It might seem preposterous to suggest that an outbreak of COVID-19 has imperiled the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), especially at a time when the government’s aggressive containment efforts seem to be working.
However, it would be a mistake to underestimate the political implications of China’s biggest public health crisis in recent history.
According to a New York Times analysis, at least 760 million Chinese, or more than half of the country’s population, are under varying degrees of residential lockdown.
This has had serious individual and aggregate consequences, from a young boy remaining home alone for days after witnessing his grandfather’s death to a significant economic slowdown. Yet it seems to have contributed to a dramatic fall in new infections outside Wuhan, where the outbreak began, to low single digits.
Even as China’s leaders tout their progress in containing the virus, they are showing signs of stress. Like elites in other autocracies, they feel the most politically vulnerable during crises. They know that, when popular fear and frustration is elevated, even minor missteps could cost them dearly and lead to severe challenges to their power.
“Frustration” would be putting it mildly. The Chinese public is well and truly outraged over the authorities’ early efforts to suppress information about the new virus, including that it can be transmitted among humans.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the uproar over the Feb. 7 announcement that Li Wenliang (李文亮) — an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital who local authorities accused of “rumor-mongering” when he attempted to warn his colleagues about the coronavirus in December last year — had died of it.
With China’s censorship apparatus temporarily weakened, probably because censors had not received clear instructions on how to handle such stories, even official newspapers printed news of Li’s death on their front pages.
Business leaders, a typically apolitical group, have also denounced the conduct of the Wuhan authorities and demanded accountability.
There is no doubt that the authorities’ initial mishandling of the outbreak is what enabled it to spread so widely, with healthcare professionals — more than 3,000 of whom have been infected so far — being hit particularly hard.
Despite the central government’s attempts to use local authorities as scapegoats — many health officials in Hubei Province have been fired — there are likely to be more questions about what Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) knew.
Not surprisingly, Xi has been working hard to repair his image as a strong and competent leader. After the central government ordered the lockdown of Wuhan in late January, Xi appointed Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) to lead the coronavirus task force. That it was Li, not Xi, who went to Wuhan seemed to send the wrong message, as Xi realized in the subsequent days.
On Feb. 3, at a CCP Politburo Standing Committee meeting, Xi took an unusually defensive tone in a speech that smacked of damage control. While he admitted that he had learned of the outbreak before he sounded the alarm, he emphasized his personal role in leading the fight against the virus.
Moreover, Xi on Feb. 10 made a series of public appearances in Beijing, aimed at reinforcing the impression that he is firmly in command.
Three days later, he sacked the party chiefs of Hubei and Wuhan for their inadequate handling of the crisis, and two days after that, in an unprecedented move, the CCP released the full text of Xi’s internal Politburo Standing Committee speech.
Although Xi has apparently regained his aura as a dominant leader — not least thanks to CCP propagandists, who are working overtime to restore his image — the political fallout is likely to be serious. The profound uproar that marked those fleeting moments of relative cyberfreedom — the two weeks, from late January through early last month, when censors lost their grip on the popular narrative — should be deeply worrying to the CCP.
Indeed, the CCP might be highly adept at repressing dissent, but repression is not eradication. Even a momentary lapse could unleash bottled-up anti-regime sentiment. It is terrifying to think what might happen to the CCP’s hold on power if Chinese were able to speak freely for a few months, not just a couple of weeks.
The most consequential political upshot of the COVID-19 outbreak might well be the erosion of support for the CCP among China’s urban middle class. Not only have their lives been severely disrupted by the epidemic and response to it; they have been made acutely aware of just how helpless they are under a regime that prizes secrecy and its own power over public health and welfare.
In the post-Mao Zedong (毛澤東) era, Chinese and the CCP have adhered to an implicit social contract: The people tolerate the party’s political monopoly, as long as the party delivers sufficient economic progress and adequate governance.
The CCP’s poor handling of the COVID-19 outbreak threatens this tacit pact. In this sense, China’s one-party regime might well be in a more precarious position than it realizes.
Pei Minxin is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a nonresident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the US.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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