Photo Above: Medical staff in China’s Wuhan celebrate on March 9 after all COVID-19 patients at the temporary hospital that they worked at were cured and discharged from hospital.

Socialistic China is Overcoming the COVID-19 Virus Threat

30 March 2020: Over the last few days, huge crowds in Wuhan have lined the streets to thanks the nurses and doctors from other parts of the Peoples Republic China (PRC) who heroically volunteered to go to Wuhan and help treat COVID-19 patients. The medics were given honorary police escorts as they went in buses to Wuhan airport to fly back to their home provinces happy in the knowledge that, in part through their brave efforts, the people of Wuhan have, at least for now, overcome the virus threat.

Please see the following short but powerful and emotional video of the people of Wuhan thanking the medics. The nurses and doctors leaving Wuhan break down in tears of joy as they receive thanks from Wuhan residents. The video can be accessed through our Facebook post on the subject here:
https://www.facebook.com/TrotskyistPlatform/posts/2807949902592547?__tn__=K-R

or through the direct link here:  https://twitter.com/OcastJournal…/status/1243791022489882624

The people of Wuhan now feel safe to congregate together in huge numbers, confident that the virus threat has been overcome.

The Peoples Republic of China has reduced the number of community transmission cases to almost zero. This is a stunning achievement for a country with 1439 million people – that is one in five of the world’s people. There is of course still a danger of a second wave. An average of around 30 to 50 people per day infected with COVID-19 have been coming into China as large numbers of Chinese people residing in the U.S. and Europe rush back to the safety of China. However, the numbers of COVID-19 infected people arriving are tiny compared to China’s overall population. Moreover, those infected people have been quickly identified and moved into hospitals for treatment.

Unlike Australia, the U.S. and many other countries, China has not closed its borders to citizens of any country at this time, despite the main risk to China now being from imported cases. Those coming into China are required to quarantine at designated hotels but this rule applies to everyone whether they are Chinese citizens or foreign nationals. Certainly there is nothing in China like the outrageous quarantine at the Christmas Island Detention Centre that the racist Australian regime forced mainly ethnic Chinese Australians – who had left Hubei Province – to have to endure when they returned here in early February. And from accounts of foreign nationals quarantined in China, it seems that they are not subjected to the harsh conditions experienced by those recent arrivals from overseas put into compulsory quarantine in Australia who have complained about intimidating guards, bad food, no fresh towels and no cleaning done (see: https://www.sbs.com.au/…/australians-in-quarantine-at-sydne…).

When the Australian mainstream media have had to grudgingly acknowledge that China has been at this time largely able to stop further spread of the virus, they have spun the myth that this is due to “authoritarian” measures. This is a lie. Indeed the lock downs currently in place in Britain, Spain, Italy, India and many other countries are in many ways stricter than the ones that were in place in China. To be sure, Wuhan had been in a stringent, complete lock down and so were many other parts of Hubei Province. However, Hubei only makes up 4% of China’s population. To be sure, in the rest of China, schools, universities and all non-essential workplaces were also closed as the PRC authorities extended the Chinese New Year holidays that had begun when the outbreak emerged and prioritised saving lives and stopping the spread of the virus over business profits. However, in these parts of China outside Hubei, including in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, people while discouraged from unnecessary travel and required to wear masks when outside, were still able to move around. By contrast the lock downs in Britain, Spain, Italy, India and many other countries are completely nationwide.

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So why has China, at least for now, been able to achieve a victory over the COVID -19 threat? Simply, it is because of the advantages of her socialistic system based on public ownership of the economy and working class rule – despite the fact that the workers state in China is bureaucratically deformed and undermined by the wavering government having allowed too much of a capitalistic private sector. So socialistic state-owned developers in China were mobilised to build two massive brand new hospitals in Wuhan in less than two weeks. They also converted in rapid time, large numbers of public facilities like gymnasiums and cultural halls into makeshift hospitals. This meant that although Wuhan’s hospitals were at the start overwhelmed, before long all COVID-19 patients in China could actually be treated in hospitals rather than be made to self-quarantine at home, as is the case with most corona virus infected people in Australia and the U.S. deemed to be “non-serious cases.” By ensuring that all people confirmed to have COVID-19 were treated in hospital and that others suspected of being infected were moved into either hospitals or centralised quarantine, the PRC guaranteed not only the proper treatment of infected people but, through ensuring that all infected people could be guaranteed food and essentials without having to go shopping for such goods, they ensured that the quarantine of these people was total and thus that they would not spread the disease to others.

Moreover, China also had a massive mobilisation to test people for COVID-19. This included not only specific testing for the corona virus but very frequent temperature testing of people in their homes, workplaces and at public transport venues in order to identify people who were more likely to have been infected. As a result COVID-19 patients or those considered likely to be infected could be identified early and sent for treatment and quarantine.

Meanwhile, Chinese state-owned manufacturers – even aircraft manufacturers, car factories and oil giants – were quickly turned into factories making masks, ventilators, personal protective gear for medics, thermometers and testing kits. Such a mobilisation on this scale is not possible in capitalist countries because the private manufacturers here are totally driven by profit and will only agree to switch production if they can make a quick buck out of it. Similarly, if private developers in Australia had been asked to build a massive brand new hospital in ten days they would have demanded a massive premium for such an urgent construction and would have wasted days if not weeks haggling for a bloated price before even thinking about starting construction. In contrast, in the PRC, not only does the socialistic public sector put social needs above profit but because the smaller private enterprises are beholden to the large public sector that dominates the markets and supply chains and because private firms have a tenuous existence under a workers state, even some private companies felt compelled to join the mobilisation to provide for the medical relief effort.

A society dominated by a collectivist economy breeds a collectivist, community spirit amongst its people. So in China, during a crisis, people, by and large, have a sense of civic duty and community responsibility. To be sure, given that there is also a sizeable private sector in China that operates alongside the socialistic state sector and which operates largely on the capitalist mode, the dog-eat-dog mentality dominant in capitalist countries has infected Chinese society to some degree and there were some cases of selfish behaviour by individuals during the outbreak. Moreover, in a country with a population 60 times that of Australia’s, one could find a few cases too of over-zealousness by local officials. And the Western media did their best to try and find such isolated cases and deviously portray them as the norm in China. So too did Australian prime minister Scott Morrison when he deceptively claimed, at a recent news conference, that China’s response to COVID-19 was typified by welding doors shut to quarantine people (how many actual cases of that happening in China were there – like five cases in a country with a population of 1439 million!). But for all the cases of self-centred behaviour by a small number of individuals and the cases of bureaucratic heavy-handedness by a few Chinese local government officials, the big picture reality is that China’s current victory over the virus threat is in good part due to the overall community, collectivist spirit of her people – a spirit that has been created by the dominance in the PRC of the socialist economic mode. It was this spirit that led to a massive grassroots mobilisation in China to respond to the COVID-19 threat. Neighbourhood collectives, Communist Party of China local committees and volunteers organised to ensure deliveries of food and other essentials to people in lock down or quarantine as well as for vulnerable people like the elderly and disabled. They also organised frequent temperature testing for people in their own neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, they provided care for the children and even pets of nurses and doctors from other provinces who volunteered to join the emergency medical brigades to Hubei Province.

The capitalist Australian media are doing their best to mask this truth about China’s mobilisation to overcome the virus threat. Other than spreading the tale about “authoritarian methods,” the other way that the media are shrouding the truth about Red China’s stunning mobilisation is by trying to find some capitalist country that they can hold up as a positive model of successful response to the virus threat so that people don’t focus on the elephant in the room when it comes to successful response – Red China. The country that the Western media have designated to be their capitalist positive model is South Korea. Yet South Korea’s rate of COVID-19 infection among its people at 188 cases per million people is more than three times China’s and is actually in fact slightly higher than Australia’s rapidly climbing infection rate is at this point. And South Korea’s number of deaths per million people is already 35% higher than China’s and is climbing at a much higher rate than China’s death rate is climbing. This is despite China having had the added difficulty of being the country where the virus first spread in a big way (at least in terms of known spread) and thus had to not only take time to recognise and identify the threat but had to develop treatment methods from scratch. The fact is that the model of successful response to COVID-19 is socialistic China and not capitalist South Korea.

Tragically, at this time 3304 people have died from COVID-19 in China as part of the more than 35,000 people who have been killed by the disease worldwide. Our solidarity and heartfelt condolences go out to the friends, loved ones and families of all the victims of the virus in Australia, China and the entire world. But to put things in perspective, the number of deaths per million people in China from COVID-19 is not only significantly lower than in South Korea but it is already (as of 30 March) three times lower than in Germany, three and a half times lower than in the U.S., six and a half times lower than in Sweden, nine times lower than in Britain, 17 times lower than in France and nearly 85 times lower than in Italy. (see the second last column in this real time table for example: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries ). This is despite the virus having basically been contained, at least for now, in China while it is spreading at an frighteningly increasing rate in these capitalist countries.

The PRC has now moved in a big way to provide aid to other countries affected or potentially affected by the virus. In Iran, the worst hit country outside Europe and the U.S., China actually first sent in medical experts to help with the virus response on February 29, when she was still in the heaviest days of her own battle with COVID-19. In Iraq, a PRC medical team helped establish a new COVID-19 testing facility that has quadrupled the daily testing capacity of that war-torn country. Meanwhile, the PRC has sent several sets of medical experts as well as large amounts of ventilators, medical masks, testing kits, medicines and protective equipment for nurses and doctors to the country with currently the world’s highest death toll, Italy. China has also flown in medical experts and/or donated badly needed medical supplies to Cuba, Laos, Ethiopia, South Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, the Philippines, Egypt, Chile, Cambodia, Serbia, Spain, France, South Korea, Japan and dozens of other countries.

That so much can be achieved by a socialistic country so squeezed by the relentless pressure of richer imperialist powers – and one which is undermined by the intrusion of capitalistic enterprises and weakened by the lack of genuine workers democracy – shows what we could achieve in a fully socialist world. At this time of public health emergency and with millions of working class people in Australia and the rest of the capitalist world being thrown out of their livelihoods every day we need to fight all the more energetically for a society based on public ownership and working class state power.