Fred Frederikse: Wuhan in centre stage again

A doctor checks the conditions of a patient in Jinyintan Hospital, designated for critical COVID-19 patients, in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province. Photo / Getty Images

Millisphere: A discrete region inhabited by roughly one-thousandth of the world population.

Wuhan (population 11 million) was known by 19th century foreigners as the "Chicago of China". Like Chicago, Wuhan is a major transport hub in the middle of the country. Wuhan is known today as the probable source of Covid-19; probably in a wild animal market, less probably in a bioweapons lab, and probably not as a result of 5G transmissions.

Fred Frederikse

Sitting on a strategic crossing, where the Han River joins the Yangtze, it wasn't until Mao Tse Tung's first five-year-plan that a road/rail bridge was completed there in 1957, joining the rail systems of Northern and Southern China. Previous to that trains crossed on a time-consuming, and dangerous ferry. A second bridge was completed in 1995, and, since 2000, another five bridges have been built and there are now seven bridges and one tunnel at Wuhan.

Wuhan has often played centre stage in China's political theatre. Wuhan was where the Qing dynasty collapsed in 1911 - leading to the civil war which ended with the communists taking power in 1949.

In 1967, accompanied by swimming bodyguards and floating propaganda posters, Mao Tse Tung swam across the Yangtze at Wuhan during China's disastrous Cultural Revolution.

Then in his 70s, Mao was re-establishing himself as "the Great Helmsman" after his
tragic "Great Leap Forward" (1958-62); the Communist Party's compulsory communisation of agriculture which resulted in the largest famine in world history.

The "Wuhan Incident" of 1967 saw two factions competing for control of Wuhan.

Half-a-million incumbents, who administered Wuhan, were challenged by half-a-million Red Guards. Mao threw his weight behind the self-righteous young guards, who prevailed, and Wuhan experienced another great leap backwards.

When Mao swam across the Yangtze there were around two million people in Wuhan. Now the urban area (on both sides of the Yangtze and Han rivers) has a population of more than 11 million.

Since Deng Xiaoping's liberalisation of China's economy in the 1970s about 150 million rural Chinese have gone to the cities every decade. For the party it was convenient; they needed the workers for their new factories and to build the new cities.

The urban share of China's population was 20 per cent in 1980, now China is 60 per cent urban. As people urbanise, and get richer, they consume more processed foods and sugary drinks, and start presenting with type 2 diabetes. Thirty years ago only 1 per cent of Chinese had type 2 diabetes, today it stands at 11 per cent, and is growing.

In recent years China's healthcare costs have been growing by 5-10 per cent faster than their spectacular GDP growth - and around 13 per cent of China's healthcare costs are to do with treating complications arising from diabetes. Figures emerging from Wuhan indicate that being a diabetic is one underlying risk factor leading to Covid-19 deaths.

Figures from China also indicate that being a cigarette smoker is not necessarily a risk factor - in fact it could be the reverse. About half of all Chinese men are cigarette smokers, while few Chinese women smoke. Chinese smokers make up 26 per cent of their population, while only 8-16 per cent of patients hospitalised because of Covid-19 were smokers (depending on which study). In Italy the figures are similar - 8 per cent of those hospitalised were smokers who make up 19 per cent of the population. In France they are trailing nicotine replacement patches on Covid frontline workers.

Total lockdown in Wuhan resulted in a significant drop in Covid cases but coming out of lockdown has resulted in a spike again. During the lockdown Xi Jinping rolled out a cyber crowd-control system, ostensibly to stem the spread of Covid-19.

To use public transport, or enter certain buildings, all citizens of Wuhan have to present their QR code on their phone. If it is green you are good to go. Yellow or red and questions will be asked. One glitch is that it is very hard to get a false red QR code corrected, as some Chinese have discovered.