7 minute read
China’s Response to COVID-19
on research by
JACQUES DELISLE
Stephen A. Cozen Professor of Law & Professor of Political Science; Director, Center for East Asian Studies
In 2020, Jacques deLisle and Shen Kui, Professor at Peking University Law School in China and a former Fulbright visitor at Penn, published “Lessons from China’s Response to COVID-19: Shortcomings, Successes, and Prospects for Reform in China’s Regulatory State” in the University of Pennsylvania Asian Law Review. A later version of the article appeared in the Administrative Law Review as “China’s Response to COVID-19: The Chinese Administrative State in a Time of Crisis,” and another, related chapter will appear in the Routledge Handbook on Law and the COVID-19 Pandemic (edited by Joelle Grogan and Alice Donald).
DeLisle is also Professor of Political Science, Director for the Center for the Study of Contemporary China, and Co-Director of the Center for Asian Law at Penn, as well as Director of the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
In the piece, deLisle and Shen expound upon the how “the handling of the [COVID-19] outbreak reflects characteristic weaknesses and strengths of the Chinese administrative state.” The authors begin with a brief discussion of the numerous legal and regulatory measures that were already in place before the COVID-19 crisis began — many of which had been influenced by the country’s experience with SARS nearly two decades earlier — including the Law on the Prevention and Treatment of Infectious Diseases, the Emergency Response Law, and an infectious disease outbreak Direct Reporting System to the China Center for Disease Control (CCDC).
The authorities’ initial reaction was “dangerously slow,” the authors contend, as “reasons for serious concern” arose several weeks before the lockdown of Wuhan — the epicenter of the outbreak — in late January 2020. The initially slow response was followed by sweeping and severe restrictions, including prohibitions on travel, business closures, and residents’ confinement to their homes. The restrictions quickly extended across much of China, with authorities declaring Level I (highest level) emergencies.
DeLisle and Shen assess the attributes of Chinese governance that contributed to the initial failure and the later “mobilizational” response to the COVID-19 outbreak. They point to the set of issues associated with “tiao-tiao / kuai-kuai and the resulting pattern of ‘dual rule,’” which they describe further:
“Officials at a subnational level responsible for a field of regulation answer to two masters: ‘vertically’ to superiors in a functionally defined, hierarchical bureaucratic structure that reaches up to a ministry (or similar central entity) in Beijing (for which the metaphor is tiao — a long, narrow piece); and ‘horizontally’ to the general-purpose government at the officials’ own level — provincial, municipal, or still-lower (for which the analogy is kuai — a ‘lump’ or ‘block’).”
The authors explain that one of the principles of tiao is “giving experts — in public health, medicine, and relevant fields of science — early access to information and greater authority to shape responses when a serious contagious disease outbreak threatens.” These rules place responsibility on national public health and medical experts to formulate central-level policies and adopt geographic widespread measures as well as coordinate with foreign counterparts and international bodies.
Kuai-based rules acknowledge that effective responses depend on the efficiency of local officials monitoring developments, guiding local branches, and coordinating efforts among local frontline units. Importantly, these types of rules “also assign early-stage responsibility to officials who, in practice and often in principle, will be held principally accountable for bad outcomes.”
The authors next turn to the legal and policy measures in place and explore how they reflect kuai and/or tiao principles. The Emergency Response Law, for example, has heavily kuai aspects, with its tiered system of leadership roles and responsibility. The same law, however, also emphasizes tiao, as it tasks State Council departments to develop emergency response plans and structures as well as establish JACQUES DELISLE criteria for the four levels of public health emergencies.
Delving into the factors that contributed to the Wuhan’s officials’ slow early response to COVID-19, deLisle and Shen point to “features endemic to the ‘kuai’ side of governance.”
“Local officials face a ‘double or nothing bet’ when encountering a problem of uncertain seriousness (including a novel, possibly communicable illness),” they write. “The official can report the emerging issue to superiors, as is sometimes mandated. . . . Doing so may have little upside for the official. It often will not be clear whether the counterfactual was a deadly pandemic or merely a fleeting problem, the avoidance of which higher authorities would not regard as a significant accomplishment and the reporting of which higher authorities might see as an attempt to shirk responsibility by passing an issue up the chain.”
An official who reports problems can face adverse consequences, the authors explain, if the feared event never becomes quite as bad as it seemed — which may happen, ironically, precisely because of the swift measures taken by the official. Superiors may conclude that the official “cried wolf” and the official could “suffer career-damaging criticism for overreacting.” Staying quiet has its own potentially more serious ramifications, particularly if the problem becomes worse or unmanageable because of the officials’ lack of prompt, required reporting.
Overall, the authors attribute “much in the initial reaction to the novel coronavirus” to “the logic of this ‘fess up or cover up’ choice for local officials.” Wuhan and Hubei party chiefs and hundreds of lowerlevel officials in Wuhan and other COVID-hit areas were dismissed in the aftermath of the botched early response, they note.
The authors also address the tiao features of Chinese governance and the problem of “dual rule” through tiao and kuai, which, they write, are apparent in “what is often called China’s ‘fragmented authoritarianism.’” First, deLisle and Shen observe that governmental leaders tend to view their counterparts in other units as “outsiders.” As relevant laws assigned many key roles to provincial and local-level health commissions and disease control and prevention institutions, such organs tended “to align more with same-level governments over higher-level bureaucratic superiors,” which was evidenced by “the failure by key actors in the public health system in Wuhan to follow the Direct Reporting System and requirements to report immediately to the central public health authorities” and even to obstruct investigative teams dispatched to Wuhan by higher-level authorities.
Second, the authors observe that “the relative strength and status of government units” matters, and “the public health and infectious disease system” is “relatively weak.” DeLisle and Shen detail the history of the system, which has undergone several restructurings but note that “[s]enior public health experts and officials long have complained that public health policy was generally not a high priority for policy makers, that its importance was not understood by leaders or the public, and that the CDCC’s powers were extremely limited.”
These unfortunate circumstances were reflected in several aspects of the early days of COVID-19, and, further proving the point, leaked documents showed a severe “lack of funding, capacity, and staff morale” at Hubei provincial center for disease control and prevention. Moreover, lawmakers did not raise the Direct Reporting System to the status of law or institute clear thresholds for direct reporting — a process that was “further undermined by medical personnel’s poor understanding of reporting procedures, the costs to them (in terms of time and distraction from treating seriously ill patients) of filling out reports, and doubts about whether cases fit the criteria for reporting in an environment where the importance of the Direct Reporting System had not been emphasized.”
Third, the authors identify and place responsibility on the “environment of ambiguity born of legal and policy mandates, from multiple sources, that do not clearly assign functions and responsibilities,” and fourth, they write that the “coordination among siloed institutions is necessary for effective government action,” but that China’s “fragmentation of authority” makes such efforts difficult. Moreover, these issues are compounded by the country’s prioritizing of the economy or social order over public health.
“Tellingly, concerns about triggering public panic or economic losses — thus putting at risk high-priority goals of order and growth — reportedly motivated Wuhan officials’ initial failure in fulfilling reporting duties and taking steps that would have risked public disclosure of the serious threat posed by the novel coronavirus,” they write.
The authors also write of the strengths of the Chinese system, notably its “extraordinary ability to mobilize people and resources on a massive scale,” which included the construction of temporary hospitals within two weeks after lockdown. Coordinated actions between the National Health Commission, the CDCC, numerous ministries, local governments, public transport organs, public works crews, and party- and state-led organizations at the neighborhoodlevel were crucial to the national response.
The authors note that “Chinese authorities also benefited from the weakness of factors that have been impediments to state responses in some other countries,” such as constraints over protecting privacy interests or threats of lawsuits over mask mandates or quarantine orders.
Overall, deLisle and Shen conclude that China’s “largely successful, centrally mandated efforts to contain the pandemic and prevent its recurrence reflected defining and durable features of the Chinese systems of law, regulation, and governance,” but that the persistence of features that hamstrung the initial response and a deep-seated aversion to reforms that would remove restrictions on information or increase legal accountability for party and state actors could continue to impede reforms that could help avert a future pandemic.
