Above, 15 February 2020: COVID-19 infected patients dance at a makeshift hospital in Wuhan used to treat and quarantine less critical cases.
CHINA’S SOCIALISTIC SYSTEM ENABLES HER PEOPLE TO ACHIEVE VICTORY OVER VIRUS THREAT
6 October 2020: It has now been a whole six months since the city in China worst affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, Wuhan removed the last restrictions on outbound travel. Those restrictions had been crucial to containing the spread of the virus, which was first detected in Wuhan. For the last several months China has been buzzing again. Not only are nearly all workplaces and schools re-opened but railways stations, airports, bars, restaurants, cafes, museums, theatres, galleries, gyms, sports stadiums, tourist venues and entertainment venues have been bustling with activity. Five days ago, people in China made 97 million domestic tourist trips on just the first day of the eight day (!) public holiday that Chinese people get for their combined National Day (i.e. anniversary of the 1949 anti-capitalist revolution) and Mid-Autumn Festival holidays. Chinese people are expected to make a further 500 million domestic tourist trips during the remaining seven days of the public holiday. Other than for the countries like Sweden where governments have callously downplayed the coronavirus threat leading to huge numbers of deaths, China and her socialistic neighbour Vietnam have more than any other populous country been able to re-open their societies.
Crucially, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and Vietnam have been able to almost completely contain the virus even while carrying out this reopening. Over the last more than one month, China, despite her huge population, has not had one single locally transmitted COVID-19 case. The only new cases have been from returning Chinese citizens and visitors arriving from overseas who have been in quarantine. By contrast other countries that have tried to significantly re-open, like Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Britain, France and Spain – not to mention the catastrophic situation in the United States – have been hit with major second waves of virus spread.
China’ success in containing the virus while re-opening is due to some very careful and often expensive efforts. For example, while most schools in Australia do not monitor the temperature of their students, China’s schools check the temperature of all students as they enter school. Some schools in Beijing have even provided students with smart thermometers that can automatically alert teachers if the student has a fever. Meanwhile, a survey found that even after the pandemic has been largely suppressed, 60% of Chinese employees are still being temperature tested when they enter work each day, including all employees at larger workplaces. Around the same percentage of workers are provided with face masks by their employers. How many of us here in Australia lucky to still have a job have the security of knowing that we and all our coworkers are being temperature tested when we enter work? How many of us are being provided with face masks by our employers? Very few would be the answer to both questions! Moreover, while universal COVID-19 testing of all people working at a nursing home only occurs in Australia after there is pandemic spread disaster like the deadly one at the Anglicare-run Newmarch House in Western Sydney, in China, all workers at nursing homes, fever clinics, medical institutes, ports, borders and prisons are given mandatory tests. Furthermore, to ensure the safety of what had been the worst-hit part of China, the PRC incredibly tested nearly 10 million people in Wuhan for the virus between May 14 and June 1. This meant that alongside the one million city residents previously tested, every single person in Wuhan has been coronavirus tested at least once, except for children under six who it is not considered advisable to have tested.
However the PRC would never have even got to the stage of being able to safely re-open if she had not succeeded in suppressing the virus in the first place. Let’s remember that China achieved this feat while facing a unique problem. You see when the virus first started spreading quickly it was on the eve of the country’s seven-day Chinese New Year public holiday. This normally sees the biggest human migrations in the world, when hundreds of millions of Chinese people travel to visit family or for vacation. Such large movements of people in crowded aircraft, trains and buses would rapidly spread any infectious disease. Moreover China was facing the rampant spread of a brand new virus that no one knew of previously and no one knew how to treat. Other countries where the virus spread later – or at least where the virus was detected later (there is some strong, though at this stage not conclusive, evidence that the coronavirus was actually in Spain and the U.S. and possibly France before it was in Wuhan) – had the advantage of knowing that the deadly coronavirus was coming and how it could be detected. When the PRC took the unprecedented step in the morning of January 23 of suspending all outbound travel from Wuhan, there was not a single recorded case of the virus in Australia. It would be another eight days until Britain recorded a case. Yet, the PRC’s response was so effective, that the proportion of China’s population that has died from COVID-19 is eleven times lower than in Australia. Meanwhile, more than nine times fewer people in China have died from the pandemic than have died in Britain, despite China having a 21 times greater population!
So why has the PRC’s response been so successful. Undoubtedly, much credit must go to the dedication and courage of her nurses, doctors, sanitation workers and community workers. This includes the 42,600 nurses and doctors from other provinces of China that heroically volunteered to go to Wuhan to help treat COVID-19 patients. In late March in Wuhan, there were emotional scenes as these medical workers about to return to their home provinces after their successful efforts broke down in tears of joy as they received warm thanks from Wuhan residents. The medics were given honorary police escorts as their brigades went in buses to Wuhan airport to fly them back to their homes as huge crowds wearing face masks lined the streets of Wuhan to cheer and honor them (see for example: https://twitter.com/OcastJournal…/status/1243791022489882624).
Yet, medical workers in other countries have also shown great resolve and determination to treat COVID-19 patients. This includes staff in the likes of the U.S., Britain and Australia, where many medical workers are of Asian, African and Middle Eastern backgrounds and have had to put up with racist abuse and harassment alongside the stress of their life-saving work. So what made the PRC’s response so decisively more effective than in these other countries? An editorial in the April 18 issue of the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet, explained China’s success as follows (see:
Sustaining containment of COVID-19 in China – The Lancet ):
The quick containment of COVID-19 in China is impressive and sets an encouraging example for other countries. What can be learnt from China? Aggressive public health interventions, such as early detection of cases, contact tracing, and population behavioural change, have contributed enormously to containing the epidemic.
However, what enabled China to make those crucial “public health interventions” so effectively? When the coronavirus was ravaging China in late January and early February, before it devastated the rest of the world, the Western mainstream media claimed that the virus spread in China was evidence of the serious flaws in her political system. Now that it has been proven that the PRC responded to the virus threat far more effectively than the Western countries, in order to be consistent with the initial methodology of the mainstream Western media we must ascribe that success entirely to the superiority of her political system. China has a socialistic political and economic system based on working class rule and the dominance of public ownership of her economy – despite the fact that the wavering Beijing government has allowed too much of a capitalistic private sector. And when one compares the results of the PRC’s pandemic response to that of capitalist countries, her socialistic system comes through with flying colours.
Tragically, at this time 4634 people have died from COVID-19 in China as part of the more than one million 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. When one compares the effectiveness of socialistic China’s response to this health emergency with that of the capitalist countries with similarly large populations, we find that her response has been far more effective regardless of which type of capitalist state that you compare with the PRC. Thus the proportion of people killed by COVID-19 in socialistic China is currently 214 times lower than in Brazil, which has a hard right government, 154 times lower than in France, which has a more mainstream liberal centre-right government and 214 times lower than in social democrat-administered Spain. Notably, the percentage of China’s people killed by the coronavirus is also 202 times lower than in the world’s capitalist superpower the U.S. – where the virus is still spreading alarmingly – and 46 times lower than in the U.S.’s only powerful capitalist rival, Russia. Meanwhile, the proportion of people killed by COVID-19 in China is 60 times lower than in one of the U.S.’s strongest allies Israel, while being 101 times lower than in one of the U.S. biggest arch enemies in the capitalist world, Iran. Moreover, the percentage of Red China’s population killed by the coronavirus is 194 times lower than in Britain, which never misses a chance to proclaim its supposed “democracy,” 31 times lower than in Turkey which has an authoritarian, defacto one-party, capitalist state and 44 times lower than in Saudi Arabia which has an absolutist, monarchist dictatorship. Nominal parliamentary “democracies”, authoritarian regimes, absolutist monarchies, hard right governments, centre-right governments, social democrat-administered “welfare states,” allies of the U.S., adversaries of the U.S., it doesn’t fundamentally matter, capitalist rule in all its forms has in general failed miserably in responding to the COVID-19 threat in comparison with socialistic China.
We should add too that the other socialistic countries have also responded in a very effective way to the pandemic. Three of these countries share borders with China – Laos, North Korea and Vietnam – and thus were other than China itself the most vulnerable to the virus spread out of Wuhan (if one discounts the slower undetected spread of the virus that may well have already taken place earlier in the U.S. or Europe). Yet, the response of these socialistic societies has been so successful that to date not a single person has died from COVID-19 in Laos and North Korea. In Vietnam, 26 times fewer people have died from the virus than in Australia, despite Vietnam having nearly four times Australia’s population. The effort of socialistic Vietnam should in particular be singled out for praise as she has not only a large population of 97 million people but a very high population density, making her at higher risk to the pandemic. Yet, through an effective program of quarantine for suspected cases, a resonant government information campaign and a collectivist spirit amongst her population that ensured that they mobilised in support of public health measures, Vietnam has been to date stunningly successful in suppressing the pandemic threat (see: How has Vietnam, a developing nation in South-East Asia, done so well to combat coronavirus? – ABC News ). Other than for the four socialistic states in Asia, the only other workers state in the world right now is Cuba. The response of Cuba, which is still burdened by a U.S. economic blockade (the DPRK is weighed down even more by draconian UN economic sanctions), to the virus threat has been less successful than the other workers states. The proportion of her people who have died from COVID-19 is more than three times that of China’s. However, this is still far, far better than most capitalist countries in her region.
PUBLIC OWNERSHIP AND THE RESULTING COLLECTIVIST SPIRIT
Photo credit: Chinatopix
So how did China’s socialistic system enable her to effectively respond to the coronavirus threat? One striking example is the way that the PRC’s socialistic state-owned developers, equipment manufacturers, and communication and power firms collaborated to build two urgently needed new hospitals in Wuhan in less than two weeks. This building of additional, large infectious disease hospitals enabled Wuhan to have the capacity to treat infected patients both effectively and in a way that ensured that infections would not be passed onto others. Just as importantly, state-owned firms acted to convert 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 or in nursing homes, as is the case with most coronavirus infected people in Australia, Britain and the U.S. deemed to be “non-serious cases.” In this way the PRC guaranteed not only the proper treatment of infected people but, through ensuring that all infected people were both isolated and guaranteed food and essentials without having to go shopping for such goods, they ensured that the quarantine of these people was water-tight. In contrast, the shortage of available hospital places in the likes of the U.S., Britain, Italy and Australia meant that infected people ended up passing on the virus to family members, house mates and most fatally, fellow nursing home residents.
Meanwhile, China’s state-owned manufacturers – even aircraft manufacturers, car factories, oil giants and of all industries underwear manufacturers – were quickly turned into factories making masks, ventilators, personal protective gear for medics, disinfectants, non-contact thermometers and testing kits. Such a mobilisation on this scale is not possible in capitalist countries like Australia 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. There have just been a handful of manufacturers here that have switched over their production to assist the pandemic relief effort and they have mostly done so at a slow pace and with low levels of output. Similarly, if private developers in Australia had been asked to build massive brand new hospitals in ten days or to rapidly convert large public facilities into makeshift hospitals 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 anti-pandemic mobilisation.
As a result of this public sector-led mobilisation, China’s daily output of medical grade N95 masks increased from 130,000 in early February to over 5 million by the end of April. Even more impressively, she increased her production of medical protective suits 90 fold from the early days of the epidemic. By late April, China was producing nearly 2 million protective suits per day! This made a huge difference to her response. Although in the early days of the pandemic, many Chinese medical workers became infected and some tragically later died, once it was realised how infectious the disease was and production of personal protective equipment was ramped up rapidly within days, all of China’s nurses, doctors and sanitation workers working in infection prone settings were able to wear space suit–style head to toe protective suits. This greatly contributed to slowing the spread of the disease within hospitals and protected the lives of medics and sanitation workers alike.
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. That meant that during this public health crisis, the population overwhelmingly followed hygiene and social distancing measures voluntarily. Moreover there were few cases of people fighting with each other over items like toilet paper such has occurred in Australia. To be sure, given that there is also a sizeable private sector in China that operates alongside the socialistic state sector and which operates more on the capitalist mode, the dog-eat-dog mentality dominant in capitalist countries has infected Chinese society to some degree and there were a small number of cases of selfish behaviour by individuals during the outbreak. Moreover, in a country with a population 57 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 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 very small number of 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. The amount of people that participated in the PRC’s grassroots campaign is staggering. Four million community workers were involved in the pandemic response along with nearly 9 million volunteers, 13 million Communist Party of China (CPC) volunteers and tens upon tens of millions of local residents. Their efforts made a decisive difference. For one they ensured that at a very local level, everyone was informed about the required social distancing and hygiene measures and just as importantly were motivated as to their importance through direct discussions. They also ensured that in addition to the daily and sometimes three times daily temperature testing of all workers that was taking places in all Chinese workplaces during the height of the epidemic, people were being temperature tested in their homes at least once a day. As a result those thought to possibly have COVID-19 were quickly identified, tested for the virus and quarantined.
PRC AIDS PEOPLES OF THE WORLD
Even while still battling to get on the top of the coronavirus, the PRC began sending out medical teams and pandemic response goods to other parts of the world. Already by the end of May, the PRC had sent 29 medical expert teams to 27 countries and had directed its medical teams already stationed in 56 countries to support local pandemic response efforts. Moreover, the PRC donated large amounts of surgical masks, protective suits, disinfectants, thermometers, testing kits and ventilators to more than 150 countries. This assistance was concentrated on countries in Africa, the South Pacific, Asia and the Middle East.
This approach is radically different to that of the U.S. leadership. The Trump regime’s “America First” ethos led U.S. authorities, on several occasions, to literally seize masks in foreign countries that had already been set for export to third countries. Several countries, including France, Germany and Canada, were in this way deprived of promised supplies. Here, Australian politicians and media imbibed the same nationalist outlook as Trump. They made a big retrospective song and dance about a small amount of masks and sanitiser being exported to China – or bought and sent on to China by Chinese Australians – during the height of the virus spread there and before COVID-19 had even spread widely here. This was claimed to be harming Australia’s national interests. This did not stop Australian authorities from, for their part, importing a far, far larger number of masks, protective suits and testing kits from China.
Meanwhile, even as Australia imposed a total travel ban on non-Australian citizens from China entering here from January 31 and then a general ban on all foreign nationals or non-permanent residents from entering Australia from March 20, the PRC has never imposed a general travel ban on non-citizens arriving from any country. On March 26, China did suspend the entry of tourists and business travellers. However, international students, workers and those conducting scientific and technical research and co-operation could still enter China. Thus, the contrast between the way that international students are being treated in China with the what they are copping in Australia is striking. Notable too is the fact that while international students here who have lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic, as many indeed have, are not eligible for any welfare payments, PRC authorities have been providing meals and other essentials to international students from Africa, the South Pacific and the Middle East studying in China. Moreover, throughout this entire pandemic there has not been one single case of an international student suffering a violent racist attack in China. This is a welcome contrast to the reality faced by many international students in Australia who have had to combine enduring economic insecurity and pauperisation with being hit with terrifying physical violence.
AUSTRALIAN RULERS TRY TO MASK THE
PRC’S PANDEMIC RESPONSE SUCCESS FROM AUSTRALIA’S PEOPLE
When the coronavirus was ravaging Wuhan before the PRC managed to suppress the threat, the capitalist Australian media could not report on the epidemic sweeping China enough. They wanted to present Red China as vulnerable, backward and deeply flawed. Yet when it became clear just how effectively the PRC was responding to the pandemic and in particular just how successful her response had been in comparison with the capitalist countries, reports about the current state of the pandemic in China … suddenly disappeared from our TV screens! Instead, when the media did start talking about COVID-19 in China again they only spoke about the origins of the virus which they attributed to China, something that is as yet unproven and moreover is actually not central to examining an overall response to an infectious disease, since viral outbreaks are a natural disaster that have always been impossible to contain at their immediate source. The motivation of Australia’s mainstream media is clear. They want to mask the truth about China’s pandemic response success from Australia’s population in order to ensure that this country’s masses do not acquire a positive attitude to the PRC and her socialistic system. They understand just how many grievances that the working class masses here have and they sure don’t want people here getting any ideas about supporting socialism.
One way that the big business and government-owned Australian media have sought to mask China’s virus suppression success is to find some other, capitalist, country that they can point to as a model of success. This so that people don’t focus on the elephant in the room when it comes to successful response – Red China. One country that the Western media had held up was capitalist Singapore. Yet this blew up in their faces as Singapore had a massive second-wave virus spread that was concentrated in the terribly overcrowded dormitories of that country’s brutally exploited South Asian and South-east Asian foreign guest workers. As a result, Singapore now has an infection rate even greater than that of Britain and Italy (although thankfully a lower death rate due to the relative youth of the guest worker population). The main positive model that the mainstream media focussed on was South Korea. Yet South Korea’s number of deaths per million people is already two and a half times higher than China’s and continues to climb, whereas all of China has not had a single COVID-19 death for the last nearly five months. Japan, and quite ridiculously Germany, were also pointed to as capitalist “democratic” models of success. Yet the proportion of Japan’s population that has died from COVID-19 is already four times higher than in China, while in Germany the proportion is 36 times higher than in China. So in the end, the mainstream media had to tout Australia as the model of pandemic response success. But despite this land’s great geographic advantages of being both an island and a country with a very low population density, this country was hit by a deadly second wave centred in Victoria. So the capitalist media and government have had to sheepishly pull back on that claim as well.
When the Western media have had to grudgingly acknowledge China’s pandemic response success they have tried to tarnish this by claiming that this was the result of “authoritarian” methods and “brutal lockdowns.” The reality is however very different. The centre of virus spread in China, Wuhan was to be sure put in a water-tight quarantine to reduce the virus spread to other parts of China. People in Wuhan and some other parts of Hubei Province were required to remain in their homes. However, this was achieved largely because of the voluntary co-operation of the people, their sense of civic duty and the effectiveness of grassroots information campaigns. Moreover what made the lock down effective is that neighbourhood collectives, community workers, CPC local committees and volunteers organised to ensure deliveries of food and other essentials to every single person in lock down or quarantine as well as more broadly for vulnerable people like the elderly and disabled.
Before the pandemic hit Australia, the mainstream media here tried to play up reports and videos shared on China’s social media of isolated cases of people breaking quarantine and then loudly protesting as they are being dragged back into their homes. Yet this was the experience for just a tiny percentage of people in China. The Western media however seized on this to describe China’s methods as “brutal” and evidence of an “authoritarian communist dictatorship.” They sold that line until the virus became rampant in Europe, America and Australia. Then these countries themselves naturally needed to enforce quarantining measures too. Soon quarantining measures here in Australia were enforced through repressive means involving not only the police, but quite unnecessarily, even the army. People were hit with hefty fines if they could not show cause for why they were outdoors – some for merely jogging. Six months ago, Victorian cops fined 26 people a total of $43,000 for holding a refugee rights protest allegedly because they were outdoors other than for the allowed reasons. This despite protesters being in a car cavalcade and thus posing little risk of virus spread. Meanwhile large numbers of other people have received $1,652 on-the-spot fines for breaching social distancing restrictions, fines which necessarily affect lower-income people the most. Meanwhile, several other people have actually been arrested and hit with criminal charges. In contrast the proportion of people fined or charged for breaching quarantine in China has been tiny compared to her huge population. In most cases, those few people found to be breaching quarantine and refusing to return to their homes were instead of being fined were literally escorted or – in rare cases – dragged back into their homes. Moreover, most of this enforcement was actually performed by volunteers, neighbourhood committees and grassroots activists. If in those tiny few cases where people who breached quarantine shouted and resisted as they were being pulled back into their homes, the reason that they resisted and complained so loudly is because they could: it was not the police grabbing them back into quarantine but often literally their own neighbours, community workers or grassroots activists. Where PRC authorities actually did have harsh crackdowns was against private shopkeepers and other capitalists who tried to profiteer from the crises by raising prices. Many of these people were arrested. However, from the standpoint of the masses these are completely supportable and very necessary measures.
It is important to note that Wuhan and the other cities in Hubei that had stringent lockdowns only amounted to 4% of China’s population. In the rest of China, compulsory social distancing restrictions were actually not as stringent as the ones at the height of lockdowns in Britain, Italy, Spain and other countries. Other than for the cities in Hubei, in a further 12% of China, at the height of the pandemic, people could only go outside for work or medical reasons and one person from each household could go out to get provisions every two days. However, in the remaining 84% of China – including in China’s most well-known cities Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Chongqing, Nanjing and most of Xian and Tianjin too – compulsory restrictions were actually less stringent than they were in Australia at the height of the virus spread here. To be sure schools were suspended, mass gatherings banned, entertainment venues closed and the Chinese New Year holidays greatly extended to keep non-essential workplaces shut. Certain housing communities restricted outsiders entering their compounds, while others required people entering to have their temperature taken and be registered for tracing purposes. However, people were still allowed to move outside freely as long as they wore a mask. Nevertheless, following urgings from the government, most people chose voluntarily to stay at home out of both civic duty and for their own protection.
The fact is that China’s stunningly successful response to the coronavirus came not from “authoritarian methods.” Rather, it came from the ability of her socialistic, public sector-dominated economy to rapidly build emergency hospitals and provide urgently needed pandemic relief goods, from the sense of collective responsibility in her population created by her collectivist economic system, from the enthusiastic grassroots mobilisation by the Chinese masses and from the fact that, constrained by working class state power, the PRC leadership put people’s needs first ahead of the interests of corporate profits.
That so much could 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 having been thrown out of their livelihoods, we need to fight all the more energetically here and across the capitalist world for a society based on public ownership and working class state power.