https://www.wsj.com/articles/beijings-covid-recovery-isnt-so-enviable-11603393097?mod=opinion_featst_pos2
Few myths are proving so durable in our pandemic age as the notion that China has somehow cracked the coronavirus code. It hasn’t.
The argument proceeds in two steps. The first is to assert that Beijing’s authoritarian approach to mass lockdowns, followed by intrusive testing and tracing, defeated the virus in a way almost no democratic government has managed. This might be true, but it is also meaningless. It does little good to argue in favor of Chinese methods to control a pandemic when a democratic society would by definition find that authoritarianism a cost not worth paying.
More interesting is the second prong of the Beijing-beats-the-world myth: the economy.
We’re supposed to believe that China’s success in suppressing the virus has facilitated a phenomenal economic recovery—and, by extension, that our economies would be growing again too if only we had batted down Covid-19 as efficiently. The claim was bolstered this week by more good news from Beijing’s statistics gnomes, who reported gross domestic product increased by 4.9% in the third quarter compared with the same quarter last year. China is set to be the only major economy that manages to grow this year.
This might even be true. Chinese economic data are notoriously, oh, what’s the word I’m looking for . . . fake. Headline GDP numbers tell you less about the real state of the economy and more about the Communist Party’s political preoccupations and goals. Still, there is substantial evidence that the Chinese economy is growing to some extent. Important and harder-to-fudge measures such as industrial production and retail sales have improved in recent months.
