Upstream - [TEASER] China Pt. 7: A Socialist Response to the COVID Pandemic w/ Creighton Ward, Kevin Li, and Alessandro Zancan

Starting point is 00:00:00 A quick note before we jump into this Patreon episode. Thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers for making upstream possible. We genuinely couldn't do this without you. Your support allows us to create bonus content like this and provide most of our content for free so that we can continue to offer political education media to the public and help to build our movement. Thank you, comrades.

Starting point is 00:00:25 We hope you enjoy this conversation. I think it's really important to emphasize that these measures benefited not just Chinese people, but the rest of the world. So anything that China did to end these chains of transmission denied the virus opportunities to evolve. into new variants that are more immune-evasive, more transmissible. That's kind of the situation that we're in right now, where we have a lot of highly infectious variants. In a monthly review article by Ting's Chalk, it says that if China had followed the reckless U.S. pass, figures indicate that China would have suffered 4.8 million deaths. Even a quick calculation reveals that China's strategy indeed saved millions of lives.

Starting point is 00:01:23 You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Despite what Western media and the ruling class they serve might suggest,

Starting point is 00:01:44 China's response to the COVID pandemic was quite possibly one of the most remarkable achievements of the 21st century. Through their zero COVID strategy, China was able to contain the SARS-COVIDs. virus, increase its population's life expectancy, and grow its economy during the most intense parts of the pandemic. This is all while the West experienced millions of deaths, countless lives destroyed, and collapsed economies. Countries like the U.S. have never really recovered from the erosion of the social bonds and faith in their systems that COVID initiated.

Starting point is 00:02:25 But China is a completely different story. In this episode, Part 7 of our ongoing Patreon series Exploring China, we're joined by Creighton Ward, Kevin Lee, and Alessandro Zan Khan to discuss this and much more. Creighton is a member of the Friends of Socialist China Chow Collective and a long COVID-M-E-CFS patient advocate. Kevin is a member of the Chow Collective working as a writer and translator and is trained in public health and epidemiology, and Alessandro is a Marxist artist and developer, a member of the Iskra Books editorial board, and a member of the Friends of Socialist China Britain Committee. And now, here's Robert in conversation with Creighton Ward, Kevin Lee, and Alessandro Zan Khan.

Starting point is 00:03:24 All right, Creighton, Alessandro, and Alessandro, And Kevin, it is great to have you all on the show. And I think, if I'm not mistaken, this might be the first three-person interview that we have done as a podcast. So very excited about that. But yeah, it's great to have you all on. And I would love it if you could start by introducing yourselves. And maybe we could start with you, Creighton. Yeah, just introduce yourself and maybe tell us a little bit about the work that you do.

Starting point is 00:03:57 and how you came to be doing it. Thank you so much for having us on. My name's Creighton. My pronouns are she, her. I am a member of the Friends of Socialist China, Chow Collective. And since I think mid-22 or so, I've been at times really deeply and at times less involved with long COVID and ME-CFS patient advocacy in a local capacity. I'm based in Boston.

Starting point is 00:04:22 So a lot of my work's been in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. I also sit on the board of Massachusetts, ME, CFS, and FM Association, which is dedicated to serving patients with infection-associated chronic conditions. Awesome. Thank you so much for that. And maybe let's go with Alessandro, just kind of picking you at random here, but maybe you could introduce yourself as well and tell us a little about the work that you do. Yeah, it's an absolute honor to be on the podcast.

Starting point is 00:04:51 I've been a fan for quite a while. So my name is Alessandro Zankan. pronouns they them. I'm a Marxist artist and developer. I'm on the Iskra Books editorial board and a member of the Friends Associates China Britain Committee. So most of my work is centered on the tech side of things. I'm involved in a number of projects mainly right now, a dialectical knowledge management and creation system called Matt Jen, which if all goes well, will be in a public beta next year. And I'm also working on a number of writings on the medical superstructure of capitalism with a focus on sex, gender, illness, disability, and the ratification of

Starting point is 00:05:31 normality as a biological construct. So I think that's where most of my thinking on the topic has come from. I'm based in London, so I got to experience COVID under the UK government, which means I have a lot to say. But yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much. And Kevin. Hi. Great to be here. Thanks for having us. I'm Kevin. I'm a member of Chow Collective. Just a brief introduction about the organization. We're an anti-imperialist media collective,

Starting point is 00:06:02 primarily focused around issues around China and counterpropaganda regarding China. As a part of my work with them, I'm a writer, I'm a translator, mostly doing Chinese-English translation with an emphasis on specifically political work and a little bit around COVID. Professionally, I have academic training in public health. I have multiple advanced degrees in public health with a lot of training in epidemiology. So five years ago when COVID was rolling around, I picked up a personal interest. My family is also from Hubei, not too far away from the epicenter of the original outbreak in China.

Starting point is 00:06:39 So this has a personal component to me as well. And so kind of since then, I'm based in Southern California, and I experienced the pandemic in the United States. So that's kind of my own, yeah, personal experience. So, yeah, thanks for having us. Awesome. Yeah, thank you all so much for that. And so, yeah, we're going to be discussing taking a bit of a deeper dive on China's zero COVID strategy today.

Starting point is 00:07:07 But we're also, of course, going to relate it to the COVID strategy and the different policies and whatnot of the United States. And I'm sure Alessandro, you're going to bring in quite a bit about the UK as well, which will be very interesting because that's a region that I have very little knowledge of when it comes to the pandemic response. And I think we're also going to spend a little bit of time dispelling some of the myths that the West has sort of promulgated around China's COVID response and their zero COVID policy. And that's a big part of the series that we're doing is really addressing misconceptions and disinformation is. well. So that's a little bit of a teaser, I guess, of what we're going to be diving into today. But before we get into the specifics of China's zero COVID strategy, I thought it might be helpful to like zoom out just a little bit because at least for me, like a lot of my memory

Starting point is 00:08:07 until I started doing a little bit more research and preparing for this conversation, I didn't remember the timeline of like, you know, when COVID first hit and like the different interventions and stuff quite as clearly. So it might be helpful to just go back to maybe like, you know, late 2019, early 2020 when COVID did first emerge. And yeah, maybe you all could remind us a little bit of that timeline a little bit and just that period of when when COVID first emerged. And if you want to discuss it like personally as like where you were or if you want to just kind of give us a little bit of sense of the timeline and the policies that were passed and broad brushstrokes whatever is most helpful or makes the most sense for you and yeah whoever wants to tackle that

Starting point is 00:08:56 one first please go ahead I can take a job at this so yeah let's kind of bring ourselves back to December of 2019 in Wuhan China so four seasons climate so December is in the winter. It's cold, it's humid, and kind of sticky. So, you know, this is a time where with flu season, with cold season, people are getting sick with colds, the flu, you might even find cases of bronchitis and or pneumonia. And so, according to some Western sources, the first cases of an unknown pneumonia or a pneumonia of unknown etiology occur in early December. And it's not until December 27th, December 27th, where they, several hospitals in Wuhan identify cases of this pneumonia, higher than average pneumonia. There is some back and forth

Starting point is 00:09:49 between these individual hospitals and the Ministry of Health in Wuhan. So there is, on December 30th, the Department of Health in Wuhan officially reports cases of an unknown pneumonia. And so these these symptoms are pretty typical of pneumonia, so respiratory symptoms, severe kind of lesions in the lung. And so these symptoms were initially identified as some sort of pneumonia. Some people mistook it as SARS, which previously had an outbreak in 2003 in China. But basically, you know, we were seeing these cases of pneumonia at higher levels than than usual. The cause of this pneumonia was identified on January 7th and recognized what we called today as COVID-19. coronavirus COVID-19. China alerts the WHO on January 9th, reporting an outbreak of

Starting point is 00:10:38 around 40 patients. By January 12th, biologists in China have identified the full viral sequence and is uploaded publicly. On January 23rd, it's clear that this is an epidemic of unprecedented proportions, and the entire city of Wuhan, which has a population of 10 million people, it locks down. And we can get into the details of what a lockdown looks like, but this is the largest scale lockdown we've ever seen in the world. And on January 23rd, the Bureau of Construction of the Wuhan city government, they call a meeting the next day they release design plans for two specialized COVID hospitals. On January 31st, infectious disease experts in China,

Starting point is 00:11:20 they announced that medical staff, who are members of the Communist Party, are to be dispatched to Wuhan because the local medical system is overwhelmed. This was a non-negotiable order. all doctors who are part of the Communist Party are considered to be eligible to this, you can call it like a draft. On February 2nd, so a little over a week after the 24th, there are two hospitals that are fully constructed, specifically dedicated to treating COVID. These were made out of prefabricated venues, and this is in addition to other temporary facilities, but these are from the ground up construction, new constructions dedicated towards COVID.

Starting point is 00:11:59 Two days later, after some last-minute checks, these two hospitals begin accepting patients. It isn't until February 12th that daily new confirmed cases of COVID peak in Wuhan at around 15,000 cases. And this lockdown, it continues for around two months, and it's lifted on April 8th. And after April 8th, at April 8th, when they lifted the last. lockdown. This was done after

Starting point is 00:12:28 confirmed zero local transmission of COVID. And by August, Wuhan, the city of 10 million people, they're hosting giant pool parties. They're hosting outdoor music festivals while the whole world are staying at home.

Starting point is 00:12:44 And that's basically the largest outbreak of COVID until two years later. And so that's the initial response for you. Okay, let's talk a little bit now about China's zero COVID strategy. And that's crazy to hear that like that story about the pool parties. I mean, that's, that's wild to think about how successful that lockdown initially

Starting point is 00:13:09 was. I had no idea personally about that. So yeah, let's talk a little bit more about the COVID strategy that China implemented. And so there's like a bunch of different parts to this. And I sort of, when I was doing my research, it was really focused on like contact tracing, mass testing, their border quarantine, and lockdowns, which we've talked about briefly. But that's just sort of what I was looking at. So maybe just from your perspective and from what you know, maybe just share with us what the zero COVID strategy was. And as we're talking about it, too, if you want to sort of where it makes sense,

Starting point is 00:13:52 compare it to the various policies implement. here in the United States. So again, I'll just throw that out to the group and whoever wants to jump in first. Yeah, thank you for your question. So as we all know, the COVID-19 pandemic was, it is the worst public health crisis of the 21st century, and it's one of the deadliest pandemics in history.

Starting point is 00:14:14 In response to this crisis, China implemented a comprehensive strategy to contain the virus, which they did with remarkable success. So zero COVID was implemented, in stages. It evolved over time, too. It began with an emergency response from December 2019 to May 2020. Then it transitioned to a control and elimination phase from June 2020 to July 2021. And then adaptation and preparation from July 2021 to October 2022. And finally, the relaxation of policies from November 2022 until the present.

Starting point is 00:14:54 Zero COVID became dynamic zero COVID in 2021, and the goal of the policy shifted a bit from its goal of zero infections to wiping out outbreaks quickly. And China responded to the pandemic rapidly executing what we think, I think, and our agreement on was a masterclass in state capacity in setting a new benchmark and epidemic control. China operated with transparency and in an international spirit, contributing significantly to COVID prevention, research, technical training and emergency responses around the world. COVID was controversial in the West due to biased media reporting on this policy, but the approach has been validated by its enormous success in containing the virus until

Starting point is 00:15:36 the relaxation of the policy, which prevented millions of deaths and probably billions of infections, and the Chinese economy continued to grow, and Chinese people's life expectancy also continued to rise and surpass the U.S.s in 2021. Yeah, that was one of the wildest things I came across in some of the literature and stuff that you sent me, Creighton, was like this increase in life expectancy during like the initial phases of the pandemic until like 2020 or something like that. And also the growth of the Chinese economy during this period, which is really fascinating because it's one of the main reasons that the United States purportedly did not implement a lot of these similar

Starting point is 00:16:14 measures that were extremely helpful to, you know, containing the virus and helping people was always like the economy, the economy, but turns out that, you know, you can protect people and not have like a recession at the same time. And so let's go through maybe some of the like specifics of like what contact tracing is, what mass testing. I mean, some of this is a little bit self-explanatory, but like the border quarantine. And like also, Kevin, you had mentioned lockdowns when we started, but we didn't get into, like, what a lockdown actually is, because I think it's really interesting here in the U.S. when we talk about, like, you know, that couple months where we had a, quote, lockdown, we didn't really have a lockdown, right? Like, so maybe we could

Starting point is 00:17:01 talk about those different components a little bit and unpack what they actually entail. Yeah, I think you outlined it really well when you mentioned before, like four main components of contact tracing, mass testing, border quarantine, and also lockdown slash local quarantine. So contact tracing, broadly speaking, is identifying and tracing the origins and the development of an outbreak of diseases. An outbreak of diseases being two or more people getting the same disease from a common source. In traditional epidemiology, this might be applied to communicable diseases like COVID or flu. It could be applied to foodborne outbreaks. It could be applied to any sort of disease with a common source. And also in traditional epidemiology, this is done in a very,

Starting point is 00:17:45 with a very manual process. So it's people and health departments, staff in these local bureaucracies. They're calling people, asking them where they went, asking them who they saw, and then reaching out to these secondary contacts, to these tertiary contacts, and creating a timeline and a narrative of how the disease has been spreading. This did happen in China. China did have manual contact tracing, but what's, I think, more impressive is that they're able to scale up using a comprehensive digital,

Starting point is 00:18:15 structure. So in China, by around April of 2020, the national government of China had finalized standards for what's known as a health code. So these are individual QR codes that are accessible on one cell phone via WeChat and Alipay, two of the most commonly used apps in China. They're linked to personal info. So that's your name, that's your national ID number, that's your contact information. And what's unique about this health code is that it's linked to also your most recent COVID test results. So your COVID test results are linked to, you register with your national ID,

Starting point is 00:18:52 and your test results are linked with your ID number. These health codes, they are used as health passports. So you go to a public space. There is a security guard who you show them your phone, and they scan your phone, and that creates a record. So you're checking into a public space. These include malls, public parks, public transportation, like subway or buses.

Starting point is 00:19:13 And this provides a means of, first of all, you're reporting your own health status to the public. And then secondly, you're providing your location for the sake of health screening and also contact tracing. And so people are testing on a regular basis. And if one person ends up testing positive, your health code is changed from like a healthy status. They called it green, a green code. It's changed to yellow, meaning you need another negative PCR test to enter public spaces. If you actually test positive, you are given a red code, and that means you are not permitted into public spaces, and you must receive treatment, and you must be, you must isolate yourself. And so these are isolation measures that are enforceable. These are measures that are trackable.

Starting point is 00:19:57 And so these health codes were able to essentially consolidate a set of previously disorganized information, like your location history, like your test results, your own personal identification. And so, you know, I think to the Western eye, I think, and I don't think this is necessarily an overblown concern, but there's issues around data privacy and generally speaking, a surveillance state. As far as I know, despite these risks or concerns, I don't think there were actually any systemic misuse of personal information during or after these health codes. So in multiple press conferences, in multiple white papers, the government did place a very strong emphasis on. information privacy and at least on like a systems level this was maintained throughout the pandemic in the united states you know we did have testing and contact tracing a lot of this was manual through local health agencies so essentially hiring a lot of contract workers to make these phone calls in a more traditional sense there were actually attempts at digitizing this process

Starting point is 00:21:02 so software engineers from google and other companies they actually did come up with a way to to use Bluetooth signals from your smartphone to automate contact tracing. But this didn't work very well because there wasn't enforced adoption. There wasn't actually any incentive to implement this on a large scale. No one's going to be on your case if you show up without this app or anything like that. So I would say the US has took a much more, I guess, traditional approach and approach that was ultimately not suited for a disease or a disease. or a virus that transmitted on us at a speed of this scale.

Starting point is 00:21:42 This was a clip from our Patreon episode with Creighton Ward, Kevin Lee, and Alessandro Zankan. You can listen to the full episode by becoming an upstream podcast Patreon subscriber. Through Patreon, you'll have access to bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support, you'll be helping us keep. upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this whole project going. Post-capitalist political

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Upstream - [TEASER] China Pt. 7: A Socialist Response to the COVID Pandemic w/ Creighton Ward, Kevin Li, and Alessandro Zancan

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