Dr Guillaume Zagury is a French epidemiologist and medical practitioner based in Shanghai. He is author of a forthcoming book detailing key learnings from the management of the pandemic worldwide. Dr Laurie Underwood is a professor of intercultural business communications (adjunct) at NYU Shanghai and other business schools.

As families worldwide send their children back to school, one region stands out regarding the mood of both students and parents. Families in East Asia face the new academic year with more calm and less fear about the pandemic disrupt-ing education than most other regions.

Importantly, most children here are prepared to attend school in person, gaining the full benefit of face-to-face teaching and socialising. The possibility of an outbreak does not worry most families here because occasional outbreaks are met with swift, effective isolation and imposing quarantine until the outbreak subsides.

Contrast this against the “back to school” season in the United States, where some students witnessed protesters pas-sionately picketing against masks outside their school gates. In Europe, similar confu-sion erupted. Professors in Brussels, for example, returned to the classroom wear-ing masks while their peers in Flanders returned barefaced.

By now, it is clear East Asia has generally contained the virus far more efficiently than the West. In tracking coronavirus- related death rates, East Asian countries tend to have tens to dozens of deaths per million people versus 1,600 per million in Europe and 2,000 per million in the US.

It is also clear that containing the virus requires the implementation of key public health measures. For the public, those include mask-wearing, social distancing and handwashing; for Covid-19 patients, testing, tracing and isolation; and for hospi-tals, adequate equipment, staff and space.

So, if the “how” of fighting the virus is well-known, why have East Asian societies achieved a death rate far lower than that of 

the West? These results illustrate far more than better implementation of public health measures. 

We believe these results demonstrate the effectiveness of a new sociopolitical model emerging in East Asia which we call “digital Confucianism”. This model, which combines Confucian-style acceptance of governance with continuous advance-ments in technology, is clearly suited to containing pathogenic virus pandemics.

“Digital Confucianism is here to stay and will be used across East Asia to tackle a number of issues

The combination of digital technology plus smooth acceptance of its mass use has armed East Asia with speed. In China, for example, each outbreak of the virus has seen the government respond by shutting down affected districts – locking down specific buildings, train stops or airports – until all Covid-19 patients are hospitalised and everyone exposed is quarantined.

Most of China’s virus controls have been enhanced by digital tracing. Because the country is now essentially cashless as virtually all consumer transactions are conducted by mobile e-commerce, people seamlessly accepted the government’s requirement for all residents to use an app showing their individual health status. 

Flashing one’s mobile health code – show-ing as green, yellow or red, depending on one’s exposure to Covid-19 – is a “new normal” in the country. 

Elsewhere in East Asia, similar health status mobile apps and QR codes are in use in South Korea, Japan and Singapore. While China did not miss a beat in rolling out its digital health code, France is still struggling to gain public acceptance of the pass sanitaire and the US cannot even discuss systematic digital tracing. 

Is digital tracing a violation of personal privacy? Certainly. Is personal freedom hindered when any shopping centre secur-ity guard can trace your location during the past 14 days? Yes. Is other data also col-lected, by phone apps as well as closed circuit TV, in many areas of China? Yes. 

But none of our Chinese colleagues and friends are complaining about this. In fact, the comment we have heard repeatedly during the past two years is, “We are so lucky to be in China because China is safe.”

If all this sounds like George Orwell’s 1984, we agree. The authors of this article, being French and American citizens, value highly the ideals of freedom and dem-ocracy. However, being based in China during the entire pandemic, and in our roles as educators and physicians (and as parents), we see first-hand the many benefits of digital Confucianism.

Many of our friends back home passion-ately defend the right to privacy and reject mass use of digital tracing in the name of freedom. We propose an alternative view. The ability to return to work within weeks rather than months or years of social dis-tancing – thus avoiding the isolation, stress and exhaustion caused by working from home – is also a form of freedom. 

The speedy reopening of restaurants, theatres and recreation travel – contrasted against the prolonged social distancing in the West – is also a form of freedom. 

Most importantly, the ability to send our children back to school and avoid the harmful impact of prolonged “learning from home” – including depression, apathy and other mental health problems – are also very valuable forms of freedom.

To sum up, we believe that East Asia’s superior management of the virus signals far more than the efficient containment of Covid-19. The pandemic has, in many ways, dethroned Western-style democratic capitalism as the best sociopolitical model to advance society, foster economic growth and address pressing social problems. 

Digital Confucianism is here to stay and will be used across East Asia to tackle a number of social issues. Armed with this approach, China, Japan, South Korea and other East Asian nations will progress far faster than Western nations in solving a host of issues, including crime, environ-mental protection and poverty alleviation.

The world is now in the midst of an era of phenomenal advancements in digital tech-nology. Going forward, nations that pair these advancements in science and digital technology with mass acceptance of them –for the collective good – will zoom ahead. It is our deep hope that the West will recog-nise the many benefits possible with the discerning use of digital Confucianism and will start zooming too.