Peter Hessler’s coronavirus piece: privilege and self-censorship?

The latest controversy to rattle the rather esoteric and increasingly acrimonious world of China-watchers has been Geremie R. Barme's response to Peter Hessler's latest essay for the New Yorker, "How China Controlled the Coronavirus". The Australian Sinologist's attack on the American author is pretty savage; Barme accuses Hessler of self-censoring, of writing from a position of privilege, and of essentially being an apologist for the Chinese state.

I read Hessler's essay when it came out last month, and I have to say I was a bit disappointed. For one of the most perceptive Western writers on China it felt like a rather vacuous effort, if well-written as always. I learnt little new about China, or even about how the country brought the pandemic under control (in spite of not actually having been in China myself since January). The essay might be of more interest for people unfamiliar with China, but for those who know the country well it doesn't really say anything new.

On the other hand, the gist of Barme's criticism seems to centre around Peter Hessler's failure to talk about the really sensitive issues in today's China: the human rights abuses, the stifling of any dissent within academia, the total control over public life and people's movements which the coronavirus crisis has only intensified, and the initial public anger at the way the government handled the pandemic.

I happen to think that Barme's criticism is seriously over the top. Comparing Peter Hessler to Walter Duranty, the Moscow Bureau Chief of the New York Times from 1922 to 1936, is just unwarranted any way you look at it. Duranty was an apologist for Stalinism who infamously denied the dreadful Soviet famines of 1932-33, claiming that "any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda", even as millions starved in Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR. Even once he was back in America, he defended Stalin's show trials.

Apart from the fact that China today is not Stalin's USSR, Hessler is also no Duranty. You only need to read his books to see that. They are often intelligently critical of the country, and certainly don't whitewash its bad sides. In his most famous book, River Town, a description of his two years teaching English literature in a small town in Sichuan, Hessler doesn't hide his disdain for the propaganda in the school textbooks he had to use, nor does he shy away from describing the Chinese as "colonizers" while writing about a trip to Xinjiang. Same goes for his later books. This is no apologist for the CPC. 

Hessler's latest essay cannot fairly be described in such terms either. He is not simply repeating the talking points of government propaganda, and in fact at one point he does touch upon some of the most delicate issues: 

"As the spring wore on, conversations often included a standard conclusion: the pandemic showed that Chinese value life over freedom, whereas Americans take the opposite approach. I disliked such simplifications, which failed to consider the initial Chinese coverup of the virus, or the government’s policies in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, or the fact that any number of democracies were handling the crisis much better than the Americans."

Barme notes that a translated version of the essay has been circulated on the Chinese internet "with official sanction", and that Hessler is now being described as a "Good American". He fails to point out however that the translation is censored: for instance, the last sentence in the quote above is left out. It is easy to turn a balanced piece into a propaganda coup when you censor the bits that don't fit your narrative. The problem here isn't so much Hessler's writing, as much as a censorship for which he bears no blame.

A bit further down, Hessler also states that "many aspects of the Chinese strategy could never be adopted in America or in any other democracy" (this was purposefully mistranslated in the Chinese version as "any other country"). All in all it is clear that this is hardly an article fit for China Daily, and Hessler's points aren't unreasonable. It isn't unreasonable to claim that China has been successful at controlling the pandemic, because it clearly has been. Yes, many neighbouring countries haven't done badly either, but given China's size and the fact that the pandemic started there, the system's success at bringing new infections down to virtually nil has been quite impressive. It also isn't unreasonable to ask whether some aspects of the Chinese approach might have something to teach the US, which has had 50 times more deaths.

And yet, I can see where some of the criticism is coming from. At one point in River Town Hessler writes about the way that he and his fellow American Peace Corps volunteers always seemed to have the effect of encouraging their students in Fuling to be questioning and irreverent, perhaps too much for their own good. He puts the reason down to this: "we were waiguoren (foreigners), and we didn’t have that voice in the back of our minds that warned us when certain lines were being crossed.” After spending so long in China, Hessler has clearly developed that voice in the back of his mind. At some points it feels like he really is trying to describe some sort of "Kumbaya China", as Barme puts it. Take this quote:

Serena’s response to her nonfiction experience—first rejected, then denied credit—was to ask politely if she could finish out the term’s work and then do it over again in the spring, this time on the books. That was one tradition that hadn’t changed: in China, a student always respects her teacher, even if the teacher is a moron.

It is interesting that Hessler should say this, because in December last year there were rumours that he had been reported by one of his own students at Sichuan University for teaching content that was "subversive" or "offensive to China". While it is unclear whether this actually happened, and Hessler still seems to be teaching there quite happily, plenty of other Chinese university professors have been reported by their own students in recent years, and there is no way Hessler isn't aware of this.

Or take this excerpt:

But 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.”

It's great that Hessler and his family didn't have any trouble, and that the teacher at his daughter's school was so enlightened. Being stuck in a campus in Chengdu probably helped. Out in China's big coastal cities, however, there were quite a few instances of discrimination against foreigners, and particularly against the African community in Guangzhou, who were targeted in an unacceptable fashion both by local people and local officials after a few of their number tested positive.

The fact is that there has been plenty of nastiness in China's response to the pandemic that Hessler doesn't mention, or only mentions in a very oblique fashion. Hessler cannot have failed to notice the exceptional (and quickly forgotten) wave of public anger in early February after the death of a whistleblowing doctor, and yet he doesn't mention it at all. Perhaps he has forgotten it too, but more likely he just doesn't feel comfortable talking about it. 

The crux of the matter is that Peter Hessler currently lives and works in China, and just like all those who do he has to measure his words carefully. Officially accredited foreign reporters have far more leeway (although even they may find their visas revoked if they really cross the line), but Hessler is not one of those. In theory he could even be accused of breaking the law by engaging in unaccredited reporting, as Barme points out. He certainly knows that if he wants to carry on with his life in Chengdu he needs to tread carefully, and only mention sensitive issues in passing and obliquely, or not at all.

It wasn't like this ten or twenty years ago, when Hessler wrote his books. Censorship was far more lax in general, for certain, but also Westerners living in China seemed to enjoy a certain level of immunity: as long as you didn't write in Chinese or try and appeal directly to the Chinese public, you could say almost anything you wanted. This has changed, and nowadays any writer based in China will feel the presence of that invisible censor peering over their shoulder as soon as they stray into dangerous territory. I am pretty sure that even Hessler's decision to use the turn of phrase "China was the first country to experience the pandemic" was taken because it has become impossible to openly state that the virus originated in China.

Barme claims that Hessler has "unexamined Caucasian privilege", leading him to write the way he does, but if anything it may be the opposite: part of the reason Hessler is so cautious is the fact that being white or having a foreign passport no longer affords you much protection. The real question that should be asked is whether it is problematic for Hessler to continue explaining the country to the outside world, when he finds himself in a situation where he has to measure every word carefully and make sure he doesn't cross any "red lines". On the ground reporting is valuable of course, but then so is the chance to give the full picture without self-censoring.

A snapshot of the plague: life in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

I am currently staying in the city of Yogyakarta, in Indonesia. Just like everywhere else on the planet, life here has taken a rather surreal turn over the past few months.

Here in Indonesia ordinary life started to shut down around mid-March, when coronavirus cases started multiplying. By then I had already been in Yogyakarta for around a month, and had some experience of what normal, pre-pandemic life looked like in this corner of the world. 

Indonesia has a reputation as an easygoing place, and its reaction to Covid-19 would seem to confirm it. The country's measures to contain the virus have generally been much less strict than those taken in neighbouring countries. People have not been ordered to stay home bar emergencies, as was the case in Malaysia, and cities have not been put under curfew like in Thailand. People are not being fined or jailed for failing to respect social distancing rules and encouraged to snoop on their neighbours, like in Singapore. Thankfully it also hasn't gone the way of the Philippines, where Duterte's police have been enforcing one of the world's strictest lockdowns with brutal methods.

Down over here, things have been a lot more relaxed. The strictest measures have been taken in Jakarta, the outbreak's epicentre, with businesses and restaurants being forced to close or only do home deliveries. But Indonesia is a huge archipelago made up of thousands of dispersed islands, with the fourth largest population in the world, and putting the whole country under lockdown was never going to be a straightforward process. 

In practice, policies and approaches have varied widely from one province to another. While Indonesia is not officially a federal country, since the fall of Suharto it has moved towards a "quasi-federal" approach, with the provinces enjoying a lot of autonomy. Yogyakarta, where I am staying, occupies a very special position in this regard. While this city of 2 million is far from being Indonesia's biggest, it gets its own autonomous region, the Special Region of Yogyakarta, which is also the only officially recognised sultanate in the country.

Until this day, the Sultan of Yogyakarta is automatically also the governor of the region, and enjoys genuine power as a result. Although there used to be many sultans in what is now Indonesia, this particular sultanate was the only one to receive official acknowledgement after independence, due to its unwavering support for the liberation struggle against the Dutch. The current sultan, Hamengkubuwono X, is genuinely popular with his people. His position as an unelected governor is an anomaly in modern Indonesia, where all other posts from villages heads to the president are now elected by popular vote. It must be added though that in 2010 a proposal by the central government to allow the governor of Yogyakarta to be elected by the people was met with angry protests by Yogyakartans, ready to fight to remain disenfranchised.

The sultan, who is a consummate politician, rejected the idea of enforcing a full lockdown in the city from the start, saying that it would have "very serious consequences", supposedly for people's livelihoods. At the end of March, he gave a speech inviting people to "calm down" since there was no "lockdown" (he used the English terms). At the same time, he invited people to stay home if they could, avoid crowds and wash their hands. At least he didn't call for achieving "herd immunity".

His majesty the Sultan of Yogyakarta announcing that there will not be a lockdown on the 23rd of March

Perhaps as a result of this stance, the measures taken in this city have been relatively lax. While schools are closed and people are encouraged to work from home, shops and restaurants have not been forced to close. There certainly are a lot of shuttered shopfronts around the city, but a fair number of businesses are still open. Shopping malls take people's temperatures at the entrance, but they have remained open too. And while a lot of restaurants are only doing deliveries, there are still a fair number of places that allow customers to sit down and eat. The fancier restaurants try and implement social distancing measures, but there are plenty of roadside stalls that seem to be operating as they always do. 

People are free to walk or drive anywhere within the city without restrictions. Masks are not mandatory, and while a lot of people wear them, there are plenty of others who don't bother. This is in contrast with many other Asian countries, where walking around without a mask has by now become taboo or even illegal. 

This is not to say that life here has gone on as normal, by any means. Much of economic activity has ground to a halt. Being able to work from home is a luxury for the few. Just like everywhere else in the world, a lot of people have lost their livelihoods. In Indonesia, a middle-income country where millions still eke out a living in informal jobs with little savings, this spells disaster for many. While the rural masses can live off the land to some degree, the urban poor have little to fall back on. Here in Yogyakarta, various charities have sprung up to deliver food to vulnerable families who are having trouble putting food on the table. Petty theft is also on the increase.

Yogyakarta's thriving tourist industry has been completely gutted. The city usually receives a constant flow of tourists from within Indonesia and from other countries, because of its cultural importance and its proximity to the ruins of Borobudur. But now Malioboro, a major shopping street and nightlife centre that is usually teeming with visitors, looks like a ghost town.

Indonesia suspended "visa on arrival" schemes in March, essentially banning all foreign tourism. At the same time, the authorities have announced that any foreigners already in the country will be allowed to stay "until the pandemic is over", regardless of whether their visa has expired. This has been convenient for me, since I would not normally be allowed to stay here longer than two months at a time. At the end of March the British and US governments encouraged any of their citizens still in Indonesia to return home, although those two countries are hardly the ideal places to be waiting out this pandemic. Unwilling to go back to Europe, and for the time being unable to go back to China, I decided to stay put.

Two months later, I am still here. Some of the worst predictions have not come to pass. Indonesia has not seen hundreds of thousands of deaths, and the health services have not collapsed. The official figure is 1351 deaths, although no one believes that the government's statistics are accurate. Indonesia's rate of testing is very low, and only people who died after testing positive are counted as coronavirus casualties. Figures for "excess" funerals in Jakarta over the last few months point to thousands of victims, including unfortunately many doctors and nurses. This is tragic, but still better than the picture in most Western countries, especially when you consider that Indonesia has 267 million people. While there has been much criticism of the state's handling of the situation, I can see that it is extremely tough to balance the need to stop a dangerous virus from ripping through communities, and the need to allow people to make a living in a country where the poor have few savings. 

Here in Yogyakarta there have officially been 225 confirmed cases and eight deaths. Even if the true figures are higher, there certainly doesn't seem to have been a huge wave of cases overwhelming the hospitals and filling up the morgues. Perhaps for this reason, or maybe because they are bored of being stuck indoors and need to make a living, people are starting to go out again. For much of April traffic was down to about 10 - 20% of its normal flow, and the streets were almost deserted. While things are certainly not back to where they were before the pandemic, over the last few weeks the streets have come alive again, and in some places you would struggle to believe anything out of the ordinary was going on. It is as if the people have unilaterally declared the end of a lockdown that was never really enforced in the first place.

On top of everything else, today is the start of Lebaran, the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. As I write these words, the takbir (Allahu Akbar) is drifting in through my window from the loudspeakers of dozens of mosques, as is tradition on the first night of the holiday. In Indonesia this holiday is normally preceded by the mudik, a mass migration comparable to China's spring festival rush, if smaller in scale. In order to stop scores of migrant workers from going home to their villages and carrying the infection to every last corner of the country, at the end of April the government suspended all inter-provincial travel with only a day's notice (they have now allowed travel for work purposes). This measure has probably left millions of jobless and frustrated migrants stuck in Jakarta's massive urban sprawl. On the other hand it may have stopped the virus from spreading more widely around the nation, in a country which just cannot deal with massive rates of infection.

This whole situation has left a strange feel to life in Yogyakarta. It is currently quite hard to get in or out, but in many ways life in the city can feel almost normal. In the backstreets, neighbours huddle together and chat without bothering with masks or social distancing (but then you will see a family of three riding around on one scooter with no helmets, but wearing face masks just to be on the safe side). Peasants sell their vegetables on the side of the road, while buskers with guitars perform at traffic lights. Some bars are even open, but they limit the number of patrons and keep the tables far apart.

One thing that has struck me about the situation is the way that many suburban communities or Kampung, a term that refers to a village but also a kind of self-contained neighbourhood, have blocked off the entrances to their streets with barriers of various kinds, in an attempt to stop outsiders from entering and infecting people. Some of the barriers have an "official" look, but others are quite clearly set up by the residents. Some have banners with slogans scrawled across them, or with information on how to protect yourself from Covid-19. This mirrors the way that many Chinese villages unilaterally blocked themselves off from the outside world in February, when the pandemic was at its peak in China. Last week I walked around a bit in the northern outskirts of Yogyakarta and took photos of a few of these impromptu barricades, which you can see below.

                                      

Two men play chess on the pavement, with their face masks pulled down

The staff at a jewellery store in a shopping mall, wearing masks and protective gear

Whataboutism and viruses: the coronavirus and H1N1 outbreaks

Over the last few days, an article entitled "Something's Not Right Here Folks" | A look at USA 2009 H1N1 Virus Compared to China 2020 Corona Virus has been widely shared and read on Chinese social media. The original article was published on LinkedIn, perhaps the only major Western social media site still unblocked in China, so English-speaking Chinese started off by sharing the original. But a Chinese translation quickly appeared, and now it is being shared more widely on WeChat and Weibo. Unfortunately this fits in with a general pattern: articles written by outsiders that coincide with the worldview which the Chinese government wants to promote often get translated and spread widely within China, while foreign contents that does not fit in with this worldview quickly gets censored.

The article in question is based on a kind of whataboutism which has become widespread on the internet: the argument is that China's handling of the coronavirus outbreak has been much more responsible and effective than the US's handling of the 2009 outbreak of the H1N1 virus (ofter referred to as the "swine flu" at the time). It is also claimed that the international reaction to the coronavirus outbreak smacks of racism and double standards, since in 2009 Americans were not prevented from travelling to other countries or in any way quarantined or shunned, as is now happening to Chinese citizens in certain places. It may seem amazing that people are managing to engage in "whataboutism" regarding a virus, but such is the world.

The article's basic argument collapses when you take a brief look at the facts. First of all, the H1N1 outbreak started in the state of Veracruz, in Mexico, and not in the United States. From Mexico it quickly spread to the US, and then became a global pandemic. There was never a sense at any time that the virus was an "American" phenomenon, while the coronavirus cases are clearly concentrated in China for the time being (although this may well change). There was never any reason whatsoever to be wary of people coming from the United States, or to be scared of going there. The two situations are simply not comparable.

Of course, the author is right that other countries closing their borders with China or rejecting any visitors who have been there is overblown (but it is by no means only "Western" countries that are doing this. Russia and Mongolia closed their land borders with China quite fast). He is even more right when it comes to people refusing to eat in Chinese restaurants for fear of catching the virus, or shunning Chinese-looking people on the street. This is nothing but ignorance and racism, and unfortunately it is occurring all over Europe and elsewhere.

But when it comes to hypocrisy and double standards, it is instructive to take a look at how Mexicans were treated in China during the initial phases of the H1N1 outbreak, when the virus was still associated with Mexico. Jorge Guajardo, Mexico's ambassador to China at the time, has just written a pretty believable account according to which China suddenly stopped issuing visas to Mexicans, and Mexicans in China were quarantined regardless of whether they showed symptoms, not always in good conditions. It seems that when it comes to taking extreme measures against foreigners who might carry an infection, the Chinese authorities are second to none. And let's not even get started on the manhunt against people from Hubei which has been seen in some parts of China.

The article praises, predictably, China's "model response" to the viral outbreak, with its "broad and aggressive domestic response" combined with "the voluntary dutiful cooperation of its citizens". The delay in reporting the new illness is blamed entirely on "a few local government officials in Wuhan". It should be noted that authorities in Mexico, the country in which the H1N1 outbreak actually started, did respond by closing down public and private facilities in Mexico City, to no apparent effect. It may well be that in China such measures can be instituted more effectively and completely. The question is whether the extreme lockdown currently in place in much of China, which is taking a huge economic toll and threatening the livelihood of the poor, and which is even costing lives, is really useful or worthwhile. This is a question that deserves some serious discussion. I am not an epidemiologist, and cannot judge how dangerous this virus could become, nor how effective these measures can really be at stopping its spread. It may even be true that China is taking a hit for the good of us all, but I wouldn't be so quick to make this judgement. And I am pretty sure the author of the piece has no more qualification than I do in this regard.

The author of the LinkedIn article turns out to be an American commentator who has lived in China for two decades. As he says towards the end, "I am truly blessed with my lovely Chinese wife and our family living here in Shenyang, in China's Northeast. You get my meaning?". He has written a couple of books. The subtitle to one of them reads "Compared to divisive western societies, middle class life in China is like Disneyland; happy, stable & safe, better than ever for 600 million people." It would seem that he is a "China expert" along the lines of Martin Jacques and John Ross, who is now having his moment in the spotlight thanks to this well-timed bit of sophistry.