China: “What Kind of Government Is This?”

Inside the Outbreak

“W hat kind of government is this?” B ellaZ hang, a25- year old perfumesaleswoman with tinted blue hair asked as she sat outside a Wuhan hospital in February 2020 with her mother and younger brother, all three hooked to intravenous drips attached to a tree branch. Her grandfather had already died after contracting the coronavirus. Since the hospital had no free beds, the whole family was quarantined at home, but visited the hospital for medication. Bella took her mother during the day and her grandmother at midnight to avoid the long lines. Ms. Zhang’s mother thundered, “They tell us to wait. But wait until when? We’ve already lost one.” Her daughter Bella added: “The news is always talking about how good everything is; they don’t care about ordinary people” (Qiu, Amy 2020).

This kind of skepticism paralleled the thousands of complaints on social media when Li Wenliang, a young ophthalmologist, died in February 2020 after he was chastised for warning fellow doctors in December 2019 that an epidemic might be breaking out. He turned out to be a victim of China’s oppressive political system—in Wuhan and in China writ large—as well as of the virus. An epidemic could begin in any country, but not every political regime would labor to suppress news of its emergence (although the US president and Iran’s top leaders downplayed its dangers). ¹One saving grace for China was that its system could build new hospitals nearly overnight and regulate population movement to limit contagion.

Ms. Zhang’s question, “What kind of government is this?” brings to mind the dirge expressed by William Butler Yates (1920) two years after the end of World War I as an influenza epidemic swept the globe, killing far more people than the coronavirus:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; Turning and turning in the widening gyre The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Boom, Bust, or Neither?

China’s experience when confronted by the coronavirus reminds us of the ways that domestic issues interact with external affairs. This interaction casts a shadow over the question posed by Ho-fung Hung: “Will China’s economic boom continue?” Hung argues that China in the long run will “disappoint many who hail or fear the prospect of its challenging the existing global order in any fundamental way” (p. 281).

Born in Hong Kong, educated in sociology at Indiana University, and now a professor at Johns Hopkins University, Hung reviews the developments that set the stage for China’s extremely high economic growth over nearly four decades. Hung argues that an important event occurred in 1581 when the Ming government unified taxes into a single silver tax, thereby enhancing the silverization and commercial growth of the economy. From 1650 to 1850 there was a “market without capitalism,” followed by a period of “primitive accumulation” from 1850 to 1980. Having devoted a quarter of the book to the years before Deng Xiaoping, Ho-fung Hung examines in great detail the trends and countertrends since 1980.

Hung’s The China Boomis rich in facts as well as ideas. The book contains sixty figures and tables...