‘China’s Dr. Fauci’ was how the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post described Zhang Wenhong, the Chinese epidemiologist who has become, for many in his country, the face of science during the pandemic.
Both share similar traits, as straight-talking experts who explained, day in and day out, the science of COVID-19 to a worried public.
Yet the similarities largely end there. Unlike Dr. Anthony Fauci’s leading national role, Dr. Zhang holds no such formal national position.
Also unlike Dr. Fauci, who regularly took positions that were flatly in opposition to the Donald Trump administration, Dr. Zhang has had to pull off a far trickier tightrope walk -- in China, the national narrative of COVID-19 continues to be tightly managed by the ruling Communist Party.
Delta variant
After the initial delayed response in Wuhan, China was able to emerge last summer to some normalcy after months of one of the world’s most stringent lockdowns. A strategy combining lockdowns and an efficient test and trace system, coupled with continued bans on international travel, allowed China to escape a second wave unlike most countries. The country is, however, currently dealing with its biggest challenge since last year with the Delta variant. Millions are under lockdown, the most since the height of the pandemic.
The strategy has appeared to work so far in curbing a mass spread of the Delta variant. It has also triggered an intense debate in China whether what’s known as its “zero COVID strategy” - referring to an approach that calls for stringent measures until cases are completely eliminated in any local cluster - is sustainable, while some of the rest of the world begins to open up.
The Communist Party leadership has strongly backed that strategy, even as China surges ahead with vaccinating hundreds of millions of its citizens. There are political stakes too. Beijing sees it as a vindication of the China model and how it curbed COVID-19 while the rest of the world — in particular the U.S., China’s great rival — reeled.
When Dr. Zhang waded into that debate recently, he discovered that tightrope walk has perhaps now become even trickier.
On July 28, Dr. Zhang posted a long note to his newly acquired 3.7 million followers on Sina Weibo, the Twitter-equivalent that helped spread his popularity. "What we've been through is not the hardest part,” he wrote. "The harder thing requires the wisdom to live with the virus for a long time.”
That prompted a strong backlash. Gao Qiang, a former health minister, posted a response shared by People’s Daily, hitting out at foreign governments for advocating “living with the virus” (in contrast, obviously, to China) and saying it was "surprising that some experts in our country have advised the nation to come up with strategies to coexist with the virus.” If a calm and measured approach won him praise, it has now brought controversy.
Rise to fame
Dr. Zhang, 52, was unheard of to most of the Chinese public before COVID-19. At Huashan, a major Shanghai hospital, he led the department of infectious diseases, a post through which he helped shape the Shanghai government’s widely praised response, which was seen as keeping cases low but without some of the more harsher measures seen elsewhere in China, which Dr. Zhang, on occasion, criticised obliquely.
He advocated a disciplined but measured approach. “We hope to catch the rats without breaking the porcelain,” he wrote in one January 24 message, the South China Morning Post reported, adding that “if we pursue the goal of zero infection, life would be too hard”.
Not fearing the virus has been a consistent theme. "There is now a growing belief that the epidemic will not end in the short term, and probably not in the long term,” he said in the now infamous July 28 post. "Most virologists in the world now accept that this will be an endemic virus and that the world has to learn to live with it.”
Dr. Zhang made a cautious case for opening up, referring to President Xi Jinping’s signature diplomatic slogan of building “a community of shared destiny”, a marked contrast from the current walling off of the country. “The way China chooses in the future must be to ensure a community of shared destiny with the world,” he wrote, "to return to normal life, and at the same time to protect its citizens from the fear of the virus.”
The July 28 post divided opinion. For some, it was irresponsible heresy that undermined China’s approach. For others, it reinforced his status as a voice of reason. Dr. Zhang, meanwhile, hasn’t posted since.