Otherwise, the PRC (CCP = world's largest bureaucracy) has clearly had the most successful response to the pandemic due to its decisive measures, which goes against your conclusion that less governance is needed to effectively combat pandemics.
I've been wondering about this as well, the extreme example of this would have been the European invasion of the Americas, and the thousands of years of disease evolution of common viruses around the world that the natives missed out on, which killed most without weapons.
There's a certain value in letting your population's immune systems adapt as the viruses come, instead of letting it be overwhelmed after long isolation.
We're in a constant natural arms race with viruses, isolation isn't sustainable.
Especially since they didn't know that they were being hit by a pandemic in the early stages of the virus in Wuhan, and would have had a delayed response even compared to the countries that handled this well.
China's statistics are a case of some combination of lying and ignorance, not of success. They aren't telling us what is happening on the ground in China.
Wikipedia says they have 100k cases in a population of 1.4 billion, or 0.007% of the population caught the coronavirus. That compares to New Zealand - a tiny, wealthy, well organised island nation with a near perfect border quarantine and easy conditions for contract tracing - where 0.2% of the country is known to have caught the coronavirus.
China did not have 1-2 orders of magnitude less cases than New Zealand (which is already going to be an outlier). The country is large and COVID is hard to control. Their stats are impossible. Having facial recognition tech and being willing to use it can't get the result the numbers claim. They got hit by a novel virus in the middle of Chinese New Year and they are having the same problem with outbreaks as literally everyone else.
Plus we know they aren't trying to publish accurate stats because they vaccinated most of the country in a few day according to the data that filtered back into the western media. They may not necessarily be malicious but the Chinese are certainly not accurate and timely with their statistics.
Here is the ideological conditioning coming into play. You have been conditioned to believing that it is impossible for the Chinese to do things better than the West. If they do, they must be cheating/stealing IP/fudging the numbers.
They are reporting believable numbers for an excellent response. China is not. Singapore alone had double the number of cases that China is reporting. Singapore! It is totally incredible, impossible, not remotely plausible and a poorly conceived joke that China's confirmed COVID number represents the number of people in China who had COVID. China is not outperforming those countries on a per-capita basis in the happy reality we all live in. There is - I repeat myself - literally no way they could have achieved that. Maybe it is equalling them, though I doubt that too as a practical matter.
The Chinese work hard, are organised and have intelligent people working in their government. But what they don't have is a magic spell to make COVID disappear the way the stats suggest it has. The stats are not real.
Why is it so hard for you to accept? China is easily the least individualistic, and most collectivist, of the major Asian economies. Chinese people, and its government, generally value social harmony over individual freedoms. This makes dealing with transmissible disease outbreaks a no-brainer -- you quarantine and do whatever it takes to prevent things from spreading. Of course, executing this correctly is only possible because the CCP is the most effective bureaucracy in human history (enabled by technology, of course).
"China is easily the least individualistic, and most collectivist, of the major Asian economies."? They have a population of 1.4 billion people! A full 17% of the earth's population! Sure on average they may be fairly communal, but that doesn't change the fact there will be some really huge pockets of weirdness that will get COVID (much like Singapore where the problem was ghettos and the disease was contained elsewhere). They aren't going to be enforcing any sort of uniformity over a country that big without switching on the mind-control waves in Ye Olde 5G infrastructure. Which is to say, they aren't. There has been at least one million-person COVID outbreak in China. Probably more than that.
> you quarantine and do whatever it takes
You're handwaving the part where you come up with a theory on how this is possible. Other countries tried better quarantines than China can achieve. Like Taiwan.
I recommended watching the American PBS documentary China's War on Poverty (which was taken off air by Washington censors) for a quick glimpse into the real China. You can find uploads on YouTube, probably.
To suggest this means that large bureaucracies are inherently good or efficient is very strange.
It's a textbook conspiracy theory.
Also can their stats be trusted? How would you know? Yes the west is following some very repressive and revolting media policies "Hi Julian!" But still a long way behind the PRC so stuff tends to come out eventually. Hunter Biden's laptop emails were real, not "russian disinformation" and we are now aware of that censorship which troubles us regardless of who we voted for. Most chinese in China have never heard of or seen this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man Still some 3 decades later. These things are related, similar but their magnitude is (at least at this stage) not remotely comparable.
There is deliberate effort by that government to erase that history. Do you think they are not effective in doing so in their own house?
- Signed, Santa Claus, coming to deliver presents to children worldwide soon.
Supposedly they have not had a single covid-death since March 2020, and have had 100 new cases this week, with a country that has 1400 million inhabitants.