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ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a multi-dimensional crisis that encompasses both the realm of public health and political economy. The divergences in the public health and economic policy responses among countries have resulted in an unleashing of a propaganda war. This paper is concerned with hegemonic narratives advocated by the mainstream media about China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the facts thereof. After examining in broad outline the temporal trajectory of the public health response in China and its underlying factors, the paper goes on to critically examine some contentious issues concerning the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic in China that have been highlighted in the hegemonic narrative in the propaganda war over the COVID-19 pandemic. It is submitted that the divergence in the public health response of different countries is intimately related to the varied state of the neoliberal project therein. The paper concludes with a brief engagement with the political economy of the hegemonic narrative in the propaganda war.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge the assistance rendered by Zixu Liu, Fan Wang, and Hanbin Wang in writing this paper but the authors alone are responsible for the contents of the paper.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on Contributors
C. Sacrachand is Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics, Satyawati College, University of Delhi, Delhi, India.
Navpreet Kaur is Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics, Janki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi, Delhi, India.
Notes
1 ICTV (International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses) announced the name “SARS-CoV-2” of the new virus on February 11, 2020. https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/technical-guidance/naming-the-coronavirus-disease-(covid-2019)-and-the-virus-that-causes-it, accessed November 29, 2020.
2 Data on COVID-19 infections and mortality is provided at: https://covid19.who.int/ and https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html, accessed November 29, 2020.
3 Compare in this regard for instance Patnaik (Citation2006) and Patnaik (Citation2018). The latter does not accord the same role to super imperialism (centred around the United States) as the former.
4 Not surprisingly, during this pandemic, there have been various attempts, particularly by the mainstream media, to hold China “accountable” for the spread of COVID-19, which has involved claims that China did not do “enough to contain it” and “downplayed the outbreak” and “covered up the outbreak.” The US President Donald Trump has termed the SARS-CoV2 virus the “Chinese virus.” Further in the United States a legislation has been introduced to amend Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, in order to allegedly sue China for damages due to COVID-19 (Steinbuch Citation2020). Apart from this, the UK think tank, the Henry Jackson Society, had argued that the G7 nations should allegedly sue China for £3.2 trillion in damages (Henderson et al. Citation2020). Besides this, Germany’s largest tabloid newspaper, Bild, has drawn up an invoice for £130 billion that China allegedly owes Germany due to the pandemic. Details are available at: https://health.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/industry/china-gets-130-billion-pound-bill-from-germany-for-corona-damages/75241376, accessed November 29, 2020.
5 In the Unites States, the dominance of Big Pharma (pharmaceutical companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck, Gilead, Amgen, AbbVie, etc.) has resulted in an attenuated public health response. For instance, many residents of the United States express concern that Big Pharma will increase the prices of pharmaceutical drugs during the COVID-19 pandemic. This issue is discussed at: https://www.europeanpharmaceuticalreview.com/news/121439/nine-in-10-americans-concerned-big-pharma-will-use-covid-19-to-raise-drug-prices/#:~:text=A%20new%20study%20has%20found,pandemic%20to%20increase%20drug%20prices, accessed November 29, 2020. Apart from this, critics of Big Pharma have pointed out that many COVID-19 vaccine candidate makers in the United States intend to price the vaccines at levels that does not account for the substantial grants they have received from the federal government of the United States. Some information on the magnitude of such grants is available from: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/moderna-details-coronavirus-vaccine-pricing-142347763.html, accessed November 29, 2020.
6 One characteristic of the public health policy debacle of the United Kingdom is the profiteering from hoarding and overpriced government contracts for personal protective equipment. Some details about this are available from this link: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/12/ppe-britain-rentier-capitalism-assets-uk-economy, accessed November 29, 2020.
7 The existence of effective capital controls in China was a key factor that allowed China to overcome constraints that the dominance of finance capital imposes in many other countries.
8 “The symptom onset date of the first patient identified was December 1, 2019. None of his family members developed fever or any respiratory symptoms. No epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases. The first fatal case, who had continuous exposure to the market, was admitted to hospital because of a 7-day history of fever, cough, and dyspnoea. Five days after illness onset, his wife, a 53-year-old woman who had no known history of exposure to the market, also presented with pneumonia and was hospitalised in the isolation ward” (Huang et al. Citation2020).
9 In terms of the model set out in the Appendix, here this means parameter h (fraction of infected population who are quarantined/hospitalised) was exogenous to policy but from then on policy (through greater testing) could increase the value of h and thereby reduce, other things remaining the same, the time profile of infections, etc., relative to what it would have been otherwise.
10 Peto (Citation2020) proposes that polymerase chain reaction based tests on a mass scale can be used to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
11 In terms of the model set out in the appendix, this allowed for a policy determined further increase in the parameter h (h is the fraction of infected population who are quarantined or hospitalised), which possibly reduced the time trajectory of infections and deaths further below what it would have been otherwise.
12 See, https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2020-01-21/doc-iihnzahk5456866.shtml&prev=search, as cited in Prashad, Zhu, and Du (Citation2020), accessed November 29, 2020.
13 The classification of infectious diseases into Category A or B or C is set out in the “Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Prevention and Treatment of Infectious Diseases” which was adopted in 1989 and amended later. The full text is available at: http://english.mofcom.gov.cn/article/lawsdata/chineselaw/200211/20021100050619.shtml, accessed November 29, 2020. In this text infectious diseases are classified as belonging to Class A or B or C where class and category have the same meaning as far as this text is concerned.
14 The full text of the “Frontier Health and Quarantine Law” of China is available at: http://www.china.org.cn/travel/2008-01/03/content_1225543.htm, accessed November 29, 2020.
15 The full text of that article is available at: http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9a9b-fea8db1a8f51, accessed November 29, 2020.
16 Lin (Citation2020) points out that commercial home delivery also had a significant role in the public health response of China to the pandemic. However, this presumably would have had a greater impact on relatively high income households.
17 In terms of the model set out in the appendix, the lockdown would work, in the first place, if it could reduce the parameter b that denotes the contribution of new infections to total infections. The parameter b can be decreased by reducing interaction between infected and susceptible individuals which is the principal aim of the lockdown. The lockdown will work better if the reasons for individuals to leave their homes are minimal.
18 A lockdown is bound to give rise to some psychological problems for individuals who are not evidently used to dealing with it. But this needs to be tackled by a combination of counselling, treatment and enabling proximity between individuals of a non-physical variety.
19 See, https://covid19.who.int/, accessed November 30, 2020.
20 See, https://covid19.who.int/, accessed November 30, 2020.
21 Ali et al. (Citation2020) point out,
By compiling a line-list database of transmission pairs in the mainland of China, we show that mean serial intervals of COVID-19 shortened substantially from 7.8 days to 2.6 days within a month (January 9 to February 13, 2020). This change was driven by enhanced non-pharmaceutical interventions, particularly case isolation.
22 There are many important differences between the functioning of the Chinese government and the US government, including those in their responses to the pandemic. But a consideration of these differences lies outside the scope of this paper.
23 The public notice of the teleconference held on January 14, 2020 is available in Chinese at: http://www.nhc.gov.cn/xcs/fkdt/202002/e5e8a132ef8b42d484e6df53d4d110c1.shtml, accessed November 29, 2020.
24 The link for this document of WHO is: https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronavirus-china/en/, accessed November 29, 2020.
25 The link for this document of WHO is: https://www.who.int/csr/don/14-january-2020-novel-coronavirus-thailand-ex-china/en/, accessed November 29, 2020.
26 This document is available from: http://en.nhc.gov.cn/2020-01/21/c_75991.htm, accessed November 29, 2020.
27 As mentioned before the link to this document is: http://www.nhc.gov.cn/xcs/fkdt/202002/e5e8a132ef8b42d484e6df53d4d110c1.shtml, accessed November 29, 2020.
28 The link for this document of WHO is: https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronavirus-china/en/, accessed November 29, 2020.
29 See, https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/16/asia/zhong-nanshan-coronavirus-intl-hnk/index.html, accessed November 29, 2020.
30 Zhong Nanshan was quoted as saying: “The local authorities, they didn’t like to tell the truth at that time,” and, “At the very beginning they kept silent, and then I said probably we have (a larger) number of people being infected.” See https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/16/asia/zhong-nanshan-coronavirus-intl-hnk/index.html, accessed November 29, 2020.
31 Information on these administrative actions to fix responsibility in Wuhan and Hubei are available at https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202002/11/WS5e420250a310128217276898.html, and http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202002/14/WS5e45ab74a310128217277684.html, accessed November 29, 2020. It may be surmised that underlying these administrative decisions was also fixing of responsibility for the public feast which was organised on January 18, 2020 in Wuhan. A news report on the public feast is available at https://www.thestar.com.my/news/regional/2020/02/06/wuhan-neighbourhood-sees-infections-after-40000-families-gather-for-potluck, accessed November 29, 2020. However, it is also likely that the effective lockdown measures in Wuhan and elsewhere somewhat reduced the consequent contagion from this event.
32 In the link that follows it is reported that doctors in some regions of France have deduced from chest X-rays that some patients may have contracted COVID-19 as early as November 16, 2019. The relevant link is: http://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20200520-scans-show-french-patients-were-sick-with-covid-19-in-mid-november-doctors-say-colmar-haut-rhin, accessed November 29, 2020. Similarly there are reports about the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in sewage in Spain on January 15, 2020 (https://www.ub.edu/web/ub/en/menu_eines/noticies/2020/06/042.html) and in sewage in Brazil since November 2019 (https://www.news-medical.net/amp/news/20200701/SARS-CoV-2-circulating-in-Brazil-back-in-November-2019.aspx), accessed November 29, 2020.
33 Gu and Li (Citation2020) do not provide any example of a country where “professional autonomy” of virologists (or other scientists working on the medical dimension of healthcare) was such that they could bypass the process of validation by the relevant public health authority and also be seen credibly as acting in public interest and along scientific lines.
34 The full text of that email is available at https://focustaiwan.tw/politics/202004110004, accessed November 29, 2020.
35 See, https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En/Bulletin/Detail/PAD-lbwDHeN_bLa-viBOuw?typeid=158, accessed November 29, 2020.
36 See, https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of-unkown-cause-china/en/, accessed November 29, 2020.
37 This information is available from: https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/taiwan-reports-first-case-of-coronavirus/article30615906.ece, accessed November 29, 2020.
38 One narrative of the public health response of Taiwan to Covid-19 is provided at: https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/taiwans-coronavirus-protocol-shows-how-it-is-done/article31484681.ece, accessed November 29, 2020.
39 See, http://www.Xinhuanet.com/english/2020-04/17/c_138984653.htm, accessed November 29, 2020.
40 See, http://www.Xinhuanet.com/english/2020-04/17/c_138984653.htm, accessed November 29, 2020.
41 See, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/17/who-says-china-revised-coronavirus-infection-data-to-leave-no-case-undocumented.html, accessed November 29, 2020.
42 Some details of these subsequent developments in Suifenhe, Wuhan, Beijing and Urumqi respectively are reported in the following links: https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-04-23/Border-city-Suifenhe-becomes-China-s-new-frontline-in-COVID-19-fight-PTvyJ5Q5FK/index.html; https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-06-02/Wuhan-completes-9-89-million-COVID-19-tests-citywide–QZLbBpbAEE/index.html; https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-06-16/Beijing-in-critical-situation-with-coronavirus-prevention-Officials-Rmv05H0PzG/index.html, and http://www.Xinhuanet.com/english/2020-08/05/c_139266919.htm. Accessed November 29, 2020.
43 See, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/12/vietnam-coronavirus-pandemic-success-repression/, accessed November 29, 2020.
44 Further consideration of this argument is outside the scope of this paper.
45 See, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/15/only-three-out-of-53-countries-say-us-has-handled-coronavirus-better-than-china, accessed November 29, 2020.