Hong Kong Prepares

As you can see in this piece, Hong Kong offers a pretty good example of what a government can do to prepare for catastrophe. But what you can also see is that Hong Kong, which, since 1997, has been part of China under the "one nation, two systems" formula, is unable to prepare fully because the other system, the one that controls mainland China's 1.3 billion people, is by some measures, still a mystery. Of course, thanks to globalization, China has progressed from being an impoverished, isolated, totally mysterious nation 30 years ago, and is on track toward having--by some projections--the world's largest economy within two decades, and, a major role in the world sooner than that. But one of the areas where China's progress has been fitful has been in in eliminating mystery, or in political science jargon, in achieving transparency. Transparency is the measure by which the world can trust that what seems to be going on somewhere is actually what's going on... Now 100% transparency can be tough to achieve, even in a long-established democratic systems like ours in the U.S. Even here, it's not the government that always announces its shortcomings and scandals. Sometimes that kind of news is revealed by the press. But the government here doesn't really cover up that much, and it can't really control the media. To a degree of confidence, you can say that what you don't know as an American citizen isn't so much due to what the government has concealed as to what the media, for whatever reason, hasn't bothered to investigate. Not so with China, an authoritarian, one-party state. Laura and I have made seven trips to China together for work since 1999 and can vouch that the system is generally getting more transparent. The Chinese media is stronger, the Chinese government weaker, and the Chinese public is getting more openly skeptical of what the government says. All the same, Chinese media outlets reporting news that the Chinese government doesn't like are still are risk of being closed down, or worse. And, that's not great for transparency. And in terms of being fully prepared for catastrophes like killer flu pandemics, that's not great for Hong Kong, the system in the "one China, two systems" formula that contains a relatively free press. The chances are much greater now than they were five years ago that if there were a huge killer flu outbreak in mainland China, the authorities would report it immediately, but the doubt still remains... And to the extent that Hong Kong can't fully see what's going on in the rest of China, across the border, whatever preparations it makes could easily be swamped by not knowing what's coming until too late.