Meanwhile, the protests in Hong Kong from June, 2019, have been a reaction to a perceived erosion of the territory's quasi-autonomy as a special administrative region. While ostensibly an anti-government protest against the introduction of an extradition bill, the Hong Kong protests could be viewed as an attempt to push back against Xi's expansion of central power.
Concurrently, a US–China trade war instigated by President Donald Trump's imposition of tariffs on China in 2018 is hitting the Chinese economy.
The COVID-19 outbreak is compounding this economic situation, holding out the potential for a global recession with major disruption to global supply chains.
Taken together, these entangled circumstances have created a unique setting in which the COVID-19 outbreak is evolving. In an interview with the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao, the physician Joseph Sung, who had a leading role in the fight to contain SARS in 2003, underscored the striking differences between Hong Kong society then and now. “At that time, society was more united”, Sung said of the SARS era, “whereas now people feel they have to rely on themselves for protection. They have less trust in the government”.
Analogies of COVID-19 are rarely extended to encompass these intermeshing social and political environments. The lessons approach skates over this history, even as history's expediency as a tool for instruction is flaunted. Historians need to contest false analogies that obscure, rather than elucidate, the social processes partly driving new infections. They need to challenge efforts to corral and straitjacket the past into summary lessons. By contrast, espousing an anti-lessons approach to history might prevent trained incapacity. Such an approach could help to ensure a strategic open-mindedness to emergent threats at a time when borders of many kinds are going up across the globe.
I declare no competing interests.