This piece by Branko Milanovic in Foreign Affairs makes an interesting observation about the responses to the virus in China and the US. I know we are supposed to assume that China was just lying about everything but the truth is more complicated. This article sorts out the question of why both countries downplaying the virus in the early days — and where that ended up:
The Chinese government’s greatest asset in the management of the crisis has been the centralization of its power and its ability to control vast resources. Because of this top-down structure, China was able to impose draconian policies extraordinarily quickly and to shift assets (including human assets, such as doctors and nurses) to the areas where they were needed most. Without these measures, China could not have achieved such remarkable results: Shanghai, a city 24 million strong, experienced coronavirus deaths only in two digits, and just three months after its quarantine was imposed, Wuhan is now mostly free of new infections.
But a centralized political system also has vulnerabilities. The economist Xu Chenggang has described the Chinese system as one of regionally decentralized authoritarianism, in which provincial authorities have broad powers, so long as they deploy them in the pursuit of objectives determined by the center. The central government’s priorities include maximizing economic growth, attracting foreign investors, and, sometimes, controlling pollution. The system is efficient in allowing provincial and local authorities to pursue these objectives using the means they know best and deem most appropriate. But central authorities reward local ones based on how they perceive their management, so local authorities also have an incentive to hide undesirable developments.
The fateful response of the local authorities in Hubei Province to the first cases of COVID-19 was not an anomaly, then, but part and parcel of the Chinese system of regionally decentralized authoritarianism. The provincial authorities reacted with hesitation—and even denial—because they did not want to create an impression of lack of control or of poor management. They relayed as little information as possible to the center about the mysterious infections, even as the seeds of the pandemic were sown. Only when the problem was too obvious to conceal was the truth allowed to flow upstream. At that point, China’s central government responded with an efficiency and professionalism that made up for some lost ground.
The American political system has reacted to the virus in a manner exactly opposite to that of China. The central authorities—the U.S. federal government and its agencies—have presented a picture of disarray and amateurism. In the pandemic’s first moments, the federal government was absent altogether, and so it has more or less remained. But American federalism assigns a role to the states that has helped compensate for the weakness of the center.
When the U.S. federal government disappeared, consumed by meaningless press conferences, the states took over management of the crisis. In doing so, they showcased the power and resilience of federalism, which, unlike “regionally decentralized authoritarianism,” devolves real powers to the states even when they may conflict with federal priorities. States, variously, adopted social-distancing measures, ordered closures, shored up health-care systems, procured personal protective equipment for doctors and nurses, and developed their own regimes of testing and contact tracing. Some took these measures even against the advice or the timetable issued by the federal government.
Whether the resilience of American federalism alone can overcome the pandemic—or whether the cacophony of approaches and priorities among the different state governments will contribute to its continuation—remains to be seen. The nature of contagion is such that in an integrated country such as the United States, the very best efforts by one state can be undermined by bad decisions or irresponsible behavior next door.
The lesson is that when people lie about these things, whether from the top or bottom up, the results can be disastrous. So far, the Chinese system has worked out for the better. However, that’s not necessarily going to be where this ends up:
[If the US] chooses to tap into its significant advantages, such as flexibility of decision-making, accountability of local governments, and transparency. The benefit of the latter is reflected, for example, in the fact that Americans have access to several alternative counts of casualties, whereas only one, of dubious credibility, exists in China. These U.S. advantages closely match the differences in the internal organization of the two countries—namely, whether the state-level or provincial powers are granted by the center or naturally belong to the second-tier administrative units
It’s an interesting question. But I would feel a lot more confident in the US system being more succesful if it weren’t the case that the Republican Party is batshit insane and more than half the states are being run by them. It seems to me that we have the worst of both worlds.