Ed Prideaux

How Mao’s medicine made modern China

History repeats itself, said Marx, first as tragedy and then as farce. And when it comes to the world’s latest pandemic, China and the coronavirus are no historical exception. ‘Mao’s Flu Strikes’, The Observer declared in November 1968. ‘200,000 people are ill with Mao’s Flu in Rome’, the paper reported, ‘and the epidemic is expected to grow in the next few weeks.’

While sixties’ Brits may have sidestepped today’s loo roll stockpiling, the ‘Mao Flu Panic’ was soon high on people’s minds. By its conclusion in 1969, Mao flu – now known historically as ‘Hong Kong flu’ – had killed around one million people worldwide, including 100,000 in the US and 80,000 in the UK.

But despite having originated in its southern Yunnan province, the question of how many actually died in China may never be answered. The country had severed its ties with the World Health Organisation and nearly all cross-border information flow was restricted. Meanwhile, two years into its Cultural Revolution, both China’s economy and its pre-revolutionary history verged on almost-wholesale destruction.

From that deep nadir, China has since emerged as one of the world’s predominant superpowers. There are many reasons to explain the country’s meteoric growth. Yet one that is often overlooked is how its reaction to disease outbreaks and the country’s determination to try and avoid them helped it along the way.

While Mao’s intent was to mobilise the masses from the bottom up, the party response to Covid-19 runs largely in the opposite direction

Both before and after the Hong Kong flu took hold, infectious disease was a stubborn focus for Mao’s regime. Data from before the 1949 Revolution – a time when China was known historically as the ‘sick man of Asia’ – indicates that the majority of its vast problems with health emerged from such infections. And in their response, Mao and his cadres did no less than launch a full-scale medical revolution.

By the 1970s, China delivered improvements to life expectancy, infant mortality and rates of infectious disease widely regarded as remarkable, with a pace that far exceeded its rates of economic growth and those of similarly developed nations.

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