Will the world look more like East Asia when the crisis is over?

Opinion: how East Asian countries have responded to the coronavirus crisis has influenced what the rest of the world is now doing

A lot has changed in the last few weeks. As the world has been turned upside down, the image of China and East Asia in public discourse has also been turned around 180 degrees. From outrageous portrayals as the source of "the China virus" and critiques of incompetence three weeks ago, East Asian states have this week suddenly become both the model to be followed, and a positive vision of what a post Covid-19 future might look like for the rest of the world. 

The west is used to using East Asia as a futurological, often dystopian, looking glass. Blade Runner is possibly the most familiar example of a genre you can trace back to Montesquieu. But the futurological gaze now being projected upon East Asia is more utopian than dystopian.

Leading scientists, politicians and media figures are now referencing East Asian examples to inform behaviour and practice in a wide range of western countries. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar referenced South Korea as the model to be followed as he closed down society and ordered widespread testing over a week before the UK did either. France, Austria and Italy referenced the Chinese model to justify lockdowns. When the UK finally did take action, the model mentioned was Singapore. Just as importantly, many countries in the west are now also looking to East Asia for examples of how to handle the crisis economically as well as in terms of health policy.  

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From RTÉ Radio 1's Ryan Tubridy Show, Irishman in Singapore Cameron O'Connor on what has been happening in the country to tackle the coronavirus

So what can we take away, at this early stage, from East Asian practices in response to the crisis, and their influence on practices in the rest of the world? How might the world look more like East Asia when this is over?

Changes in behaviour

The first area where we are likely to see lasting change in the west is in how we regulate social behaviour. In the 19th century, when most western nation states came into being, political thinkers like J.S. Mill believed that individual (Christian) morals could be relied upon as the basis of social order. By contrast, very few people in our post-secular west today would believe that individual morals can form the basis of social order. Nor, after 30 years of liberal political dominance, is state coercion, the use of legal force, acceptable to most as the primary means for imposing order.

How can social order be achieved? The Covid-19 crisis, and the consequent need to discipline society, has thrown this problem into sharp relief. As the only option currently available to control virus surges, self-isolation has become a key weapon in the war. But self-isolation only works if society does it. While western societies have struggled to get their citizens to conform to isolation and quarantine rules, East Asian nations have achieved this comparatively easily.

Social conformity to isolation and quarantine in China was rather mainly achieved by harnessing peer group pressure

So how have East Asian states and societies attained conformity to isolation and quarantine rules? This goes to the heart of much of both the positive and negative commentary on China. The stereotype of China as an ultra-authoritarian state led western commentators early in the crisis to portray China as able to enforce social conformity because the authoritarian state possessed unique coercive power.

But this assumption was wrong. Conformity to social rules during the crisis was not achieved in China primarily by the use of coercive state power. Social conformity to isolation and quarantine in China was rather mainly achieved by harnessing peer group pressure. Civil society, through horizontal networks, often facilitated by social media, shamed citizens into correct behaviour. Social pressure, rather than state power, was key.

Similar levels of social conformity were also achieved in South Korea and Taiwan, two of the most dynamic democracies on earth, as well as in other democratic East Asian countries like Singapore and Japan, partly by using similar methods of horizontal socialisation. Top-down state authoritarianism was not a key factor.

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From RTÉ Radio 1's This Week, Dr Jerome Kim, Director General of the International Vaccine Institute in Seoul, on how South Korea has managed to significantly slow the number of new cases of the virus

The use of social shaming, social conformity and having the citizenry cultivate proper behaviour in society, underpinned China’s ability to stop the spread of the virus. The state authorities allowed the public identification of contact points, thereby facilitating online public knowledge of where the nodes were. But it was the people, not the state, who enforced isolation around this knowledge.

Social media

Social media was quickly harnessed by millions of ordinary Chinese to identify and discipline potential non-conformism. There was no way for Chinese who had contact with a case not to self-isolate very strictly, because all the society around them were equipped to check on their behaviour.

What was really effective in enforcing social conformity to isolation rules in China was the use of social media in urban areas. Not just the ubiquitous Wechat, but also new bespoke virus apps allowing you to geographically identify infection clusters in your area. This allowed people to immediately be aware of any non-conformity in their own areas, and more importantly, meant that everyone knew their own actions would be seen and judged by their own community. Shame was key - the fear of being outed as an anti-social element, and the knowledge that the information about any non-conformity would be out there immediately. 

Rather than "lock-downs", Ireland, Britain and California have out-sourced compliance to civil society

Privacy

Yes, this might offend some readers’ ideas of privacy. But as the crisis has progressed, many western countries’ state leaders have also fallen back on shame as a prime method of trying to enforce social compliance. As in China, this has included widening the amount of information on cases which is released by the state into civil society.

In Ireland, the state spent huge efforts suppressing any details of the first case of Covid-19 going public so as to protect individual privacy. But three weeks later, the strategy had been completely reversed, with the state openly identifying places where cases had been confirmed, be they primary schools or workplaces, thereby facilitating social enforcement of self-isolation.

Just as in China, Ireland and other European countries began to encourage compliance by facilitating social pressure not by using coercive force. Rather than "lock-downs", which we have indeed seen in Italy and France, with police on the streets enforcing legal restrictions, Ireland, Britain and California have out-sourced compliance to civil society.

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From RTÉ Radio 1's Ray D'Arcy Show, Wexford woman Kathy Kane, a teacher in the Chinese city of Suzhou, on life in the country at present

This follows East Asian examples of using shame and peer group pressure as prime drivers of behavioural change. Horizontal rather than vertical social control has become key. Civil society, rather than state enforcement of social and behavioural norms, has become the new normal. This indicates a movement towards a new social normality where the relationships between privacy, individualism and society are perceived differently, and shame and peer surveillance play a newly accepted role.

Technology

The crisis has also demonstrated that technology is more advanced and permeates more deeply in the daily lives of people in East Asia compared with the west. The key weapon in the hands of civil society’s ability to facilitate compliance in East Asia has been social media. Already for some years, the social penetration, access to data, and thereby also technical capacities of social media have been superior in East Asian societies compared with the west.

Rather than the state trying to limit social media, countries like China have facilitated huge amounts of data being pumped through social media systems for years, thereby giving them a much higher capacity to penetrate society and provide information. In every facet of daily life, from ordering a coffee to paying for it, from finding jobs or a lifetime partner, social media is much more developed and central to social life in East Asia. This increased connectivity has been a powerful weapon in horizontal social conditioning, but also in keeping economic activity going through the crisis.

This signals a really deep change in the priority people give to issues like privacy in comparison to free access to information

Cash payments had already all but disappeared from large Chinese cities well before the crisis. Apps were used to order often remotely provided services or deliveries, and a much higher percentage of consumer activity was already done remotely. All of this provided a powerful tool for the comparatively better maintenance of consumer demand during the coronavirus crisis in East Asia.

The comparatively lower take up of technology in the west is now being challenged. As millions move to working and shopping remotely, western cities will come to look, work and consume more like cities in East Asia. State-created obstacles to the natural development of online technology and commerce - for instance the European Union’s data protection rules - are likely to be challenged as society embraces rather than reviles from a big data dominated commercial and social environment.

Again, this signals a really deep change in the priority people give to issues like privacy in comparison to free access to information. The former trumped the latter before the Covid-19 crisis, but this is now likely to be reversed. Again, western societies will become ethically, technologically and practically more like East Asia, favouring the free flow of information and penetration of technology over abstract ideas of privacy.

State responsibility for health 

Although having completely different political systems and widely varied traditions, the countries of East Asia’s shared geography has given them a shared experience of regular natural disasters. This, combined with a recent shared experience of SARS, has engendered a different way of thinking about health care and planning to what is seen in many western countries. Japan, China, Taiwan and Korea all experience regular devastating natural disasters. Japan and Taiwan in particular are constantly threatened by large scale earthquakes. The healthcare systems and planning thereby automatically take into account issues of extra emergency capacity and an ability to be centrally directed.

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From RTÉ News, timelapse video shows how the 1,000 bed Huoshenshan Hospital was built in eight days in Wuhan

Be they democracies like Japan and Taiwan, or the single party state of China, all ethically agree that the state is ultimately responsible for providing a functional health system, and for long-term planning of this and other state infrastructure. Although Japan is famous as the country which invented "just in time" management and production processes, hospitals there are not managed to operate right at the margins of capacity as they are in many English-speaking countries. In Japan, it is recognised that hospitals treating human beings are different to factories making cars.

In most East Asian societies there is again an ethical agreement that human life is different to an inanimate object. The short-termism of some western, notably English-speaking cultures, has been challenged, and may not survive this emergency. 

In relation to the ethics of human life, long-term versus short-term thinking, the relative importance of privacy versus the free flow of information and the role of technology in daily life, the west may well become more like East Asia after this crisis. The trumping of freedom of information dissemination over privacy may create a less individualist, but ironically freer west. The increase in horizontal social control over state direction or individual autonomy will create a more socially ordered, yet less legally-coerced west.

It will be less individualistic and more socially focussed, but without any increases in top-down state intervention. Increasing the social penetration of technology will likely create a more efficient, but ironically also more leisure-oriented economy. A new valuing of planning and preparation will likely create a safer, but also more disciplined society. The future remains to be seen, but Covid-19 may well make the world ethically, technologically and socially more like East Asia. 

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ