There’s no greater contrast between how countries have treated the COVID-19 pandemic than that between nations on both sides of what might be called the Asian Iron Curtain.
It’s a contrast that tells us much about how to handle the disease, and how events now in the distant past can determine the fates of hundreds of millions of people today.
On one side is the People’s Republic of China, where the novel coronavirus apparently transferred from animal to human hosts. There, the government deliberately lied about human-to-human transmission, persecuted to the point of death doctors who warned of its dangers, and is still almost certainly lying about its continued spread.
On the other side of this Iron Curtain — actually, a virtual barrier penetrated, until the virus appeared, by dozens of airline flights every day — are places which seem to have responded most successfully to the pandemic: Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
Three of these are ethnically or culturally Chinese. Each had an authoritarian government at some point. Each has (or in Hong Kong's case, clearly wants) a rule-of-law democracy.
It’s a divide as sharp as the one Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used to show visitors — a photo of the Korean Peninsula at night with South Korea lit up brightly and North Korea almost entirely pitch black. A one-picture lesson in the difference between the free market and communism.
Taiwan intensively screened passengers flying in from China, produced and distributed record numbers of facial masks, and strictly enforced quarantines. South Korea introduced an intensive testing and contact-tracing program. Hong Kong reduced land borders crossings from an average of 300,000 daily to 750 and imposed strict quarantines. Singapore had mandatory quarantines for arriving airline passengers and stringent contract tracing.
All four of these nations have had relatively low numbers of deaths and seem to be on track to stopping the spread of the disease. And all have done so with a transparency that’s a vivid contrast with the concealment and lies that are standard practice in the People’s Republic of China.
Just as in Donald Rumsfeld’s Korean Peninsula photo, it’s clear that regime character makes an enormous difference. Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong have shown how people raised in Chinese or Chinese-influenced cultures of social cohesion and observation of rules can perform well in a situation of unanticipated stress.
It’s hard to avoid reflecting how much better off East Asia and the world would be if the billion-plus people of mainland China lived under such a regime. But that was foreclosed when the Red Army led by Mao Zedong declared victory in the Chinese civil war and took power more than 70 years ago, in September 1949.
Regret over that unhappy event has been largely verboten in American political discourse since the discrediting of the “who lost China?” campaigns of Joe McCarthy and others in the early 1950s. Some even charged that President Harry Truman and Gen. George Marshall were pro-communist for opposing military aid to Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist army.
The American diplomats known as “China hands,” who regarded Mao as a domestic reformer, were called traitors and their careers destroyed. They were wrong about Mao, but they had been sincere in their beliefs. And Truman and Marshall were surely correct that the American public, after just losing 450,000 soldiers in a world war, would not support involvement in an Asian civil war.
Two decades later, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger pioneered a new policy of strategic engagement with China, and later presidents welcomed increasing trade with China, including normal trade relations in 2000. The hope, expressed succinctly by Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick in 2005, was that China would become a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system and more democratic, or observant of human rights, at home.
Those hopes have been dashed. The low-priced China manufactures that Americans have been buying seem to have carried too high a cost. Xi Jinping’s China has become markedly more hostile to human rights at home and much more menacing abroad.
Despite attempts at a cover-up, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought both these aspects of the Communist regime into full view. The contrast with the success stories of Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore could not be stronger.
Of course, no one can change what happened in 1949, and China’s Communist party, unlike Russia’s, seems entrenched in power after threescore and ten years. But we can at least regret Mao’s victory and hope that China’s East Asian neighbors, not China, are the wave of the future.
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