The New Yorker Radio Hour - Life After Lockdown, and the Politics of Blaming China

Episode Date: May 29, 2020

Since January, Peter Hessler has reported from China under quarantine. Now, as restrictions lift, he tells David Remnick about his return to normal life; recently, he even went to a dance club. But, although China’s stringent containment measures were effective enough to allow a rapid reopening, one scientist told Hessler, “There is no long-term plan. There’s no country that has a long term plan.” Back in Washington, Evan Osnos explains how blaming China for its sluggish response—and insisting that it cost lives worldwide—has become a touchstone of the Presidential race in America. The candidates have found a rare moment of agreement that it is time to get tough on China, and that their opponent is weak. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. A couple of months ago, I called up Peter Hessler, a staff writer who lives with his family in the Chinese city of Chengdu. It was just before our country had started going into lockdown. But Peter and his wife and his daughters had already been under strict quarantine since January. And he described exactly what that was like. Convenient stories were always open. kind of like small markets were always open.

A lot of people do stuff online anyway here. Like there's some guy upstairs about like a hundred inch television, you know, when you see them. Peter is reporting now on the process of reopening China. And I called him last week to see how that was going. And because I, to be honest, was a little worried about some of this reporting. Peter, I hear that you went to a dance club. What on earth possessed you to do such a thing?

Well, my former students were taking me out. It's a techno party. Yeah, I was curious to see what, you know, is this really happening or people really going? And it was a club and, you know, it was mostly gay, young Chinese. Chung-Du was a pretty hip place and it's got a pretty active music scene. And, you know, the sort of the promo material was all about, you know, nobody else and the rest of the world can really do this. So let's show solidarity and have some fun, basically, you know. And was it packed in?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was crowded. I mean, there really is, I mean, it's actually sort of a problem. I've been talking to epidemiologists. And because the lockdown was so intense here and so absolute, people didn't really develop the sense of social distancing. So people wear the masks. They know that that's important. But there's no, you know, space in lines or, you know, I was just on an air on a flight from Chengdu to Hongzhou. There were 185 passengers. There was not a single seat empty on that flight. Peter, when we spoke in March, you'd written in The New Yorker about your life.

life in Chengdu. And it was, to be honest, like reading the future of what our life in New York would be just weeks ahead of time. So can you do that again? Where are you now in terms of the way people live in China? And how does the opening up process play out? Well, I mean, I'm afraid I can't do it again because I think the future has diverged. That was the story at that point. Everybody was going through the same thing with the lockdown, but partly because China's lockdown was so intense, also because they caught things earlier, and also because, mostly because of their intense contact tracing and testing, we don't have the same issues anymore. So my life now is, I think, not the life people in America are going to be having anytime soon. We have, I mean, my kids have been in school

for three weeks. I mean, they've got 54 kids in the class. They're all back. You know, they wore masks for three weeks and then the teachers got tired of it clearly and they let everybody take the masks off basically so the masks are off in a classroom of 54 kids yeah and people are feeling safe yeah i mean you know personally i feel like they were going to always have things popping up because students are in chinese nationals are always coming back um but i think that they can contain it all And when they don't contain it, like that's what happened in Gileen. They fire people. I mean, they fired six officials.

So, you know, the system is built partly on fear. What restrictions do exist? Is there any restriction on freedom of movement or the way people work in offices or in schools? You know, when my kids went back to school, I mean, they take their temperature a lot. I mean, we have to take it every morning and send it to the school. And then, I mean, actually, they have their temperature taken three times by 8.30. You know, once at home, once in the subway station going to school, and then once as they enter the school. And then the school usually checks them in the middle of the day.

So there's, you know, and we have to scan a QR code for each of the kids in one of these health code apps that they have. I have to send the college where I teach my own information every morning. So there's a lot of this stuff going on. And when you travel, you have these health codes, which are actually by city. So like when I made this trip last weekend, you know, I had to prepare three other things. city's codes before I made that trip to make sure that when I... I mean, China's a big country and not everybody, I presume, has a smartphone. What if you don't?

You could not travel in China now without a smartphone. So let's put it that way. You do need this to go to another city because if you go to a train station or an airport, they check it and they say you've got to have our version of this. And it has to come up green. What that means is that if you've been somewhere where later there was a case turned up, the color of your code will change. and it would be yellow, which is like a warning thing,

and then there's red, which means you're going, basically, you know, you've got to be checked. And everybody cooperates. Nobody rebels against this. No, no, not in China. So when you see film of people in various parts of the country in the United States, people defying the law,

defying recommendations of the CDC, what does that tell you about the difference, if any, between Americans and Chinese? I mean, there is. is a complete difference in terms of the response of things like this. And, you know, in China, when they had the initial lockdown, people, you know, were very obedient, very willing to go along. But I think part of it is also that the messaging was much clearer here. I mean, you know, while we have, we do have these protests in the United States, they have come at the end of

a long lockdown period that was very open-ended and that was never presented to citizens in a strategic fashion. You know, they never told Americans it's going to take this amount of time. And while we're lockdown, we're going to set up a system that make sure that we can tell where this disease is popping up. And so, you know, in some ways, while those U.S. protests are crazy, I do kind of understand the frustration people would feel because, you know, where does this end? Where is it going? You know, they should have set this up. I mean, and that's where the Chinese were doing during the whole lockdown period was setting up their systems to track things and to prevent future outbreaks, to be able to respond if something happens. The U.S. doesn't have that. So it's all just guesswork now.

There's been talk of conspiracy theories in the United States about how the virus started, where it started, possibly in a lab, all this kind of stuff. And it's had been heavily trafficked online, of course. How is this all playing out in China? How do you, how does the official media describe what Donald Trump is saying and doing and how the internet is discussing the conspiracy theories? I mean, there's conspiracy theories here. I mean, there's a, you do hear from people that the United States. States started this and that it was brought in by the military and so on. I personally don't feel like people take that very seriously. You know, first of all, if the U.S. did liberally they should have been ready for. It's not a very good conspiracy theory. It's like a bomb that comes around and hits you. But, you know, they're aware of Trump and people bring, I mean, when I went to

the airport the other day, the guy, you know, run my bag through the x-ray machine. He's like, hey, what do you think of your president? But just like in a very joking one. I almost feel like they feel sorry for me, you know, and sorry for what's going on. There isn't this sense of... What does that mean? They feel pity for the United States? I mean, the government, obviously, the things the government says are different, but I'm talking about personal interactions.

I've been here at many times, you know, when there have been tensions between the country and you feel a kind of anger on the part of people, it can be very tangible, very visceral. I have not felt that here. You know, when I talk to my students, they're very cautious about asking any questions about the U.S. You know, my daughters went to school on the first day back in school after, you know, a couple of months out. And, you know, their teacher made a point of saying Ariel and Natasha did not leave the country during this period, you know, just to let the other kids know that not to be afraid that they were carrying the disease. What are the next steps for China until a vaccine arrives?

I mean, that's the big issue. And you hear different things from different people. I was just talking to a couple of epidemiologists in Shanghai. one of them was very optimistic and one of them was very pessimistic actually about a vaccine because they have not had great luck with coronaviruses in the past and he had other reasons. So if there isn't a vaccine, then China could at some point reach a point where there's this great disparity in terms of how many people have had the disease outside of the country and how many people have had it in China and they would probably have to adjust their strategy at some point.

But, you know, I asked them, I said, so what's the long-term plan? And he said there is no long-term plan. There's no country that has a long-term plan. Peter, thank you and all the best to your family. Talk to you soon. Yeah. Take care, man. Be well.

Bye. Peter Hessler is a staff writer, and you can read him on China and many other subjects at New Yorker.com. More on China in a moment from the New Yorkers Evanosnos. Stick around. Now, in the 2020 presidential race, the issue of China and the pandemic has become absolutely central. In radically different ways, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are eager to prove that they will never be weak in the face of China.

I would be on the phone with China and making it clear. We are going to need to be in your country. You have to be open. You have to be clear. We have to know what's going on. But Trump rolled over for the Chinese. He took their word for it. Staff writer Evan Osnos was based in Beijing for many years, and he reports now from Washington. Now, you've covered China for a very long time. Is it your sense that criticism of the Chinese government's handling of COVID-19 is fair? What did they do wrong? Criticism is fair. When the virus first appeared, the immediate political necessity was to maintain stability,

to prevent the eruption of disorder in Wuhan. This is how, and we all now know about that doctor, Dr. Li Wen Liang, who was one of a handful of doctors who tried to raise alarms, said there's a serious problem here. He was silenced. The police told him to not spread rumors. Because of a set of leaked documents, there have been reports now that there was this critical six-day period in January when the senior leadership in Beijing knew the severity of the crisis,

but they didn't move to do anything about it. They waited six days to undertake the kinds of dramatic restrictions, which they later did. And those restrictions worked. They did bring down the virus in really extraordinary ways. It's also an authoritarian government is able to physically move people, which is what they did in some cases, move them from their homes into quarantine facilities forcibly when necessary. They were also able to roll out a very competent response when it came to testing, contact tracing, monitoring the spread of the disease, all the things on which the United States, frankly, failed. And so I think a full accounting of how China has performed on the coronavirus includes both its initial failure, which contributed to the global. pandemic, and then also the demonstrations of extraordinary competence, which it did later.

Is there a way to quantify that? In other words, if the Chinese government had acted faster, a week faster, or two weeks faster, what would the numbers be internationally, and would we in the United States be in this predicament? It would have had a dramatic effect. There was a British study that estimated that at least 60% of the cases in March around the world could have been avoided had China moved faster. So we probably would have gotten it in this country anyway. We probably would have gotten it around the world. But the scale of the disaster would have been fundamentally different. Evan, the 2020 campaign is now really in full swing. So let's take a listen to this ad from the pro-Trump America First Action Super PAC. Joe Biden on China. On China,

It is in our self-interest that China continue to prosper. Biden voted for job-killing trade deals with China and failed to support the China travel ban to stop coronavirus. China and all travel will not stop it. China's killing our jobs and now killing our people. They're not bad folks, folks. After 47 years in Washington, Joe Biden just doesn't make sense. America First Action is responsible for the content of this advertising.

Well, there it is in all its subtlety, Evan. You want to deconstruct that ad? What it's proposing and what's true and what's not? I think what you're seeing right now from the Trump administration is an urgent effort to try to take what they recognize is a political reservoir of public dissatisfaction. There are just very few people in the United States who are going to rise to the defense of the Chinese Communist Party right now, either over its handling of American trade or the American economy, or its handling of the American economy, or its handling of the United States. the pandemic. And so they're going to use that idea where they just took the free-form political energy that had been circulating around the sense that China's economic competition has undermined America's way of life. They've shifted that now onto the language of the pandemic. And I actually would not be so quick, David, to assume that it's not going to be politically useful for them. I mean, whether or not we think it is defensible, whether we think it's valid on the

that's a very different question from whether it's a successful campaign strategy. I understand the logic, Evan. I just don't understand how it squares with the facts. Isn't it easy for the Biden campaign to put together a sizzle reel of quotes of President Trump extolling the efforts of President Xi and the Chinese? It's not as if he's been unfriendly to the Chinese leadership throughout this episode. You had a moment early on when the pandemic came to the United States when Trump was trying to decide whether he wanted to stay close to China on this and try to, you know, marshal some sort of cooperative response or whether to turn China into the opponent.

Trump, he was saying, I think the Chinese government has it under control. It's nothing to worry about it. And so these quotes are becoming quite damning for him now. Now, why was he saying that? I think it's a combination of, A, he didn't want to spook the stock market. He was trying to will this virus into submission to sort of pretend as if it just wasn't going to be the threat that it became. And then there's another piece of this, which he has had throughout the three and a half

years in office, he's had this deep abiding hope of being able to build a friendship with Xi Jinping that can somehow overwhelm the structural challenges that these two countries are facing. And it just hasn't really produced the dividends that he imagined at night. So one Joe Biden ad claims that President Trump, and this is a quote, rolled over for the Chinese and that he led in 40,000 people from China after he announced his travel ban. Do we have a sense of why Biden is focusing on China and not the president's handling of the virus in this country? I think that there is a sense among people in the Biden campaign that they have to meet some of this China-focused.

toe to toe. Now, the question will become, how do you have a response to it that does not take this in a downward spiral to the lowest common denominator? There are activists in the United States, Asian American activists who have pointed out that the risk here is not abstract. There have been a significant uptick in attacks on Asian Americans, verbal, in some cases, physical. And this is attributed they do to this climate of hostility towards Asian American partly because of the pandemic, but then also partly because of the way the president has been using that language from the bully pulpit. So let's set falsehoods and conspiracy theories aside for one blessed second. What is Joe Biden's actual record on China?

Is he generally in sync with what you could call the Washington consensus since, I don't know, 1978 or so? He is, and I think it's then worth pointing out how that consensus has changed. So the basic consensus and the one that has defined Joe Biden going back to when he was, after all, chairman of the Senate of Foreign Relations Committee, was that engaging with China, nudging it to open up, to trade to some degree of Western influence, that that would ultimately be good for the United States and it would be good for China.

That was the basic idea. And that continued in Joe Biden's time in the vice presidency. He had the job of being the counterpart to Xi Jinping when Xi Jinping was the vice president before he became the president. It was an important position, actually. He had to do a lot of face-to-face time to form an impression of who this very powerful incoming figure was going to be. And what's changed since then is that even if Donald Trump had not won the presidency,

you were probably going to see a change in the thinking around China on both the left and the right. And Joe Biden has sort of moved in step with that. He is harder on the place than he was when he was the vice president and certainly than when he was in the Senate. But where that's going is a live issue. It's actually an open question about whether the United States is going to come to see China as an opponent that it can deal with in a kind of, you know, reasonable level of competition or whether it's, in fact, an enemy that is on the opposite side of a fundamental Cold War-style conflict. And that is partly what this election is about in the United States. It's about that not only at the presidential level, but it also seems to be having an effect down ballot.

Let's play an ad from Texas congressional candidate Kathleen Wall. China poisoned our people. President Trump has the courage to call it what it is. The Chinese virus. Kathleen Wall has his back. Wall will cut off trade, aid, and support to China. Fight to replace Made in China with Made in America. And stand with President Trump to face down the Chinese threat.

China is a criminal enterprise masquerading as a sovereign nation. It's time to fight back. I'm Kathleen Wall, and I approve this message. You know what's interesting about that, David? It's actually, that's not new. I've been hearing these ads recently, and it reminds me of years ago, I was in Beijing, 2012, and there was an ad by a Michigan Republican congressman named Pete Hextra,

in which it was the most offensive imagery. I mean, he had an Asian actress speaking in broken English, wearing a conical hat. It was grotesque. By the way, Pete Hextra is now the American ambassador to the Netherlands on behalf of the Trump administration. So this idea of attacking China has been part of our politics for a long time. On the Chinese side, they're used to this too. So on the Chinese government side, they basically tend to look at American campaigns as a kind of silly season in which you are going to hear absolutely everything. And they don't assume that a lot of that's going to translate into policy.

And that can create some weird reverb in the American political consciousness, because I've heard American political consultants say, well, we know the Chinese don't take this seriously. So we can say pretty much anything during a campaign and it doesn't really have an impact. So the effect is that it is amped up the anti-China rhetoric to quite a remarkable degree already. Evan Osnows, thank you very much. My pleasure. Thanks, David. Evan Osnows reports for us from Washington. I'm David Remnick, and that's our show for today. Thanks for joining us.

And I hope you'll join us next time for The New Yorker Radio Hour. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon, Corby, Cala Leah, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Gauphin and Putuguele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Mung Faye Chen, and Emily Mann.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.