memory from the pre-industrial past. The severe measures adopted in China strongly suggest that the ancient, basic concept of quarantine is still valid. In the absence of a targeted vaccine, general preventive interventions still have to be relied upon.  The strategies recently adopted in Italy have their roots in the past. From the onset of the Black Death in 1347-48, Italian cities implemented a complex health defense system, which was an example to other European countries. The cornerstones of this health defense system lay in quarantine, sanitary cordons, lazarettos (quarantine stations), disinfection and social regulation of the population at risk.”
 
"In fact, the first to refine a system of defense against disease was Venice." Today, Italy, which enjoys robust human rights, cannot impose isolation measures with the same intensity as in the past: at the time, Venice required foreign sailors to be locked in a closed room and speak to someone positioned outside the window who recorded what they said. This was "safe distance" as understood then. "The recommended distance for coronavirus in the guidelines today is one meter. I could not verify in the historic records what distance was suggested by the Venetian health magistrates!"   
 
The Siracusa Principles and Human Rights "Derogations"
                                                                          
In fact, scholars of disease control and officials in various countries generally agreed throughout the twentieth century that human "medical progress" was still limited and that the past system of isolation could not be easily abandoned. This is especially true at the international level. It is well known that progress in human rights has been significantly slower internationally than within democracies; freedom of movement, for example, is not a problem within democracies, but it is still difficult internationally. Thus in the 20th century, quarantine and isolation developed mainly at the international level.  A multilateral convention on international health was concluded in Paris in 1912, and another such convention was signed in Paris in 1926 to replace that of 1912. These conventions both had provisions for international cooperation in the application of quarantine and isolation.

At the same, human rights considerations are also an international trend. Following the adoption of the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), in 1984 the International Institute of Criminal Justice and Human Rights in Siracusa, Italy, and the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations adopted the Siracusa Principles, which introduced certain limitations and "derogations" from the human rights standards of the ICCPR, which left room for the mandatory system of dual isolation.
 
The Siracusa Principles state that public health may be used as a basis for restricting certain human rights if the state needs to take measures "aimed at preventing disease or injury or providing care for the sick and injured." However, human rights restrictions (such as isolation) must be "strictly necessary", which means that they must:  respond to urgent public or social needs (in matters of health); be proportional in their pursuit of legitimate objectives (preventing the spread of infectious diseases); represent the least restrictive means necessary to achieve the purpose of the restriction; follow the law in their framing and implementation; be neither arbitrary nor discriminatory; restrict only rights within the jurisdiction of the state seeking to impose the restriction.
 
In addition, certain scholars have identified the following ethical requirements for the implementation of isolation measures, based on the Siracusa Principles and other United Nations regulations:  all restrictive measures must be fully supported by data and scientific evidence; all information must be made available to the public; all actions must be clearly explained to those whose rights are restricted and to the public; all actions are subject to periodic review and reconsideration.
 
Finally, the state has a moral obligation to provide certain guarantees:  infected people will not be threatened or mistreated; basic needs such as food, water, medical care, and preventive care will be provided; communication with relatives and caregivers will be allowed; restrictions on liberty will apply regardless of social considerations; the sick will be fairly compensated for financial and material losses, including wages.
 
As a number of scholars have concluded, quarantine and other public health tools remain at the core of public health preparedness in the face of new challenges posed by the emergence of infectious diseases in the twenty-first century, and the increasing risk of their rapid spread. In this regard, attention must be paid to the valuable lessons of the past. At the same time, given their very nature, vigilance is required in order to avoid prejudice and intolerance. Public trust must be sustained through regular, transparent, and comprehensive communication to balance the risks and benefits of public health interventions, and successfully respond to public health emergencies.
 
It is clear that these provisions are intended to reconcile the principles of human rights in the modern civilized world with the existence of the age-old system of compulsory quarantine, which one cannot, in fact, abolish when antibiotics and vaccines cannot be counted on. But as decades of practice have shown, achieving this balance is often a matter of wishful thinking, and in 2013, scholars pointed out that in Kenya and Canada's efforts to combat the spread of drug-resistant tuberculosis, there were cases where the free movement of the source of infection was considered a threat to public health and safety, resulting in the involuntary detention of people, in a breach of the Siracusa principles. The article, entitled " Failing Siracusa:  Governments’ Obligations to Find the Least Restrictive Options for Tuberculosis Control, " demonstrates that the Siracusa Principles do not fully resolve the "lesser of two evils" problem. 
 
And the current coronavirus pandemic has only heightened the problem.
 
The undeniable fact is that, despite its many mistakes, China succeeded in controlling the epidemic by using extreme coercive measures that go far beyond the Siracusa Principles. Democracies such as European countries, America, Japan and Australia, however, have been significantly less coercive than China in terms of these principles, and have had difficulty controlling the epidemic. As time goes by, insufficiently coercive measures may also have the effect of doing more harm than good to the economy, even as they fail to eradicate the epidemic. Once the dilemma of "human rights" versus "no humans left" becomes that of "death by starvation" versus "death from the virus," the choice is all the more difficult. In retrospect, it is certain that survival (“humans left”) is more important than human rights. The fierce criticism of the early days of China's "Wuhan lockdown" has almost disappeared now that the effects have become clear.

Knowing what we know now, if we could turn back the clock, I think European and American governments would have chosen to copy China's "lesson" at the beginning of the epidemic (of course, this in fact would have meant reviewing the "lesson” from their own medieval experience).  Whether the democratic system would allow them to do so is another question. But today, as the second wave of the coronavirus hits already devastated economies, the dilemma of choosing between "dying from the virus" (where continued laxism worsens the still spreading disease) and "death by starvation" (where renewed control leads to the collapse of an already weakened economy) is all the more painful.
 
This raises an acute question:  in what kind of emergency can human rights be "limited" or "derogated from" (in the language of the Siracusa Principles) and to what extent, and can these limitations or derogations be imposed “efficiently” enough to be effective? Must democracies be so incompetent in the face of an emergency? "Live free or die" is certainly timeless and of universal value as a slogan for freedom, and as a choice for some individuals can be admirable. But for human society, survival is more important than freedom (especially high levels of freedom, such as the freedom of getting together to have fun during an epidemic), and jeopardizing public safety for one's own freedom is contrary to universal values (not just "Asian values"). Of course, the current coronavirus epidemic may not be the most serious challenge; after all, the death rate is not very high. But what if the death rate had been like that of the Black Death, and there were still no antibiotics or vaccines available?
 
It is also possible to imagine an even more extreme scenario: what if the "conspiracy theories", which are now commonplace in both China and the West, were to prove true in the future: democracies and totalitarian states would unfortunately really be engaged in a "virus war" against each other, with each viciously attacking the other with “contagions.” Don’t tell me that it's technically or humanly impossible, and making logical deductions on the basis of the current pandemic, what are the odds of democracy’s survival? Are they greater than for totalitarianism? Obviously, if we support democracy, not necessarily seeking to develop it further, but supporting it simply in terms of the sustainability of its achievements so far, we cannot avoid this serious question: can the survival of the democratic system depend solely on the goodwill of others, and even the enemy?
 
Rights, Legitimacy, and the Good:  On the Definition of Human Rights and the Legitimacy of "Derogations" Therefrom
 
Recently, the Chinese Government has seized the momentum of victory in the fight against the pandemic. It held a series of international video seminars on "global epidemic prevention and control and human rights safeguards," strongly criticizing the West both for its ineffectiveness in fighting the epidemic and for blaming China, and accusing the West of "disregarding human rights," the same accusation the West often directs at China. On the Internet, others have applied the phrase "low human rights advantage," which I coined, as far as I can tell, to the West, saying that their "low human rights advantage" is reflected in the West's refusal to adopt the harsh Chinese approach to fighting the epidemic, despite the spread of the disease and the increasing death toll-- which is, of course, a mockery.
 
Undoubtedly, the West's incompetence and ineffectiveness in the face of the epidemic should be criticized, just as China's success in fighting the epidemic through lockdowns should be recognized and emulated. But what this success has to do with the relationship between ineffectiveness and human rights is quite the opposite, in my view.  As a matter of fact, the saying that was popular around the world during the campaign against the pandemic was "quarantine, no human rights, no quarantine, no humans left."  Taken together with the “Siracusa Principles," the above-mentioned UN's statement that in the event of a forced quarantine, a temporary “limitation and derogation” should be imposed on a certain range of human rights, both express the high-level contradiction between "human rights" and "human survival" during states of emergency, and the need for a temporary freeze on certain human rights to assure that priority be given to human survival. It should be acknowledged that low human rights have indeed been a major advantage in China’s successful fight against the pandemic.

To put it another way, high human rights have become a disadvantage for the West in its fight. The high priority accorded to human rights, regardless of the state of emergency, has severely hamstrung public power in the West, meaning that coercive measures that should have been implemented were not implemented, or were implemented too late, or were removed to soon, or were not applied properly. In this global pandemic, Westerners have paid a very heavy price for their freedom and human rights. This is an important point to reflect on this pandemic.
 
In recent years, my argument concerning China’s "low human rights advantage" has aroused heated controversy. Some think that the term "low human rights" belittles China, while others think that using the term "advantage" justifies China's low human rights. Others point out that there is too much controversy over the definitions and standards of human rights, and that we should not discuss their “superiority” or “inferiority” lightly. In fact, I am clearly aware of and do not ignore the human rights debate; if we wanted to have the kind of debate where we all cite our favorite authors, we could easily produce several books. At the same time, I don’t think it is difficult to explain what "human rights" are in common sense terms. It is just that if we invest rights with value, and decide that “human rights” are unconditionally regarded as a good thing, then conflicts between values will lead to a confusion of meanings:  if there is a right that we should not have, then is it not a right? 
 
In fact, "human rights" are the rights that belong to people, and “people” clearly means the individual, not the "state" or the "nation," or anything else. The reason is simple: the "rights of the state" are usually described by the term "sovereignty," and the debate over which has priority, sovereignty or human rights, no matter which we choose, shows that the two are not the same thing. Not to mention the fact that countries generally seen as disregarding human rights, such as Nazi Germany, usually give great prominence to the "rights of the state" and emphasize the dependence of the individual on the state. The word now used for rights in modern Chinese—权利—meant something different in classical Chinese, but now is seen as the equivalent of “right” in English:  if a certain person can choose to do, or not to do, a certain thing, then we say that that person has the right to do that thing, and if he cannot do that thing, then he does not have that right.  If he has to do the thing, then it is an obligation, and not a right.
 
The debate about human rights is, in the final analysis, not about whether the ability to do or not to do a certain thing is a right or whether or not it is a human right, but rather if the rights themselves should be granted. For example, I believe that democracies should not grant an unconditional right for citizens to bear arms. But the reason should be that this is a right one should not have, and not that it is not a human right. To cite opposition to the right of citizens to bear arms as the reason to brag about the state’s unlimited monopoly on and use of violence, and to call this a “high human right,” is the height of absurdity.
 
Of course, such human rights are not always recognized even in the developed democratic world. The reason is that with more gun owners, there will be more gun-related deaths and injuries, in the same way that with more cars, there will be more deaths and injuries due to accidents. But if the number of car crashes is not a measure of human rights, what does the number of gun deaths have to do with a "human rights record"?
 
But it is also important to note that the high incidence of gun-related crime, while not a human rights issue, is one of the ills of American society. It is untenable to justify the right to bear arms today by saying “that’s the way things have always been." Today’s United States is not the same as it was in the colonial era. The days when settlers carried guns for self-defense in a lawless state and resisted the King's ban on guns to protect their dignity are long gone. Arguments about protection against wild animals, attacks by Native Americans, and defense against tyranny no longer hold water, and the idea that "standing armies are always tyrannical" has long been disproven in a democracy. Since the misuse of firearms has become a danger to law and order, there is more harm than good in having guns as an individual right. It is debatable how to ban guns in a society such as the United States, where guns have long been commonplace, and if things were mismanaged so that the good people handed in their guns while the bad guys kept theirs, the situation would be even worse. But strict gun control is clearly the way to go.
 
The point is, the right to bear arms is a human right, but it is no longer an "inherent right." Whether a certain phenomenon is a human right is a factual judgement, and whether it should be a human right is a value judgement. But the problem is:  the word "right" in English also means "legitimate" or "lawful," which seems to be a positive word, so whether something is a human right becomes a value judgment instead of a fact judgment. At the same time, the English-speaking world has long had the expression "right isn't necessarily good," so it is logically possible to have "bad rights." However, the prevailing opinion on the relationship between right and good has always been that right takes precedence over good as a fundamental issue in ethics.

Although I accept this in general (because not accepting it would mean that arbitrary human rights violations on the grounds of what someone calls “goodness” would become the norm), in an English context where "right" in the sense of legitimate and "right" in the sense of a human right are the same word, if we changed “right takes precedence over good” to “rights take precedent over good,” there is a danger that the rights of the individual would expand so infinitely that they would break through the boundaries of the "rights of the many." After all, there are limits to individual rights; even if the human rights recognized by the United States currently include the individual right to bear arms, does it follow that the United States would recognize the individual right to possess nuclear arms? Naturally, the reason for not recognizing such a right is not that the individual right to nuclear weapons is not "good" (just as "not good" acts committed by gun owners does not negate the individual right to bear arms in the view of the gun advocates), but only that it is not "legitimate."  It goes too far, so even those who are pro-gun rights can't be pro-nuclear weapon rights.
 
Obviously, it is possible for rights to be not only "not good" but also "not right." Maybe it has to do with the nature of the English language, but while Americans are very active in discussing the idea that a "right isn't good," they have a hard time with the notion of rights that aren’t “right.” As a result, some people wind up unconditionally affirming and defending human rights that are not “right” in the sense of being improper (such as the “right not to wear a mask”), or, refuse to “derogate” from rights which in normal times are legitimate and proper, but which should be limited in times of emergency, thus doing harm to general social welfare.  Others, on the contrary, in order to deny these same rights (i.e., people who refuse to recognize the “right not to wear a mask”), refuse to acknowledge them as human rights, to the point of opposing "excessive" human rights as if they were no rights at all, and regard the necessary "derogations" from human rights in certain states of emergency as human rights themselves.  In this way, not only does "derogation" becomes the norm, and even legitimate human rights, from which there is no derogation under the norm, are absurdly labelled as "disregard for human rights." This creates a situation in which those who oppose human rights in normal times wind up adapting to the state of emergency because they can "derogate" at will, to the point of becoming defenders of human rights!
 
In fact, since "right" is the ability to "do or not to do" something, it is synonymous with "freedom." Take isolation during an epidemic as an example.  Under normal circumstances I can either stay home or go out, which means that I have the right, or the freedom, to choose between the two.  However, during an epidemic I am asked to be in "home isolation," at which point I lose my "right" to go outside (or, conversely, I am put in "medical quarantine" in a public health facility, I lose my right to stay home), and in these cases staying home (or remaining in the medical facility) become "obligations," that I have to fulfil, and no longer my right. Obviously, in such a situation, my rights, or human rights, suffer an extreme “derogation.” Because of the needs imposed by the pandemic, this temporary restriction of rights is proper, and if I were to insist on the normal exercise of my rights in this situation it would be improper.  However, you cannot argue that my human rights are better “protected” in this situation, just as you cannot argue that I am “freer” in isolation.
 
In the “seminar on the prevention and control of global epidemics and the protection of human rights,” that I mentioned above, many people claimed that China's draconian measures reflected respect for the right to life. In fact, I do not disagree that these measures were correct and that their implementation is a sign of respect for "life." But if we are to say that the right to life is respected, then we must ask who is the subject of this right. If we consider it to be a living person, it obviously cannot be said that forcing him into isolation is respecting his individual rights, although it could be argued that it would be respecting the public interest.
 
Because the right to life in the strict sense must be a right that living beings possess, it is not always the same thing as life itself. A typical example is that some advanced countries commonly recognized as having high human rights, such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Canada, have now passed laws to allow legal euthanasia, i.e., to allow terminally ill people who feel that they would rather die than live, to choose to give up their lives in an appropriate manner to end their suffering. Conservatives can criticize this as a lack of respect for life, but not for the "right to life". For if a person is "forced to live," then although he has life, it is not his right to live, but merely his duty. It is true that life can be understood as an obligation (especially in the religious sense), but at least in the secular legal sense, allowing euthanasia is undoubtedly a major step forward in safeguarding human rights (including the right to life).
 
The most extreme examples of "being forced to live" were the horrific forms of torture practiced in an era of cruelty and disregard for human rights: slow slicing, or death by a thousand cuts, the imperial Chinese punishment that brutally required that the victim be kept alive to endure the pain of 3,600 cuts instead of being allowed to die a quick death. Often, the victim and his family had to bribe the torturer in order to get it over with. Can we say, then, that the prisoner who wants to die retains the "right to life" until he or she has suffered thousands of cuts? Of course not! We cannot at the same time affirm that euthanasia respects the right to life while the Chinese torture tramples on the right to life.
 
Similar misunderstandings are common with the so-called "right to subsistence" issue.[11]  In a debate a few years ago, I argued that: "Officials say that because China’s level of development is still low, our current emphasis must be on the ‘right to subsistence,' but some of my friends who value human rights offered the criticism that this right to subsistence is too low, that it is not a human right but a ‘pig's right,' because pigs also subsist. Yet rights are related to freedom, so the 'right to subsistence’ and 'subsisting’ are not the same thing. A pig subsists only because people need it to subsist, and if one day they decide to slaughter it, it no longer subsists, so a subsisting pig does not have the right to subsist."

Similarly, there are people who survive and even live a very comfortable life, without necessarily having a right to exist. "For example, the Tang dynasty imperial courtesan Yang Guifei (719-756) lived a very prosperous life (when she was favored), right? But she was able to survive because emperor Tang Xuanzong (685-762) let her survive, and once they got to Maweipo, Tang Xuanzong stopped allowing her to survive and she was killed.[12] So she ‘subsisted,’ and indeed subsisted very well, but still had no right to subsist. In this sense, the right to subsist is indeed an important human right that we need to pursue, because in the past we had a tradition of 'if the ruler wants the minister to die, the minister must die,' in which case, while most Chinese ‘subsisted,’ they did not have the right to that subsistence. Yang Guifei is a case from history, but contemporary examples are not hard to find.  Where was Liu Shaoqi's[13] right to subsistence during the Cultural Revolution? Lin Zhao's?[14] Where was the right to exist for those killed by the 'man-made disaster' of the three-year famine caused by the Great Leap Forward? So to solve the problem of 'right to subsist’ is actually also to fight for freedom…We still face the legacy of 'if the ruler wants the minister to die, the minister must die,' and the people's right to subsist is still not sufficiently guaranteed.  The fact that we cannot obtain this guarantee does not mean that we cannot survive, but rather that this survival is dependent on the will of others…In this sense, the right to subsist and the right to speak are on the same level, they both imply freedom, and to fight for freedom you have to limit the power of the government.  This is true of the freedom to subsist, and is true of freedom of speech.”
 
The right to subsistence and the right to speak are what we call negative rights, freedoms that “cannot be denied (or taken away).”  The traditional "right wing" in the West, or those who preach laissez-faire, often only recognize these types of human rights. But there is in fact another category of "positive rights" pursued by the Western "left" that are seen as "socialist," such as affirmative action programs seeking to redress the conditions of African-Americans, a focus of attention in the United States at present, or the social security and welfare rights enumerated in the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, or, once again, the Siracusa Principles, which refer to "basic needs such as food, water, medical care and health care" that must be guaranteed even in times of epidemic, and the idea "the sick will receive fair compensation for financial and material losses, including wages", etc.  These rights seek the freedom to demand certain things.  Since the realization of such demands requires the government to expend a considerable amount of power, accomplishes a certain redistribution of wealth, and inevitably contradicts the "negative rights" of at least part of the population (e.g., paying high taxes to finance high welfare), the "right wing" tends to reject such appeals.
 
But even from the left's standpoint, the proposition that "the welfare state requires greater power and positive rights require the redistribution of wealth" cannot be turned around to argue that "great power is the welfare state and heavy taxation is the guarantee of positive rights." In fact, the subjects of what the left calls positive rights are still free individuals; and what they call big government still means an accountable government, a government that gives rights to the people and is answerable to the people. "Positive rights" mean that I have the right to ask for guarantees, that the government has a duty to provide services, that I do not have to “thank” the government for these services because it is their duty to deliver them, and that if it does not, it will be held accountable, which could mean losing power. If, on the other hand, "welfare" is an imperial gift for which subjects must give thanks without demanding accountability, then this is the “imperial state,” the exact opposite of the welfare state, and what the imperial subjects receive has nothing to do with the "positive rights" of citizens, to say nothing of human rights.
 
Therefore, any human right, be it a negative right prized by the "rightists" or a positive right dear to the "leftists," is in fact premised on free human rights. This is the reason why I can rise above "left and right" to talk about the existence or lack thereof of human rights, and the level at which human rights exist. Of course, their existence—or lack thereof—and the level at which they exist are all judgments based in fact, while whether we should have them, and at what level, are value judgments. Whether it is the negative human right of "not being deprived of something" (which is often seen as the human rights of the right) or the positive human right of "demanding something” (often seen as the human rights of the left), both have limits, and in normal times we cannot say that the “greater” a right is, the “better” it is, and in extraordinary times, “derogations” may be required from both types of rights. 

There is also a contradiction between these two human rights:  in constitutional democracies, when the poor demand their positive human rights to "high welfare," this will inevitably conflict with the wealthy who demand their negative human rights "not be deprived (by high taxes) of their right to keep their money" (under non-democratic conditions, however, when rulers practice extortion in the name of self-interest, the conflict between the poor’s demand for welfare and the wealthy’s demand for limited taxes does not always occur). In a normal constitutional state, it is precisely this contradiction that leads to the left replacing the right, and vice versa. In a state of emergency, however, where both human rights may require temporary derogations, political temperatures rise quickly, and the different issues that this gives rise to in different political systems are well worth examining.
 
Part III: States of Emergency and Political Institutions
 
When "High Human Rights" Threaten the "Survival" of Human Beings:  An Analysis of the "Titanic Story"
 
Human rights are rights, the ability to "do or not to do something," or in other words, freedom. And in all countries throughout history, prison (deprivation of liberty) has been used as a punishment for criminals, so it is clear that freedom is a human desire and human rights are universal values. Even a fascist dictator will defend his own freedom—it’s just that he will deprive others of their freedom and violate their human rights, extending to a broad deprivation of the right to life of others, to the outrage of all.
 
But just because everyone wants to be free does not mean that that is all they want, and that nothing else matters. In fact, while "live free or die" is certainly a celebration and encouragement of the spirit of freedom, when faced with the choice between death with freedom and life without it, most of us, following human nature, choose the latter.  Moreover, absolute freedom does not exist, although authoritarian arguments that deny different degrees of freedom or even defend an absolute lack of freedom because there is no “absolute freedom" are absurd, but everywhere and throughout history, human beings, in pursuit of survival and other public values, have surrendered part of their freedom.  At the same time, freedom also has two kinds of "externalities," positive and negative: instances in which people fail to compromise their freedom to achieve a common goal,[15] and those in which people ignore the freedom of others after having obtained own freedom, should both be prevented.

The Chinese scholar Yan Fu (1854-1921) translated the title of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty as "On the Boundaries between the Rights of the Group and the Individual", which I think is very accurate. The essence of constitutional democracy is to strictly observe the boundaries of the rights of the group and the individual. The community wants democracy and the individual wants freedom. The two domains have their own rules, which should not be confused and especially not reversed. Public affairs cannot be "freely" managed by individuals without a public mandate, even if they are sages, and personal affairs cannot be left to the "public power," even if it is a democratic regime. This establishes "boundaries of rights" for both freedom and democracy.
 
As far as the relationship between freedom and survival is concerned, "the right to subsistence" is not the same "subsistence," as discussed above. Opportunities to live a life of luxury through relying on others, like Yang Guifei, the “golden bird in a cage” without human rights, are both rare and unreliable (as the tragedy that befell her at Maweipo proves), so human rights and survival, high human rights and a superior quality of life are usually highly correlated.
 
But it is different during a state of emergency. When we say "quarantine, no human rights; no quarantine, no humans left," what we mean is that on such occasions, the normal "rights boundaries between the community and the self" must be adjusted.  "Derogations" to human rights made in the public interest, diminishing the realm of the individual and limiting individual freedom are all necessary to ensure our common survival.
 
In fact, the “rights boundaries between the group and the individual” often need to be fine-turned even under normal conditions. I have argued that the interaction between "left and right" in a democratic system serves this function.  Generally when the left comes to power, in economic terms it tends to expand the realm of the group and shrink that of the individual, and in ethical terms, will expand the realm of the individual and shrink that of the group. The right, by contrast, in economic terms will expand the individual realm and in ethical terms expand that of the group.  The mechanism of democracy is still necessary to decide who will be in power.  Of course, "Democracy can only determine the rights boundaries between the group and the individual in terms of the fuzzy areas of contention defined by the modern left and right, while the basic divisions between public and private, including questions of freedom of speech…cannot be defined by direct democracy or the constitution. The most basic human rights can in principle only be regarded as self-evident truths".
 
However, in states of emergency, where societies are faced with the difficult choice between the lesser of two evils, the normal logic just discussed often does not apply.
 
More than 20 years ago, I used the "Titanic story" to illustrate this point in another context.  In a nutshell, the Titanic was sinking and there were only enough lifeboats for the women and children.  Can you use your right to exist to force your way on?  In other words, when the crisis is so severe that it threatens the survival of all, even the "fundamental value" of an individual's right to live is not "absolute."  Some may say:  what actually happened on the Titanic? Others say people did not behave as nobly as the legend suggests. It is true that there are a number of different accounts of the Titanic incident, and it is neither possible nor necessary to make a historical examination here, but we can confine our analysis to what is known as "Titanic literature." Because this treatment of the legend is generally accepted, it reflects a kind of judgment as to "how things should be." This judgment itself deserves careful analysis. One can doubt whether, as the Titanic was sinking, they truly managed to cling to the principle of "women and children first," but no one seems to think that women and children should not have been given priority, nor does anyone say that the priority of women and children is only a "Western value," and that Chinese would have abandoned women and children in a mad scramble for the lifeboats. So the "Titanic question” can be judged on its own, apart from the specific event, and discussions of the questions can transcend cultural differences.
 
The point raised by the Titanic story is to say, in effect, that the right to existence in the usual sense of the word may be restricted when the crisis is so severe that it is a matter of life and death. Even then, of course, the question of the “rules of fairness” remains. The Titanic is in trouble and the right to existence is restricted, but restricted to whom? If the principle is women and children first, then if you're not a woman or a child, too bad. I wrote at the time: "An essential element of liberalism is the emphasis on the 'rights boundaries between the group and the individual.’ The group talks about democracy, while the individual talks about freedom. However, the above example illustrates that the boundaries of the public and private domains are not so absolute. In the extreme case of the Titanic, even the most basic private right, the right to subsist, is handled by the group. But this does not mean that it was handled arbitrarily; the group also has to be governed by rules, and the basic rule is democracy. Although the 'women and children first' principle seen in the tragedy of the Titanic was not the result of a vote, it was clearly accepted as such, and anyone violating the principle would have been stopped by the rest of the group."
 
In fact, it now seems that this last argument of mine does not hold water.  Since “women and children first” had not been decided by a vote, we cannot see it as the product of “group democracy.” The fact that everyone accepted the captain's decision and cooperated with him does not prove that the decision was democratic, otherwise any tyrannical act that did not result in public revolt would be equally "democratic." In fact, the Titanic story does suggest that the rights of individuals in states of emergency are extremely curtailed by the public interest, but the public interest is not decided by democratic processes. In other words, during an emergency, not only does the individual sacrifice his freedom, the community also sacrifices its democracy.  The only reason for this is if, during an emergency situation, we allow ourselves the "freedom" to fight for a small number of lifeboats, it may wind up being the case that no one gets on, and the same is true for the time it takes to carry out a "democratic" vote. So the captain has to decide. This has nothing to do with "culture," nor does it have anything to do with "political philosophy."  The passengers may be libertarians who, when they are on land, argue in favor of gun rights.  They may also be progressives, who argue that even the captain of the ship should be elected.  But when the Titanic hit the iceberg, they all had to put their "doctrines" aside.
 
Yet, why is the captain's decision, which both denies freedom and tramples on democracy, accepted by all?  What values would explain this acceptance, whether we mean by the passengers at the time, or others, East and West, who heard the story later?  At the time, I came up with two possibilities, one of which no longer seems valid (the "democratic" explanation mentioned above), leaving only one: "The captain of the ship who made the decision was not himself a woman or a child, which means he sacrificed his own right to exist, and it is this sacrifice by some for the sake of others that makes the decision seem acceptable.  If the captain himself and his friends and family had rushed onto the lifeboat, the story would have turned out differently."
 
This is in fact an important rule of "public disaster ethics". We will come back to it later.
 
An Historical Review of "Dictatorship" and "Autocracy"
 
In fact, the shortcomings of democratic systems in coping with states of emergency is nothing new. From the earliest use of the political notions of "democracy" and "republic" in ancient Greece and Rome, sustainable democracy has been associated with special arrangements for dealing with states of emergency. The Roman Republic's dictator system (military dictatorship) was a typical example. This was originally an emergency institution, created by the Roman Republic, in which the normal function of the republic was interrupted in the event of war, and military commanders were granted short-term arbitrary powers not constrained by Roman law, and at the end of the war the dictator stepped down and handed power back the Senate, which promised not to hold him accountable for his actions during the dictatorship. According to the customs of the time, the dictator’s mandate was limited to six months, and its renewal required a new authorization from the senate. But toward the end of the Republic the dictator ceased to respect the rules, and by the time of Octavian he was simply called head of state (princeps), and as Rome entered its imperial, the title of “dictator” ceased to exist.
 
The word "dictatorship" in Western languages is derived from the Roman dictator system. Obviously, because dictatorship was a state of emergency in wartime, it was different from autocracy, and conventional authoritarian regimes seen in Persia and elsewhere, including those imperial Rome.  In the later periods of the Roman empire, and in the medieval and Byzantine periods, when "despotism" became the norm, the word dictator was extremely rare. It was not until the violent revolutions of modern times that the term was used again in its original sense, with Cromwell in the English Revolution and the Jacobin system in the French Revolution being two examples that are often mentioned. Robespierre, for example, stated that dictatorship "is a state of war between liberty and its enemies, while constitutionalism is a free system of government in times of victory and peace."
 
Thus the first thing we see that what we call dictatorship it is kind of wartime interruption of democracy, or in other words, that if there is dictatorship, then there is no democracy, so the term "democratic dictatorship" makes no sense, it’s as if we were to say "black-colored white". Secondly, dictatorship is also incompatible with the rule of law in peacetime, and Lenin was right when he said that "a dictatorship is a regime without any legal restrictions," which was the original meaning of the term. Of course a dictatorship cannot be a lawless jungle state, but it requires the replacement of the rule of law and the high human rights usually associated with the rule of law with certain military control measures. Thirdly, a dictatorship is a temporary measure associated with a state of emergency (usually war), a short-term suspension of the republican system, rather than a normal way of governing, unlike "autocracy."
 
The reason why Marx and Engels spoke only of the "dictatorship" of the proletariat and never of the “autocracy” of the proletariat, the reason why they spoke of the "dictatorship" only in the context of the 1848 revolution and the "civil war" of the Paris Commune, and the reason why the leftist organizations of Western and Central Europe in the era and under their direction of Marx and Engels did not include the term "dictatorship" in their manifestos or even general documents was that such a temporary measure were seen as similar to those employed in the context of the Roman Republic, an interlude that had nothing to do with the republican idea. According to the Russian dissident scholar Roy Medvedev (b. 1925), when Marx and Engels spoke of the "dictatorship of the proletariat," "they used the word 'dictatorship' in the ancient Roman sense". In fact, this was also the common understanding before Lenin.
 
In Marx's time, most continental European countries had not yet established democratic systems, or if they had, there was no universal suffrage, the proletariat generally lacked political human rights such as the right to form associations and political parties, and hold elections. I believe it is accurate to call such a representative system "bourgeois democracy" (Marx and Engels never called the later system of universal suffrage bourgeois democracy, as did Lenin). The "democracy" of this time had no way of expressing the will of the poor, and the movements of the lower classes were often violently suppressed.  In this context, Marx "said to the workers:  To change existing conditions so that you will have the capacity to rule, you may have no choice but to endure 15, 20, or even 50 more years of civil war," and "the working class must win the right to its own emancipation on the battlefield," which could lead to the creation of a dictatorship.  This idea of fighting violence with violence did indeed have a great impact on later generations.
 
However, as "bourgeois democracy" made further progress and allowed universal suffrage, the spread of political human rights made it possible for "class competition" to be played out entirely within a constitutional framework, and Engels stopped advocating violent revolution in favor of the constitutional form of leftist movements. Although pure "Gandhism" is rarely accepted, and neither the left nor the right in modern politics has ever guaranteed they would never resort to violence if the rulers they were to abolish the constitution and return to tyranny (the United States is now considered a "rightist" state and the citizens right to bear arms implies that the use of force against tyranny is not excluded), but the violent subversion of constitutional government is unacceptable in modern politics.
 
At the beginning of the 20th century, only the then still illegal Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, operating in the most authoritarian empire in Europe, referred in its program to the "dictatorship" of the proletariat, a term which was still generally regarded, including by the originator of Russian Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov (1856-1918), as an option for fighting violence with violence in a state without universal suffrage. But Lenin had another idea. His reason for advocating "dictatorship" was not that the proletariat had to fight violence with violence, but instead that the overwhelming majority of the Russian people were backward peasants, and the proletariat could not win elections, thus it could only seize power violently and use a "dictatorship" to force the backward peasant majority to obey the “advanced minority.”  

In other words, since the "backwardness" of the majority, i.e. the peasants, meant that democracy did not favor the proletariat, the "advanced elements" were forced not only carry out violent revolution in the face of the repression of the dictatorial tsar, but even after the overthrow of the tsar, they would have to resort to "dictatorship" to overthrow democracy and to force "60 peasants to unconditionally obey the decisions of 10 workers." And by the same logic, the 10 workers would also obey one or two leaders.
 
In this way, "dictatorship" ceased to be the wartime state of affairs that it had been from its ancient Roman origins to Marx's era, "a transitional emergency measure that would yield to democracy as soon as the situation became more stable", and became a "dictatorship" that extended not only into peacetime, but eventually became an “eternal” posture:  "The form of the Soviet Republic is the model of the permanent dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasantry."
 
What followed is well known: under the name of the "dictatorship of the proletariat," Soviet-style countries never knew what freedom, democracy, constitutionalism, and human rights were. The dictatorship of leaders under the name of one-party rule became the norm. The bloodshed, terror, and death caused by the indiscriminate violence of the state have made people in the modern political civilization blanch at the very idea of "dictatorship." What was meant to be a temporary measure to save democracy in a state of emergency became an even more fearful "totalitarianism."
 
All of this meant that when state of emergency was really needed in the West, people were even more hesitant. Which is all the more understandable because the ancient Roman dictator did not in fact return power to the Republic when the emergency was over, but extended the dictatorship into peacetime, a state which extended through the latter era of the Republic, eventually bringing about its fall. The lessons of both ancient and modern times have meant that people are reluctant to lightly explore contingencies, but when something like the Titanic happens, there is no alternative to extraordinary measures. As far as the fight against epidemic is concerned, in 1918 the United States employed coercive measures against the "Spanish flu" that are difficult to implement in the West today.

But subsequent human successes against bacterial infections and the democracies’ victory over Hitler World War II, in alliance with the Soviet Union, have greatly increased confidence in democratic governance. If, in the case of World War II, the democracies had to unite with one totalitarian power (the Soviet Union) in order to defeat another (the Nazis), then the democracies’ victory in the Cold War was all the more likely to be seen as the "end of history" marking the triumph of democracy over totalitarianism. In the 30 years that have followed, democratic countries have seemed to enjoyed a period of prolonged peace for the governments and the people, and when the crisis finally struck they were reluctant to employ emergency measures, and either hesitated repeatedly, thus missing the window of opportunity, or employed light-handed measures, which did not do the job, or revoked the measures too quickly, which made the scourge even worse. There are the bitter lessons to be learned from this fight against the epidemic.
 
Two Types of Emergencies: Fighting Epidemics is not War
 
Of course, dictatorships in history, even when they functioned properly, dealt only with states of war. The state of emergency summoned into being by the fight against a severe epidemic is similar to that of wartime, in that they both require necessary and temporary "derogations" from normal human rights to serve vital public interests. But war and epidemics are, after all, emergencies of a different nature. The range of human rights from which they require derogations, and the special mandate/accountability mechanisms are very different. Metaphors such as "winning the war against epidemics" are fine, but epidemic prevention cannot really be considered a war.
 
The basic difference between fighting epidemics and war is that epidemics are natural disasters, and the germs humans are facing are not a willful enemy, although it is a common metaphor to call a virus an "enemy." In the absence of such an enemy, there is no such thing as winning or losing an epidemic, whereas in war, "victory or defeat is the order of the day".
 
From the Black Death through the flu, throughout history and all over the world, mankind has experienced many plagues of varying size and severity causing innumerable losses, but as long as the human race has survived without being exterminated by the plague, it can be said to have "defeated" it.  When there were few casualties in the Haicheng earthquake in 1975, we naturally won, and when we finally achieved a “great victory in our fight against the earthquake disaster” after the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, which in terms of casualties was one of the worst in history, we also “defeated” it.
 
To put it succinctly, even if it is not a natural disaster but a man-made "germ war" or "virus war," what we would call victory or defeat depends on whether the people of one side succumb to the people of the other side, and not on whether they succumb to bacteria or viruses. Bacteria and viruses are only a weapon, not a "party to the war."  This is like China’s battle with the allied forces of England and France in 1860, when the Qing troops suffered heavy casualties from foreign guns and artillery, and the Qing rulers were finally forced to sign the Treaty of Beijing.  You can say that the Qing lost to the British and French, but you cannot say they lost to their guns. Decades later in the war against Japan, why were we victorious? Because the Japanese surrendered. Although Chinese civilians and soldiers suffered far more casualties under Japanese attack than during the battle with English and French battles, victory or defeat always refers to the people who win or lose (British, French, or Japanese), not the weapons employed (whether cold, hot, or biological).
 
However, although mankind has been the victor in all fights against epidemics throughout history, the success or failure of a particular epidemic has been evaluated very differently.  In fact, the only true criterion for this evaluation the "cost" incurred, which basically refers to the number of human lives lost. Therefore, winning the “war” against an epidemic "at all costs" makes no sense at all if the cost refers to human life. When people go to war, it means that they are willing to pay a certain price, including the sacrifice of human life to achieve a certain result. Evil wars are often fought without regard for human life, and may even be waged to kill innocent people, as in Hitler's wars to exterminate the Jews. Even in a "just war," the protection of more lives may be one goal among many or the ultimate goal, but there are many "just wars" that are fought for "great causes" other than life, causes such as freedom, dignity, honor, territory, sovereignty, and so forth. This is the origin of lofty expressions such as “give me liberty or give me death.”
 
The achievement of any of these causes requires "victory."  Hence, all wars, even just wars, always have victory as the primary objective, and the price of victory is of secondary importance. In order to win, one has to kill (the enemy), and one's own people who are killed in the process are this "price." Even in a just war, "killing a thousand enemies at the expense of eight hundred" is theoretically acceptable. This is all the more true in practice, and at least in World War II, many countries that resisted German occupation, or China, in its war against Japan, all of which are commonly seen as examples of just wars, military and civilian casualties were far heavier on the righteous side than for the enemy. In the end, however, they were still victorious.
 
But the fight against the epidemic is completely different. In the fight against the virus, there is no need to pursue “ultimate victory,” instead what we should seek is the least cost.  Especially in the fight against malignant infectious diseases, can there be any goal other than of protecting life? Can the logic of "kill a thousand enemy soldiers, lose eight hundred of mine" be applied to the fight against the epidemic? And if we are talking about “losing 800,” it is true that we could send one infected person to the incinerator alive and kill the millions of viruses he is carrying, but could such an inhumane act be considered fighting the epidemic? No matter how many epidemics there may be, there will always be an end to them, and human beings will not pay reparations and tribute to the virus, let alone sign a treaty of surrender or an "unequal treaty" with the virus.  There may be thousands of individual victims in the face of diseases and natural disasters, but mankind will always be the victor. The victor, however, can neither ask for "freedom" from the virus, nor can it obtain reparations and territory. What is the point of mankind's efforts to fight epidemics and disasters if it cannot protect as many individual lives as possible? If "at all costs" means the "cost" of human life, what is the value of winning a "victory" that cannot be lost anyway? Is "minimizing the cost" not the only criterion for evaluating the fight against the epidemic?
 
Because of the unpredictability of the outcome of a war, those who are granted exceptional wartime powers are usually not subject to exceptional accountability. For example, during wartime in ancient Rome, the dictator had full authority without legal restrictions, and the people did not hold him accountable for his actions during his dictatorship. The only bulwark against his doing bad things was the time limit attached to his mandate: six months or the end of the war, when he had to leave office and hand over power. However, for emergencies such as epidemics or disaster relief, where there is no risk of victory or defeat, the time factor is secondary, and accountability is mandatory. Power can be expanded in a state of emergency, but responsibility must be expanded accordingly. Those who exercise exceptional powers must be held exceptionally accountable.

Correspondingly, those who lose their ordinary rights in a state of emergency should be given extraordinary safeguards. Voluntary medical care for ordinary diseases can be at private expense, but compulsory medical care for those suspected to have virulent infectious diseases must not only be medically accountable, but must also be at public expense (and not only after the infection is confirmed, nor can testing be refused in order to save public funds). Free people can make their own living, but when this right is denied, the government is responsible for the full range of "from cradle to grave" safeguards and must be held fully accountable for them.
 
In the exercise of power, there is also a difference between war and the fight against epidemics. Soldiers in war must take risks, and sometimes these risks are involuntary, i.e. part of "battlefield discipline." And the "white-coated warriors" on the front lines of the fight against the epidemic deserve the same credit for their dedication and courage as those in the line of fire in war. However, their coercive employment must be clearly distinguished from wartime rules, and so-called "battlefield discipline" must not be imposed lightly. Especially in the prevention and control of highly contagious epidemics, allowing doctors and nurses to carry out the frontline medical work of infectious diseases in the absence of protective gear is not only irresponsible to the lives of medical personnel, but also irresponsible to those receiving care, to the sick, and to society as a whole. This is because frontline health care workers are not only the most susceptible group, but also the greatest source of infection once they themselves are infected: they work in "congestion" every day, and this cannot be avoided.

Very few of the people they come into contact with in the hospital are indeed suffering from infectious diseases, but the vast majority of them are suffering from various ailments (why else would they be at the hospital) and thus are weak and vulnerable.  If the health care workers cannot ensure that they themselves are not infected, then is not clear whether letting them work is helping or harming people. Finally, if they fall ill, the risk that they will infect others inevitably falls principally on other medical personnel, and at a moment when the epidemic is severe, when medical resources and especially medical personnel are scarce, this is a disaster within a disasters, and is not fighting the epidemic but spreading the epidemic.
 
Unlike soldiers, whose risks affect mainly themselves, the threat of health-care workers who become infected goes beyond their own lives. It is therefore not only irresponsible, but downright perverse, for medical personnel to deal with infectious diseases on the front line without protective gear. Because of this practice, the infection rate among medical staff in some places in China was alarmingly high, even much higher than in the people who were coming for treatment: two-thirds of the medical staff in the ICU ward in Wuhan Seventh Hospital were infected. Doctors were severely underprotected, but felt that "they had to go to work even if it was obvious they're going to get sick,” which those who were interviewed called "running around naked" practicing medicine. Of the 138 coronavirus patients admitted to Wuhan Zhongnan Hospital between January 1 to and January 28, 57 were in-hospital infections, 40 of which are medical staff, an infection rate of 29%. As many as 262, 194 and 125 medical and nursing staff at Wuhan Union Hospital, Wuhan University People's Hospital and the Wuhan Number One Hospital, respectively, were infected. The officials concerned should be held accountable for this.
 
In terms of the consequences of emergency measures, fighting epidemics is also different from war, and similar to the "public disaster ethics" mentioned above in the context of the Titanic story: the only reason the captain's decision was universally accepted was because the captain sacrificed himself as a result of the decision. As I argued above, if the captain and those close to him had slipped into the lifeboat, he would not have been praised, even if his decision to give priority to women and children had been correct. If he had profited his decision, he would have been condemned all the more, even if somehow as he saved himself at the expense of others he also managed to save more people (or more deserving people such as women and children), and even if there were no doubts about the correctness of the decision.
 
But this is often not the case in war, and when a commander-in-chief wins a war at the cost of countless lives, even if the commander-in-chief is not personally harmed, or has even profited (not necessarily in terms of money, but instead in terms of the power, glory, and adulation that comes with leading a victorious war), the victory is still attributed to the general. This is true even in democracies, just think of the war heroes like Washington, Grant, Eisenhower, and De Gaulle who became popular presidents in their own right. Why?
 
This is because the goal of war is not the same as that of disaster relief. War, of course, is also about minimizing sacrifice, but this is often secondary to the struggle for ultimate victory. War entails the risk of defeat. Victory in war, on the other hand, brings the victor benefits in exchange for the lives lost: territory, sovereignty, freedom, democracy, independence, unity, reparations, dignity, etc. At least theoretically, these gains are not the same as in disaster relief. And, at least in theory, these gains are shared by everyone on the winning side. Since everyone benefits, there is nothing wrong with the commander-in-chief also benefiting, and even if he benefits more than the average person, it is usually acceptable.
 
But disaster relief, and in particular the fight against epidemics, a special kind of disaster (as opposed to earthquakes, droughts and floods, in that in an epidemic there is no direct material destruction and the principle cost is human suffering and death), is completely different, and the sole purpose of the fight against epidemics is to reduce the number of people who die, not to defeat any willful enemy, nor to obtain territory, freedom, reparations, and dignity in exchange for the deaths. The result of coercive efforts to fight an epidemic, despite the sacrifices demanded of some, is simply that the rest of the population survives, even if everyone, in fact, has paid a certain price (such as the loss of freedom that comes with confinement, reduced income, consumption, and entertainment, the loss of learning and employment opportunities, the fatigue and risk of health care workers who have to work overtime, and whole population also has to bear the serious economic, social and psychological aspects of the epidemic). In theory, no one should profit from an epidemic (it's more shameful to issue plague bonds than war bonds).
 
In fact, in a democratic system, other conditions are required for a general to become a hero. After the victory of Britain and France in the Second World War, the people of both countries "burned their bridges behind them" and removed Churchill and de Gaulle from power. They only returned to power after serving a term in opposition and experiencing bitter fights for re-election. Grant’s and Eisenhower's paths to the presidency were even more tortuous, and among presidents who came to office after winning a war, only Washington was re-elected. It is totally unthinkable that a someone who profited from his position while managing a state of emergency in a natural disaster, such as an epidemic or an earthquake, would receive the “gratitude” of those that did not die, and on that basis could hold onto power even after the emergency.
 
On the other hand, the wartime dictator is granted military power over the army, and if his ambitions grow and the army listens to him, the risk of his not handing over power after the war and turning the dictatorship into an autocracy is substantial and indeed has happened. But the authorization of the state of emergency against epidemics involves, at most, special civil control and the expansion of police and security powers, with few or no military implications. Therefore, the risk of a democratic state changing from a dictatorship to an autocracy as a result of powers granted to an "epidemic dictator " is slight, or at least there is not precedent for this. However, if the state is already authoritarian, the risk is great that after the authoritarian leader has used the epidemic to further strengthen his control, these increased powers will not be abolished once the epidemic is over, thus normalizing the state of emergency and pushing an autocracy a step further toward totalitarianism.
 
Democracy and Authoritarianism: The Long-Term Impact of the Experience of Fighting the Pandemic
 
Derogations from and restrictions on normal human rights during states of emergency occur in both epidemics and wars, but their scope and extent still differ.
 
Generally speaking, the state of emergency imposed to fight a pandemic is more costly to human rights than in the case of war. For the citizens of a democratic country, as long as they are not captured or defeated in a war (in which case it is not a simple matter of human rights, but of sovereignty), a state of emergency in wartime will only affect human rights by increasing taxes, reducing welfare, expanding conscription, and at most regulating the economy, restricting free speech, and suspending certain aspects of democracy, but the restrictions will not extend to shutting down businesses, suspending the economy, locking down the cities, and confining everyone in their houses as if they were prisoners, and the compulsory epidemiological investigations and transmission monitoring are far more damaging to the people's right to privacy than national security investigations targeting a small group of people in wartime.
 
More to the point, there is a category difference between the restrictions on human rights imposed by epidemics and those imposed by war; for example, epidemics do not require restrictions on freedom of expression or the suspension of democracy. War, on the other hand, does not require the "confinement" of citizens. A war may result in a ban on strikes or compulsory overtime, but an epidemic may result in a ban on going to work or the imposition of a compulsory "holiday." But for the vast majority of people, lockdowns are worse than restrictions on free speech, and it is conceivable that bans on work are worse than bans on strikes. Here, I would like to highlight the difference in the impact of the two types of state of emergency on freedom of expression.
 
In wartime emergencies, democratic countries sometimes impose more restrictions on freedom of expression than usual. There are two reasons for this.  The first is to prevent the enemy from deliberately spreading "rumors" and conducting "psychological warfare" to arouse panic, and the second is to prevent unlimited reporting from revealing military secrets to the enemy. However, both of these reasons are based on the existence of a declared enemy and the risk of losing the war. There is no such condition in the fight against the epidemic, and what we call enemy, the virus, will neither spread malicious rumors nor obtain any secret information our “loose lips” might reveal. As long as it is not the enemy spreading rumors, it is extremely rare in the tradition of freedom of speech for civil discourse to cause panic. The current epidemics in Europe and the United States are proof enough of this: many of these countries have locked down cities for a time to fight epidemics, but they have never denied their people the right to speak, and the result of free speech has not been panic—instead the public's carelessness and excessive "willingness to speak their mind" have been distressing.
 
This leads us to reflect on the once popular saying, "Americans are afraid of death, but Chinese are not." In fact, there are those who are afraid of death and those who are not afraid of death in any country, and those who take chances and those who are really afraid of dying are in the minority, and the general population's tolerance for danger to life is usually somewhere in the middle. But in terms of institutional characteristics, the real difference is that "the American government (i.e., democratic rulers) is afraid of people dying, while the China government (i.e., authoritarian rulers) is not afraid of people dying," at least in wartime, as a comparison of Chinese and American casualties reveals. But the popular saying during the pandemic is: " Chinese are obedient, while the Americans are really disobedient; the Chinese are afraid of death, but the Americans are really not afraid of death.” If there really is such a thing as "national characteristics," then in the fight against the epidemic, the American character has been very costly in terms of lives lost.  This leads one to ask: should the American state interfere with the people's "right to exist" for the sake of their own "survival," and use the power of the state to force them to "fear death?"
 
In short, the coronavirus pandemic has raised many questions about mankind’s political institutions that are well worth pondering. For both China and the West, the questions are both urgent and far-reaching: on the issue of fighting epidemics, China, with its “low human rights advantage,” has achieved great success in limiting human rights in order to get the pandemic under control, but it will be a great challenge to prevent the normalization of emergency measures from worsening human rights conditions in normal times. The West, which has actually suffered from the rigidity of its "high human rights" this time around, must learn how a democracy can efficiently enter a state of emergency and how to put an end to emergency measures at the proper time.
 
In a system that lends itself readily to use of coercive control, in the early stages of the virus, China chose to control the "whistle blowers" and not the virus, and  the individuals who are responsible should be punished.  In the West however, instead of engaging in political finger-pointing about individual responsibility, they should be reflecting on the shortcomings of the existing democratic system in dealing with emergencies. Democracies may want to review their historical experience of “dictatorship,” while China, once the epidemic is over, must work to get rid of "autocracy," "leave the imperial system behind" and practice genuine respect for human rights.
 
At present, some countries and some politicians are bickering over the responsibility for the global outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic. But in fact, since the virus is not man-made but a natural organism, no one deserves credit or blame for it, no matter where it came from. If it becomes an epidemic, then there is credit and blame to be assigned in terms of whether it is properly handled. Regardless of the origin of the virus, the epidemic started in China, and of course China should bear some moral responsibility to the world for the initial errors in its response that led to the spread of the epidemic. As in the case of the outside world’s criticism of China’s early mistakes, it is their choice, not their obligation, to praise China’s later successes, and China has no “right” to this praise, and the West has the same “right” to selectively study, if they wish, China’s later successful experience.  For China to thoughtlessly ask the world for thanks it is absurd, or at least highly inappropriate. This is like when the white settlers brought smallpox to the New World, causing a catastrophe for the Native Americans, and later the West invented the measures that eradicated smallpox throughout the world. Do the Native Americans "owe the white man a thank you" for that? Could the white man justifiably ask the Native American for such thanks?
 
But that is not the crux of the issue. What the West should seriously consider is the important flaw in liberal democracy as an institution in the face of the current emergency. Of course you can complain about China’s ineffective control in the early stages of the epidemic that led to its spread elsewhere, but when the virus reaches your shore and takes root, and you can't control it with the high level of medical care and the national power at your disposition, does it make sense to blame China? Can blaming China resolve the trade-off between the pros and cons of democracy and authoritarianism in this institutional contest? Imagine again the worst-case scenario: what would you do if democracies and totalitarian states were really engaged in "biological warfare," or "virus warfare," the deliberate spread of an epidemic to an enemy? If you spread your epidemic in a totalitarian state and they can control it completely with extreme measures, and when they spread theirs in your democracies and you wind up in the same mess you are in today, how can democracy be sustainable? Or does the sustainability of democracy depend on the benevolence of its enemies?
 
Notes

[1] 秦 晖, “瘟疫后的全球化：新冠疫情引发的反思.”

[2] Translator’s note:  Qin Hui’s first caption is a virtually untranslatable, bilingual pun:  “人左”或“人右”的困惑.  人左 means literally “people left”, 人右 “people right”, and 困惑 “riddle” or “puzzle”.  Neither “people left” nor “people right” has any meaning in Chinese, and it only after reading further in the text that one realizes he means “people on the left,” i.e., those who wear a mask, and “people on the right,” those who insist on their rights, which leads to the play of words, in English, opposing “human rights” with no humans “left.” 

[3] Translator’s note:  The Chinese expression for “there are many fish in the sea” is “if a three-legged toad is hard to find, there are lots of two-legged men walking around 三条腿的蛤蟆不好找，两条腿的男人满街跑.”

[4] Translator’s note:  Both terms refer to an unfree status which began as military service and evolved into agricultural labor on the estates of the wealthy and powerful.

[5] Translator’s note:  404 in Chinese is pronounced “si-ling-si,” and April 4 is pronounced “si-yue-si,” a play on words that is lost in translation.  Qingming is the “tomb sweeping festival” which occurs every year on the fifteenth day after the Spring equinox, which in 2020 fell on April 4.

[6] Translator’s note:  This is another play on words in Chinese, as “no human rights 人权没了” and “no humans left 人全没了” are pronounced exactly the same way, “ren quan meile,” which gives the expression an air of “damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

[7] Translator’s note:  “Cultural confidence” is in quotes because it is a quality the Chinese government urges the Chinese people to develop.  One might say that Qin Hui is bursting with irony.

[8] Translator’s note:  Fang Fang (b. 1955) is a Chinese writer who lives in Wuhan and kept a diary of what she and other Chinese endured during the lockdown.  The diary was rapidly translated into English, earning Fang Fang the criticism of many Chinese who felt she was airing China’s dirty laundry—she was widely appreciated before she work was translated. 

[9] Translator’s note:  This paragraph is full of internet slang and puns based on that slang which 1.  Makes a literal translation impossible and 2. makes it perhaps seem slightly humorous, or difficult to tell how serious Qin is being.

[10] Translator’s note :  Chen’s story is told on the American podcast “This American Life”. 

[11] Translator's note:  Qin is referring here to one of the key arguments advanced by the Chinese state for why Western-style democracy is not appropriate for China:  China is still a developing country, which suggests that a right to "subsistence" is more important than, for example the right to vote.  The point is argued in one of China's early "White Papers" in the early 1990s and is still evoked today, despite China's considerable progress.

[12] Translator’s note :  This has to do with the Anlu Shan rebellion (755-763), a major uprising during the Tang period.  Yang Guifei, and indeed her entire family, had been close to Anlu Shan, who had been part of the imperial entourage before leading the uprising, and the Yangs thus took some of the blame for the events.  The reference to Maweipo refers to a place in which the emperor and the court took refuge when they were forced to flee the capital.  There was a near mutiny, with several of the emperors’ generals demanding the death of the Yang clan, and the emperor acquiesced despite his love for Yang Guifei.

[13] Translator’s note :  Liu Shaoqi (1898-1969) was a high-ranking member of the CCP and Mao’s right-hand man on various occasions, but became the object of attacks on "revisionists" during the Cultural Revolution.  Liu died while in captivity, reportedly from being denied the insulin he needed as a diabetic.

[14] Translator’s note :  Lin Zhao (1932-1968) joined the CCP as a teenager, but eventually became a dissident and dared to criticize Chairman Mao.  She was executed in 1968.

[15] Translator’s note:  Qin’s actual reference to the story of the “three monks.”  At the beginning of the story, one monk lived alone in a temple at the top of a hill, and, using a shoulder pole, brought up two buckets of water every day.  A second monk arrived, and they tried to cooperate by sharing their labor, but the pole was too short for use by two people and they could only carry one bucket of water, much of which splashed out as they climbed the hill.  Finally, a third monk arrived, who simply drank the water.  The two original monks forced the newly arrived monk to haul up two buckets of water, which he did, but then he drank them both.  Everyone went on strike until a fire in the temple made them realize that cooperation was the only solution, and they devised a pulley system to bring water to the hilltop.