Introduction: Confronting the Covid-19 Epidemic and Control: Reports and Reflections from China

Early in 2020, while we were preparing for the Chinese lunar calendar’s New Year’s Day and Spring Festival on 25 January, the Covid-19 first appeared in Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei Province and one of China’s biggest cities. The virus quickly spread through the entire country, causing thousands of people to lose their lives and many more to be hospitalized or quarantined. As a natural disaster suddenly appearing in the present world, the virus is a kind of revenge of nature upon human beings, who have exhausted the earth’s natural resources, ill-treated nature, and sometimes continued eating wild animals during the past few decades, as the grand project of modernity led to a process of globalization. The Butterfly Effect of this Black Swan, the coronavirus, set off a global upheaval. In China itself, through the joint efforts of ordinary people and medical personnel as well as central and local government intervention, the virus was effectively contained. Cases imported from abroad still flare up now and again though, and the epidemic escalates globally. Since this is a global health emergency, it should be contained by global governance.