Peter Hessler reporting on China's coronavirus response

August 11, 2020 8:35 AM

"How China Controlled the Coronavirus", a New Yorker article by Peter Hessler, details his experience as a journalism professor at Sichuan University. Hessler is a long-time writer at the magazine and he's considered by many Chinese to be their favorite writer on China.
posted by of strange foe (21 comments total)

This is a great piece – I was planning to post it tomorrow but I'm glad it's already up now! ;) It's a really touching reflection and it's about so much more than just coronavirus. I particularly enjoyed these two sections:

Each day, my daughters had their temperature taken at least five times. This routine began at 6:30 a.m., when the class’s WeChat parent group engaged in something called Jielong, or “Connect the Dragon.” One parent would start the hashtag #Jielong, and list her child’s name, student number, temperature in Celsius, and the words “Body is healthy.” One by one, other parents jumped in—“36.5, Body is healthy”—lengthening the list with every dragon link. My account usually had about sixty of these messages every day. After eight o’clock, impatient notes were sent to stragglers: “To so-and-so’s father, please quickly connect the dragon!”

I lived in fear of the dragon. My mornings were a mess of fiddling with apps; one consisted of a daily form for the university on which I listed my temperature, location, and whether I had had contact with anyone from Hubei, the province that contains Wuhan, in the past fourteen days. If I missed the noon deadline, an overworked administrator sent a gently passive-aggressive reminder. (April 11, 12:11 p.m.: “Hi Teacher Hessler, How are you doing today?”) In addition, a QR code with a health report had to be scanned every morning for each of my daughters. I often felt overwhelmed, not to mention a little odd: during the first month of dragon-connecting, I received 1,146 WeChat messages listing the body temperatures of third graders.

and:

I worried about my daughters, who were the only Westerners at a school of some two thousand students. Our isolation increased throughout the spring: most of my American acquaintances had left, and it became rare to see a non-Chinese person on the street. At the end of May, the twins told my wife, Leslie, and me that a boy in their class had made some anti-American comments, but we didn’t say anything to the teacher. Virtually all of the girls’ classmates treated them warmly, and, with everything on the news, it seemed inevitable that there would be scattered instances of anti-American sentiment. That week, George Floyd had been killed, and the American death toll from the coronavirus was approaching a hundred thousand.

The teacher, though, responded quickly. The following Monday, she stood before the class and told a story that, in the Chinese way, emphasized science, education, and effort. She talked about Elon Musk, and she described how his California-based company had successfully launched a manned rocket into space the previous weekend. At the end of the story, she said, “Every country has its strong points and its weak points.”

Turns out Elon Musk is good for something after all!
posted by adrianhon at 8:39 AM on August 11, 2020 [19 favorites]

Brilliant piece!
posted by Chickenring at 9:53 AM on August 11, 2020

Such venders were common in the nineties, before campaigns were launched to make the city more orderly. Now the stalls reappeared all at once, and the evening crowds in my neighborhood reminded me of how Chengdu felt more than twenty years ago.

Turns out this is part of a power struggle at the top between Premier Li Keqiang and President Xi Jinping.
posted by clawsoon at 10:01 AM on August 11, 2020

Thank you so much for sharing, OP. And Adrianhon, that's such a great pullquote, especially in light of the anti China rhetoric.
posted by infini at 10:10 AM on August 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

Turns out Elon Musk is good for something after all!

But was he the strong point or the weak point?
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:15 AM on August 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

But was he the strong point or the weak point?

Yes.
posted by allegedly at 10:32 AM on August 11, 2020 [13 favorites]

I mean the Musk example is ultimately false. Any criticism of anything can be met by the counter well they have strong and weak points. Progressives have moved on, we know such things are deflections and false equivalences and whataboutisms and so forth. It is conservative moderates who eternally insist on appreciating the good points of any oppressor.

Anti-American and anti-Chinese sentiment should be met by acknowledgement and confrontation of the harms. Not by pointing out America or China produces some good things too. Of course they do but that's beside the point. The key is that when a person in a position of authority makes an appeal to fallacy of middle ground, they neutralize dissent. This is how today's ideological power functions, essentially by capitalismsplaining.

Just look at the 2nd to last paragraph. A close reading reveals that after all that's happened, it's the middle class that has grown in favor of the mainland Chinese government. And why wouldn't that be the case. Jingoism and state subjectifiation are alive and well everywhere; ideology merely changes form and softens itself a little.
posted by polymodus at 11:18 AM on August 11, 2020 [6 favorites]

Anti-American and anti-Chinese sentiment should be met by acknowledgement and confrontation of the harms. Not by pointing out America or China produces some good things too.

When the goal is to stop kids from bullying another kid, it is perfectly acceptable. Making some expat's grade-school child bear the weight of America's sins in a classroom setting is extremely wrong-headed.
posted by grumpybear69 at 11:59 AM on August 11, 2020 [48 favorites]

When the goal is to stop kids from bullying another kid, it is perfectly acceptable.

Exactly. These are little kids! Can we leave the pessimistic, anti-Capitalist, America-hating indoctrination at least until they are spoiled entitled college students??
posted by Chickenring at 12:44 PM on August 11, 2020 [13 favorites]

When the goal is to stop kids from bullying another kid, it is perfectly acceptable.

I don't know, the teacher's approach strikes me as a very roundabout and Chinese way of approaching bullying. The direct way would have been simply to say you shouldn't make fun or bully people for being different, because it's not what a "nice" person would do. Whereas, the teacher seems to be saying that you shouldn't bully people as long as their country or ethnicity has done something beneficial for other people?

And that reminded me, I remember when I was in China (this was over a decade ago) being taken aback how nearly every conversation that involved the Uighur people, Han Chinese folks had nothing positive to say about them. And I recall at the time I didn't necessarily agree with what they said, but I also didn't push back as much because I felt like I wasn't knowledgeable enough and that I was a guest in this country and shouldn't make a ruckus (and maybe my own Asian upbringing played a part in wanting to smooth over things). And now I regret that.
posted by FJT at 12:56 PM on August 11, 2020 [11 favorites]

I don't know, the teacher's approach strikes me as a very roundabout and Chinese way of approaching bullying

Yeah, and I mean, the school is in China, the kids are part of Chinese culture, so naturally I would expect things to be dealt with in the 'Chinese' way, not the American way. And absolutely the CCP leverages this to manage dissent.

But, you could just as easily interpret the teacher's parable as saying that you shouldn't bully people based on some stupid shit their leaders say/do, as not everyone in those countries is the same... which is actually a great lesson for America and China both in the way they talk about each other.

I say all this as a staunchly anti-CCP person. But I think as westerners we do tend to unconsciously bias "direct is good/roundabout or ambiguous is bad". I mean, I work in communications, it's literally my job to remove ambiguity. However, for people from these high context cultures, often-times communication that westerners perceive as roundabout, is actually not in their eyes/culture.
posted by smoke at 6:20 PM on August 11, 2020 [13 favorites]

which is actually a great lesson for America and China both in the way they talk about each other.

I agree, and also agree that both styles of communication are good to know about and use.

Though I will say that lately it sometimes seems as if America and China are just learning the worst behaviors and habits from each other like two bullies sitting at the back of class comparing notes.
posted by FJT at 7:16 PM on August 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

- It is an extremely Chinese way of solving interpersonal social conflict, I personally know this, and I fucking hate my uncle who does this all the time.

- Children the are perfect point of indoctrination developmentally speaking, and in fact, the purest indoctrination is arguing that they are too young to be indoctrinated, that is a Western neoliberal move. There is no neutrality. Leftists have gone over this many times, not a new idea.

- Cultural relativism is a postmodern neoliberal idea, I am 1.5th gen Chinese American which means I am not in fact purely Western. I reject the very framing and position that one culture cannot criticize the practices of another; it is yet another classist intellectual move for which multicultural minorities are a literal counterexample. (If you don't like that line of reasoning, at the very least Chinese society itself is in cultural flux and constantly modernizing and adopting "Western" notions of child development; this is based on actual scholarship in education studies, cross-cultural child psychology, etc.)
posted by polymodus at 12:51 AM on August 12, 2020 [4 favorites]

imo, all this is a hangover from the whole Pax Americana and new american century shtick, centered on the belief the entire world must think and behave like Americans, at the point of gun if need be.
posted by infini at 1:43 AM on August 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

I'd like to push back on cultural relativism being neoliberal- My understanding was that it's basically the opposite. Neoliberalism is commonly critiqued for being culturally imperialistic, not relativistic.

Very interesting article, thank-you! I noticed that the writer sometimes to his students as 'children', eg "My freshman composition classes consisted entirely of engineers, and there was no logical reason for them to be assigned journalism projects, but nobody complained. Even among these only children, there seemed to be little sense of entitlement. " Am I getting confused- I understood that Hessler's students were at university?
posted by Braeburn at 4:12 AM on August 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

Even among these only children, there seemed to be little sense of entitlement.
Am I getting confused- I understood that Hessler's students were at university?

He’s referring to them as “only children”, people without siblings because of China’s one-child policy. And implying that people without siblings are entitled or spoiled.
posted by third word on a random page at 5:08 AM on August 12, 2020

I see! Thank-you, that makes more sense.
posted by Braeburn at 5:59 AM on August 12, 2020

Thanks to clawsoon for the Nikkei article, it's rare to find an honest account of internal CCP power struggles.

I don't know, the teacher's approach strikes me as a very roundabout and Chinese way of approaching bullying

...

But, you could just as easily interpret the teacher's parable as saying that you shouldn't bully people based on some stupid shit their leaders say/do, as not everyone in those countries is the same... which is actually a great lesson for America and China both in the way they talk about each other.

When I taught at public schools in that province, I was told that we effectively couldn't discipline students because we as foreign teachers had no way of knowing whose parents were Party members and whose weren't.

I was later told at other public schools in China, when I raised a bit of a stink about the frequency with which I observed Chinese teachers slapping around some students, that even for a teacher to say "I'm sorry" to their boss, or to a student, would raise uncomfortable issues also related to 'saving face'. I still wonder about that one sometimes.
posted by viborg at 8:00 AM on August 12, 2020 [2 favorites]

Surely there are Chinese subcultures where some of these things are different? Isn't the CCP partially pushing the idea of a single Chinese culture in order to crush what's going on in Hong Kong right now, to crush worker and student movements across the country, and to prepare to crush Taiwan? My impression is that China has a rich and varied - and dynamic, constantly changing - culture, with many regions and social classes. It's not (and hasn't ever been) the old "unchanging culture of the Orient", is it?
posted by clawsoon at 10:22 AM on August 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

clawsoon, you are probably right but I have not directly encountered such cultures. On the contrary, often when I am noticing something here that seems like an aspect of "Chinese" culture, my wife will then point out that it is very similar to what they do in Tajikistan, where she is from. And then, we will both notice that it is pretty similar in Korea and Malaysia too.

Obviously there are nuances and shades that as outsiders we do not pick up on. But there is also a definite set of "Asian" cultural characteristics that are broadly common, and in contrast to "Western" or "European" ones.
posted by Meatbomb at 8:43 PM on August 13, 2020 [2 favorites]

Yes I mostly agree. With the caveat that as a white alien to Asian culture, I can only say that based on my experience living in Asia and close relationships with folks from various Asian backgrounds that there generally seem to be some common qualities in east/southeast Asian societies, which some thinkers have attributed to the influence of Confucian thought among other traditions.

Clawsoon with regard to your specific question, there are no doubt regional differences even within the PRC much less considering wider China and the vast Chinese diaspora. What strikes me about modern society within the Middle Kingdom is that there is a massive generation gap in attitudes. With the Party's efforts at total information control extending throughout social media now though, in my view it's hard to say whether the new fixation on the ultra high tech is necessarily an overall positive on the country or not. My Chinese isn't really good enough to engage much with Chinese internet culture beyond the most superficial level though.
posted by viborg at 11:35 AM on August 15, 2020 [2 favorites]