4 ideas
When the 'fever' became AIDS and people began to die, Ding Hui profited again by selling government-allocated coffins meant to be free and by brokering ghost marriages for the dead. Villagers took revenge by poisoning his twelve-year-old son, whose ghost narrates the novel, and Ding Hui's own father eventually kills him.
An extractive broker who creates a catastrophe can keep earning from each later phase of it: first from the risky trade, then from the scarce goods the dying need, then from the rituals of death itself. Because he already controls the networks, official contacts, and supply channels, the person who caused the damage is best placed to monetize its aftermath. His profits grow as the harm deepens.
When officials measure success by income growth and promote a single get-rich scheme from above, poor people's bodies become the raw material, and safety is treated as a cost to cut. Because the campaign carries political authority, the risk is framed as patriotic modernization, not danger. When disaster follows, the institutions that promoted the scheme have every reason to conceal it rather than to repair it.
When the sick are quarantined together in the village schoolhouse, their shared death sentence does not produce solidarity for long. Food and goods are stolen, and ambitious patients seize the village seal to make themselves leaders and allocate coffins and timber. Scarcity and the chance to hold power reproduce the same petty grabbing and rank-seeking even among people with months to live.