Eli Lake, Columnist

China’s Response to the Coronavirus Is Not a Model for the U.S.

Even when fighting a pandemic, authoritarian regimes exact a toll on society.

March 10, 2020 at 11:36 PM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

Is this what success looks like?
Photographer: NOEL CELIS/AFP

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If China’s health authorities are to be believed — a big if — then the government’s mass quarantine policies have been working. According to the country’s health ministry, there were only 40 new cases of the virus reported on Monday, a remarkable decline considering that there were 2,000 new cases a day in China only last month.

All of this has led some Western observers to wonder whether the authoritarian model works when a country is facing down a pandemic. Chuck Todd captured this view on “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “How uncomfortable is it that perhaps China’s authoritarian ways did prevent this?” he asked. “Meaning, had China been a free and open society this might have spread faster?”