How China Succeeded in the COVID-19 Epidemic Prevention and Control: Interview with Associate Professor Leijie Wei, Editor of Waiting for Dawn: 21 Diaries From 16 COVID-19 Frontlines

Leijie Wei,Shuoying Chen

doi:10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.11.4.0551

Abstract

The book Waiting for Dawn: 21 Diaries from 16 COVID-19 Frontlines takes a global perspective, examining the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on governments and the public around the world. Associate Professor Leijie Wei, editor of the book, believes that the reasons why mandatory tracking, testing, and quarantine measures have been effectively implemented in China center on the unified leadership provided by the Communist Party of China (CPC), the active response by state-owned enterprises and institutions, and the full trust of the majority of the public in the government's anti-pandemic measures. In an effort to win elections, meanwhile, politicians in Europe and the United States are politicizing the pandemic and making China a scapegoat. In contrast to socialist China's policy of ensuring all those in need are hospitalized with free testing and treatment, the essentially capitalist public health models applied in most Western countries have brought more concrete and explicit class conflict, and the drawn-out pandemic in the West has exacerbated various forms of social injustice. The COVID-19 epidemic is a reminder that a country's governance ability should not be judged on the basis of simplistic conceptions of democracy, and that the needs of Mother Earth must be considered in the collective building of a community of shared future for humankind.

Highlights

The global pandemic began in February when the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) broke through the threshold of extraterritorial spread, and the world fell gradually into the “darkest moment” of the pandemic
During the last Special Spring Festival, when everyone was in a state of panic, they wouldn’t have guessed that China today would be one of the safest countries in the world, a country where the novel coronavirus has basically been eliminated, while much of the outside world remains in a hopeless quandary with out-of-control outbreaks
There have been rising voices criticizing the anti-pandemic measures and even protests against them. Under such circumstances, asking people to exercise self-control and selfdiscipline to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus may seem like a feeble response, but it may be the best that the central governments of these countries can do at the present time

Summary

Introduction

We have had to rethink COVID-19 from a global rather than a local perspective, taking into account especially how other countries are different from or similar to China in terms of their experience of fighting the pandemic. Under such circumstances, asking people to exercise self-control and selfdiscipline to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus may seem like a feeble response, but it may be the best that the central governments of these countries can do at the present time.

Results

Conclusion