In November 2019, doctors and nurses in the Chinese city of Wuhan, located in the southeastern Hubei Province started noticing an influx of patients suffering from an unusually violent flu. China is no stranger to harsh seasonal flu outbreaks, but this was unlike anything they had ever seen before. Older patients began ending up in ICUs and their lung scans resulted in the startling realisation that this was something very different.
The story of what happened next has gone down in history as a compendium of some of the most poignant and expensive lessons about governance, economics and geopolitics that 21st century humanity has had to face in the short and compressed space of just 2 years.
Regime security obsession causes death – Lots of it
The Chinese Communist Party is hardly a stranger to taking decisions that many of us would find restrictive, invasive – even unthinkable. The institution that has controlled the government of the world’s most populated country since the early 20th century has presided over a litany of the most unbelievable human disasters, governance travesties and draconian policies in recorded human history. The world has become so used to such reports coming out of China that information such as the fact that Chairman Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ directly killed up to 45 million people barely raises an eyebrow.
For reference, the first world war killed about 20 million people and permanently reshaped the world. When it is China however, eyes glaze over because, well – is it not just the Chinese at it again? Banning Google and only allowing their citizens access to government-approved information – it’s just China. Locking millions of Uighur Muslims up in concentration camps where they are raped and have their organs harvested – is it not China? Rolling over student protesters with military tanks on an urban street – big deal, it’s just China. The Chinese government has a way of interacting with local problems that goes back so long that nobody – not foreigners, not Chinese people, not the CCP itself – has any bigger expectations of that institution.
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Thus in November, when faced with the jarring reality that it was facing a new outbreak of something new, nasty and infectious, the Chinese government simply did what it always does – it kicked the ball into the long grass by silencing everyone who tried to raise the alarm about the emergence of what later became known as the SARS COV-2 novel coronavirus. With its unprecedented ability to silence people online and in real life through its dystopian social credit system, it is only too easy to duck the responsibility of governance and outsource the consequences to the people in classic authoritarian fashion.
Regime Security =\= National Security
In China, like with every other society controlled by a dictatorship, all information that could potentially challenge the credibility of the ruling junta is fought with the intensity of actual warfare. Whether it is Xi Jinping or Idi Amin, the basic thread running through the dictator’s fear of information is the same – the authoritarian regime can only survive by convincing the nation that said authoritarian is somehow intrinsic to its existence. Incidentally, the CCP regularly flies this very kite, claiming to Chinese citizens that only it has the capacity to keep China together because if China adopted democracy, the country would allegedly break up chaotically.
When such regimes successfully perpetuate the idea that country and government are the same thing, they can also justify any action they take because regime security becomes the same thing as “national security.” Thus, anything that can challenge the credibility of an authoritarian government – be it political opposition, pro-democracy protesters or news about the spread of a new virus it may not be able to control – is something to be put down with extreme prejudice.
Unfortunately as we saw to disastrous effect, this reflexive position to defend the political interests of a ruling regime over anything else under the pretext of such contrived “national security” can lead to horrible outcomes. In this case, the horrible outcomes leapt out of Wuhan, where COVID-19 could have been contained according to some reports as far back as October 2019. Instead it tore a path of unprecedented economic destruction across the world, multiplied Nigeria’s food inflation and jeopardised global security in a way nothing had done since the second world war.
Even more unfortunately, being that the CCP’s biggest claim to credibility among Chinese people is the country’s sustained economic growth, the real estate ponzi scheme underpinning China’s much vaunted growth began its long term decline with the near-demise of Evergrande. Rather than address the problems such as strict capital controls, which created the housing bubble in the first place, the Chinese solution will be to bring out the money hose and extinguish another fire in the short term. Unsustainable for the country – yes. Expedient for the regime – absolutely. Xi Jinping wouldn’t call it “regime security” though.
He will call it “national security.”
