Instead of having an adult conversation with the population about the virus and putting in place reasonable policies that have been used effectively elsewhere, the Chinese state has gone into full lockdown mode. This demonstrates one of those truisms from political science: Authoritarian governments are like people who don’t have any fingers but do possess two thumbs. They can take forceful actions but can’t fine-tune the levers of government.

Actually, I’m not being fair. When the Chinese Communist Party has time, it can come up with and use sophisticated policies — witness its co-opting of traditional faiths to fill a spiritual vacuum in society.

But when faced with a crisis, the party can’t seem to avoid grand gestures: building hospitals from scratch in two weeks, locking down tens of millions of people, banning millions more from traveling to big cities and so on. In some ways, a moment like this one is a technocrat’s dream: When Western health care experts say that this sort of lockdown won’t work, they basically mean it’s never been tried on this scale with this kind of uberefficient government.

Now that it’s being tried, not just in Beijing but also across the country, the effects are kind of thrilling to watch. Apartment compounds like mine are being fumigated. (With what? Who cares!) People are walking around with loudspeakers blaring out warnings against the virus. Villages are closing their gates as if bandits were on the prowl. And going to a restaurant or a bar is almost an act of treason or, at best, foolish selfishness.

The most interesting question is why the party feels the need to carry on like this. I think it knows the people don’t trust it in these cases and assume there has been a cover-up.

Hence one of the most popular figures in the crisis: Zhong Nanshan, the hero of the 2002-3 SARS outbreak, now 83, who is back in action, treating patients and warning citizens about the need for hygiene. He has been adopted as the incorruptible official — a familiar trope in Chinese history, the Confucian official who stands tall despite pressures to bend. And so we read endless profiles of Dr. Zhong in Chinese social media, discussing his family background, upbringing, successes and apolitical pursuit of science-based truth. The clear implication is that he is that rare official capable of such principled conduct.

Behind all this lies the feeling that most other people in the party can’t quite be trusted. This has been reinforced over the past few days by reports that at least eight people who were detained in Wuhan in early January on charges of spreading rumors are in fact medical doctors, not fear-mongering ne’er-do-wells. This startling fact is now leaking out in online reports that are sometimes, but not always, being blocked. At some point, the government will have to admit to a partial cover-up.