“How China Controlled COVID-19, Teaching and learning in Sichuan during the pandemic” is an insightful article by eminent writer and journalist Peter Hessler who also teaches nonfiction writing and freshman composition, in English, at Sichuan University in Chengdu. It is not a technical report as one might expect from the title, it is an engaging humanistic portrayal of life and culture in China in these times of COVID-19, seen through the eyes of a teacher/writer and his students. Interspersed between the stories of his students and the people of Chengdu are nuggets of information and insights about how the government and the people of Chengdu brought COVID-19 under control, what life looks like now and the qualities of the Chinese people that played a key role in managing the pandemic.
It is a long read, well worth your time but I present here a dry “CliffNotes” version of it, focusing on the COVID-19 part of the article. Much of the text is lifted from the article with some editorial changes, but rearranged and grouped for clarity.
Lockdowns and Enforcement
- The Chinese lockdown was more intense than almost anywhere else in the world. Neighborhood committees, the most grassroots level of Communist Party organization, enforced the rules, and in many places they limited households to sending one individual outside every two or three days to buy necessities. If a family were suspected of exposure to the virus, it wasn’t unheard-of for their door to be sealed shut while tests and contact-tracing were being conducted.
- Very little was left to individual choice or responsibility. The lockdown had been strictly enforced, and any infected person was immediately removed from his or her household and isolated in a government clinic. By early April, all travellers who entered from abroad, regardless of nationality, had to undergo a strictly monitored two-week quarantine in a state-approved facility.
- Many aspects of the Chinese strategy could never be adopted in America or in any other democracy. But we need alternatives.
Schools and Universities
- Much of education was done online during the lockdown period. Nearly 30 million college students were being educated online, along with an estimated 180 million schoolchildren.
- Interactive video was a luxury that rarely worked. Most interaction was done using presentations, voice and text.
- After the lockdown, elementary school never bothered with more effective but disruptive policies—reducing class size, remodelling facilities, instituting outdoor learning—because the virus was not spreading in Chengdu.
- In the middle of May, the Chinese Ministry of Education declared that students no longer needed to cover their faces if they were in low-risk areas. Some teachers stopped wearing masks, although nearly all of the children kept them on.
- Students, faculty and workers are regularly screened for symptoms many times a day. There are facilities on campus to do a second level screening and clinics to perform COVID-19 tests. Similarly at schools.
Economy
- This was a recurring theme—in economic terms, individuals seemed to be largely on their own. The Party had never allowed the protections of independent unions, and across China salaries were cut and workers were laid off.
- Stimulus policies remained modest: instead of offering American-style cash payments to many citizens, the Chinese government preferred to give entrepreneurs some space to figure out their own solutions. E.g., in Chengdu, city officials allowed vendors to set up stalls on the streets.
- People also had low expectations with regard to stability. The Chinese middle class was still too new to feel complacent, which was one reason they put away so much cash. And they were accustomed to sudden shifts in policy or circumstance.
Social Distancing
- And, while Chinese officials required citizens to wear masks from the beginning of the lockdown, they didn’t actually depend much on them. China never allowed residents to move freely in a community with significant viral spread, hoping that masks, social distancing, and good judgment would reduce infections.
- Instead, the strategy was to enforce a lockdown until the virus was eliminated
Testing
- In a June outbreak in Beijing (300+ cases), the government locked down parts of Beijing, and, within a month, nearly 12 million residents were given swab tests. The city had the capacity to test 400,000 people per day. For comparison, the U.S. now does about 800,000 tests/day across the entire country with 300 million residents.
Community Engagement and Contact Tracing
- Neighborhood committees became bigger and better-funded. Crews went door to door, giving out information, questioning residents to see if they had been to high-risk areas, and helping with contact tracing.
- Tracers were divided into teams of between five and seven, with each group directed by an individual who had formal training in public health. Other team members might have no health background, but they came out of the same detail-oriented national educational system that had produced Hessler’s students, and they often had local knowledge.
- Contact tracing tools are much less sophisticated than phone based programs used in South Korea, Singapore and Europe. Some smartphone apps that assigned health codes to individuals are also used, but they require manual data entry.
- Today, it is old fashioned phone calls and face-to-face interviews. The C.D.C. policy is that, whenever a new case appears, contact tracers are called immediately, even in the middle of the night. They are given eight hours to complete the tracing.
- The Chinese epidemiologist in Shanghai had also worked for many years in the U.S., and I asked if there was anything that Americans could realistically learn from China. “Community engagement,” he said immediately. “We don’t have the neighborhood-committee structure in the U.S., but it’s important to find some alternative.” He noted that public-health services might have served this purpose if the American system had been properly funded. Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me that contact tracing is something of a lost art in the U.S.
The secret of their success?
- Hessler states that for all the Chinese education system’s flaws, it produced diligent researchers. The students had an extremely high tolerance for boredom, which is a lesser-known secret of effective journalism.
- As part of the story about one of his students, Peter states that one tradition hasn’t changed in China — a student always respects her teacher, even if the teacher is a moron (Hessler is referring to himself for having made a stupid mistake that cost his student a semester).
- Hessler’s perspective — there are also issues of education and effort. Despite the political indoctrination involved in Chinese schooling, the system teaches people to respect science. Hard work is another core value, and somehow society has become more prosperous without losing its edge. Nearly a quarter century ago, I taught young people who were driven by the desire to escape poverty; these days, my middle-class students seem to work at least as hard, because of the extreme competitiveness of their environment. Such qualities are perfect for fighting the pandemic, at least when channelled effectively by government structures. In comparison, the American response often appears passive—even enlightened citizens seem to believe that obeying lockdown orders and wearing masks in public is enough. But any attempt to control the virus requires active, organized effort, and there needs to be strong institutional direction.
The Results
- Chengdu has a population of about 16 million, but since late February there have been only 71 symptomatic cases, all of them imported. Virtually every case has involved a Chinese citizen who arrived on an international flight and proceeded directly from the airport to treatment and quarantine.
- Once the lockdown ended, subways, buses, and trains quickly became crowded. Mask-wearing remained mandatory indoors and on transport, but otherwise little had changed about human contact.
- And the lessons that a young Chinese drew from the crisis were likely very different from those of a young American. In my students’ last essays, many expressed a renewed faith in their government.
Here is a thread and some discussion on the article -
About Peter Hessler
Peter Benjamin Hessler (born June 14, 1969) is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of four books about China and has contributed numerous articles to The New Yorker and National Geographic, among other publications. In 2011, Hessler received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in recognition and encouragement of his "keenly observed accounts of ordinary people responding to the complexities of life in such rapidly changing societies as Reform Era China." He's also well known in China as a writer and journalist under the Chinese name 何伟 (Hé Wěi).
He is best known for his four books on China. River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001) is a Kiriyama Prize-winning book about his experiences in two years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in China. Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China (2006) features a series of parallel episodes featuring his former students, a Uighur dissident who fled to the U.S., and the archaeologist Chen Mengjia who committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution. His third book, Country Driving: A Journey from Farm to Factory (2010), is a record of Hessler's journeys driving a rented car from rural northern Chinese counties to the factory towns of southern China, and the significant economic and industrial growth taking place there. In 2013, he published Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (2013), which, consistently with his previous works, also covers China's ordinary people and life. en.wikipedia.org/...
Epilogue
The article is an interesting read; many of its insights are not new but some of it is surprising. Also, the article provides a humanistic on-the-ground observation and analysis of life in China, which many articles lack. And it points to the cultural and institutional differences between China and the USA that has resulted in vastly different responses and results to the pandemic. We can rightfully complain about China’s honesty in reporting numbers, authoritarianism, human-rights violations, etc., but the steps they have taken to combat COVID-19 are vastly superior to what we have done and they have results to show that we don’t.
This also has implications for the future. Asian tigers already have a head start coming out of COVID-19 lockdowns; their schools and Universities are open, their factories are humming, there is a renewed level of unity and collective cooperation. Their future is bright, while ours may include social and economic decline.
We in the U.S. can only look upon China with curiosity, suspicion and some envy, as vast parts of China are open to “normal” life, while we remain hunkered down in our homes with no real plan to control the virus and a ruling party that is actively engaged in sabotaging efforts by scientists, health workers and blue-state governors.
Stay safe and stay strong.