Sun Liping, "Fighting the Virus in China and the West"

Sun Liping, Stray Thoughts on the Epidemic, # 18
“Fighting the Virus in China and the West:  Three Conceptual Differences”[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Sun Liping (b. 1955) is Professor of Sociology at Tsinghua University and a leading public intellectual in China.  Over the course of his long and prolific career, his research has focused on a wide variety of issues, most related to the question of the effects of China’s economic transformation on China’s society.  He writes as a liberal, as illustrated by his well-known 2009 essay, “The Biggest Threat to China is not Social Turmoil but Social Decay,” in which he interrogates the cost of the state’s overweening emphasis on “stability.” Several of Sun’s texts are readily available in English translation on the web; your favorite web browser will find them for you.
 
Sun is also a frequent blogger, and the brief text translated here is taken from a recent thread entitled “Stray Thoughts from the Epidemic,” of which this is number 18.  Unlike Byung-Chul Han, Sun is writing not as a theorist of post-modernity or even really as a sociologist, but rather as a concerned citizen and public intellectual.  Sun’s observations are that:  much is explained by China’s experience with SARS and the fact that the West was largely spared that experience; that China decided from the beginning to extinguish the virus while the West sought ways to accommodate it (Sun relates this to China’s history of struggle); and that China decided to focus on virus control and worry about economic problems later while the West dithered on the same question (thus his second and third points are similar).
 
These are Sun’s random thoughts in reading and reflecting on the news from China and elsewhere, and it would be unfair to subject such random thoughts to rigorous analysis.
 
That said, my random thoughts on Sun’s random thoughts are:
 

1.  Sun instinctively reduces the world to China and “the West.”  By most accounts, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore merit higher praise for their performance in fighting the virus (in large measure, of course, because China’s earlier misfortune tipped them off to what was coming), but Sun makes no mention of these examples.  Nor does he differentiate among the various Western responses.  I have no idea to what extent the broader East Asian experience is reported in Chinese media, but in my reading, Chinese intellectuals do tend to divide the world into China and “the West” (by which they usually mean the United States).
2. I have no doubt that the stories we tell ourselves about the SARS and the flu, or about the tradeoffs between public health and the economy, impact different countries differently, but admit to being a bit surprised to see Sun elevate these to “conceptual differences” that divide along Chinese-Western lines (and which at the moment are more flattering to China than to the West).  The reference to Samuel Huntington, even if tongue-in-cheek, seems surprising for a liberal, because it seems to suggest that “our Chinese civilization is winning.”
3. Sun’s suggestion that fumbling Western efforts at controlling the coronavirus might a roundabout (almost sneaky) way of achieving herd immunity, which might leave China vulnerable once the pandemic runs is course in the West speaks, in my reading, to China’s “century of humiliation” and the idea that the West is out of thwart China’s “peaceful rise.”      

 
These observations, let me repeat, are not meant as criticisms of Sun’s off-the-cuff blog post.  Sun could undoubtedly respond to them, and might well point me to other blog posts which do just that.  But posts like Sun’s are part of the “background noise” which in turn is part of Chinese intellectuals’ attempts to come to terms with the meaning of the coronavirus, and have their value as such.
 
Translation
 
Mankind’s struggle against the coronavirus has now been underway for a season.  In this process, there have been very important differences in the models employed in China and the West to fight the virus.  The comparison of different trends has also changed somewhat during the period.
 
In the early period, China was extremely passive, especially Hubei and Wuhan, which became a disaster center that the whole world was watching.  But after Wuhan was locked down, the situation rapidly turned around, and the virus was largely brought under control.  While China was achieving a partial victory over the virus, Western countries, and especially Europe, evolved practically overnight from a situation of unconcern to one of near total defeat, at which point some countries said: “Why not copy China?”  At present, the West seems, after paying a heavy price, to show signs of getting the virus under control.  And now, in China, people are starting to wonder if the West has quietly achieved herd immunity, leaving China isolated, and when other countries with herd immunity head back to work, China will be once again passive.
 
Today’s text will not attempt to answer or explore these questions, which are beyond my field of specialization.  This overview of the changing situation in Chinese and Western methods of fighting the coronavirus is meant to provide a basic background for discussing the differences in ideas in these Chinese and Western methods.
 
As everyone knows, Chinese and Western models for combating the virus have been clearly different.  There has been much discussion of this already as well as impassioned debate.  Let me begin with two related points.  First, I am not giving my evaluation of the effectiveness of these two models, because the pandemic is still underway, which means that there is no need for such speculation now.  Now is not the time to say who is best, now is the time to learn from one another.  Second, even if many of the differences in the model have to do with systemic factors, I am not addressing systemic factors in this text.  Instead, I will mainly discuss conceptual elements in the two models, because this question is not only very interesting, but also very important for understanding the differences between the Chinese and Western models and even some of the problems encountered in this fight.
 
My personal view is that there are in fact three conceptual differences in the Chinese and Western models.
 
First, the difference between the SARS hypothesis and the flu hypothesis

I have already discussed this question, so here I will go over it simply.  In China, the dominant hypothesis, among the officials as well as among the people, is the SARS hypothesis, which means that this virus is seen as a contagious disease as virulent as SARS.  It is completely natural that China think this way.  In 2003, SARS emerged in China and basically ran its course there, and the memory of this remains fresh on people’s minds.  Hence, once the coronavirus appeared, people immediately made the association to SARS.
 
By contrast, in some Western countries, the hypothesis was that at worst the virus was like a bad case of flu.  They often said that the death rate of the coronavirus was not that different from the flu.  We heard this from Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, from the Japanese government, from the American government.  And this was a natural reaction in the West.  The 2003 SARS outbreak was a long way from them, and there have been many flu outbreaks over the past few years.

Differences between these two hypotheses explain the differences in people’s reactions.  Chinese cannot understand how anyone could not take it seriously, while Westerners wonder why people are so afraid of the flu.  It is now clear that the coronavirus is not the flu, but for the 80% of people whose symptoms were not serious, it really wasn’t all that different.
 
Two, the difference between eliminating the virus and adapting to it.
 
In the face of the virus, the technical difficulties faced by China and the West are the same, by which I mean that at the present time, we have neither effective medical treatments nor a vaccine.  In other words, we still lack effective technical solutions.  Nonetheless, China and the West still evolved two different methods.
 
China took the path of elimination, the path of winning a war.  At the time, we talked about smothering the virus, meaning stopping the chain of transmission through isolation, to the point that the virus was dead.  Of course, part of this is a natural reaction when disasters occur, and part of it has to with the possibilities provided by our national institutions, but we cannot deny that this is also linked to Chinese people’s ideas that have taken shape over many years, the idea that anything is possible as long as people apply themselves.  And of course, this confidence is also linked to the victory over SARS 17 years ago.
 
But the Western view is, there is no way to extinguish the virus.  Instead we have to figure out a way to increase human resistance to it so that we can live with it.  Before we get to this point, we have to slow the spread of the epidemic, flatten the curse, avoid overstressing the medical system, and give priority care to the vulnerable.  Some countries are pursuing herd immunity in reality even if they say they are abandoning it.  There are even some who say in the absence of universal testing, attending to the vulnerable and ignoring the light cases is in fact a methodology of herd immunity.  This may not be completely accurate, because the way the US is doing universal testing is not in contradiction with herd immunity.  And there are some people that say closing down Wuhan was in fact imposing herd immunity on the people of Wuhan.
 
Three, the difference between ignoring the cost and seeking a balance
 
As everyone knows, in our system in China, joining our strength to fight to the finish, giving our all, has always been our way of thinking and our standard of value, and this is also the strong point of our system.  Especially when Wuhan’s prospects seems so dismal, people were all the more willing to do everything to stop the virus’s spread.  At they time, there were those who said that the price to pay for closing the city was too high, and others said that we had to avoid yet another disaster, but these voices were ultimately quite weak.  The logic of going all in is that, if we can’t stop the virus, then there’s no point of talking about anything else.  
 
I thought this way at the time, too.  I went back and looked, and found several of my Weibo posts about it: "Whether to postpone work after the holiday is a matter of great importance. I dare not venture to make suggestions. But I urge relevant departments to carefully weigh and make decisions carefully. I did not want to talk about this, but I was very moved on seeing the videos of the tremendous flow of people coming out of the Beijing West Railway Station. So I’ll say once more, let’s make decisions carefully. "  "I once again call on non-essential departments to postpone work. Restraining the spread of the epidemic should be given top priority."
 
But in the Western fight against the virus, they tried to weigh costs and benefits and balance different goals.  For example, they sought to reduce the impact on the economy and maintain the normal rhythm of social life.  Of course, it’s not that there was no consideration of this in the China model, but we were more focused on winning the primary battle, after which we would return to other concerns.
 
Of course these conceptual differences are intimately connected to all sorts of objective factors, including features of the different government systems.  But we should note that ideas and ways of thinking are also very important.  This is why I have focused on ideas in this analysis.
 
At the same time, conceptual issues are often linked to the hypothesis you want to test.  The virus isn’t over, and many questions will be answered by practice, for example:  Does China’s current victory really mean that the virus can be extinguished?  What state or stage is China’s fight against the virus currently in?  What is the price to be paid for the Western pursuit of herd immunity?  Has the peak arrived in the West?  What are the prospects for the pandemic as a whole?  What will happen if the virus spreads to developing countries with poor medical systems?  It is perhaps still too early to answer these questions.
 
But in any event, I sometimes think that there was something to Huntington’s theory of different civilizations, because different people examine questions differently.
 
Notes
 
[1] 孙立平, 疫中杂感 18, “中西抗疫：在理念层面的三个差异,” posted on Sun’s Weixin blog post on April 9, 2020, available online here.