Stupid Authoritarian Regime Syndrome (SARS)
Feb 7, 2020
THE CORONAVIRUS has its first martyr: Li Wenliang, the whistleblowing Wuhan opthalmologist who was reprimanded for “spreading rumours” only a week or so ago, has now died after contracting the illness from a patient while performing a glaucoma operation. He was just 34.
Apart from being a public health crisis, this has turned into a major political catastrophe for the Chinese Communist Party. Pundits are calling it China’s Chernobyl, though it should also be remembered that the same thing was said about the SARS outbreak of 2003.
An old article written by the economist Wu Jinglian in the aftermath of SARS is now doing the rounds. Back then, Wu called for more transparency and accountability in government. Meanwhile, social media - WeChat in particular - is blistering and crackling with discontent. Users are calling for Li Wenliang to be given the Nobel Peace Prize, which is not (alas) bestowed posthumously. Rage is building. It seems that despite all their ruthlessly accumulated political power, the Chinese Communist Party’s moral authority has never been weaker.
We are clearly getting a repetition of Stupid Authoritarian Regime Syndrome. Their reflex is to shut down, to repress, to censor, to reach for the draconian. Meanwhile, they mobilise their entire chain of command, from the Premiers in Beijing to the street-level volunteers, to take on what has become an existential threat to the system. Teetering on top of all this is Xi Jinping, who is currently nowhere to be seen.
In a 2004 essay, the political scholar He Baogang pointed out that the outbreak of SARS came after a sustained crackdown on media outlets lasting from June to December 2002. Beijing had even established a special task force to eliminate illegal political publications, and prosecuted 70 newspapers and 48 journals. There was, He suggests, an explicit connection between the coordinated state repression of free speech and the subsequent cover-up of a new and deadly infectious disease.
SARS, he said, gave the incoming administration of Hu Jintao a “window of opportunity” to push through vital political reforms that would make the system more open, more flexible, and more capable of handling epidemics. Instead, Hu blamed predecessors and took credit for the “people’s war” against the disease, and the window quickly slammed shut. Things returned to normal. The system prevailed.
The death of Li Wenliang, though, does represent another window of sorts for the central government, and I have no doubt they will take it: they will try to scapegoat the Wuhan government and police, fire (and perhaps even prosecute) local officials, laying the blame for this crisis firmly in their corner. As soon as Wuhan is declared safe, it will be placed in lockdown again so Xi can sweep in and conduct a mass self-criticism session, as he did in the past in Hebei when another crisis - the Beijing “smogocalpyse” - also threatened to undermine CCP rule. The trick, honed over the decades, is to associate the Centre with the solution and not with the problem.
