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2020/2/17
The Chinese coronavirus
Time and again
A new virus is spreading.
Fortunately, the world is better prepared than ever to stop it
As The Economist went to press, over 600 cases had been confirmed in six countries, of which 17 were fatal. The new virus is a close relative of sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome), which emerged in China in 2002 and terrorised the world for over half a year before burning out. sars afflicted more than 8,000 people and killed about 800, leaving in its wake $30bn-100bn of damage from disrupted trade and travel.
That toll would have been lower if the Chinese authorities had not hushed up the outbreak for months. But things are very different this time. The Chinese have been forthcoming and swift to act. Doctors in Wuhan, the metropolis where it began, have come in for criticism, but the signs are that they promptly sounded an alarm about an unusual cluster of cases of pneumonia—thereby following a standard protocol协议 for spotting new viruses.
The WHO has long worried about the possible emergence of a “disease x” that could become a serious international pandemic and which has no known counter-measures. Some experts say the virus found in China could be a threat of this kind. And there will be many others. Further illnesses will follow the same well-trodden path, by mutating from bugs that live in animals into ones that can infect people. Better vigilance in places where humans and animals mingle, as they do in markets across Asia, would help catch viral newcomers early. A tougher task is dissuading people from eating wild animals and convincing them to handle livestock with care, using masks and gloves when butchering meat and fish, for example. Such measures might have prevented the new coronavirus from ever making headlines.
2020/2/18
The apotheosis of Chinese cuisine in America
Its upward trajectory reflects the Chinese-American community’s
Chinese restaurants began to open in America in the mid-19th century, clustering on the west coast where the first immigrants landed.
They mostly served an Americanised version of Cantonese cuisine—chop suey, egg fu yung and the like. In that century and much of the 20th, the immigrants largely came from China’s south-east, mainly Guangdong province.
After the immigration reforms of 1965 removed ethnic quotas that limited non-European inflows, Chinese migrants from other regions started to arrive.
Restaurants began calling their food “Hunan” and “Sichuan”, and though it rarely bore much resemblance to what was actually eaten in those regions, it was more diverse and boldly spiced than the sweet, fried stuff that defined the earliest Chinese menus.
By the 1990s adventurous diners in cities with sizeable Chinese populations could choose from an array of regional cuisines. A particular favourite was Sichuan food, with its addictively numbing fire (the Sichuan peppercorn has a slightly anaesthetising, tongue-buzzing effect).
Yet over the decades, as Chinese food became ubiquitous, it also—beyond the niche world of connoisseurs—came to be standardised. There are almost three times as many Chinese restaurants in America (41,000) as McDonald’s.
Virtually every small town has one and, generally, the menus are consistent: pork dumplings (steamed or fried); the same two soups (hot and sour, wonton); stir-fries listed by main ingredient, with a pepper icon or star indicating a meagre trace of chilli-flakes. Dishes over $10 are grouped under “chef’s specials”.
There are modest variations: in Boston, takeaways often come with bread and feature a dark, molasses-sweetened sauce; a Chinese-Latino creole cuisine developed in upper Manhattan. But mostly you can, as at McDonald’s, order the same thing in Minneapolis as in Fort Lauderdale.
2020/2/19
Obituary Li Wenliang The man who knew
Dr Li Wenliang, one of the first to raise the alarm about a new coronavirus, died of it on February 7th, aged 33
Busy though he was as an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central hospital, rushed off his feet, Li Wenliang never missed a chance to chat about his favourite things on Weibo. Food, in particular.
Since he shared every passing observation online, it was not surprising that on December 30th he put up a post about an odd cluster of pneumonia cases at the hospital. They were unexplained, but the patients were in quarantine, and they had all worked in the same place, the pungent litter-strewn warren of stalls that made up the local seafood market. Immediately this looked like person-to-person transmission to him, even if it might have come initially from bats, or some other delicacy. Immediately, too, it raised the spectre of the sars virus of 2002-03 which had killed more than 700 people. He therefore decided to warn his private WeChat group, all fellow alumni from Wuhan University, to take precautions. He headed the post: “Seven cases of sars in the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market”. That was his mistake.
The trouble was that he did not know whether it was actually sars. He had posted it too fast. In an hour he corrected it, explaining that although it was a coronavirus, like sars, it had not been identified yet. But to his horror he was too late: his first post had already gone viral, with his name and occupation undeleted, so that in the middle of the night he was called in for a dressing down at the hospital, and January 3rd he was summoned to the police station.
On January 8th an 82-year-old patient presented with acute angle-closure glaucoma and, because she had no fever, he treated her without a mask. She too turned out to run a stall in the market, and she had other odd symptoms, including loss of appetite and pulmonary lesions suggesting viral pneumonia. It was the new virus, and by January 10th he had begun to cough. The next day he put an n95 mask on. Not wanting to infect the family, he sent them to his in-laws 200 miles away, and checked into a hotel. He was soon back in the hospital, this time in an isolation ward. On February 1st a nucleic-acid test showed positive for the new coronavirus. Well, that’s it then, confirmed, he wrote on Weibo from his bed.
2020/2/20
Japan’s state-owned version of Tinder
Local authorities are setting up matchmaking websites to pair their residents with lonely-hearts in the cities
Even after years of attending match-making parties, a professional in Tokyo explains, she has not found any suitable marriage prospects. “I’m tired of going to these events and not meeting anyone,” she gripes.
So she has decided to expand her pool of prospective partners by looking for love outside the capital. To that end she has filled out an online profile detailing her name, job, hobbies and even weight on a match-making site that pairs up single urbanites with people from rural areas.
Match-making services that promote iju konkatsu, meaning “migration spouse-hunting”, are increasingly common in Japan. They are typically operated by an unlikely marriage-broker: local governments.
In Akita, a prefecture near the northern tip of Japan’s main island, the local government has long managed an online match-making service to link up local lonely-hearts. It claims to have successfully coupled up more than 1,350 Akita residents since it launched nine years ago.
It recently began offering a similar service to introduce residents to people living outside the prefecture and is optimistic about its prospects. “By using the konkatsu site, we hope that more people from outside will marry someone from Akita to come and live here,” says Rumiko Saito of the Akita Marriage Support Centre.
Along with online matching services, municipalities across Japan host parties to help singles mingle. They also organise subsidised group tours in rural prefectures, in which half the participants are locals and the other half from cities, to encourage urbanites to marry and move to the countryside. Hundreds of singletons participate in these tours every year.
The difficulty of finding true love in the countryside is compounded by a gender mismatch. In 80% of prefectures with declining populations, young women are more likely than men to relocate to cities.
This means that whereas there are more single women than men in big cities like Tokyo, bachelors outnumber spinsters in rural areas. Many men in the countryside are “left behind”, laments a government official in Akita.
2020/2/22
Many Chinese students are frightened of studying abroad
Some pay ex-commandos to teach them how to avoid mass shootings in America, say
Their fear is not of ideological contamination, but of the petty crime and shootings that China’s state media highlight as a scourge of Western societies. For Wang Xuejun, this is an opportunity. A veteran of Chinese peacekeeping and international relief work, he is the founder of Safety Anytime, a company that runs security-training programmes for anxious Chinese who are preparing to sojourn abroad. His customers are taught how to respond to gun-toting assailants, kidnapping attempts and terrorist attacks, among other perils. But the bulk of the training focuses on safety consciousness: how to be aware of more mundane dangers such as muggings or pick-pocketing and how to avoid or cope with them. There are also lessons in first aid, information security and drugs laws, plus advice on how to handle fraud and sexual harassment.
The clients include not just Chinese students, more than 660,000 of whom went abroad last year, but also workers from the many Chinese energy, telecoms, finance and engineering companies that send employees abroad as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. That project, a sprawling scheme to build infrastructure and spread influence across much of the poor world, has put ever more Chinese into some of the world’s riskier places.
Many of the students are heading off to leafy college campuses in America rather than strife-torn African countries, but they are still extremely anxious. With relentless regularity, they see reports of senseless and deadly mass shootings in American cities. Mr Wang stresses that his training is about much more than avoiding crazed gunmen, but that is the main draw for many of his trainees. “I hope to go to university in America, but we always hear so much about gun violence there that I really have to take it into consideration,” says 15-year-old Cao Zhen, as his mother stands alongside nodding in agreement.