With the relentless spread of the Wuhan coronavirus, China may not conquer the world after all

The nation may be advancing in economic terms, but in the realm of public health there is much popular discontent

The very notion of a city the size of London being quarantined, physically cut off from its surroundings, is almost impossible to imagine. But this is today’s reality in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people in central China, and now in Huanggang and Ezhou, cities with another nine million people nearby.

Local public transport has been suspended, airports and stations have been closed – and this at China’s peak travel season, the eve of the lunar new year holiday, described as one of the biggest annual mass movements of people anywhere in the world.

Elsewhere, public events to celebrate the new year have been cancelled, including in Beijing. This is not something any government would decree unless there was serious concern.

The objective is to halt, or at least minimise, the spread of a new and dangerous respiratory disease – believed to be caused by a strain of the coronavirus (the same virus responsible for the Sars epidemic in 2002-03). So far, 17 people have died, all in the same Hubei province as Wuhan, but hundreds are reported to have fallen ill, and isolated cases have been reported from as far away as Thailand, Japan and the United States.

Reports from Wuhan speak of empty streets, bare shop shelves, and sky-high prices for such items as rubber gloves and masks, despite appeals against profiteering. And the questions proliferate. How effective will the cordon be? How long will it be before the more enterprising or desperate try to escape the city illegally? How long will discipline prevail? How much force, in extremis, are the authorities prepared to use?

A few years ago, I watched a simulated – so-called “table-top” – exercise that presupposed just such a public health emergency. And one of the findings was less whether public order in quarantined territory would break down, but how soon.

As a more consoling thought, I have in my mind’s eye a picture of the churchyard at Eyam, the Derbyshire village I know well because my parents retired nearby. The month is June 1666 and the plague has claimed its first victims here. As history relates, the villagers were persuaded by their parish priest to observe their own quarantine, essentially sacrificing themselves to save villages and towns nearby. Around half the population, some 260, died, but the village survived – and the advance of the plague was halted before it reached bigger settlements.

But the days of self-sacrifice (and church pressure) are long gone, though an industrialised part of China may have more going for it in terms of enforcing quarantine than many other places. It is possible to sever public transport links; orders from the centre are for the most part obeyed – if only because the penalties for defiance can be draconian. And there is a degree of social pressure that is not replicated in many other, especially western, countries. That pressure has only been reinforced by the recent introduction of a system that awards points for “social capital” – and commensurate rewards.

China also appears to have learned from the experience of Sars. It has been more open, earlier, about the risks than it was then. Sars had spread not only to densely populated Hong Kong, but much further afield before Beijing provided any information. The imposition of quarantine on Wuhan and elsewhere suggests that it also has contingency plans in place. If greater exposure to the outside world, better communications and higher living standards are making China a more responsible global citizen, then that is welcome.

Whatever happens in Wuhan, however – whether the measures taken succeed in curbing the spread of the disease, whether public order can be maintained peacefully, and how far the city’s prospects may be blighted by its association with the epidemic – this new outbreak of a potentially deadly disease has implications for China as a whole, and for the way China is perceived in the wider world.

There has long been a consensus – challenged only by a very few – that China is on an inexorable rise in economic growth, wealth and power. It is seen as the global hegemon of the future, as the United States eases into an equally inevitable decline. The only question is whether the rivalry between them will be confined to the spheres of trade and influence, or whether it will eventually be fought out, one way or another, on the high seas. The recent trade skirmishes between Beijing and Washington are seen as harbingers of what may be to come.

But is it inevitable that China will rise to the point where it is a rival to more advanced regional powers, such as Japan, or globally to the United States? And even if it is, what is the timescale? China’s GDP is currently a little more than half that of the United States ($13.4 trillion compared with $20.5 trillion for the United States). The per capita GDP figures are even starker: $8,800 for China, compared with $59,500 for the United States. Estimates of when China may catch up and overtake the US vary wildly, from 2023 to 2050, depending on how accurate China’s own statistics are deemed to be, and the weight given to other factors.

One of those other factors relates to China’s singular demographics. From a country where the population was growing so fast that the one-child policy was introduced to restrict it, China is now ageing. Its GDP may be growing much faster than that of the US (6.8 per cent compared with 2.3 per cent for the US), but that growth is slowing and is likely to slow further and faster.

As a result of the one-child policy, China also has a gender imbalance – whose full social and demographic consequences have yet to be seen. When China abandoned its one-child policy in 2015 after 35 years, 118 boys were born for every 100 girls. That disparity still has to make its way through the system.

Further elements are political. It seems sometimes to be forgotten that China is still a one-party communist state. Now it may be that it can develop and modernise further within that system, showing that a relatively free market can coexist without the underpinning of democracy and showing the western world that there is another way. But that cannot be taken for granted. The last serious clash between the forces of democracy and the communist state was 30 years ago, in 1989, and it culminated in a victory for the system and the massacre at Tiananmen Square.

The protests and clashes seen over the past half-year in Hong Kong may be small and localised by comparison – against the vast backdrop of mainland China, that is. But they are a manifestation of something similar. And while the balance of forces today is massively in favour of Beijing, that might not always be so. One feature of a non-democratic state is that it is hard to gauge the strength of genuine support – or not – for the system, and even harder to divine what might be bubbling up beneath.

In other words, things could change very fast. The Chinese have experienced massive policy swings over the past 50 years and huge economic advances as well. They are better educated and richer. In other respects, however, especially in the realm of public health – as in environmental pollution, contaminated milk and medicine, and hygiene at food markets, such as the one believed to have spawned the latest illness – there is much popular discontent. Wuhan’s new year quarantine may not turn out to be any sort of tipping point, but be warned: China may not remain as stable as it currently seems.