Originally Posted by sinoflyer

You are applying Western cultural norms based on personal freedom and individual-thinking to Chinese culture that regards people not as individuals but as elements of a larger humanity. Much of Chinese culture originated from the Yellow River Basin, which flooded regularly and invariably swept some people away each time. For example, the notion of celebrating the Lunar New Year (guo-nian) isn't really about welcoming the spring and planting seeds but refers to a classical fable of having survived (guo) a human-eating monster (Nian). In more recent history, the Chinese torched the entire city of Changsha in 1938, killing tens of thousands, to leave nothing for the Japanese to take. And during the HIV outbreak in several villages in Henan in the early 2000s, the villages were isolated to contain the HIV spread until the problem literally died away. Now with the coronavirus, people in the affected areas are accepting their fate as a part of the bigger whole. The current government's "patriotic education" and its history of intimidating the people have definite effects on the people's reactions, but it's the underlying culture that allows the Chinese to quarantine themselves in a way that other cultures like ours in the U.S. will absolutely not tolerate.