Xu Jilin, "Culture and the Coronavirus"

Xu Jilin, “Cultural Factors in Different Models of Fighting the Coronavirus,”* Financial Times, Chinese Edition April 13, 2020
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
Xu Jilin (b. 1957) is a well-known historian who teaches at East China Normal University in Shanghai, and a leading liberal public intellectual in China.  The cultural themes he sounds in this brief article on the different models employed around the world to fight the coronavirus pandemic are consistent with his more scholarly work on China’s modern intellectual history and China’s contemporary thought world. 

With China’s recent rise to superpower status, “culture” has become problematic, especially for China’s liberal intellectuals.  Mainland New Confucians (on the culturally nationalist right) and China’s New Left intellectuals (on the statist “left”) have both used China’s rise to argue that Enlightenment values, once widely embraced by most Chinese intellectuals, are not universal and do not apply to China, or to the new world defined by “China’s century.”  For Xu and other liberals, such trends are dangerous, as they fuel both the rise of unconstrained state power and a blind worship of a “reinvented” Confucian tradition which has little to do with China’s past civilization.  In articles like “What Kind of Civilization?  China at a Crossroads” Xu warns China against following the paths of pre-war Germany and Japan in worshipping native culture and ignoring world civilization, and in texts like “The New Tianxia:  Rebuilding China’s Internal and External Order,” he tries to recycle Chinese tradition in a way he finds both more truthful and more palatable.

Hence, Xu’s praise of the Four Little Dragons in their fight against the coronavirus—and his criticism that the Chinese model is unsustainable—are of a piece with Xu’ larger work, reminding his readers (which we hope include China’s leaders) that there is a world outside of China, and that is important that China keep learning what works and what doesn’t
 
Translation
 
Why have the East Asian “Four Little Dragons” been relatively successful in fighting the virus?  Why has the fight been a disaster in several Catholic countries?  A nation’s model for fighting the coronavirus is not merely technological, but is also constrained by political systems and cultural traditions.
With the evolution of the pandemic, we can already see that individual countries have different models for combatting the epidemic, and while the winners and losers in this first stage seem clear, the war against the coronavirus could easily last a year or two, and it is far from obvious who will be smiling at the end.

Three Important Models for Combatting the Virus

In my view, so far we have three standard models, the Chinese shock model of strict enforcement, the relaxed British model of herd immunity, and the model of the East Asian Four Little Dragons, which lies between the two.  The approaches employed by other countries are not strictly models; those of Italy and Spain have failed, and those of the United States and Germany are mixed.

Other countries cannot copy what China has done.  There are two reasons for this:  one is that they don’t have the same system.  No other country (with the exception of Russia) has China’s highly centralized capacity for administrative mobilization and social control.  The other is that cultural traditions are different.  Chinese people are obedient, and submit to authority, and China also has a tradition of feudal separatism.  That feudal separatism can coexist with highly centralized power is a paradoxical anomaly, but China has historically been this way and still is.  When the people hide behind their village walls, the virus naturally dies out.

Another extreme is the English model of herd immunity.  This too is something that other countries have trouble imitating, because it is part of the unique Anglo-Saxon character.  Anglo-Saxons do not believe in or appreciate the government making choices for them or controlling them.  They believe that everyone is a rational economic actor, and will make rational choices according to his interests, so as long as people have accurate information everything will be okay. 

Prime Minister Boris Johnson was a top scholar at Oxford, and is England’s most intelligent prime minister since Churchill.  He told the British people what the worst outcomes might be, which was effective in limiting movement in a way that the most restrictive measures would not have been.  Of course, Britain’s relaxed model of fighting the coronavirus was forced upon them, because they missed the early opportunity to control the virus and the infection spread rapidly.  All they could do was accept the consequences of their mistakes, and in their English utilitarian way, exchange maximum benefits for all for the heroic efforts of a few. 

Which of these models is the best and which the worst?  The Chinese model is unsustainable, and the price of the British model is too high.  What is widely seen as the most effective model is that of the Four Little Dragons, and especially the South Korean model, which lies between the Chinese and British models.  South Korea experienced a local outbreak of the virus, but successfully got it under control, without paying the Chinese price of bringing social life and economic production a halt to.  Everybody knows about the technical side of the South Korean success, which used measures of wide-scale testing and rapid distancing.

Political and Cultural Factors in Different Models of Combatting the Virus

What the institutional or cultural factors in play outside of technology?  In the 1980s, there was the theory of East Asian Confucian capitalism.  Might today’s success in fighting the coronavirus by the Four Little Dragons have something to do with a Confucian liberal democracy?  My tentative conclusion is that liberal/rule of law systems (Singapore, Hong Kong) and democratic systems (South Korea, Taiwan) achieve greater information transparency that to a great degree suppresses lies and fake news, allowing people to make clear-headed rational choices like the English do, and also allowing public opinion to supervise and correct the government’s policies on social welfare.  For example, Hong Kong public opinion and the public behavior of medical doctors in Hong Kong took decisive measures that surpassed those of the government.  From another angle, the historical Confucian cultural tradition lends the government more authority, and makes the people more self-disciplined, and both the officials and the people tend to respect the opinions of experts because of the Confucian heritage of elitism.

A country’s model for fighting the virus is not merely technical, but also political and cultural, which means that it is constrained by the political system and the cultural tradition.  Liberal political systems with different cultural traditions can arrive at different outcomes in fighting the virus.  In terms of comparison, among democratic countries, Protestant nations like England, the United States and Germany, and the Confucian Four Little Dragons, have achieved much better results than Catholic countries.  The complete failure of Italy and Spain is not completely unrelated to their Catholic heritage.  Latin peoples have always been romantic and self-indulgent, their governments are relatively weak and incompetent, and in terms of law and order and self-discipline they cannot compare to Protestant countries.

Today the United States has become the country with the most confirmed cases, but I remain cautiously optimistic.  This optimism is based not only on America’s world class health care system, but more importantly on two indicators:  state capacity for mobilization and social capacity for self-regulation.  As a liberal empire, the United States possesses both capacities, while most countries have only one or the other.

There is already a multi-sided competition throughout the world in terms of various countries’ models for combatting the coronavirus, and the models are not mutually contradictory but can learn from one another and achieve victory through emulation.  Taking China as an example, the fact that it succeeded through strong preventive measures in the first period does not necessarily mean that it has achieved a final victory, and instead should learn from the experience of the Four Little Dragons.  And when the coronavirus recedes to become a common flu, ultimately China will have to follow the English model and achieve herd immunity.  For these reasons, we should not be too sure of ourselves and rely solely on the methods used to date.  We must continue to learn and adapt to changing situations.  The most important experience and lesson is that we must fight the virus according to the virus’s own internal mechanisms, and do our best to see past politics and administrations and rely on the expertise of experts.

After the Pandemic, the World Will Enter “Globalization 2.0”

From the beginnings of globalization in the 1980s through the election of Donald Trump, we already see signs of problems with the new order, such as Brexit and the US-China trade war.  With the current global pandemic, we may see a stop to this wave of globalization.  This does not mean that all countries will turn inward and erect trade barriers, but we might well enter an era of “post-globalization.”  The worldwide industrial division of labor may not be what it was, following completely the principles of greatest efficiency, and ideology and state security may come to seem more important than economic efficiency.

The idea that China would be completely decoupled from the world is not possible, but reliance on China will be greatly reduced, as will China’s role as “factory of the world.”  We cannot expect things to return to where they were before once the pandemic is over, and even if globalization continues, it will be a completely new globalization 2.0, what I call the “post-globalization era.”  The coming of this era is inevitable, and what form it will take, what kind of exchanges will flourish and what the internet structure will look like will be the subject of predictions by economists, political scientists, and specialists in international relations.  The better China’s predictions, the more China can seize the initiative and avoid missteps.  Our past missteps were often the result of our concepts’ lagging behind the challenges we were facing, so that we could not see the direction of the changes or where we were heading.

​*许纪霖，”不同抗疫模式中的文化因素,” Financial Times (Chinese edition), April 13, 2020.