When the infected number and the death toll in New York City rose rapidly and surpassed China's numbers, many people started to question the numbers provided by the Chinese government. This question is legitimate, and I am one of many people, especially considering that these numbers are crucial for the world to understand this virus, collect ways to fight it, and save lives.
While being frustrated and eager to know the number, I realize that this emotion associated with the question could prevent us to be calm and to learn from Chinese people and their culture in terms of fighting the virus.
Parts of China have been back to normal and schools will reopen soon, which does not mean that China completely tamed the virus, but it could mean that they found ways to control it. What are these ways? What can we learn from them?
First of all, China had a complete lockdown, no one can go out and no one can come in. Let’s leave privacy and human rights issues alone, and focus only on how China could make the lockdown possible, physically. In the US, we occasionally see some communities have fences, and some might have intercoms. Not all universities have fences, most of them are open to the public, and each campus only has one or two guarded gates to control traffic. In China, however, each unit, such as a residential, official, or business complex, has its own enclosed territory with guarded gates. Once the government issued the lockdown, all these guards were quickly mobilized to control not just the gates, but the people inside and outside of the community. This enclosed territory with guarded gates is not a modern invention. First, let’s look at the character of the country, 國, the outside is an enclosure 口, and the inside is an independent character, 或 meaning “state.” This inside character is the combination of a character of “state” 口 in the shape of the mouth and a character of “weapon” 戈. Therefore, the word of “the country” has three parts, but representing only two essential elements: weapon and walls. Not just a state needs fences, this enclosed space and walled concept extended to any city, village, and family. The First Emperor did not build the Great Wall from the ground up, instead, his contribution was to connect the existing walls or fences. I left China for Madison, Wisconsin in 1998, when I returned in 2005, it took me a while to find the entrance of the community that I grew up in, simply because they moved the guarded gate from the east to the south, so I had to encircle the entire block to find the gate.
Second, in China and other East Asian countries, they tracked down each patient and publicized that person’s routines until the moment. In this way, the entire community knows where the infected person went, whoever had an overlapping journey with the person should take immediate action to prevent the virus from spreading further. While in the US, disclosing patient information is against law, so when I was told that one of the employees at my kid’s daycare was tested positive, I, simultaneously with the other kids’ parents, felt worried and panicked. We could not help but guess who the person was, whether our kids had close contacts with the person, and what we should do next. I love America, I love all its values such as human rights, privacy, and freedom, but that was the moment I was forced to think about the relationship between individualism and collectivism: under what circumstance does an individual need to sacrifice his or her privacy for the safety of the community? How much sacrifice does that individual need to make? How much freedom does an individual possess? It seems so essential to fighting the virus successfully, that the people in East Asia followed the lockdown order and coped with publicizing individual journey. They were stuck inside their small apartments for months, and only one member of a household was allowed to go outside to purchase the necessities once in a while. Again, this tolerance and obedience cannot happen overnight. Considering the fact that every half year during China’s over-three-millennia history, there was a major natural disaster, such as flood, locust, and epidemic, an idea struck me that the collective society may not be the result of centralized government, instead, the centralized government was the result of the collective culture, that means facing the frequently happened disaster, people had no choice but to act collectively, in order to survive.
Third, everyone in Asia wears a mask when they go out. The history of masks is a needed research topic. But before it is done, let’s talk about the contemporary development of the mask. When I moved from western China, Urumqi of Uygur to central China, Taiyuan of Shanxi, I started to wear a white fabric mask every day and washed it every night. I still remember how dirty the white mask turned at the end of the day. So wearing a mask in the 70s and 80s was an efficient way to fight air pollution. The air quality might be improved over the next decades, but SARS, overpopulation, and crowded public spaces and transportation forced people in East Asia to wear masks continuously. In the US, people did not experience the damage caused by the SARS or H1N1, did not experience severe air pollution, and most people live in suburbs without dense populations, so wearing a mask is a symbol of being sick. That is why we saw hundreds of American police officers and medical professionals get COVID-19, even though they have close contact with patients, they were not used to wearing masks, so they did not.
So what are the inspirations from the practices in China: for individuals, keep social distance as much as we can, and wear a mask in public, even a fabric one; for government, test as fast as possible to identify as many positives as possible. This virus is bringing a revolution, it is not just testing our hygiene habits and our public health system, but also challenging our political system and cultural values. This is the moment we, all human beings, have to think about the relationships between nature and humans, between individuals and society, and between people and government. We also have to think about what life we like to live, what are the values that we cannot live without and that we like to wrap them well and hand to our children.
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