A “Dead End”? Or “The Empire Strikes Back”?

The editors of the Washington Post salute Xu Zhangrun’s throwing down of the gauntlet to the present Chinese authorities:

THE NEW coronavirus sweeping China has produced images of a government acting with urgency: erecting hospitals almost overnight, cordoning off megacities, declaring a “people’s war.” But from inside China comes a darker message. Xu Zhangrun, a professor at Tsinghua University who was punished for his unsparing critique of President Xi Jinping, declares that China has reached a dangerous dead end and the coronavirus has exposed the bankruptcy of its rulers. Mr. Xu courageously insists that democracy is the only way out.

[…]

Mr. Xu writes, “The coronavirus epidemic has revealed the rotten core of Chinese governance.” He recalls the rise of a new generation of competent technocrats in earlier years. Now, he says, President Xi’s campaigns for stricter controls and a return to Maoist ideology has led to a “system-wide collapse of professional ethics and commitment.” The Chinese government system now “values the mediocre, the dilatory and the timid,” he says, and is mired in “inoperability.” The mess caused by local officials in Wuhan who covered up early signs of the disease “has infected every province and the rot goes right up to Beijing.”

Two points. The valuing of “the mediocre, the dilatory and the timid” didn’t start in January. It has been a feature of the Chinese system for at least a decade and probably a lot more. It is a feature of all authoritarian governments.

Second, there are many, many more possibilities than liberal democracy for China and IMO all of them are more likely than that. For example, the authoritarian fist could tighten. That is by far the greatest likelihood. The Chinese military might be a threat to other countries but it is definitely a threat to the Chinese people themselves.

Another possibility is fragmentation. I don’t know enough about internal CCP politburo politics but it may be that some of its members have the power to carve out little kingdoms of their own. It’s happened before.

I strongly suspect we’re seeing the beginnings of unrest in China. We will learn soon enough if, to paraphrase Metternich’s wisecrack, when China sneezes the world gets a cold.