The Chinese government's response to this situation (after some initial dithering) has been to move swiftly with big moves. I suspect that the force that overcame the initial delays in local response were powerful central government actors who could some in and simply shut cities and entire areas down and not fool around. There appears to be at least one emergency prefab hospital with about 1600 beds under constructi…
This kind of analysis I'm seeing everywhere is so misguided. The reason the local government didn't report on the situation accurately and even punished some journalists for speaking about it is a flaw of how their country is run and how their command structure incentives are poorly set up. This isn't a new problem and it's why we have converged to a different system in most of the West. The government coming in late…
Ultimately the problem for these series of epidemics is the poor conditions and practices of many Chinese citizens that results in unsanitary conditions, especially around food animals. It's easy to look at China as a whole, take a point sampling for a given location and time, and come to a negative evaluation of the entire place. What's harder to do is to recognize that in absolute terms, China today is in much better shape than it was before the '78 reforms. China today is in much better shape than it was before 2000!
The structural problem within China, with respect to how local governing happens, is most certainly a problem. However, I think it's very easy to lob complaints across the Ocean when the West is certainly not in a present state of good order at the moment.