China is facing what is arguably the worst crisis in governance since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. Even the 1989 Tiananmen uprising did not affect as many people as the Covid lockdowns.
Previous crises were political and social. This one is political and biological, easily visible, and not hidden behind towering red doors. The open defiance of government policy, thuggish enforcement of intolerable rules by “white coat” health workers (who dress in head-to-toe white bunny suits), and utter collapse of infrastructure to support the basics of survival in China’s more international and prosperous city: all of this is an unprecedented disaster. Venerable as they may be, the “theories” of General Secretary Xi do not cure COVID.
Unfortunately, rather than forcing the government to make the most obvious adjustment to the visible realities of the situation, the backlash is more likely to reinforce the Party’s sense of being under siege.
The world has been aghast at images being streamed by the connected and sophisticated people of Shanghai: people leaping from high-rises to their deaths in order to escape the lockdown. Babies separated from their parents and carted around quarantine centers in huge shopping carts. Parents beaten by the health police in front of their children. People opening their windows to scream in unison: “We’re hungry!” Who imagined that this could happen in Shanghai, one of the wealthiest cities in the world? Certainly not Shanghai people. It has been some 60 years since any but a handful of people went hungry in Shanghai.
With the lockdowns, self-obsessed and self-deifying leader-for-life Xi Jinping is clearly reaching for the control over COVID he claimed in 2020. Even in the face of international charges that China was irresponsible by not revealing the virus emergence at its early stages, the government continues to hide early mutation data that could help ease the global impact and might even have inadvertently released the virus. But China’s aggressive mobilization of tracking, testing, and tracing has provided high credibility with Chinese inside and outside China and with the international world.
Now that perception has radically changed, as the established policy confronts newer, faster-spreading variants, and the Party seems incapable of changing courses. The Party is locked down in its own self-made policy claims and propaganda. The botched lockdowns and flow of damaging videos and testimonials undermine Xi’s core messages: infallibility of the Party and total focus on the welfare of the people.
Now the stage is set for a wag-the-dog distraction: a domestic mass movement of some sort, claims of external aggression, anything to give Chinese people the idea that foreigners are against them and they must retreat into isolation. It is notable and darkly comedic that China reports very few “domestically transmitted” cases: less than 1,000 per 25,000 cases, the other 24,000, the people are told, being carried in by unclean foreigners or their mail or freight. That messaging, like the claim that the virus was secretly created by the U.S. in Ukraine and planted in Wuhan, is too much for even the most gullible.
Shanghai is the most visible of locked-down cities, but currently about half of China’s population is locked down, almost 90% of the most populous cities and most of its coastal highways are closed. Given a very low reported death rate and high case rate, not only persistence but toughening the harsh control measures is almost incomprehensible.
For one thing, they are decimating the economy. The controls are far more widespread than in Q1 2020, when China reported that GDP contracted by 6.8%. Truck transport in Shanghai in April has been at 15% of the 2019 level. Ships are lined up outside all China’s major ports. Many container shippers are skipping Shanghai port, but dry bulk and oil tankers unlucky enough to have called on Shanghai face massive delays, as many longshoremen are not working. Exports have basically halted, and steel mills along the east coast are not operating. Crop planting in the Northeast is delayed.
Meanwhile, YouTube watchers are treated to:
· Police and health workers beating and dragging people off even as people claims they have tested negative
· Recordings of Chinese health employees telling residents not to go to hospitals
· Widespread, vocal skepticism about case reporting.
· Disastrous food logistics, angry reports from people claiming not to have eaten in four or five days.
· Breakdowns in trash collection
· Deaths from non-Covid diseases, as hospitals refuse to accept patients
· Complete lack of support for poorer, migrant populations, many of whom lack the resources to purchase food online or pay rent, given workplace closures.
· Dystopic scenes of robotic dogs and drones trumpeting propaganda messages along the empty streets of the city
These measures, now affecting the majority of China’s economy, look like the most colossal misstep any national government has made in decades, given the mismatch between the stated purpose, the evident tactics, and the visible outcomes
With its increasing centralization of power, China has trapped itself in an authoritarian feedback loop (much like Russia's). Bad news is met with anger and withheld from leaders. Empowered central-government teams are parachuted in and confront local leaders. Policymakers are glorified and policy implementers excoriated.
This is not the first example of the negative effects of Xi Jinping’s recentralization of authority, a stark reversal of Deng’s focus on collective decision making. Another recent example is the self-induced energy crisis. China has massive coal reserves and consumes 4 billion tons a year, but it ran short of coal. Why? Misguided yet forceful command-economy efforts to constrain inflation through intervention in transfer pricing and environmental enforcement throughout the power value chain, from mine to end-users
What does this mean for China’s reform trajectory? China has managed only one reform-era leadership transition that followed institutionalized rules, from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao. Hu was pilloried as weak as Xi ascended, crushed political competitors, and took singular control of the top organs of power. But to the extent that the history of China’s legacy governance structures has lessons for the present, it is useful to reflect on the wise words of the second century BC poet Jia Yi, whose famous essay, “The Faults of Qin,” (过秦论) noted that there was a big difference between grabbing power and using it wisely.