China’s information-control system creates its own virus problems, and its people-control system solves them while enabling the spread of the problems to other countries.
Yet those other countries, practitioners of neither information-control nor people-control, have their own solution that China’s information-control system hasn’t been particularly adept at, namely effective vaccines.
Let’s consider some established facts.
The Communist Party’s information-control system, and the concomitant slowness of information-sucking centralized decision-making, prevented identification of the COVID-19 outbreak and communication among the population at large quickly enough for individuals to take precautions. By cleaning sites and destroying samples, it also eliminated the possibility of forensics.
But China’s people-control system responded, belatedly, and eventually managed to control the spread by physically detaining entire subpopulations in isolation — something it still does. The immediate vehicle of China’s ancient people-control system is the ubiquitous Communist Party system of neighborhood committees available to control all entry and exit from premises. That system complements the ancient architecture of single-entrance buildings, compounds, and courtyards, itself an impact of the biome on Chinese culture over centuries.
China’s traditional use of human manure (versus animal manure in Europe) as fertilizer nourished the biome and may have contributed to making China, historically, an exporter of plagues internally contained via people-control. Ecological parasitologist Kevin Lafferty in Proceedings of the Royal Society in 2006 first illustrated the impact of the biome on human culture. Karl Marx even praised China’s “recycling” of human manure as opposed to its treatment as sewage in Western cities, which Marx criticized as wastage typical of capitalism.
The people-control system removed the urgency in China of developing a vaccine effective enough in immunizing against the virus, as much as it has lent urgency in advanced countries to developing their own effective vaccine(s), precisely because of the absence of the people-control system unique to China.
China’s main motivation in developing a vaccine has been directed abroad for commercial opportunity, face-saving (because of China’s initiation of the pandemic), and the political opportunity of providing free vaccines to poor countries. The motivation abroad in developing a vaccine was desperation: The only way to control the pandemic there is to eliminate it through herd immunity, the best long-term outcome. Rather than vaccine development abroad, China would much prefer that its people-control system be adopted there, but that would serve only to manage and control the pandemic.
Coincidentally, China’s information-control system impairs China’s ability to develop an effective-enough vaccine, while the absence of an information-control system abroad has enabled optimally effective vaccine development there. In particular, because of the effectiveness of its people-control system, China has no critical mass of its own infected people left to do clinical trials on and, therefore, conducts poorly documented, insufficiently transparent clinical trials on infected populations in disparate developing countries.
Most importantly, China’s ideology-first, politics-first information-control system precludes the free flow, peer-review, and publication of information about these trials among clinicians worldwide that is the very essence of empirical science. Poor science and technology generated by China’s information-control system, in turn, enables outright deception by China’s vaccine developers in releasing information.
The Sinovac CoronaVac vaccine was trialed out in Brazil but was shown to be only 50.4% effective. That is, when including all trial subjects eventually infected by the virus, not just the ones with serious symptoms on whom Sinovac admitted, it was basing a previously announced 78% effectiveness statistic.
China is now targeting vaccinating only 40% of its population and with its own less-effective vaccines. Without herd immunity in China, the biggest culture shock of the COVID pandemic may be occurring there: cancellation of Lunar New Year mass migration for the long term.
We thus see how systemic failure in China comes at both ends of the pandemic: failure to nip the outbreak in the bud and lower efficacy of China’s own vaccine(s).
Robert Blohm is an economist who spent the decade until 2016 in China. He is a frequent contributor to the Nelson Report for East Asia policy and has contributed to The Wall Street Journal editorial page for three decades. He can be reached at [email protected].
