Engineering only works if it is using good data. But data probity is another of China’s casualties in the aftermath of Covid. The government has had a wobbly commitment to accurate reporting at the best of times. After the pandemic, the government has more regularly succumbed to the temptation not to share bad news.
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5. Zero-Covid
China’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic embodies all of the engineering state’s merits and madnesses. It is a powerful reminder of how the engineering state could accomplish things that few other countries would even attempt, while revealing how its literal minded enforcement can lead to tragic results for human well-being and freedom. I lived through all three years of the zero-Covid strategy that China pursued to stomp out the highly transmissible virus. In the first year, the country felt like a realm of serene calm after it pushed out the virus that was raging far away.
It is a little bit difficult to praise the US response to Covid. In retrospect, the whole thing looks shambolic, with different states having different policies, mostly made worse under Donald Trump’s chaotic management. Americans stumbled into learning to live with the virus in large part because of the ineffectualness of the government. But the United States (under Trump’s Operation Warp Speed) produced mRNA vaccines that China could not. And in retrospect, China’s response to Covid looks shambolic as well. The engineering state tried as hard as it could to hold on to earlier triumphs, until it was forced to let everything go.
Xi’s question had produced fresh worry among businesses. Authoritarian systems aren’t good at disseminating bad news. The coronavirus had spread, after all, because local officials in Wuhan refused to let the news of a virus disturb their political serenity as they arrested medical whistleblowers. Companies and investors therefore wondered whether Xi was genuinely unaware of how much his policies had destroyed major segments of the economy. Perhaps nobody had told Xi that he was the most feared unicorn hunter of all.
Engineers are bad at several things. They’re not very good, for example, at producing appealing cultural products.
During the height of the pandemic, Xi declared that China needs to become more “loveable.” The country’s image had suffered as people around the world blamed China for the spread of the virus.
Food was not the only item to run short during the pandemic in the United States. Many different items were hard to find: furniture, semi-conductors, personal protective equipment. The Chinese government and Chinese companies tend, on average, to maintain greater stockpiles of different goods so they have better resilience. The American corporate dictum is that “inventory is evil.” Although having spare capacity hurts various profit measures of Chinese firms, especially its state-owned enterprises, they are better able to leap into action in any crisis. A lot of manufacturing and food capacity is a useful thing to have if there is another pandemic— or a war.