Coronavirus Exposes Core Flaws, and Few Strengths, in China's Governance (NYT)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/25/world/asia/coronavirus-crisis-china-response.html

Coronavirus Exposes Core Flaws, and Few Strengths, in China’s Governance
While China can mobilize a huge national response to the outbreak, its response to the crisis is also a lesson in how the country’s political weak points can carry grave consequences for world health.
By Max Fisher
Published Jan. 25, 2020

... “When you look at the coronavirus, it looks a lot like what happened with SARS. It involves a very similar template,” Mr. Yasuda said.

The SARS epidemic, which killed hundreds of people in 2002 and 2003, initially spread unchecked when local Chinese officials minimized early reports.

Their fear was not public unrest, it later emerged, but getting in trouble with the party bosses who controlled their careers. ...

In the mid-2000s, Beijing demanded a drastic increase in milk production. When factory farms were unable to meet their targets, officials conscripted vast numbers of rural farmers. Some of the farmers, struggling to meet their quotas, watered down their milk, then added an industrial chemical known as melamine to fool quality sensors. The tainted milk poisoned thousands of infants.

Experts fear a similar regulatory failure may have enabled the coronavirus outbreak: the longstanding inability to clean up so-called wet markets, which are stuffed with livestock living and dead, domesticated and wild. Though the outbreak’s cause is still being studied, Wuhan’s wet market is considered a prime suspect.

The markets have long been considered a major threat to public health, particularly as a vector for transmitting diseases from animals to humans. And they are a lesson in the perils of patchwork, decentralized regulations like China’s: While some markets are more carefully policed than others, all it takes is one to cause an outbreak.

In another echo of the tainted milk scandal, top-down political priorities provide an incentive to look the other way. Taking down the markets, which are popular, would risk a public outcry. Local officials had every reason to fear that their bosses, who have not made the markets a priority, would punish them for causing trouble. ...

In 2001, for instance, Beijing ordered provincial officials to reduce water pollution from factories. Many provinces simply moved the factories to their borders, ensuring pollutants would flow into the next district. Nationwide, water pollution worsened.