 |
| A Wuhan sports stadium used as a temporary hospital for patients with milder symptoms of the coronavirus, February, 2020. |
by a Chinese Trotskyist
On March 24, the online journal of the
International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), The World Socialist
Web Site (WSWS), published an article titled “Five Years of the COVID-19
Pandemic: The Response of the World Socialist Web Site.”[1]
In it, the WSWS reiterated its long-held view that the Chinese government
initially sought to contain the pandemic but abandoned its public health
measures under the pressure of capital from the United States and other
countries. To quote the WSWS article,
On January 23, 2020, facing
growing pressure from a restive working class, Chinese authorities initiated
the first Zero-COVID elimination policy in the world, with 13 million people in
Wuhan beginning the first mass lockdown in human history. This policy expanded
throughout Hubei province and was combined with a program of regular mass
testing, rigorous contact tracing, the safe isolation of infected patients,
travel restrictions and universal masking, a comprehensive suite of public
health measures designed to stop viral transmission. Seventy-six days later,
all of Chinese society exited from these lockdowns and largely resumed normal
life.
Until
China abandoned its zero-Covid policy in December 2022, the WSWS never wrote a
word of criticism of the response of the Chinese government to the pandemic.
For instance take this statement from an “inquest” published by the WSWS in
December of 2021:
epidemic control measures in Chongqing and
elsewhere in China, based upon basic principles of epidemiology and modern
technologies, such as PCR testing and smartphone-based contact tracing, have
proved to be effective. It is imperative that scientists, workers, and students
push for similar life-saving policies to be adopted around the world.[2]
But the
WSWS never conducted any serious investigation into what was really happening
in China during the pandemic. Instead, it manufactured a fairy-tale of China
heroically resisting the neglect and incompetence of the capitalist powers by
projecting its own unique zero-Covid policy. Now a zero-Covid policy is indeed
a laudable goal, but the real life implementation of this policy by a corrupt
and incompetent bureaucracy inevitably shipwrecked those goals. In what follows we will examine how this
policy came into being, how it was implemented by an authoritarian bureaucracy
and how it finally ended.
China’s zero-Covid policy
as seen from the ground
1. A Government that missed
the best timing
In the 1980-84 British TV series “Yes Minister,” we are told
what the attitude of a qualified bureaucratic government should be in the face
of an event:
1. First, refuse to acknowledge that anything has happened.
2. Second, admit that something has happened, but insist the situation is under
control.
3. Third, acknowledge that the matter is serious, but claim that nothing can be
done.
4. Fourth, declare that the incident is already in the past.
This
pattern of delay, obfuscation, and willful forgetting unfolded in China from
the moment the virus was first discovered as Chinese bureaucrats tried to cover
up the pandemic and muddle through. It took nearly two full months from the
discovery of the coronavirus until the Chinese government officially began
implementing protective measures. During this period, many patients paid for
their own tests and found this new virus, which was very similar to the SARS
coronavirus.[3]
Yet once these test reports were issued, the Chinese government immediately
forced them to be revised after they were released, and then banned their
further dissemination.[4]At
the end of December, an ophthalmologist named Li Wenliang privately warned his
friends on his personal account that a novel coronavirus had been discovered.
He did not intend to spread this information to the broader public.
Nevertheless, he was arrested and detained by local police for more than ten
days. In the end, he died during the massive outbreak in Wuhan that spring.
 |
| Li Wenliang |
After two months of suppression, news of the outbreak finally surfaced just as China’s Spring Festival travel rush began in January 2020. The virus quickly spread nationwide. It must be noted that as the Lunar New Year migration started, a vast number of workers returned home from the factories. Most of them came from small cities or poor rural areas, forced to leave their hometowns for work in large cities. With absolutely no protective warnings, the virus was carried across the entire country. Even routine preventative measures like those for avian influenza in China, or policies such as wearing masks in public during periods of heavy pollution, could have significantly slowed the spread of the pandemic.
 |
| Map showing spread of coronavirus infections in China as of Feb.2020. |
With the
arrival of the Chinese Lunar New Year, the Chinese government began large-scale
epidemic control measures as Wuhan's medical system was completely overwhelmed
by the virus. All hospital beds in Wuhan were full, even forcing some patients
from other wards to vacate their beds. The medical system collapsed under the
impact of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of patients. The elderly
died in droves, and large numbers of working-class people lost their families.
We do not grant any credibility to the official death toll statistics published
by the Chinese government. Officials reclassified a huge number of deaths as
being caused by “underlying conditions worsened by COVID-19.” Countless
patients with chronic illnesses died without access to medication. If it were
not for the spontaneous solidarity exhibited by China’s working class, many would
not have survived through that spring.
2. Crude,
One-Size-Fits-All Controls
After
the outbreak spread, the Chinese government quickly imposed nationwide
lockdowns forcibly closing factories, halting business operations, and shutting
down schools
Abrupt
control measures left countless chronic patients unable to obtain their
medications. With Wuhan sealed off, China’s working class showed the most
united, spontaneous spirit of mutual aid by sending essential medicines into
Wuhan from outside.[5]
No matter how harshly the government tried to suppress the strength of the
working class, no matter how propaganda distorted their role, workers followed
their conscience.
Many
doctors, facing dying patients, defied government lockdown orders and secretly
performed life-saving surgeries. Workers from every sector donated money to help
Wuhan overcome the crisis. Doctors and nurses voluntarily registered to go to
Wuhan to ease the medical shortage. Volunteers across industries offered to
work in logistics companies to maintain a minimal flow of supplies nationwide.
They carried medicines across city walls with their bare hands and feet. Thanks
to such selfless volunteers, many chronic patients survived. Without these
heroes, countless patients and elderly people in China would likely have faced
death.
But
unreasonable policies also appeared. To implement central orders, local
bureaucrats often doubled down on enforcement. During this period, more than
ten pregnant women were refused entry to hospitals because they lacked a
24-hour nucleic acid test certificate, leading to miscarriages or even deaths. Long-haul
truck drivers were blocked at highway entrances and exits and spent more than a
month in their trucks deprived of the most basic living conditions. A large
number of hospitals closed down except for fever clinics, resulting in many
patients losing treatment options.
Yet the
working class did not initiate a
critique of the epidemic control policies themselves. This was due to the
influence of traditional Chinese culture where emperors are often portrayed as
wise but deceived by corrupt ministers. Local officials may exploit the people,
but once an imperial envoy from the central government arrives, problems are
expected to be swept away. Influenced by this tradition and decades of
government propaganda, most workers blamed only local officials in Wuhan and
elsewhere, while believing that the policies originating from the leadership of
the CCP were correct. In other words: “The central government had good
intentions; it was only local officials who distorted the policy.”
3. Profits of the
Medical-Industrial Complex
At the
start of the outbreak, demand for masks skyrocketed. Fortunately, since winter
and spring are both peak flu seasons and periods of high air pollution, most
Chinese people were already in the habit of stockpiling masks. As a result, the
early stage of the pandemic did not cause a complete collapse in mask
availability. Moreover, because workers traditionally stockpile about half a
month’s worth of supplies for the Spring Festival—what we call “New Year
goods”—there was some buffer. But once the lockdown orders were issued, large
numbers of workers who had returned home for the holiday were unable to return
to their factories.
As the
epidemic was gradually brought under control, various industries were about to
return to normal. But China's medical conglomerates came to the forefront and
became even more greedy in their pursuit of profit. In their eyes, epidemic
prevention and control measures were not about saving the lives of the poor,
but creating new avenues of profit for the rich.
Chinese
medicine has long been divided into three categories:
1.
Western medicine (xiyao 西药) — modern pharmaceuticals developed through
scientific methods.
2. Traditional Chinese medicine (zhongyao 中药) — herbal remedies passed down
from ancient times.
3. Patent medicines (zhongchengyao 中成药) — preparations derived from
Chinese herbs.
This
last process generally involves decocting the herbs,
concentrating the decoction into granules, and sealing them in plastic
packaging. When patients buy the medicine, they open the packaging, pour out
the granules, and reconstitute them with water to make a medicine for
consumption. Some traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) preparations are made by
adding excipients (often starch) to the decocted soup and concentrating it into
tablets, packaged like modern pharmaceuticals.
From a
modern medical perspective, the effects of Chinese herbal remedies can often be
explained by their active ingredients. But patent medicines are more dubious:
during production, the specific active compounds are rarely identified. In
clinical double-blind trials, the vast majority of patent medicines have been
proven ineffective. Yet, paradoxically, patent medicines are often the most
expensive products on the market—typically costing five times more than
equivalent Western medicines. Many “effective” patent medicines secretly
contain Western drug ingredients.
A
typical example: a course of cefixime (a Western antibiotic sold under the
brand name Suprax) costs about 40 renminbi, while a course of Pudilan Koufuye
(a patent herbal remedy) costs around 200 RMB and is far less effective than cefixime or the simple and reliable roxithromycin. Moreover, the side effects of most patent
medicines are vaguely described in labels as “not yet clear.” Despite this, the
government still allows them on the market.
Furthermore,
in ancient Chinese medicine, heavy metals were frequently used directly in
medicinal materials. Ancient Chinese medicine believed that mercury sulfide
could treat insomnia, arsenic sulfide could treat leukemia, enhance male sexual
function, and even treat oral ulcers and some colds. They even believed that
herbs containing aristolochic acid could promote urination. These drugs are
still sold at drug prices today, and no one has to pay the price for patients
who died due to misleading government advice about the value of traditional
Chinese medicines.
As the
pandemic spread, the Chinese government, instead of massively expanding the
production of modern medicines, aggressively promoted traditional Chinese
medicine and patent remedies. From central to local levels, large-scale
promotions extolled their alleged antiviral effects, allowing the
medical-industrial complex to reap staggering profits. For instance, a box of
ibuprofen costs no more than 15 RMB, while a course of Chinese medicine
treatment could exceed 200 RMB and still be ineffective. A box of the patent
drug Lianhua Qingwen was speculated up to 200 RMB, yet its effectiveness was
virtually nil. When the epidemic prevention and control measures were suddenly
and completely lifted, the public discovered that the efficacy of these drugs
was almost zero.
The
producer of Lianhua Qingwen, Yiling Pharmaceutical, saw its owner Wu Yiling
become the richest man in Hebei province. By 2020, he had amassed a fortune of
$1.5 billion, earning the nickname “the Academician Billionaire.”
 |
| Wu Yiling, the 'Academician Billionaire' |
Meanwhile,
nucleic acid testing also became a tool for profiteering. The Chinese
government mandated that all public places nationwide require a nucleic acid
test report within one week for entry. In areas with even a single case of
COVID-19, a nucleic acid test – known in the west as a polymerase chain
reaction or PCR test – within 24 hours was required, infinitely
amplifying the profits from nucleic acid testing. China's nucleic acid testing
also pioneered a new method: collecting samples from five to ten people
together for testing, and then conducting separate nucleic acid tests on those
individuals after a case was detected. Over the years, nucleic acid testing
providers have reaped enormous profits, and many have discovered that some
testing institutions did not send the collected samples to professional testing
facilities but instead destroyed them directly.
4. Terror and Repression
As more
and more workers began questioning the harsh epidemic control measures, people
generally believed that only reasonable precautions—such as wearing masks and
taking temperature checks—were necessary. But the Chinese government thought
otherwise. Through epidemic prevention measures, the state gained access to the
complete movement records of nearly every individual. This gave officials the
most direct and crude means to suppress any worker or mass movement.
In 2021,
local banks in Henan province embezzled all the deposits of their clients.
Although we lack direct evidence linking these banks to government officials,
the actions of those officials made the connection obvious. Faced with furious
depositors, they did not attempt to arrest the culprits or compensate the
victims. Instead, they used epidemic prevention measures to forcibly quarantine
all the protesters, repeatedly restricting their ability to leave Zhengzhou or
travel to Beijing.
We
called the Henan official involved in this case the “Red Code Secretary,”
because they weaponized the digital health-code system—turning protesters’
codes red to confine them. When this was exposed, public outrage erupted
nationwide. The official in question received a stern warning and was demoted from
her administrative positions. Hardly a
severe punishment but even this slap on the wrist proved to be a fraud. Just last year, netizens discovered that this
very same official had once again assumed a leadership post in Zhengzhou.[6]
 |
| Zhang Linlin, the 'Red Code Secretary'. |
This
convinces us that the incident was a clear example of government officials
themselves embezzling citizens’ property and then covering for each other
within the bureaucracy.
5. The Reluctant
Reopening
How to
explain China’s abrupt abandonment of epidemic control measures?
In 2022,
Shanghai’s epidemic lockdown left tens of thousands unemployed. The vast
majority were migrant workers who had left their hometowns to work in Shanghai.
Not only did they lose their jobs, they still had to shoulder extremely high
rent and living costs. The same was true across the country: as overzealous
control measures dragged on, mass unemployment and economic depression spread
across industries. Unlike the well-dressed gentlemen sitting in offices,
China’s working class has no unemployment insurance. Losing one’s job simply
meant starvation.
And yet
these gentlemen, dressed in fine suits, demanded that we obey the government’s
epidemic control measures. If we refused, they denounced us as agents of
capitalist manipulation!
Furthermore,
bureaucratic rule always operates in a crude, one-size-fits-all manner. When
the outbreak began, they banned everyone from traveling—even the gravely ill.
But when they decided to reopen, they lifted all restrictions at once, without
leaving any middle ground. Bureaucrats never consider the so-called interests
of the masses; they only seek to achieve their own goals, even by the most
brutal means. If a building catches fire, the deaths of a few dozen people mean
nothing to them—just numbers in a report. But if the survivors escape, then the
officials start fearing for their own positions.
We must
also responsibly point out that the government’s decision to abandon epidemic
controls was not primarily due to workers’ protests, nor due to “intervention
by imperialist transnational capital,” as the World Socialist Web Site claims.
The real reason was that after medical-industry capitalists had extracted all
possible profits, local governments across China fell into chronic and
widespread fiscal deficits. No state can sustain such high levels of spending
for years on end, even if held hostage by medical conglomerates. That is why
epidemic prevention measures were suddenly abolished in their entirety—rather
than gradually eased in response to working-class demands.
For the
past 20 years before the pandemic, China had relied on what was known as “land
finance.” Governments would first build infrastructure such as subways and
high-speed rail, which raised land prices in the area, and then sell the land
to real estate companies. When these developers built and sold large housing
projects, the government would collect taxes on the transactions, gaining
further revenue. At that time, China’s population was still growing rapidly,
and people believed cities would keep expanding. Even if a newly-purchased home
wasn’t in a prime location, it was assumed that its value would still rise.
This expectation sustained the land-finance model.
But once
people lost faith in the future—especially with plummeting birth rates during
the pandemic—the model collapsed. The result was unfinished construction
projects all over the country. This crisis even led to the downfall of Xu
Jiayin (Hui Ka Yan), once China’s richest man, who became the world’s most
wanted debtor and a global laughingstock.
The
collapse of land finance, combined with years of enormous pandemic-control
spending, forced the government to abruptly abandon its controls. Overnight,
epidemic prevention disappeared. Almost everyone in the country was infected at
least once. The sudden reopening caused hospital overcrowding, allowing the
medical-industrial complex to seize one last windfall of profits from the
pandemic.
6. Criticism of the ICFI
The ICFI
once described China’s implementation of a zero-Covid policy as a legacy of the
1949 revolution. [7]
But this is utterly absurd. The author
of that statement arbitrarily selects one moment, the triumph of the revolution
of 1949, out of the last 100 years of Chinese history, strips it out of genuine
history and collapses all the other moments of Chinese history. Forgotten is
the “Great Leap Forward” of Mao Zedong that resulted in the starvation of 20
million people. The author of that statement endows that one moment of 1949 with
the special status of being the handmaiden of China’s economic growth. One can
respond that another moment in recent Chinese history, the 1989 massacre of Tien
An Men Square might be a more appropriate moment if one wants to pinpoint when
Chinese economic growth was ensured, for it was in that moment that the Chinese
Stalinist bureaucracy demonstrated that it would follow the road to capitalism
and hold onto power regardless of the toll on the Chinese working class. Furthermore, the author contrasts, favorably,
China’s handling of the pandemic with India’s, noting that the pandemic, “…was
contained by China early on, even as it spreads uncontrollably in India,
pushing its death toll past the 400,000 mark.” It’s true that the Modi
government’s criminal policies were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of
thousands and it’s also true that the zero-Covid policy of the Chinese
government was superior to India’s approach even when counting the corruption and
incompetence inherent in its implementation.
But what happened in the end? It
is impossible to get accurate statistical data from official Chinese sources
but according to one study, published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Preventions (CDC), when China finally abandoned its pandemic containment
measures approximately 1.4 million Chinese died in a short period of time.[8]
Should those deaths also be credited as
one of the legacies of the 1949 revolution?
In
discussions of China in this and other articles on the WSWS, it is frequently emphasized
China had a successful revolution in 1949. But what is left out is that China
also went through many different historical phases, eventually leading to the
restoration of capitalism. Some of the
policies carried out during Mao Zedong’s era actually set the infrastructure of
China back by decades. This was particularly true of the “Great Leap Forward”
and the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”. To quote John Peter Roberts,
from his major study of China, ‘China: From permanent revolution to counter
revolution’,
Famine was a hallmark of the GLF [Great Leap Forward], rural
death rates leapt from 11 to more than 28 per 1,000 people/year in 1960. Population
growth rate in Henan, for example, went into reverse and dropped from +22.8% in
1958 to – 4.3% in 1961. Only in 1980 did the CCP admit that at least 20 million
people had starved to death during the great famine.
The famine was due to the combination of severe natural
disaster and, possibly more importantly, the bureaucratic system itself. The bureaucracy
had reduced the area of land sown with grain and insisted that a vast amount of
unnecessary work be carried out on the blast furnaces, but a third and
important factor was the Anti-Rightist Campaign which scared lower level
bureaucrats into exaggerating the harvest to please their superiors. In late
August and September, Mao himself, uncritically accepted boastful provincial
reports that state grain purchases had been fully met and accomplished in
record time. Mao ordered the publication and distribution of these falsehoods
with his accompanying observations containing a blistering attack on
‘rightists’, further increasing the pressure on lower rank cadres. Grain
procurement by the state based on these false figures played a major causal
role in the famine. [9]
It is
evident that the Chinese government’s manipulation of and fabrication of false information,
so prominently employed during the pandemic has a long pedigree. It played and continues to play a particularly
pernicious role in covering up the economic and social catastrophes that could be
directly attributed to the policies of the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy.
The
point was nicely summarized by a resident of Wuhan on the one year anniversary
of the lockdown, as quoted in the New York Times,
“It has always been this way in China. How many tens of
millions died in the Great Leap famine? How many in the Cultural Revolution,”
says Ai Xiaoming, a retired professor in Wuhan who, like quite a few residents,
kept an online diary about the lockdown. “Everything can be forgotten with the
passage of time. You don’t see it, hear it or report it.” [10]
The WSWS
fails to point out that Chinese society today is fully privatized, and that its
medical-industrial complex is part of international capital. This is an
extremely serious and crucial point, because it determines for whom the state’s
measures are carried out.
China’s
state apparatus and medical conglomerates whether classified as privately held
or “state-owned” exist to serve the interests of Chinese capitalism, not the
health and lives of the working class. China’s zero-Covid policy during the
pandemic was no exception to this sober truth. When examined from the ground
up, China’s highly touted zero-Covid policy looks much different that the fairy
tale disseminated by the WSWS.
7. Afterword: A note on sources.
I am not
entirely sure how the coronavirus outbreak of 2003 in China should be referred
to in the English context. In Chinese, we generally call the 2003 outbreak
“atypical pneumonia” (非典型冠状病毒) or
SARS, while the virus of 2019 is called the “novel coronavirus.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20200131074029/http://china.caixin.com/2020-01-31/101509761.html
This is
an interview with a doctor who was punished by the Chinese authorities at the
time. The doctor had merely posted on his private social media account to warn
his friends that he had discovered a virus similar to the 2003 SARS
coronavirus. It was only meant as personal advice to friends and was never
intended for public dissemination. Nevertheless, he was arrested by local
police and detained for more than ten days.
This
article reports that after the doctor tragically contracted the coronavirus and
died, the CCP exonerated him posthumously and honored him as a martyr. But
responsibility was shifted entirely onto the grassroots police, without holding
higher government officials accountable for labeling his warning as
“rumor-mongering.”
This
piece concerns a female doctor who, after realizing that the virus could be
transmitted between humans, publicly refuted the official claim that
human-to-human transmission was impossible. In the early stage, however, most
doctors believed the virus’s structure was very similar to the SARS coronavirus
of 2003.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200227094018/https://china.caixin.com/2020-02-26/101520972.html
This
news report describes how the government ordered testing institutions to
suppress information once the coronavirus was detected. Some severely ill
patients had even paid for genetic sequencing tests themselves. As soon as
these institutions identified the pathogen as a coronavirus, the authorities
forced them to destroy the samples and forbade publication of the results. In
fact, as early as December 25, 2019, laboratories had already found the virus
to be extremely similar to the 2003 SARS coronavirus. Yet the Chinese
government insisted that the similarity was only discovered on January 7.
This is
the official report that the mayor and Party secretary of Wuhan were dismissed
for mishandling the epidemic response.
Many key
materials about the outbreak have since been permanently erased from the
Chinese internet. I asked friends and many still vividly recall a massive
Spring Festival banquet held in a Wuhan residential community (the so-called
“Ten-Thousand-People Banquet”), but we can no longer find reliable records of
it. During this period, my main focus has been searching for materials on how
the Chinese government used epidemic prevention both as a means of
profit-making and as a tool for suppressing protests.
I am
still organizing more related materials. The Chinese government deleted vast
amounts of pandemic-related content, making it very difficult to find sources.
I am also currently searching for evidence regarding monopolistic control by
certain enterprises during the epidemic.
[1] 5 years of the
COVID-19 pandemic: The response of the <em>World Socialist Web
Site</em> - World Socialist Web Site
[3] In Chinese, we generally call the 2003
outbreak “atypical
pneumonia” (非典型冠状病毒) or SARS, while the virus of
2019 is called the “novel
coronavirus.” The information from these tests should have been a huge warning
to Chinese authorities that a new and potentially extremely dangerous form of
the coronavirus was being spread to humans.
[4]
https://web.archive.org/web/20200227094018/https://china.caixin.com/2020-02-26/101520972.html
Some quotes from this important piece of investigative
journalism in China
An individual from a gene
sequencing company revealed that on January 1, 2020, he received a phone call
from an official of the Hubei Provincial Health Commission, informing him that
if any COVID-19 case samples were sent for testing in Wuhan, they could not be
tested; existing case samples must be destroyed, and sample information,
related papers, and data could not be disclosed to the public. "If you
detect any in the future, you must report to us."
Looking back at those days
from the end of December 2019 to the beginning of January this year, it should
have been a crucial moment that determined the fate of countless people. But at
that time, the public was completely unaware of the consequences that this
virus would later cause.
An
individual from a gene sequencing company revealed that on January 1, 2020, he
received a phone call from an official of the Hubei Provincial Health
Commission, informing him that if any COVID-19 case samples were sent for
testing in Wuhan, they could not be tested; existing case samples must be
destroyed, and sample information, related papers, and data could not be
disclosed to the public. "If you detect any in the future, you must report
to us."
[6]
https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1808052327181584499&wfr=spider&for=pc&searchword=%E7%BA%A2%E7%A0%81%E4%B9%A6%E8%AE%B0
[7]
See 100 years
since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party - World Socialist Web Site,
where the author writes
“That they are compelled to still speak of socialism
and even proclaim that their capitalist policies are guided by Marxism is
testament to the enduring identification of the Chinese masses with gains of
the 1949 revolution. China’s staggering economic development over the past
three decades reflect in a contradictory way the impact of the Chinese
revolution. It would not have been possible without the far-reaching social
reforms introduced by that revolution.
To understand the significance of the Chinese
revolution, one only has to ask the question: Why has such development not
taken place in India? The contrast between the two countries has found sharp
expression in the COVID-19 pandemic, which was contained by China early on,
even as it spreads uncontrollably in India, pushing its death toll past the
400,000 mark.”
.
[9] John Peter Roberts, China: From Permanent
Revolution to Counter-Revolution, Wellred Books, 2016, 13.5.1 Famine in the Communes, available
online at https://marxist.com/china-permanent-revolution-to-counter-revolution-book/china-under-mao-the-great-leap-forward.htm
[10]
A Year Later, Wuhan, the First Post Coronavirus
Pandemic City, New Yor Times, Jan. 22, 2021,
A
Year Later, Wuhan, the First Post Coronavirus Pandemic City - The New York
Times
.jpg)
