The Great Inversion

Historians are going to be kept very busy in years and decades to come, sorting through and trying to explain the strange circumstances unfolding now during the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the most confounding is the contrast between the impact of the virus in the People's Republic of China and here in the United States. The Chinese government obviously exerts profound control on the gathering and flow of information, thus it may never be possible to fully and accurately quantify the impact of the virus on the PRC with total confidence. But it seems highly likely that, when all is said and done, the per-capita rate of infection and mortality in China will be significantly lower than that in the United States, and that this differential may even extend to the total number of fatalities in absolute terms. In other words, China may actually see fewer people die from the virus despite having 4X the number of people than the US. How is that possible?

As I wrote initially, it will take significant time to sort through evidence and causes. But some factors are on full display to see as the event unfolds. What is most surprising (and inexplicable) is the contrast between the systemic response of the PRC government and that of the USA. The gap between the overperformance of the former and the underperformance of the latter is so yawningly wide as to defy belief, much less explanation.

In the abstract, a neutral observer would expect the fundamental principles of the two political systems to be manifest in the practical response to the virus as events transpired. The salient traits of the PRC system are its authoritarian nature and its radically high degree of centralization. By contrast, the USA is a liberal democracy with a much  more decentralized structure. These facts should have given each system different but predictable strengths and weaknesses, respectively.

The great weakness of an authoritarian state is its tendency to let politics override the needs of policy. Because leaders are not ultimately or directly accountable to the people, their first impulse is very often to cover up problems rather than solve them. We saw this in the initial response of the PRC government to the first appearance of Covid-19. Early whistle blowers like the physician Li Wenliang (who contracted the virus in the course of treating patients and died) were ignored or gagged.

But once the facts on the ground demonstrated that the dangers could not be papered over, the CCP leadership switched very quickly to a "policy first" orientation, and began issuing directives at the advice of its medical experts. I remember distinctly the point at which the PRC went into a very severe "lockdown mode" in January, and friends living in China began to post in social media about being confined to their apartments. I thought at the time that this was a typical "overcompensation" on the part of the CCP leadership. That impression, in retrospect, was of course wrong.

At that point, the hyper-centralized nature of the PRC state, which is usually a weakness, proved ironically to be a strength. There is no ultimate division of jurisdiction or authority between the different levels of the PRC government. The local traffic police in Xiamen are effectively an extension of the government thousands of kilometers away in Beijing, which under ordinary circumstances creates inefficiencies and corruption.

But the pressing need in a pandemic is for coordination. Formulating an effective response requires that everyone be given the same information and undertake the same set of priorities simultaneously. This is a state of affairs to which the PRC system is uniquely well-adapted, and once the CCP had shifted toward a policy based in the prescriptions of epidemiologists, the machinery of the PRC state worked smoothly in its implementation.

Where the hyper-centralized structure of the PRC is usually a weakness, the federalism of the US government is usually a great strength. Allowing for differences in power and jurisdiction between different levels of government makes it more responsive to the particular needs of people in each locality and region, and creates checks against waste and corruption. But in a pandemic, where coordination is at a premium, the balkanization of state functions becomes a liability.

This weakness has been mitigated in past by arrogating robust emergency powers to the federal government, enabling it to step in during such moments of crisis and provide needed coordination and coherence. During wartime and natural disasters, we expect the federal government to take up the reins of leadership. The Covid-19 pandemic is an emergency greater than virtually anything encountered in recent memory, vastly eclipsing a disaster such as Hurricane Katrina or the 9/11 terror attacks in impact. Yet federal leadership to meet the scale of the crisis has not materialized. Where a unified national response to the pandemic is critically necessary, each state has been left to formulate its own policy, creating a fragmentary response that has extended and amplified the destructiveness of the disease.

Even more strange than that, what should be the greatest strength of American governance has been totally undetectable in the current crisis. One would expect a liberal democracy like the United States to adopt a "policy first" orientation toward the pandemic from the very outset, especially when so much empirical data about the scale of the threat was available and when clarion alarms had been sounded by seasoned government experts as early as January. But here we are in May, and the White House has been and is still locked into a "politics first" functional routine. Denials and random disinformation are disseminated in lieu of facts, non-essential distractions like "the war on drugs" are spotlighted in public briefings, and partisan attacks are given pride of place over a focus on public health. Almost 80,000 Americans have died, and the United States is seemingly locked into a kind of "Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius," with no end in sight.

No matter how one slices it, the view on either side of the globe makes for a very strange comparison. The Chinese government has effectively overcome its greatest weakness, and converted what is ordinarily its greatest weakness into an extreme advantage. By contrast, the United States has completely nullified its greatest strength and allowed its greatest weakness to metastasize and intensify out of all proportion, essentially crippling the government's capacity to confront the catastrophic threat to public health. We here in the US have fallen into a trap of our own device. For all our sake, I hope that we find our way out of it before the systemic damage wrought by this crisis becomes permanent and irremediable.