[Norseman]

Maybe, although I’m not sure the Chinese masters even needed a “cure” before sending everyone back to work. They needed to get the factories humming again.

And we don’t even know it they’ve succeeded in that. China appears to be one locked down country right now.

[Zhang Fei]

[Maybe, although I’m not sure the Chinese masters even needed a “cure” before sending everyone back to work. They needed to get the factories humming again.]

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Given the way pandemics have a way of breeding both bottom-up revolts and elite mutinies, I think he’d want to have at least something in hand before getting people back to work. In a time of ostensible emperor worship, pandemics during the Tang dynasty 1300 years ago triggered this elite revolt:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Lushan_Rebellion

And this peasant revolt, which lasted a full decade and captured the imperial capital:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huang_Chao#Rebellion

Nobody worships Xi Jinping as a living god, either his inner circle all the way down to the people sweeping the streets. Xi, like his fellow emperors over thousands of years, as well as potential challengers, isn’t so much forward- as backward-looking. He examines thousands of years of Chinese history as a catalog of the ways in which future challenges to his reign might arise. Pandemics are just one of those challenges, and you can bet he takes this seriously, not because he particularly cares about the hoi polloi, but because this is one of the ways in which he might get himself killed.