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.

On xenophobia and administrative overreach

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought to light and exacerbated tensions and inequalities that already existed all over the world. Among its many side-effects it has engendered fear and suspicion towards foreigners and minorities, or sometimes even people from elsewhere in a country, as possible carriers of a dangerous virus. Initially it was the Chinese, or those who looked like they might be Chinese, who found themselves under suspicion around the world, but later on many other groups started feeling the heat.

In China too, the possibility that foreigners might carry the virus with them from abroad has turned into a driving factor, and an excuse, for xenophobia. The EU Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai recently surveyed its member companies, and found that discrimination on the basis of foreign nationality or appearance had been experienced by 39% of respondents or their colleagues. And this is in Mainland China's most cosmopolitan city, known to be far more friendly to outsiders than the rest of the country. Over half of respondents felt that reports in the local media portraying the virus as "imported" are fuelling xenophobia.

The phenomenon began in earnest towards the middle of March, when it became clear that the pandemic was mostly under control within China and exploding in the rest of the world. At this point the big concern in China became new cases of Covid-19 imported from abroad. Very quickly, levels of fear and discrimination towards foreigners living in the country skyrocketed. 

In cities across China, people who do not look Chinese started having unpleasant experiences: locals very obviously refusing to sit next to them on public transport; being refused entry into shops, restaurants and shopping malls based solely on their features and skin colour; being barred from entering xiaoqu (gated neighbourhoods) for being foreign, while Chinese people entered quite happily; taxi drivers refusing to pick them up; being monitored by their neighbourhood committees and local officials to a greater extent than their neighbours; and in the worst cases, being yelled at or berated on the streets, even in spite of wearing a mask. Hotels started rejecting foreign guests to an even greater extent than usual, very often citing directives from local officials. In most such situations, being able to show a green code on Alipay's Health App made no difference: no foreigners meant no foreigners, green code or not.

Never mind that the great majority of "imported cases" of Covid-19 actually belonged to Chinese citizens returning from abroad, of whom there was a much bigger number than there were foreigners entering the country. Never mind that the only person guilty of flying to China while purposefully concealing that she had coronavirus symptoms was a Chinese lady living in Massachusetts, who returned home because in the US she had been repeatedly denied both a test for the virus and hospitalisation (she got into serious trouble when the Chinese authorities understood what she had done). In spite of all this, foreigners suddenly became a prime target both of the people's anxiety and of official measures.

Of course, foreigners in China are not all equal. Wealthy foreign executives living in Shanghai may have felt almost no inconvenience at all. Others have been less fortunate. The worst of it, by far, has been experienced by Guangzhou's African community. The city has China's only real African enclave, an area where traders from all over the continent reside and do business. Although the community has been dwindling for years, partly due to greater strictness in the enforcement of visa regulations, it still exists. 

Towards the end of March, numerous personal reports emerged of Africans who had not travelled outside of China for months being locked into their flats by the authorities and tested repeatedly for the virus. Others were kicked out of their homes by their landlords, while the police refused to help. Those kicked out often spent days wandering the streets, unable to find hotels that would welcome them or even restaurants and shops that would let them in. Groups of volunteers, mostly Chinese, helped bring them food and find them places to stay.

This wave of xenophobia quickly gained attention in the international media. The Guardian and the New York Times both ran features on the general animosity towards foreigners that was sweeping over the country, while numerous outlets reported on the plight of the Africans in Guangzhou. Coverage wasn't limited to English-language media either, as this Italian report can testify.

The mistreatment of Africans led to a real diplomatic crisis. The reports, corroborated by video evidence, sparked a wave of indignation across the continent, and led to Chinese ambassadors being read the riot act in Nigeria and various other countries. Photos of a sign outside a McDonalds in Guangzhou stating that the establishment could not accept black customers further inflamed the public. Unsurprisingly the Chinese authorities denied anything was wrong and blamed the foreign media for slandering their country, but it seems they also quietly took some action to rein in the discrimination. Perhaps they realised what an own-goal the whole thing has been for the country that is the biggest creditor and trading partner for the African continent as a whole.

In any case, the worst of the paranoia about foreigners seems to be over for now, especially since foreign citizens have been unable to enter China for months except in special cases (not that most of the public is aware of this). Even the new outbreak of Covid-19 in Beijing in June does not seem to have led to a significant upturn in xenophobia, perhaps because the origin was clearly local (although they did their best to link it to imported salmon). In spite of this the problem still lingers, with occasional reports of foreigners being singled out for attention by the police and of bars not allowing foreigners in, particularly in Beijing. It is worth pointing out that in many of these cases "foreign" simply means non-Chinese looking, since it is features rather than nationality that cause people to be singled out. Many international students in China have also found themselves locked in their campuses for months on end, even as life outside goes back to normal.

For long-term foreign residents this turn of events will sadly not be too surprising (except for those who insist on remaining wilfully naive, of which there are many). Chinese society clearly has the potential to act like this, especially in times of crisis. Scapegoating of foreigners is a real problem, particularly for black people but also for other foreigners. The narrative that foreign citizens enjoy special privileges has long allowed the public to rationalise and justify any mistreatment they may face. 

Back in March cases of foreigners going out while they were supposed to be self-quarantining, behaving badly towards staff while under centralised quarantine, or picnicking in parks without masks (very often next to Chinese people doing exactly the same thing) were widely publicised by the media and pandered to the preconceived idea of "entitled" foreigners not respecting the rules, while cases of discrimination went unreported. There is no doubt that this media-driven sentiment helped to create the unfortunate situations described above, as well as an outpouring of online xenophobia (for an example, see this). 

There are those who have tried to minimise the issue, claiming that in the end anything suffered by foreigners in China is nothing compared to what Chinese and Asians have had to put up with in the rest of the world. And indeed, cases of verbal harassment and even violent assault against people of East Asian origin due to Covid-19 have been sadly numerous, particularly in Western countries. But then again, surely being kicked out of your flat and spending days on the street or being locked inside your home simply for being African should count as being subjected to a form of violence? 

Even if we take the less extreme forms of discrimination that have surfaced against other foreigners in China, we are still talking about things that would cause a riot in most of the world, including barring people from entering shopping malls and staying in hotels due to their foreign passports and/or appearance. It is true that this xenophobia has not, generally, descended into violence, but it has been institutionalised and accepted by society to an extent hardly seen elsewhere. 

Having said all of this, xenophobia and racism are probably not the only culprits here. It is undeniable that some foreigners, and especially Africans, have been subjected to real discrimination in China due to Covid-19. On the other hand, much of what they have been through is not different from what people from Hubei, and especially Wuhan, experienced at the start of the pandemic. After the Spring Festival, Chinese citizens with a Hubei ID living in other parts of China found themselves targeted by local officials and ostracised by the public. Hotels wouldn't let them stay. Neighbours shunned them, especially if they had got back from Hubei shortly before the province was sealed off. In some cases families literally had the doors to their flats chained shut by local officials, mirroring what would happen to Africans in Guangzhou a couple of months later. In another case, a county in Hebei offered a literal reward to anyone who could report people from Wuhan.

It is clear that in both cases, much of what has been driving this behaviour is the huge pressure on local governments to stop the virus from spreading in the areas under their watch. It is made clear to local officials that this should be their one and only priority. In order to achieve it, they are quite ready to subject any group considered "at risk" to unreasonably harsh measures, whether it's people from Hubei, Africans or foreigners in general. Sometimes the measures are so broad as to be absurd, and target people regardless of their travel history, evidence of being tested etc... I am sure it would be equally effective to target people in a more focused way, rather than treating entire groups as if they literally have the plague. But why not be on the safe side? The rights and comfort of the people in question aren't believed to matter, and almost nobody will step up to defend them in the current climate. In fact, much of society seems happy to pile on, driven by fear and latent resentment. 

China's system of governance has been highly effective at containing the pandemic within its own borders (notwithstanding the mistakes made right at the start, which deserve their own debate). It would be wrong to deny this just because official statistics are unreliable, as some have tried to do. Covid-19 outbreaks cannot easily be covered up, and there is good evidence that outside of Hubei the virus never really took much hold. Masks alone cannot account for this success. Mass testing, tracing, centralised quarantine, strict lockdowns and neighbourhood committees enforcing the rules all played a part. On the other hand, before heaping praise on China's response it is important to understand the inevitable side effects of a system where the "good of the nation" is put above the rights of individuals and of entire groups. How effective different countries and political systems have been in their response to Covid-19 is going to be a major talking point for years to come. That is why it is important to see the full picture, lest we fall prey to easy rhetoric.

Black Lives Matter and the Cultural Revolution

Conservatives in the West and Chinese internet users seem to have come to an agreement on one point: 43 years after it officially ended, China's Cultural Revolution has come back to life on the other side of the Pacific; the Black Lives Matter movement protesting police brutality and toppling statues is equal, in its irrational fury and ideological rigidity, to the Red Guard mobs unleashed by Chairman Mao in 1966. The Cultural Revolution analogy is being pushed by conservative and alt-right media outlets from National Review to Spiked; but it has also become extremely common on Chinese social media, the only space in China where people can discuss these topics relatively freely.

That this historical comparison is overblown shouldn't be hard to see: the first act of China's Cultural Revolution came when the students of a renowned all-girls high school in Beijing tortured and beat their own principal to death (the high school is still a prestigious one today, and there is still no memorial or acknowledgment of what happened on site). This marked the start of Beijing's "Red August" of 1966, when a couple of thousand people were murdered by student Red Guards with the encouragement and explicit protection of Mao and of Xie Fuzhi, the Minister of Public Security. Over the next few years, countless innocent people would be killed or pushed to suicide, and countless more would have their lives overturned.

Not only are comparisons between the Cultural Revolution and the BLM movement completely hyperbolic, they also ignore the most fundamental point about China's "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution": it was a movement launched and promoted directly by a totalitarian leader, for reasons that are still debated today. While people were encouraged to lash out at figures of authority and traditions, the one figure of authority who could not be questioned was Mao himself. Even accidentally spilling ink on one of the characters that made up his name got one person into very serious trouble. It was impossible to oppose the movement or denounce its excesses without risking public humiliation, imprisonment or violent death. The whole of China spoke with one voice, and you could either play along or you could get persecuted.

In contrast, the BLM protests are a spontaneous bottom-up reaction against the brutal and unjustified murder of a black man by the police, the last in a long series. The protestors are very definitely acting against the will of government authority, at least in the US. One only needs to look at the harshness with which they have been met by the police, compared to the free hand that pro-Trump, anti-lockdown protestors carrying guns and assault rifles have been given. In fact, Trump has just threatened long prison terms against those who deface American monuments, memorials and statues - in a tweet, of course.

A statue of Confucius getting removed by the Red Guards

In spite of how over-the-top it may appear, talk of a 美式文革 (American-style Cultural Revolution) remains popular in China. It is of course not meant as a compliment; if there is one thing that almost everyone in China agrees upon, including the ruling party, it's that the Cultural Revolution was an unnecessary disaster.

It doesn't surprise me that the BLM protests are not particularly popular in China. Chinese political culture decries any form of mass movement, particularly by young people, as naive, manipulable and bound to lead to nothing but trouble. Mass protests in Western countries, from the Yellow Vests to this latest one, are derided in the media as examples of the West's chaos and moral decline compared with harmonious, well-ordered China. Government propaganda is also using the current protests in the US to denounce America's supposed hypocrisy ("they" quash riots on their own soil, but support them when they happen in Hong Kong). That's when government representatives aren't clumsily trying to express support for their "African friends" in America - also on Twitter. The two superpowers' race to the bottom never seems to end.

But these feelings are obviously rooted in more than just government propaganda. The fact is that their historical experience has left many Chinese suspicious of any movement made up of radical, idealistic youngsters attempting to right the world's wrongs and rectify the arts or target historical symbols. It is not uncommon to hear people in China claim that the Cultural Revolution was an example of "democracy" (and indeed, Mao Zedong said that the movement should be accomplished through 大民主, "big democracy", helping to cement the link between democracy and chaos in people's minds). The fact that the BLM protesters are very much targeting their own national leader, rather than worshipping him like the Red Guards were, may not mean much to their Chinese critics. To those who take a cynical view of democracy, this may just mean that someone else is manipulating and stoking the protests rather than the president himself.

There is also an ideological divide within China, which in this case mirrors the one we see in the West. China certainly has a minority of liberal intellectuals, feminist and LGBT-rights activists who are inspired by their counterparts in the English-speaking world. Protesting about discrimination against local minorities is unthinkable, because it relates to "national unity", but other sorts of activism are possible: China has even seen a "MeToo" movement of sorts. The majority of the youth tends more towards illiberal nationalism, however, and it is their views that receive backing from the state. To this group, idealistic, naive Western liberals have become a figure of disdain. That's why 白左, which can be translated either as "white leftists" or "stupid/naive leftists", became a term of abuse on the Chinese internet a few years back. Add the underlying prejudice against black people that is unfortunately strong in China, as in most of Asia, and it is hardly surprising that the BLM movement isn't winning too much praise.

To some extent, it's understandable that images of young activists targeting the statues of 19th century men for being racist would remind the Chinese of the Red Guards destroying temples and statues of Confucius for being "feudal". News of old films and TV series being cancelled because they are deemed racist has compounded the feeling that this is an intolerant, censorious movement. Reports on the temporary removal of "Gone with the Wind" from HBO Max due to racial sensitivities were met with overwhelming scorn in Chinese social media, and more talk of the Cultural Revolution and of "political correctness gone mad". This is a country where most people have far more experience of censorship than of racism, of course, and government censorship does bother many Chinese: when screenshots of the "I can't breathe" tweet by the foreign ministry's spokesperson were posted on Weibo, hundreds of users replied with "I can't tweet".

These attitudes may have a lot to do with nationalism, distance and distorted reporting, but it is striking how much similarity they bear with a certain rhetoric coming from the Western right. This points to how alienated and indeed threatened many conservatives feel by the wave of left-wing identity politics that has arisen in the US and the rest of the English-speaking world over the last few years.

It would be easy to dismiss the constant complaints about the mortal threat that "safe spaces", "cancel culture" and "de-platforming" pose to our freedoms as the whining of people whose privileges and views are for once being challenged. And indeed, the reality is that in Western societies the debate on these issues remains vigorous and quite free on both sides, if acrimonious. Jordan Peterson is a successful university professor constantly appearing on TV, rather than a dissident languishing in jail, under house arrest or even just out of a job, as one might expect if there was anything approaching an actual Cultural Revolution by the "woke left" taking place. If you know what being silenced really means, the right-wing victim complex appears rather ridiculous. Those who claim that toppling old statues is a "neo-Maoist war on the past" might want to ask themselves whether they would have reacted the same way to the destruction of Lenin and Stalin's statues in Eastern Europe after 1989.

I would be the first to agree that the identitarian turn of left-wing politics over the past few years has a troublingly illiberal and regressive side to it, especially in its more radical fringes. Its focus on who is saying something (specifically their race and gender), rather than what is being said, is fundamentally anti-intellectual. Its view of privilege as determined almost entirely by race and gender, rather than by class and bank account, is out of step with the world today. Its overly broad interpretation of the concept of cultural appropriation would lead to hilariously regressive results if it were applied literally (basically we would have to give up on adopting, let-alone adapting, foreign religious traditions, clothing and food). Its post-modern focus on feelings and subjective points of view, rather than facts, makes its claims essentially unanswerable. Any human ideology can become dangerous when its core tenets can no longer be questioned in the public sphere, and it is important to ensure that debate remains free on all sides.

I would also claim, by the way, that the same political movement can be credited with positive outcomes like an increased public awareness of sexual harassment and an increased push for diversity in companies and organizations. But more important than all of this, the current BLM protests are reacting against the unquestionable fact that the US police kills unarmed civilians far more than any civilized country should accept, and black people are disproportionately (although not exclusively) the victims of this. The protestors are pitted against America's most openly racist president in over a century, and the statues of confederate generals and slave owners are a fair target of their fury. I see no reason why they should not receive the support of all those who call themselves progressives.

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. 

Chinese high schools the best in the world. Or maybe not?

They've fallen for it again. A couple of weeks ago the world's media pounced upon the results of the latest PISA evaluation, churning out headlines along the lines of "Chinese schools now the best in the world". You can see some examples in Bloomberg (China's schoolchildren are now the smartest in the world), CNN (Teens from China's wealthiest regions rank top of the class in global education survey) and Singapore's SME (China's students best in the world). The Chinese press also didn't hesitate to chime in, with the notorious nationalist tabloid the Global Times publishing a piece entitled "China's education is fuelling its unstoppable rise", while the more serious 观察者 went for "Who are the world's best 15 year old students? China comes first in the world again" (in Chinese).

If you get past these articles' headlines and read carefully, most of them do actually mention the crucial fact that, while all the other countries in the survey were assessed in their entirety, the results for China were based solely on four areas of the country: Beijing, Shanghai, and Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, in other words China's two richest municipalities and its two most prosperous and developed provinces. But the headlines talk simply about "China" and "Chinese students", and that is credibly what will stay with most readers.

The influential PISA report compares the educational achievements of dozens of different countries, testing 15 year-olds in the three areas of reading ability, maths and science. It is organized by the OECD, and the tests include all of the OECD countries and a number of others. The report is released every three years.

In 2009 and 2012, the first years that PISA carried out its assessments in Mainland China, the final reports only included results for Shanghai. While assessments were conducted in various other provinces, the Chinese authorities did not allow the results to be released, so that only Shanghai made the final ranking. And guess what? China's richest metropolis came above all the countries surveyed. This led to a flurry of headlines like "China: the World's Cleverest Country?" from the BBC, and "China Beats out Finland for Top Marks in Education" in Time magazine. The point that comparing a fancy metropolis to entire countries is not very fair was only timidly hinted in most of these reports.

In 2015, the PISA report included assessments for Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Guangdong. While the results were respectable, they were hardly incredible: the Chinese students came 27th, sixth and tenth in reading, maths and science out of the 78 countries surveyed. Then in the 2018 assessment, the one that's just been published, they suddenly leaped into first place in all three categories. 

Some Chinese educational experts have suggested that the leap to the top spot is due to the replacement of Guangdong with Zhejiang province. This makes sense: while Guangdong is known as an industrial powerhouse, it has a huge population of 113 million and great inequalities, with lots of poor migrants and areas in the North that are not very prosperous. Zhejiang is a smaller, more compact province with higher standards of living and less inequality. 

The difference it made to replace one province with another only confirms the general point that proclaiming Chinese schools to be the best in the world based on a ranking of nations where China is only represented by its most advanced regions makes very little sense. It makes little sense not only because those regions are not typical, but also because of the country's deep-rooted educational inequality. China's hukou system means that, particularly in Beijing and Shanghai, the children of the migrant workers who do the menial jobs are locked out of the local educational system by the time they are 15, the age when the PISA test is administered.

Many of them are forced to go back to their home province so they can go to high school and take the gaokao, the highly competitive examination that will determine their chances of getting into university. This means they not only have to leave their families behind and live in boarding schools or with their grandparents, but they also need much higher grades to get into a good university in a city like Beijing than they would if they could just take the test in Beijing.

PISA's reports have been criticized in the past for holding up Shanghai's educational system as a model, while seeming to outright deny the problem of lack of access to education for the children of the migrants who make up the city's working class. There is also a lack of transparency about how the Chinese provinces are picked, and why.

Essentially, the PISA report has turned into a regular occasion for China's educational system to bask in some mostly undeserved glory. It would appear that PISA and the OECD, like many other international institutions have done, are bending over backwards to get access to China, acquiescing to conditions which most other countries would not be able to get away with. 

Why won't foreign tourists come to China?

It seems that a few people high up in the Chinese hierarchy are finally starting to realise that, when a country operates on a parallel system to the rest of the world and does nothing to accommodate foreign visitors, there are costs.

In a post last year, I talked about the large gap between the number of foreign tourists that visit China and the number of Chinese that holiday abroad, and how this is hurting the country's capital account balance. The figures for 2017, which I provided in my post, were 130 million trips abroad made by Chinese citizens, as opposed to only 30 million trips to China made by foreigners. It appears that in 2018 the gap got even wider, with 30 million trips to China against 150 million trips abroad by the Chinese. These figures for inbound tourism are seriously unimpressive, with even far smaller countries like Thailand or Turkey managing to attract more visitors over the course of a year.

According to a report by Sixth Tone, based on previous reports in the Chinese-language press, it seems that a real effort is now being made to address this deficit. In August the Chinese government published a set of proposals to encourage inbound tourism (although they don't appear to address any of the real issues, talking only about "developing new tourist routes, performances and local products to attract visitors"). Then last week Shanghai brought a bunch of foreign experts on tourism together at the China International Import Expo, and announced a number of projects designed to attract foreign visitors.

Most importantly, earlier this month Ant Financial and Tencent announced in quick succession that it has now become possible to link foreign credit cards to Alipay and WeChat. Alipay is rolling out a system geared specifically to foreign travellers, who will be able to use it for a 90-day period. In principle this would go some way towards solving one of the biggest difficulties that short-term visitors face in China, in other words the impossibility to pay via mobile phone, in a country where using cash is now probably rarer than it was at the peak of Maoism.

If this could finally happen, it is only because the People's Bank of China took the step of allowing the two companies to open up to foreign bank accounts, abandoning concerns about money laundering and cross-border cash flows. Leaving aside the fact that Alipay's new feature for foreign users doesn't seem to be working all that well, this suggests that an effort is being made all the way at the top to start making China a bit more convenient for foreigners to navigate.

Some of the reasons for this shift aren't hard to see: James Liang, the co-founder and chairman of Ctrip, who has long been calling on the government to make China more open to foreign visitors, claimed at a conference in May that the deficit between inbound and outbound tourism is costing China a figure equal to 1.7% of its huge GDP. At a time when economic growth is at the lowest point in decades, and the trade war with the US is causing much damage, this state of affairs is obviously becoming a problem. Since restricting foreign travel for ordinary Chinese remains politically impractical, there is no alternative but to try and make the country a little bit more inviting for outsiders.

At the end of October the Ctrip chairman, who seems to have made this his mission, gave a talk at the "World Culture and Tourism Conference 2019" in Xi'an which was summarized in a popular WeChat post, entitled 携程梁建章：为什么外国游客不愿意来中国? (Ctrip's James Liang: why won't foreign tourists come to China?). The post has gained over 100,000 views, showing that this topic is finally gaining some traction. Mr. Liang claimed in the talk that while outbound tourism has been growing fast over the past decade, foreign tourism to China hasn't really grown at all. He pointed out that foreign tourism makes up 1-3% of GDP in most of the world's biggest economies, while in China's case it only accounts for 0.3%. In his estimate, China's tourist sector still has the potential to rake in an extra 1-200 billion dollars annually.

Mr. Liang then outlined the three main reasons why, in his view, foreign travellers are not coming to China. The three points he made are the difficulty of getting a Chinese visa, the inconvenience of not being able to access mobile payments, and the "cost of internet controls". The last point is eye-catching, because it is rarely made in public in China: the Ctrip chairman pointed out that the blocking of foreign websites (which he euphemistically referred to as "foreigners not being able to access their own country's internet after reaching China") makes it hard for Chinese travel destinations and businesses to promote themselves abroad, while also making it hard for foreign travellers to share their experience of China on social media.

As the WeChat post's author adds: "foreign travellers make an effort to get here, and then you don't even let them post in their "Moments". That's not beneficial for the reputation of China's travel industry" ("Moments" is where you post photos in WeChat). The article then suggests lifting the restrictions on the internet for foreign travellers, which seems unlikely to happen any time soon.

In any case, it may well be that a shift in thinking is indeed happening, and that the leadership is waking up to the fact that the lack of foreign visitors is an economic issue. It is even possible that more measures are on the way. But whether these efforts to attract more tourists will lead to anything is an open question.

Making mobile payments easier is certainly an important step, but I suspect the biggest issue remains the difficulty and trouble in obtaining tourist visas, especially considering that citizens of developed countries no longer need visas at all to enter most of China's neighbouring countries. If the government really wanted to attract more foreign tourists, this would be a good place to start. Then there is the mind-boggling fact that a large proportion, perhaps even a majority, of hotels around China will not accept guests with foreign passports. This is seriously inconvenient for the independent traveller, not to mention unnecessary and unfair. Changing this state of affairs should not be all that difficult.

The larger point is that, beyond a certain level, isolationism has real economic costs. Over the last decade the general trend has been for China to become more closed towards foreigners, whether long-term residents or visitors, in step with the tightening of restrictions and ideological controls and the creation of a local internet that runs separately from the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the great firewall has become higher and harder to get around than ever before. Apart from tourism, there are certainly many other ways in which this is constricting economic growth and dynamism. It will be interesting to see if the pressure brought on by the trade war and the economic downturn may actually exert a push in the other direction, towards greater openness and global integration.