Opinion | China’s Coronavirus Crisis Is Just Beginning - The New Y... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/03/opinion/coronavirus-china-xi-...

https://nyti.ms/3crfac4

China’s Coronavirus
Crisis Is Just Beginning
Xi Jinping’s handling of the epidemic is reviving political dissent.

By Geremie R. Barmé
Mr. Barmé is the editor of China Heritage.

March 3, 2020

The Chinese Communist Party has always been quick to congratulate itself for how
it deals with crises, be they natural disasters or catastrophes of its own making. The
coronavirus epidemic is no exception, even now that it has become a global health
emergency. The government of China’s first response to the deadly virus, detected in
late December, was dilatory at best, willfully negligent at worst, and yet the party
promptly lavished praise on the state, particularly on China’s president, Xi Jinping.

“Seeking Truth,” the party’s leading theoretic journal, recently celebrated the fact
that the “People’s Leader” had handled the disaster with unflappable confidence,
proving himself to be not only “the guiding light of China and the backbone of 1.4
billion Chinese,” but also a “calming balm” for a world whose nerves had been
jangled by the outbreak.

Judging by the hyperbole, it would seem that the party’s or the president’s own
nerves have been badly jangled. With good reason. Not since Charter 08, the
manifesto by Liu Xiaobo and other activists that called for constitutional reform
more than a decade ago, has the Chinese Communist Party faced such a pointed
challenge from its political critics.

In early February, as party propagandists were preparing a book-length paean to

Mr. Xi’s crisis management skills — “A Battle Against Epidemic: China Combating

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Covid-19 in 2020” (also to be published in English, French, Spanish, Russian and

Arabic) — two well-known critics of China’s party-state published searing analyses
of what the outbreak really exposed.

Xu Zhangrun, a law professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, posted this

assessment online: “The coronavirus epidemic has revealed the rotten core of
Chinese governance; the fragile and vacuous heart of the jittering edifice of state
has thereby been revealed as never before.”

Since early 2016, Xu Zhangrun has been publishing speeches and essays warning of
the perils that China is inviting by turning away from substantive economic and
political reform and instead reaffirming the Chinese Communist Party’s dominance.
His work is usually widely read in China — until it is censored. But thanks to its
broad circulation in international Chinese-language media, it gets recirculated on
the mainland in the form of digital samizdat, and is frequently quoted in WeChat
discussions.

In what arguably is his most famous critique of the Xi government, which was
published online in China in July 2018, Xu Zhangrun had written: “The gunpowder-
like stench of militant ideology has become stronger.” He had decried attempts to
mythologize Mr. Xi like Mao Zedong was many decades before: “We need to ask
why a vast country like China, one that was previously so ruinously served by a
personality cult simply has no resistance to this new cult.”

And ruinously it is served again today, with the coronavirus epidemic. Xu Zhangrun
wrote of Mr. Xi in his essay last month: “The price for his overarching egotism is
now being paid by the nation as a whole.”

For Xu Zhangrun, the current crisis is only the latest in a series of policy failures —
including Beijing’s handling of the trade war with the United States and the pro-
democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong — that highlight the deficiencies of an
authoritarian system that has increasingly concentrated power in the hands of one
man:

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“Don’t you see that although everyone looks to The One for the nod of approval, The
One himself is clueless and has no substantive understanding of rulership and
governance, despite his undeniable talent for playing power politics?”

“The political life of the nation is in a state of collapse and the ethical core of the
system has been hollowed out,” Xu Zhangrun declares in his elegant signature prose,
which rings with classical cadences. “The ultimate concern of China’s polity today
and that of its highest leader is to preserve at all costs the privileged position of the
Communist Party and to maintain ruthlessly its hold on power.”

The same day that essay was published, Feb. 4, another powerful, sarcastic analysis
of China’s party-state appeared online. In an open letter addressed to Mr. Xi, the
legal expert and rights activist Xu Zhiyong called on the president to take
responsibility for numerous political missteps and step down.

Xu Zhiyong — who previously spent nearly four years in jail after being sentenced
for “gathering crowds to disrupt public order” — was on the run when he published
this text. He was located by the police in Guangzhou, southern China, on Feb. 15 and
has been in detention, his whereabouts unknown, since.

Xu Zhiyong’s essay lambasts the president for promoting a vision for China’s future
that is, in fact, a muddle of contradictions:

“Where do you really think you are taking China? Do you have any clue yourself?
You talk up the Reform and Opening-Up policy at the same time that you are trying
to resuscitate the corpse of Marxism-Leninism.”

Also: “Your lack of confidence means that everywhere you look you see threats and
you crank up ‘stability maintenance’ measures in response.”

The term “stability maintenance” (維穩, wei wen) is shorthand for a vast, well-
established system devoted to maintaining the Chinese Communist Party’s power
and control over society. With a budget that outstrips the military’s, this domestic
security machinery comprises a pervasive network of paramilitary forces, the
police, local officials, neighborhood committees, informal community spies, internet

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police and censors, secret service agents and watchdogs, as well as everyday
bureaucrat-monitors. Used, for example, to quell any sign of uprisings in Tibetan
areas of the country and popular discontent following the 2008 earthquake in
Sichuan, this network has been working full-throttle since the first coronavirus
infection was announced in the central city of Wuhan in December.

It was “in the name of ‘stability maintenance,’” Xu Zhiyong’s essay charges, that
“the Public Security Bureau of Wuhan threatened and denigrated doctors who tried
to reveal the truth about the coronavirus.” The state-controlled China Central
Television in Beijing, he adds, “offered support by condemning rumormongers and
decried the doctors’ legitimate freedom to express their views. The cover-up in
Wuhan led directly to what is now a national disaster.”

And that was no mishap. Xu Zhiyong warns that what is happening in Xinjiang today
— an extensive surveillance network; large numbers of Uighurs “incarcerated in
‘educational training centers’ on the most spurious grounds” — could soon become
the norm for the rest of China. “What kind of country has ever, anywhere, been run
like this?”

What’s more, he suggests, the system undermines itself: “Stability at all costs — at
the price of the freedom of the Chinese people, their dignity, as well as their pursuit
of happiness? Yet, for all of that, is the system really stable?”

Xu Zhangrun, too, points out its inherent paradoxes, notably the ones revealed by
the constant expansion of “big data totalitarianism” and “WeChat terror.” “The
Chinese body politic is riven by a new canker,” he declares, “but it is an infection
germane to the system itself.”

Where, then, is the country headed as it increasingly stymies the rights of its
citizens and stifles civil society?

For Xu Zhangrun:

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“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.”

For Xu Zhiyong:

“I’m deeply concerned about our nation’s future; I’m afraid that a system that is so
tightly wound up is a dangerously brittle one; and, I’m worried that there is no
meaningful or substantive form of civil society that can deal with the situation.”

Yet Xu Zhiyong rejects the view promoted by the Chinese Communist Party and
some of its fellow-travelers that a country as vast and complex as China is unsuited
to constitutional rule and democracy: “There are those who argue that China needs
a strongman to lead it. I would posit that the kind of authority figure we need should
be more like Chiang Ching-kuo,” he writes, referring to the president of Taiwan from
1978 to 1988 (and son of Chiang Kai-shek) who steered the country toward the end of
martial law and undertook the reforms that eventually transformed it into a modern
democracy. But instead, says Xu Zhiyong, addressing Mr. Xi, “With your move away
from collective leadership in favor of your own one-man dictatorship, you are
driving the country backward.”

The president of China, shortly after coming to power in late 2012, famously quoted
an ancient Chinese poem about the fall of a kingdom to explain the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991: No “True Men” (or “Real Men,” in some translations) had
come forward to defend it. Now, Xu Zhiyong was pointing out caustically to Mr. Xi:

“How can you expect there to be a ‘True Man’ when you, The Revered One, sit at the
pinnacle with millions fawning at the foot of your throne? Autocracy encourages
sycophants to crowd around the Emperor, but this particular Emperor’s new clothes
are on full display for all to see. Yet, even now, the people of China dare not
‘comment inappropriately’ about what is in front of them.”

“Well,” Xu Zhiyong continues, “I’m like that kid who blurted out the truth: The
Emperor has no clothes!”

Indeed. He and Xu Zhangrun have raised their voices at a moment of national

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emergency, both well aware that their warnings may prove not only futile, but also,
for them, suicidal.

Xu Zhangrun’s essay ends with a plea:

“Faced with the crisis of the coronavirus, confronting this disordered world, I join
my compatriots — the 1.4 billion men and women, brothers and sisters of China, the
countless multitudes who have no way of fleeing this land — and I call on them: rage
against this injustice; let your lives burn with a flame of decency; break through the
stultifying darkness and welcome the dawn.”

A few days after the publication of these texts, Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist and
early whistle-blower in Wuhan, died, having been infected by the virus. The
outpouring of grief expressed throughout China took the party aback.

And so it tried to regain control of the narrative by casting Dr. Li as a brave soldier
in the “people’s war” against the virus: He and other health care workers infected
on the job — their number now exceeds 3,300 people — were praised for making
sacrifices for the party, the state and the people, in that order.

Meanwhile, citizen journalists who had been reporting independently from Wuhan
were disappearing. And by mid-February, Xu Zhangrun was incommunicado in
Beijing and Xu Zhiyong had been detained.

On Feb. 20, the official Xinhua News Agency published an opinion piece entitled
“Truth Telling is a Precious Virtue.” It admonished: “One must pursue truth and not
feel intimidated by those in authority. It requires a selflessness that allows one to cry
out in protest and speak up in the best interests of the people.” The public’s reaction
online was explosive; many people denounced the essay’s hypocrisy.

A new crisis generates new dissent, followed by repression — and then more
dissent.

As both Xu Zhangrun and Xu Zhiyong have pointed out, it is the canker in China’s
body politic that turned the coronavirus outbreak into a health crisis far worse than

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it needed to become. And the epidemic, in turn, has only exposed the extent of the
party-state’s sickness.

Geremie R. Barmé is an historian and the editor of China Heritage. He translated from the Chinese the two
recent essays by Xu Zhangrun and Xu Zhiyong; they are available in full in English on ChinaFile.

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