Movement at the epicentre: Wuhan’s lockdown lifts

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Southern Africa has mostly been spared the jihadist violence seen elsewhere on the continent. In Mozambique, that is changing. Attacks are ramping up just as a huge natural gas project promises to change the country's fortunes. And some of humanity's oldest stories were conjured to explain geological features, with godlike figures shaping mountains, volcanoes, and lakes. Now scientists have linked a landscape to another story and uncovered the oldest myth yet. First up, though— The news that broke while China slept on January 23rd was astonishing. The Chinese government had quarantined an entire city at the center of a mysterious new viral outbreak.

"Normally traffic-jammed highway in the city of Wuhan, China, near empty." "China's two cities at the epicenter of a new coronavirus outbreak on lockdown on Thursday." —has held the world in awe.

—Chinese city of Wuhan and nearby towns locked down. No trains, flights, or mass transit.

As of today, lockdown restrictions have been lifted. Healthy residents and visitors are at last free to leave the city, even as much of the rest of the world now looks the way Wuhan did during the past 10 weeks.

We saw extraordinary scenes as the clock struck midnight early this morning, a stream of cars leaving the city. We saw people in the railway station heading out in their tens of thousands.

David Reni is our Beijing bureau chief.

But it's not quite true to say that a lockdown is over because the whole city of Wuhan is still divided up by high yellow plastic fences with strict control points. Most people are basically staying indoors. It's still a city in a very strange state of deep control.

And so why have authorities lifted the restrictions as much as they have? At this point?

China has been juggling two gigantic imperatives since this crisis broke out in December. One is to try and stop Chinese people from meeting infected Chinese people with this virus. And they've achieved that in the crudest, but remarkably effective way of just stopping people from meeting each other and locking down, at some points, hundreds of millions of people. The other imperative, of course, is when you do that, you basically kill your economy. And the Chinese economy has been really on its knees, immobile, for weeks and weeks now. And Wuhan was a major industrial hub, full of car factories, other big industrial plants, and had basically been sort of dead. And so where they see evidence that the flow of new infections is tailing off, and on Sundays this week, the official numbers, we had no new infections, they were desperate to try and open carefully, gingerly, but to open as much as they could.

Well, you say no new infections, but there has been quite a bit of chatter about whether or not the numbers coming out of China are being reported accurately. What's your take on that?

Look, this is a very secretive country with a track record as recently as the beginning of this year of lying about what was going on with this virus. But I think that the idea that there's some gigantic scandal that is known about and is being hidden, involving huge numbers of infected cases or deaths, that's hard to believe. When you look at the global statistics, and you see even European countries whose populations are smaller than an individual Chinese province having 2, 3 times the number of dead that China has reported overall. It just doesn't really make sense that China can have such low numbers.

Well, what about how the Chinese people themselves feel, indeed? Do you have a sense for how comfortable people outside Wuhan are with the end of the lockdown there?

Chinese people definitely feel that they achieved something real. It was painful, it was a sacrifice, but they broke the back of that infection. So you can see people coming out now in a way that they didn't a few weeks ago. They also look at foreign news, and I think it's very common for Chinese people to look at what's happening in America, or in Britain, or Italy and say, those countries are totally messing up compared to China, why are they not doing it the Chinese way? That said, there is tremendous discrimination against people from Hubei on the part of other Chinese. Landlords not letting them move back into their own apartments, companies not wanting to come back to work. And you've seen senior leaders here urging the Chinese people not to discriminate. So I think that speaks to the lack of trust and the real fear that's still in the air.

Well, I mean, Chinese authorities would surely like to propagate that idea that the West is messing it up and that China has not. I mean, how do you think China has dealt with this strategically in terms of its being the first country now to lock down and among the first to unlock?

Look, all good propaganda has a kernel of truth at the middle of it. And it is true that some big democracies, starting with the United States, have not prepared for this well. The Chinese propaganda machine is not stupid. They have been replaying criticisms of President Trump made by American politicians or American media. Those are now very familiar to the Chinese people. So there's a very clear story being told here, which is that China's people in their hundreds of millions sacrificed their jobs, their savings, and their sort of freedom to lock themselves down to buy the rest of the world precious weeks. And that chaotic, messy, selfish Western democracies squandered that precious time and betrayed the Chinese people's sacrifice. And that shows that the Chinese one-party dictatorship is a superior, more efficient, but also ultimately more benevolent system than selfish, wicked American democracy. That's the message being pumped home.

So that's the message that Chinese authorities want to convey to the people. What about that message as seen from abroad? I mean, how much is that propaganda message actually meant for outside China?

It's definitely meant for external consumption. And so China is putting tremendous propaganda efforts behind things like flights of medical equipment to countries in Europe, or deliveries of face masks to Canada or any number of other countries, and they're kind of flying the Chinese flag, you have the Chinese ambassador welcoming it. But it's a mixed picture, because some of that aid wasn't actually a donation, it was sold by China. These are expensive machines, and we bought them, and thank you, but we did buy them. You're also seeing some fairly senior European politicians, including the President of France or the Chancellor of Germany saying, well, hang on, Europe also has been delivering aid to some of these countries. And it's no coincidence that some of the loudest voices praising China in places like Central Europe, so the leaders of Hungary, some politicians in Serbia, in Italy, they're also populist Eurosceptics who've spent years saying that the European Union is not generous and is doing their country down. And so it's actually politically very convenient for them to praise China for being a friend in need. I think that China has been trying to make a very pronounced propaganda push, but it's done it rather clumsily.

But some of that propaganda has resulted in rumors about, for instance, you know, American military having spread the virus on purpose. This stuff has taken hold, even if clumsy.

Yeah, look, some of the propaganda has crossed the line into kind of hostile disinformation. And you're right, there have been Chinese Foreign Ministry officials who actually spread conspiracy theories that the American military somehow delivered the virus to China in the first place. And that has caused intense anger, not just at the top of the American government, but in other Western allied governments. But the weird thing, once again, is that although you have a very hawkish administration in Washington, the man at the top, President Donald Trump, consistently keeps taking a different view. And he was asked about that disinformation, and would he denounce it? And he told Fox News a few days ago, 'Oh, hey, every country does it.' And I think what that really shows you is that Donald Trump is an example of something you see so often with China, that when people talk about a China policy, they mean two separate things. One is what they think of the actual real live one-party dictatorship called China, and people have issues with all kinds of things that that country does. But then there's also kind of China the idea, which is a kind of a symbol of all kinds of things. And I think that once again, Donald Trump has shown that He's not that fussed about anything that China, the actual dictatorship, does. In fact, he praises it for its kind of ruthless self-interest. What he's interested in is China the idea, which stands for basically a proxy for globalisation. And I think that still interests him far more than the clash of ideas and values that you're seeing other capitals worrying about in the context of what does the world look like after this virus is over in terms of whose model is deemed to have performed better? Whose is superior? You know, is a dictatorship more efficient or is a democracy ultimately safer?

David, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. The COVID-19 pandemic is bringing immense uncertainty to citizens, governments, and the global economy. Economist Radio is drawing on the expertise of our international network of correspondents to report on the crisis.

On the science: The more you understand about the mechanism of a virus, the more places that there are that you can glue it up.

On the economics: The banks are in a really interesting position for this crisis because last time they were maybe the cause of turmoil, and this time they could be one of the arms through which the impact of the crisis is and on the politics of COVID-19.

Some worst-case scenarios have a very large number of people dying. That is going to trigger very, very grave conversations about whose fault this is.

For the latest on the pandemic and more, join us on Economist Radio. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Until recently, Southern Africa has been relatively free from the jihadist attacks that have caused havoc elsewhere on the continent. Such as those by Boko Haram in Nigeria and al-Shabaab in Somalia. But a conflict in northern Mozambique, primarily in the province of Cabo Delgado, has turned increasingly violent. Aid agencies say that since 2017, more than 1,000 people have died and at least 100,000 more have fled their homes. The government is struggling to get the situation under control, and that endangers an enormous energy project.

The conflict is taking place next door to what could be Africa's largest ever gas project. Before oil prices plummeted and COVID struck, analysts were thinking that Mozambique could one day be the African equivalent of Qatar.

John McDermott is our chief Africa correspondent.

But as this conflict escalates, it becomes costlier and harder for Mozambique, one of the world's poorest countries, to reap the benefits of its vast natural resources.

And it's not just the oil and gas companies that are worried, that those who are behind this project who are concerned. This is also affecting people's lives. I mean, you've been to Mozambique. What's the situation on the ground?

That's right. Yeah, I was one of the few journalists that managed to get into Cabo Delgado recently. One man I met whom I'll call Michael, 28-year-old, he fled his home in January after an attack on the town of Bilibeira. And he described how one afternoon he looked up and he sniffed and he saw a plume of smoke coming from what he suspected correctly was a torched village nearby. And then within a few hours, the insurgents had stormed his town as well, burning houses including his own, burning a school, firing indiscriminately into the air, and causing 10,000 or so residents to flee.

He's not feeling well because so much— yeah, because the big problem is how to get sufficient food.

And the story he has to tell is not such an unusual one now for Mozambique.

It's not unusual for Mozambique. It's not even unique in Michael's life, quite frankly. He said to me that 2 years before this attack in Bilubisa, he had been on the receiving end of an attack in his home village where it didn't just kind of threaten violence, but actually caused the killings of 5 locals, including one of his friends who was sadly decapitated.

So what's going on here? Who are these insurgents?

It's all very murky, which is why I was so keen to go. And the causes are probably best understood as a mix of the local and the international, as well as the religious and the economic. So Cabo Delgado is the most marginalised part of Mozambique. And it's right up in the far north next to Tanzania, and that border is very porous. It also has a Muslim majority, whereas the majority of Mozambicans are Catholic. And the region has long felt locked out of economic opportunities, both in the legal and the flourishing illegal economy of Kabudo Gado. So in 2008, a sect known as Ahlus Sunnah wa Jama'a was set up, and it was influenced by Islamists along that porous border with Tanzania, but also throughout the East African region. And it attracted followers, mostly young men, who were angry at the mainstream Islamic institutions that it saw as being kind of the lackeys of the the Mozambican government and the ruling party FRELIMO. And these followers also joined because it was a sense of— it gave them a sense of purpose and frankly livelihood. They offered them money.

And you say that there is some inspiration from outside Mozambique. Are there formal links with any other jihadist groups?

Most analysts believe that the group remains local in origin, but also local in focus. However, it's clear that over the past year it has drawn closer to Islamic State in particular. Last year, IS claimed the insurgents as part of its Central African Province group, and in that recent attack against Massimbo de Praia, the young men were carrying the black flag of ISIS. And they also appeared on video during that attack for only the second time in 2 years, where they were pictured or recorded saying, you know, "We are not fighting for wealth, we only want Islamic law." And that goes alongside some other kind of bog-standard jihadist wishes that you would find in Islamic State videos, such as the imposition of Sharia and the closing of secular schools.

And how have the authorities responded to what seems to be a growing threat?

Not particularly well, to be honest. The Mozambican military is not well cut out to be fighting a kind of counter-guerrilla campaign. And it's been a heavy-handed response that's also been counterproductive. So you've seen police arrest hundreds of so-called suspects, some of which probably of them, no doubt, are militants, but many others are perhaps not. They've been held in their dozens without trial. Conscripts—Mozambique has a conscript army—they've been dispatched en masse to the north, mostly not speaking the language, often not being paid, often lacking kit. As well as that, President Filipe Nyussi last year asked the Wagner Group, a bunch of Russian mercenaries linked to the Kremlin, to help out. But even they've found it hard going and have seemingly lost about a dozen men since arriving in Mozambique last year. So what's to be done?

What could the government do to get a handle on the situation?

I think it would be naive for anybody to believe, to think that FRELIMO, the ruling party in Mozambique, is going to suddenly care about the people of Cabo Delgado, which it's neglected for decades. But it does care about the spoils of the gas fields, and the risk of losing billions of dollars in potential gas revenue may be reason to rethink its strategy.

But in a sense, it sounds as if Mozambique has its hands tied. It doesn't have a sufficient army. It doesn't have the resources. What else is there?

Well, the rest of the world is clearly occupied with COVID-19, but the region does need to offer Mozambique some support. In particular, its northern neighbor, Tanzania, and South Africa. For most of the past 3 decades, while Islamist violence has become more common in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, in and around Nigeria and Chad and Cameroon. Southern Africa has been relatively free of jihadists. And there is a risk that if the southern and East African neighbors of Mozambique don't step up and don't put pressure on the governments and don't support the government, that jihadist violence could soon become endemic in that region as well. When they take the people, they are killing.

They are headless.

And that would bring the risk that the suffering experienced by people like Michael would spread to yet more countries.

John, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

To get a lot more analysis like this, subscribe to The Economist, a trusted source of information and, well, intelligence for 175 years. Just go to economist.com/radiooffer. 12 issues for $12 or £12. Geomythology is the study of oral traditions that involve geological events, stories created by pre-scientific cultures to explain the natural world around them. Take this one from the Klamath, a group of Native Americans who live in what's now Oregon. It's thought to be the world's oldest dateable tale. A god named Lao fell in love with a mortal woman and grew furious when she rejected him. So he came out from a mountain to rain fire down upon her village. But he was then attacked by a sky god, Skel, who wanted to protect the humans. Skel forced Lao back into the earth, and the mountain he had emerged from collapsed on top of him. As he fled. In the terrible rains that followed, the hole left behind became a great lake.

The lake itself is still there. The mountain was once known as Mount Mazama. It is a dormant volcano, blew itself to pieces 7,700 years ago.

Matt Kaplan writes about science for The Economist.

When it exploded, most of the top half of the mountain was effectively shattered, and then the rain collected inside the crater that was left behind, and that's known as Crater Lake National Park today.

And so that's where the myth comes from, essentially invented to explain these, these general geological features, you think?

That's what a lot of archaeologists think. So the notion is that the Klamath Indians who witnessed this event, and we know from their archaeological record that they were there, that they incorporated that into their stories, and that those stories were passed from generation to generation for 8 millennia, and that, that's how we have that story today, because they weren't writing it down back then. So it was all oral storytelling. And so that's been considered a pretty monumental feat. Yet it looks like that feat is about to be broken. How so?

How do you mean?

So the people of Australia in the state of Victoria, they're known as the Gunditjmara. They also have a story about a god named Budj Bim, which incidentally is also the name that they give a nearby volcano. When Budj Bim came into existence, their stories tell tales of him spitting fire from between his teeth and the land and trees dancing as he came to life. We've known for quite some time that Budj Bim, which is also known as Mount Eccles by the non-native Australians, that Budj Bim's eruption likely occurred when people were on the island and that people probably witnessed it. But we really didn't have any idea of how old it was.

So how old is it?

I mean, how do you even find out how old it Yeah, so there's a geologist named Erin Matchen at Melbourne University. She's, she's an expert in trying to figure out how old rocks are, and one of the areas of expertise that she has is on potassium-argon dating. Potassium naturally radioactively decays into argon over time. Now, when you have rock that becomes liquid magma, almost everything in that liquefies as well, except for argon. Any argon turns into gas and vaporizes off into the atmosphere. So every time you create lava from hard rock, it loses the argon that's present. When it resolidifies, potassium slowly breaks down into argon once more, so it effectively is a stop clock. As soon as you melt the rock, you can monitor how much argon builds up inside the rock, and that tells you how long it's been there since the rock melted. If you use the, the argon dating, you can work out that this thing is 37,000 years old. Which, I mean, that's like 5 times older than the Skellan-Lowe story.

And so in a sense, it seems the storytelling record has as much fidelity as the isotopic record, the elemental record here.

That's the really amazing thing. And we know that oral storytelling does not mutate. Research conducted from between 1934 and 1950 by 2 mythologists at Harvard University revealed that illiterate bards in Yugoslavia, where oral storytelling was still quite a thing, used a mix of stock phrases, narrative fragments, and formulas to keep tales intact over years. Indeed, they documented that Yugoslavian stories that were as long as Homer's Odyssey remained locked in form between bards and over many years of time. It's clear that humans have the ability to do oral storytelling that keeps the original story in reasonable tact for quite some time.

Matt, thanks very much for joining us.

My pleasure, Jason. You take care.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts. See you back here tomorrow.