China’s Post-COVID Challenges
| Date | 01 June 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/20419058211022932 |
| Published date | 01 June 2021 |
| Author | Jane Duckett |
12 POLITICAL INSIGHT • JUNE 2021
The Chinese Party-state’s handling
of COVID has been remarkable for
both its failures and its successes.
It is now well-known that its early
lack of transparency cost the worldwide
fight against the outbreak vital weeks.
Similar questions have been raised about
Chinese vaccine trial data.
Much less reported, however, has been
China’s subsequent success in putting the
genie back in the bottle. Its conrmed cases
and deaths peaked in mid-February 2020,
falling rapidly thereafter. Since then it has
successfully contained several outbreaks,
including one close to Beijing around the
Lunar New Year in January 2021. China has
not yet experienced a second, let alone third
or fourth wave.
China is thus probably the only country
that has contained a large-scale outbreak of
COVID. At its peak, the authorities reported
over 30,000 conrmed cases, most of them in
Wuhan, and yet still ultimately prevented the
serious spread of the virus across the country
beyond Hubei, a province the size of many
large countries. In this sense its handling –
despite the early problems and the costs of
its stringent policies – is impressive.
China’s Post-COVID
Challenges
The global pandemic has strengthened the Communist Party at home
but damaged China’s international reputation, writes Jane Duckett.
As a result, China’s ocial COVID mortality
is currently 4,856, and in the year since
mid-April 2020, China has reported only 215
deaths. Its mortality rate (per capita) is one of
the lowest in the world given China’s massive
1.4 billion population. Though we have never
been told how COVID deaths are counted
and the ocial gures almost certainly under-
report the actual number, China has not so
far experienced anything like the death rates
of many industrialised democracies in Europe
and the Americas.
We could ask, though, whether China
should be compared with Western Europe
and the United States, which had not recently
directly experienced a serious epidemic?
Perhaps a better comparison would be with
other parts of the East and Southeast Asian
© Xinhua / Alamy Stock Photo
Political Insight June 2021 BU.indd 12Political Insight June 2021 BU.indd 12 12/05/2021 15:3312/05/2021 15:33
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