When faced with the brewing public health crisis brought on by
the Covid-19 epidemic in the central Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019 that same system acted in ways unheard of under democratic forms of government.
They included the shutdown of a city of 11 million people, almost three times the population of Los Angeles, spread over an area five times the size of London. And that was just for starters.
It does not take much of an imagination to speculate that such measures in either of those Western cities would have resulted in public uproar and protests on the streets.
In South Korea, for example, thousands of protesters on February 22 defied a ban on public gatherings implemented by the government after a jump in infections in that country.
That did not happen in Wuhan nor in the rest of Hubei province, where the measures were extended to envelop almost 60 million people.
Or at least as far as has been reported, which
points to the potential flaws in the same centralised China system that restricts information flow. It also stresses following orders from above, which has been shown to have sped up the response in some respects, but delayed it in others.