The EconomistFebruary 1st 2020 China 35I
f censors incommunist-led regimes are good for anything, it is
spurring creativity. With a new coronavirus stalking China, neti-
zens have been heaping praise on “Chernobyl”, an American-made
television drama about the Soviet Union’s worst nuclear disaster.
Their aim is to sneak discussion of the outbreak onto China’s tight-
ly policed internet. In less hectic times censors would swiftly
stamp out such impertinence. For the parallels with the reactor ex-
plosion in 1986, and the official cover-up that followed, are painful
for China’s Communist Party bosses, whose system of government
was cribbed from Soviet designs. But pointed comparisons keep
popping up on China’s social media. One urges Chinese viewers to
learn from “Chernobyl” that a free flow of information offers more
security than aircraft-carriers, Moon landings and other signs of
superpower might. Another contrasts a soothing interview grant-
ed to state television by the governor of Hubei, the province where
the epidemic began, with a speech by the hero of “Chernobyl”, a So-
viet scientist, about the costs of official lies.
Parallels are likely to continue in the real world. Back in the
1980s, Kremlin leaders scapegoated local officials and engineers,
coolly blaming them for the disaster and denying a wider cov-
er-up. In recent days, Chinese state media have dropped heavy
hints that the mayor of Wuhan, the industrial city where the virus
was first detected, will lose his job. When Li Keqiang, China’s
prime minister, was appointed to oversee virus-control work, cyn-
ics suggested that his role was to take the fall should the outbreak
spark a pandemic—in effect, to protect President Xi Jinping.
As it happens, censors should be relieved that Chinese netizens
are focusing on the ills of Soviet collective leadership. It would be
more dangerous if online critics were to start exploring a historical
parallel closer to home, namely the way that in Chinese history
natural disasters undermined an emperor’s claim to rule. More
than one dynasty fell after catastrophes signalled that Heaven had
withdrawn its favour. It was not only seen as ineptitude when a
ruler was unable to protect his people from floods or famine—or,
as in the second century during the Han dynasty, from repeated
outbreaks of disease (probably smallpox and measles) that killed
perhaps a third of the population. Such bungling showed that the
emperor lacked virtue and deserved to be overthrown, people said.Modern-dayChinesemaynotbelieve that a rampaging corona-
virus signals divine anger with Mr Xi. Still, the party chief has a
great deal at stake in this crisis, precisely because large claims are
made about his wisdom, which is now taught in schools and stud-
ied by party members as Xi Jinping Thought. Every day, state media
credit Mr Xi with personally guiding China to ever-greater pros-
perity, modernity and global clout. No leader has amassed such in-
dividual power since Mao Zedong, or been so lavishly praised. Chi-
nese intellectuals accuse Mr Xi of claiming the mantle of an
emperor. They point to Mr Xi’s speeches praising traditional Chi-
nese culture, and lauding codes of morality and deference to impe-
rial authority, as handed down by Confucius and other sages.
The result is an awkward hybrid. On the one hand, officials
make claims about the efficiency of collective party leadership
that would be familiar to any Soviet apparatchik. To them, populist
insurgencies sweeping the West are proof that multiparty elec-
tions, a free press and other forms of democratic accountability
are sources of chaos and dysfunction. As they describe it, China’s
system is a meritocracy that selects highly competent experts to
run the country, with a track record of correcting their own mis-
takes. Yet at the same time, the party’s propagandists lay claim to a
very different form of legitimacy, involving the people’s love for
and trust in one man, Mr Xi. So sweeping is their praise of him that
it leaves essentially no room for the idea that Mr Xi could make a
serious mistake.
This convoluted claim to legitimacy can be heard in the context
of the current coronavirus outbreak, as leaders insist that their
system of government is ideally suited to tackling the disease. On
January 28th Chinese leaders hosted the head of the World Health
Organisation (who), a unbody that played an invaluable role in
demanding transparency in 2003 after China’s initial cover-up of
the extent of an outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome
(sars), which led to many avoidable deaths. Wang Yi, the foreign
minister, assured the who’s boss, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus,
that China would be more resolute this time thanks to “the strong
leadership of the party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jin-
ping as the core and the strong advantages of the socialist system”,
as well as its experience of sars.Unaccountable, even to Heaven
It is too simplistic to assume that all bad things that happen in Chi-
na must harm Mr Xi. The virus outbreak could end swiftly, amid
worldwide praise for the bravery of China’s doctors and nurses, the
self-discipline of the public and the resolve of Chinese leaders, al-
beit after a slow start. If the crisis does not end well, scapegoats
will be found, and underlings punished. That alone would not
have to shake Mr Xi’s authority, which can always be shored up
with repression, still greater ideological discipline and nationalist
propaganda. But a botched response to the virus would lay bare
tensions inherent in the party’s hybrid claims to legitimacy.
Mr Xi’s China is two things at once. It is a secretive, techno-au-
thoritarian one-party state, ruled by grey men in unaccountable
councils and secretive committees. It also claims to be a nation-
sized family headed by a patriarch of unique wisdom and virtue, in
a secular, 21st-century version of the mandate of Heaven. If forced
to choose between those competing models, bet on cold, bureau-
cratic control to win out. For Mr Xi and his team learned their own
lesson from the Soviet Union’s fall, five years after the Chernobyl
disaster. Expressions of public love for Mr Xi, the “People’s Leader”,
are all very well. But keeping power is what counts. 7Chaguan The politics of pandemics
Xi Jinping wants to be both feared and loved by the Chinese people. The coronavirus may change that