The Big Doctor State
March 10, 2020
AT THE gym, in the supermarket, at the entrance to every compound, we are being asked to hold up our phone and click open an app that shows our whereabouts for the last few weeks, giving us a “green light” if we have stayed away from infection zones. Big Brother has become Big Doctor. China has now found itself a perfect excuse to deploy all this hypersecurity state paraphernalia for our own good.
The Washington Post says COVID-19 represents a big opportunity for the state to dig even deeper into the nerves and muscles and memory banks of its people. “[T]he recent introduction of coronavirus-related surveillance measures, many of them unlikely to disappear when the epidemic is over, has also given [President Xi Jinping] an opening to assert even tighter control over society,” the legendary Sinologist Orville Schell tells the paper.
Aside from all the moral and political concerns about human rights, freedom of speech and freedom of movement, the consensus now seems to be that China is well-placed to impose emergency containment measures, lock down transportation and enforce curfews and quarantines, but its top-down political system is simply incapable of properly handling outbreaks when the first occur.
And yet, it is becoming increasingly difficult to argue that the pandemic was a unique consequence of China’s dysfunctional mode of governance when every other system of government appears to be messing up too. Overseas-based dissidents and foreign Sinologists are hoping that this coronovirus will presage the end of authoritarian rule, that it will somehow provide the “Chernobyl moment”: This is wishful thinking.
Xu Zhangrun, a law professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, is warning about “big data totalitarianism”, writing that “The authorities have blocked off all possible roads that may imaginably lead to positive change. We must seriously doubt whether any form of peaceful transition might now even be conceivable.”
As President Xi marches through a heavily scoured and disinfected Wuhan, issuing his stating-the-obvious commandments and telling people to do what they have already been doing for weeks, it is becoming clear that he has won the coronavirus crisis. Despite those early missteps, and despite all the prognostications of western pundits and dissidents, the scales were always tipped so far in Xi’s favour that it would have taken a catastrophe of biblical proportions and a sequence of heinous policy failures to unseat him. As it turns out, China is emerging from the crisis looking stronger than ever.
