As the scope of the coronavirus threat has begun to impress itself on the American public this past week, and the impulse to look inward and protect ourselves, at the national, state, and personal levels, becomes stronger, we need to reserve some energy and effort to understanding how this pandemic in the making came to be. In particular, the fact that it’s emerged from China, one of the most authoritarian and anti-democratic countries on earth, seems to cry out for deep examination. The country has been recalcitrant in its sharing of information about the virus with other nations; from this perspective, the country’s authoritarian style has hampered the efforts of the global community to control the spread of the coronavirus, and so itself effectively contributes to the threat to other nations.
Likewise, it has seemed highly probable to me that the country’s totalitarian governance has a direct relationship to its internal mishandling of the outbreak — but this has been more of an intuition than a well-developed theory. The basic lack of accountability to its people gives the Chinese government an incentive not to act competently, but this is certainly balanced by the government’s need not to lose the confidence of its population and provoke unrest or even threats to the Communist Party’s hold on power. At the same time, I could see the obvious counter-argument that its broad control over the population meant it might conceivably be more effective than democratic nations in locking down the virus; after all, so easily being able to effectively declare quarantines for vast swathes of the population could be seen as an advantage when dealing with a contagious disease. And wouldn’t its vast surveillance apparatus aid it in detecting and controlling an epidemic?
But as professor and technology writer Zeynep Tufekci discusses at The Atlantic, the idea that authoritarian leaders might have trouble understanding what’s going on in their own countries is actually a well-documented phenomenon. From China’s own modern history, she describes how the famines that began in the 1950’s could be traced to Chairman Mao Zedong receiving wildly inflated information about food production from subordinates “afraid of reporting bad news and because they wanted to please their superiors.” However, China’s leadership learned from such tendencies, and in more recent times has used “big-data analytics in a digital public sphere” to monitor public sentiments and monitor events. The government has used this to respond to real issues (such as incidences of corruption) in a way that allows it to appear accountable to the Chinese people without the democratic mechanisms that normally make accountability possible.
But under Xi Jinping, surveillance has been heightened ever more through social media and monitoring apps, and the country now also has an extensive system of cameras that interface with facial-recognition software. The logical effect is to make people more cautious about the information they share, which confounds the government’s ability to rely on its monitoring of them to manage social unrest.
When the virus began to appear, it also seems likely, based on Tufekci’s description of events, that local authorities had incentives to downplay the ominous news, and in so doing enabled its spread. She points to Xi’s slow response to the outbreak as evidence, writing:
It’s hard to imagine that a leader of Xi’s experience would be so lax as to let the disease spread freely for almost two months, only to turn around and shut the whole country down practically overnight [. . .] If people are too afraid to talk, and if punishing people for “rumors” becomes the norm, a doctor punished for spreading news of a disease in one province becomes just another day, rather than an indication of impending crisis.
Tufekci notes that it’s difficult to know with certainty how events have played out in China, but the dynamics she outlines are persuasive. The coming months should involve a continued close look at how Chinese authoritarianism has led to a direct threat to the health and livelihood of the rest of the global community.
Even without definitive conclusions, it’s not too soon to see China as a warning sign, as our own authoritarian president shows every sign of fumbling the U.S. response to the coronavirus, threatening to add a deadly new dimension to his reign of incompetence. Many observers were rightly horrified by his press conference yesterday; coming on the heels of bountiful evidence that he is less worried about Americans dying than about the stock market drying up and costing him re-election, his appearance provided further evidence that he’s not up to the task of protecting the United States, either mentally or morally.
And just as the Chinese effort seems undermined by the unwillingness of those lower in the state hierarchy to pass bad news on to their superiors, the president has spent the last three years replacing competence with loyalty in the U.S. government, prizing denial and disinformation over facts. It seems well within the realm of possibility that he has now surrounded himself sufficiently with an apparatus of personnel and information-gathering that ensures he will only hear what he wants to as he deals with the first true crisis of his presidency.
It also seems quite possible that he will resort to authoritarian solutions to the challenge, both out of personal inclination and because the intelligence and prior planning needed to deal with this crisis are wholly beyond the man. At a minimum, he will surely use this “viral invasion” to double down on his lies that America needs to cut itself off from the world, when the real lesson is that his idea of defending America’s borders, through physical walls, destroying alliances, and cruelty to immigrants (including crowding them into camps where they are more vulnerable to communicable diseases) bears no relationship to what protecting the United States actually looks like. As many have noted, a global pandemic can only be addressed by global cooperation; in the face of this, the radical nationalism that the president advocates begins to appear even more cut off from reality, even outright delusional, and promoting American weakness, not strength.