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Wuhan: How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control
The definitive account of the Chinese government's response to the initial Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan .
The Covid-19 pandemic, which began as an outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019, has claimed millions of lives and caused unprecedented disruptions. Despite its generation-defining significance, there has been a surprising lack of independent research examining the decisions and measures implemented in the weeks leading up to the Wuhan lockdown, as well as the missteps and shortcomings that allowed the novel coronavirus to spread with minimal hindrance.
In How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control, Dali L. Yang scrutinizes China's emergency response to the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan, delving into the government's handling of epidemic information and the decisions that influenced the scale and scope of the outbreak. Yang's research reveals that China's health decision-makers and experts had an excellent head start when they implemented a health emergency action program to respond to the outbreak at the end of December 2019. With granular detail and compelling immediacy, Yang investigates the political and bureaucratic processes that hindered information flows and sharing, as well as the cognitive framework that limited understanding of the virus's contagiousness and hampered effective decisions.
Yang's research uncovers that urgent warnings from sources outside Wuhan helped shift the Chinese health leadership's focus towards epidemic control. Once this shift occurred, China's party-state mobilized resources and enforced a lockdown in Wuhan. This lockdown was divided into two providing additional medical resources and enforcing community-level lockdowns and home confinement. The 76-day lockdown contained the virus within China's borders, but the leadership and public later faced the challenge of reopening China in a world still grappling with SARS-CoV-2.
How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control also critiques the Chinese authorities for prioritizing dominance and control in their response to the Wuhan outbreak. This preoccupation led to the suppression, distortion, and neglect of crucial disease information, fostering an atmosphere of organized silence. The punishment of whistleblowers and the banning of the immediate release of research findings on the novel coronavirus further contributed to this silencing. Yang emphasizes the importance of retaining public trust during a pandemic and underscores the need for transparency, openness to new information, and direct communication of risk with the public.
The Covid-19 pandemic, which began as an outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019, has claimed millions of lives and caused unprecedented disruptions. Despite its generation-defining significance, there has been a surprising lack of independent research examining the decisions and measures implemented in the weeks leading up to the Wuhan lockdown, as well as the missteps and shortcomings that allowed the novel coronavirus to spread with minimal hindrance.
In How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control, Dali L. Yang scrutinizes China's emergency response to the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan, delving into the government's handling of epidemic information and the decisions that influenced the scale and scope of the outbreak. Yang's research reveals that China's health decision-makers and experts had an excellent head start when they implemented a health emergency action program to respond to the outbreak at the end of December 2019. With granular detail and compelling immediacy, Yang investigates the political and bureaucratic processes that hindered information flows and sharing, as well as the cognitive framework that limited understanding of the virus's contagiousness and hampered effective decisions.
Yang's research uncovers that urgent warnings from sources outside Wuhan helped shift the Chinese health leadership's focus towards epidemic control. Once this shift occurred, China's party-state mobilized resources and enforced a lockdown in Wuhan. This lockdown was divided into two providing additional medical resources and enforcing community-level lockdowns and home confinement. The 76-day lockdown contained the virus within China's borders, but the leadership and public later faced the challenge of reopening China in a world still grappling with SARS-CoV-2.
How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control also critiques the Chinese authorities for prioritizing dominance and control in their response to the Wuhan outbreak. This preoccupation led to the suppression, distortion, and neglect of crucial disease information, fostering an atmosphere of organized silence. The punishment of whistleblowers and the banning of the immediate release of research findings on the novel coronavirus further contributed to this silencing. Yang emphasizes the importance of retaining public trust during a pandemic and underscores the need for transparency, openness to new information, and direct communication of risk with the public.
416 pages, Hardcover
Published March 1, 2024
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469 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 6, 2025
Dry but informative narrative about the complex Chinese communist bureaucracy and how this system caused key authorities to badly mismanage the initial Covid outbreak. The critical timing of this incompetence allowed Covid to become a pandemic. Thanks. Thanks alot.
January 12, 2025
“Politics first, safety second, science third.”
Rarely has a sentence caused my blood to boil like it did reading this in Dali L. Yang’s “Wuhan: How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control”. I had been looking forward to this book. Having lived through the early days of the pandemic in Beijing and then experienced the traumatic Shanghai lockdown, I wanted to find out if my feelings, suspicions and understandings had been correct and what I might have missed. Additionally, my hope was to learn more about how we ended up in this mess and how the many screwups we witnessed along the way came to be. The book delivered on these hopes and then some.
“Wuhan” is filled with enough facts, details and minutiae to serve as an unassailable, comprehensive account of the early days of the COVID-19 epidemic in the same sense as “Tombstone 墓碑” by Yang Jisheng 杨继绳 was the same for the Great Chinese Famine. Coincidentally, Yang is known to have said “Our history is all fabricated. It’s been covered up. If a country can’t face its own history, then it has no future.” Certain people would do well to listen to those words.
The infuriating guideline “Politics first, safety second, science third” was issued on Jan 19, 2020 by the NHC leadership. Wuhan leaders silenced anyone they could from quickly spreading the news of the outbreak and the possibility of human-to-human transmission. But why?
Wuhan officials had spent 15 years trying to win designation as a “National Healthy City.” They had finally succeeded in 2015 after a hard-fought and hard-won struggle for Wuhan and they were not inclined to lose it again. They could, so they did.
“Imagine you are a provincial or municipal official (…). You must decide whether to report the outbreak (…), which could not only damage the city’s reputation but also jeopardize its designation (…).” And that gets us into a central theme of this book, the effects of fragmented authoritarianism. This is a case study for what happens again and again in China and other countries where local officials have unlimited power to censor, obfuscate and delay. COVID-19 was the seventh coronavirus to break out and following SARS Chinese scientists and medical professionals had developed the capabilities to effectively deal with emerging infectious diseases. It took just ten days for the virus to be identified on Jan 9, 2020. Dali Yang pulls no punches in his assessment of the major cause for China’s delayed response: it was a failure of epidemiological imagination and intellectual leadership. Local Wuhan officials ignored pleas from healthcare workers and NHC officials. Instead, they used every tool in their chests to muffle dissent, complaints and warnings about human-to-human transmissions in Wuhan, thereby delaying an effective response and directly enabling further suffering. As a filmmaker, this reminded me of the HBO disaster drama “Chernobyl,” written by Craig Mazin, which explored the shortcomings and obfuscations of local officials, who described the released radiation as “the equivalent of a chest x-ray” when they already knew otherwise.
On page after page “Wuhan” meticulously constructs a scathing criticism of policies and PR of the Chinese government. It took the respected, elderly Dr. Zhong Nanshan’s arrival in Wuhan to finally cut this gordian knot, though Wuhan officials did their best to stall him. We also learn more about the case of Dr. Li Wenliang, a physician who became a symbol of the government’s mishandling of the outbreak and its systematic and institutionalized abuse of power. If there is one fault to be found it has to be the lack of attention paid to conspiracy theories. The false “lab-leak theory” surrounding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was advanced even by individuals like Jon Stewart, could have been addressed. While the author describes in great detail how infections initially spread from the Huanan seafood market and not the Institute of Virology I am saddened he did not deem it worthy to help those with misguided ideas who might be picking up this book. That is a lost opportunity. I am also skeptical about the author’s contention the initial outbreak and pandemic could have been prevented from spiraling out of control.
I will however not quibble with the conclusion that the fragmented authoritarianism of the current Chinese political system and its tensions significantly weakened the health emergency response during the initial weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak. This was a harrowing and exhausting book for me to read and for me it’s one of just three books I have read in recent years I’d want to option for a limited-run series, were I in the position to do so. “Wuhan” is worth your time, as is visiting Wuhan. It's a lovely city.
Rarely has a sentence caused my blood to boil like it did reading this in Dali L. Yang’s “Wuhan: How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control”. I had been looking forward to this book. Having lived through the early days of the pandemic in Beijing and then experienced the traumatic Shanghai lockdown, I wanted to find out if my feelings, suspicions and understandings had been correct and what I might have missed. Additionally, my hope was to learn more about how we ended up in this mess and how the many screwups we witnessed along the way came to be. The book delivered on these hopes and then some.
“Wuhan” is filled with enough facts, details and minutiae to serve as an unassailable, comprehensive account of the early days of the COVID-19 epidemic in the same sense as “Tombstone 墓碑” by Yang Jisheng 杨继绳 was the same for the Great Chinese Famine. Coincidentally, Yang is known to have said “Our history is all fabricated. It’s been covered up. If a country can’t face its own history, then it has no future.” Certain people would do well to listen to those words.
The infuriating guideline “Politics first, safety second, science third” was issued on Jan 19, 2020 by the NHC leadership. Wuhan leaders silenced anyone they could from quickly spreading the news of the outbreak and the possibility of human-to-human transmission. But why?
Wuhan officials had spent 15 years trying to win designation as a “National Healthy City.” They had finally succeeded in 2015 after a hard-fought and hard-won struggle for Wuhan and they were not inclined to lose it again. They could, so they did.
“Imagine you are a provincial or municipal official (…). You must decide whether to report the outbreak (…), which could not only damage the city’s reputation but also jeopardize its designation (…).” And that gets us into a central theme of this book, the effects of fragmented authoritarianism. This is a case study for what happens again and again in China and other countries where local officials have unlimited power to censor, obfuscate and delay. COVID-19 was the seventh coronavirus to break out and following SARS Chinese scientists and medical professionals had developed the capabilities to effectively deal with emerging infectious diseases. It took just ten days for the virus to be identified on Jan 9, 2020. Dali Yang pulls no punches in his assessment of the major cause for China’s delayed response: it was a failure of epidemiological imagination and intellectual leadership. Local Wuhan officials ignored pleas from healthcare workers and NHC officials. Instead, they used every tool in their chests to muffle dissent, complaints and warnings about human-to-human transmissions in Wuhan, thereby delaying an effective response and directly enabling further suffering. As a filmmaker, this reminded me of the HBO disaster drama “Chernobyl,” written by Craig Mazin, which explored the shortcomings and obfuscations of local officials, who described the released radiation as “the equivalent of a chest x-ray” when they already knew otherwise.
On page after page “Wuhan” meticulously constructs a scathing criticism of policies and PR of the Chinese government. It took the respected, elderly Dr. Zhong Nanshan’s arrival in Wuhan to finally cut this gordian knot, though Wuhan officials did their best to stall him. We also learn more about the case of Dr. Li Wenliang, a physician who became a symbol of the government’s mishandling of the outbreak and its systematic and institutionalized abuse of power. If there is one fault to be found it has to be the lack of attention paid to conspiracy theories. The false “lab-leak theory” surrounding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was advanced even by individuals like Jon Stewart, could have been addressed. While the author describes in great detail how infections initially spread from the Huanan seafood market and not the Institute of Virology I am saddened he did not deem it worthy to help those with misguided ideas who might be picking up this book. That is a lost opportunity. I am also skeptical about the author’s contention the initial outbreak and pandemic could have been prevented from spiraling out of control.
I will however not quibble with the conclusion that the fragmented authoritarianism of the current Chinese political system and its tensions significantly weakened the health emergency response during the initial weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak. This was a harrowing and exhausting book for me to read and for me it’s one of just three books I have read in recent years I’d want to option for a limited-run series, were I in the position to do so. “Wuhan” is worth your time, as is visiting Wuhan. It's a lovely city.
June 5, 2025
this book seems like a lk boring topic but it really is so fascinating. the insights into local and central CCP leadership during the initial outbreak are insane. yang is such a good analyst and any china watcher should take a page from his book.
May 14, 2024
I skimmed the book. I guess it was okay… Too soon to read. 其實蠻無聊的. 🤔 還是更喜歡Wuhan Lockdown那本
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews