A New York Times article (1/12/22) assailed China for following a zero Covid policy, “no matter the human costs”–without ever mentioning the human costs of not containing the coronavirus.
The New York Times report (1/12/22) on the response to an outbreak of Covid-19 in the Chinese city of Xi’an featured over-the-top hand-wringing about “authoritarianism” and a complete erasure of the dangers of the coronavirus. Had this article been about Covid-19 response in Europe or the United States, one could swear it was from InfoWars or some other far-right, Covid-denying fringe outlet.
China’s “zero Covid” policy is indeed a major outlier in the world’s approach to the pandemic. The country, the most populous in the world, took pride in this fact when it announced that it had less than 200 reported positive cases for January 8, a slight increase from days before (Reuters, 1/9/22). This hasn’t come without its hardships; noncitizens of China should be advised not to plan a vacation to a country with closed borders (CNN, 11/15/21; Time, 12/1/21). And outbreaks are met with lockdowns that can upend daily life for millions, as the city of Xi’an is learning (Xinhua, 1/10/22).
‘Iron-fist, authoritarian policies’
The Times article by Li Yuan started off with some undeniable hardships, reflecting chaotic coordination of services. But it leaped from this to calling the Chinese Covid response a set of “iron-fist, authoritarian policies [that] emboldened its officials, seemingly giving them license to act with conviction and righteousness.” Chinese officials are striving to “ensure zero Covid infections”—not because it is the right thing to do, but because “it is the will of their top leader, Xi Jinping.”
With language like “conviction and righteousness” and “the will of their top leader,” you can hear the Times attempting to parody the propagandistic style of CCP outlets for its own anti-China purposes. But by applying tems like “iron fist” and “authoritarian” to successful public health measures, the Times unironically echoed the framing of right-wing partisans (Breitbart, 8/3/21, Federalist, 9/9/21; Fox News, 9/29/21; Newsmax, 9/13/21; Telegraph, 11/22/21; Miami Herald, 12/20/21) when they attack less effective Western containment policies.
The New York Times compared officials who enforced public health measures in Xi’an to Holocaust engineer Adolf Eichmann; like him, they are “willing to be the enablers of authoritarian policies.”
It gets worse. When reporting on how low-level officials in the city comply with lockdown measures, Yuan quoted Chinese social media commentary to invoke philosopher Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” a concept Arendt applied (as Yuan noted) to high-ranking Nazi official Adolf Eichmann. Again, this is the same trope the far right (CNN, 7/7/21; Reuters, 12/15/21; NBC, 1/12/22) uses when they insist that vaccine cards and mandates are just a step away from the cattle cars, which is not just absurd but an offensive trivialization of Nazi terror.
This invocation of Arendt sets up the rest of the piece: While there are some who don’t like the Xi’an lockdown, those that are going along with it aren’t an opposing viewpoint, but rather the brainwashed drones of a devious plot against humanity. “Chinese intellectuals,” Yuan wrote, are baffled that workers and civilians who enforce zero Covid policies are “driven by professional ambition or obedience…to be the enablers of authoritarian policies.” Such prose could have been lifted from Josh Mandel, the Republican senate candidate in Ohio who, in response to the idea of vaccine mandates, “compared [President Joe] Biden to the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police force” (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 9/10/21).
Them, not us
The New York Times complained that lockdown rules in Xi’an hospitals “
The Times spoke of social media censorship in China in relation to lockdowns. Such an issue isn’t nothing, but again, this is also true of the major US social media networks, like Facebook and Twitter (Bloomberg, 6/7/21).
The Times wrote of “the hospitals that denied patients access to medical care and deprived their loved ones of the chance to say goodbye.” It noted that because of the lockdown, a man was denied care and died of a heart attack, and a pregnant woman who was turned away had a miscarriage.
The part about dying alone suggests that in a normal country, it is standard procedure to allow visitors in to see patients who are dying from contagious diseases. This is of course not the case, as the Times (3/29/20) acknowledges in its non-China reporting.
As for the denial of care, keep in mind that these were two tragedies in a city of 13 million. People being unable to access emergency rooms because they are overflowing with Covid patients is an enormous problem in the United States—sometimes with fatal results—but the Times story gives no inkling that access to care could be a problem outside an “authoritarian” state.
And Xi’an’s health system under lockdown does have some semblance of accountability, as the AP (1/6/22) reported: “Hospital officials in the northern Chinese city of Xi’an have been punished after a pregnant woman miscarried after being refused entry, reportedly for not having current Covid-19 test results.” The CCP-run Global Times (1/5/22) called the incident a “heartbreaking misfortune” and reported that “local authorities stressed that all hospitals must not use the excuse of epidemic prevention and control to avoid treating patients.”
There are other forms of accountability in Xi’an public health. The South China Morning Post (1/5/22) said that the city “suspended its top official in charge of big data after the system powering the local health code app, a critical tool in China’s zero-Covid strategy, crashed for a second time.”
The Times article does acknowledge that
a few low-level Xi’an officials were punished…. The general manager of a hospital was suspended. Last Friday, the city announced that no medical facility could reject patients on the basis of Covid tests.
“But that was about it,” Yuan sighs. It’s not clear what kind of retribution she was hoping for—prison sentences?
‘To surmount these trying times’
The New York Times, depicting food delivery during the Xi’an lockdown, said that “” in the city.
China’s state-run news wire, Xinhua (1/4/22), doesn’t dispute that the lockdown in Xi’an comes with “strict” containment measures, but at the same time defends them as a necessary public health measure. It quoted one French expatriate who “believes that it is necessary for Xi’an to adopt strict control measures”: “Not being free now is for real freedom later. The epidemic should be brought under control as soon as possible through strict measures.” As the paper put it, Chinese “authorities have taken strict measures to curb the spread of the virus,” noting that the response’s priority is “to surmount these trying times.”
This outlook is one that many people have expressed the world over, including in the United States. While few have experienced the kind of intense lockdowns associated with China’s zero-Covid policy, a great many people from all corners of the globe have come to the conclusion that canceling events and travel, mandating remote work, restricting in-person services and requiring masks are things that must be done to tackle this pandemic.
Just compare this Times report to Xinhua’s coverage (1/13/22) of the US government’s response to the omicron surge. It is written in cold, straight journalism that pulls heavily from US officials, academics and at least one US newspaper. And while it paints a picture of a country struggling to deal with the pandemic, it does report some positive news: “The White House also promised to make lab capacity available for 5 million free polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests.”
Xinhua could have easily mocked America’s overstrained hospitals and the breakdown of public services (New York Times, 1/7/22, 1/14/22; AP, 1/8/22; NPR, 1/13/22) as proof that Covid has exposed the United States as a failed state and an empire in decline. Instead, Chinese state media’s reporting on the pandemic in the US is, at least in this instance, fairer than the Times coverage of Xi’an. That’s quite a feat.
FAIR (1/29/21, 9/17/21) has criticized New York Times coverage of China’s Covid policy in the past, for its harsh, one-sided attacks on a strategy that has literally saved millions of lives. (If the same proportion of China’s population had died from the pandemic that has so far died in the United States, its death toll would be 3.6 million. Its actual toll: less than 5,000.) But its latest coverage of Xi’an, with the casual flinging about of Nazi analogies, reaches a level of partisan hyperbole that puts the paper of record on a par with Fox News and Breitbart.
ACTION:
Please tell the New York Times to report on the successes as well as the problems of China’s Covid strategy, without resorting to the far-right’s anti–public health tropes.
CONTACT:
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