By Madeleine Kearns
Monday, February 17, 2020
Crises, particularly unexpected ones, can make or break a
government as much as an individual.
In 2019, China “celebrated” 70 years of Communist Party
rule. China’s economic growth was at the lowest it’s been in three decades. And
it faced the added political challenge of the Hong Kong protests, as well as
the economic strain of an escalating trade war with the United States.
Nevertheless, 2020 brought a more urgent challenge.
The Chinese government’s recent quarantine of 60 million
people — roughly the size of Italy — is unprecedented. At the last count,
China’s death toll from COVID-19 — also known as the coronavirus — had reached
1,367, and the number of confirmed cases was 59,804. Since no cure has yet been
found, the most effective means of preventing further spread is isolation.
But reports from Wuhan and Hubei (the province of which
Wuhan is the capital city) are bleak.
One district in Shiyan (another city in Hubei province)
has implemented “wartime measures,” meaning that residents are prohibited from
leaving their apartments. The infected are rounded up to face further
isolation; the deceased are taken away and burned like dead animals. According
to one official, any person who fails to come forward with his symptoms “will
be forever nailed to history’s pillar of shame.” The Associated Press reports:
Authorities initially assured
people that there was little to no risk of human-to-human transmission, a
statement that was later retracted. Wuhan residents said hospitals were
overcrowded and lacked sufficient medical supplies. Doctors who tried to share
information early on were reprimanded by police for “spreading rumors.”
Possibly responding to public anger, the Communist Party
of China has replaced its top officials in Hubei and Wuhan. President Xi
Jinping has more or less absolved himself of guilt, publishing a speech by
state media in which he claims to have given instructions to fight the virus as
early as January 7. He says that he asked Hubei province on January 22 to
“implement comprehensive and stringent controls over the outflow of people.”
Of course, the U.S. has its own version of quarantines,
which — when implemented appropriately — are a legitimate government response
to a public-health emergency. The 600 Americans evacuated from the Hubei
province remain in a military quarantine. And after the Diamond Princess
cruise ship was quarantined in Japan, the 380 Americans on board were given the
option of taking American government-chartered aircraft back to the U.S., where
they’d face another 14-day quarantine. But unlike in China, American civilians
and government officials are approaching the challenge in a spirit of
cooperation and willingness.
In the 1980s, few predicted the twilight of the Soviet
Union. But with hindsight, Mikhail Gorbachev, its former leader, noted an
important turning point: the disaster at Chernobyl, when a nuclear reactor
exploded at a power plant in northern Ukraine in 1986. In 2006, Gorbachev
wrote:
The Chernobyl disaster, more than
anything else, opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to
the point that the system as we knew it could no longer continue. It made
absolutely clear how important it was to continue the policy of glasnost.
The official death toll from Chernobyl is 31. But we now
know that, in the weeks and months that followed the accident, the USSR
recruited between 600,000 and 800,000 of its citizens as part of the deadly
clean-up project. These human “liquidators,” as they were known, came into
direct contact with radioactive substances. Within 20 years, 120,000 were dead,
and, of the survivors, the vast majority have suffered health complications,
ranging from respiratory problems to cancer.
The USSR’s response was an effective exercise in damage
control. Practically, the mass evacuations, animal slaughters, and human
“liquidators” undisputedly averted further disaster. But at what cost? When
faced with a crisis, the Communists resorted to pride and denial, deception and
confusion. This strategy was a devastating political miscalculation —
enshrining a legacy of weakness and inspiring years of public resentment.
As unpleasant as it may be for the Chinese, their
government’s approach may well have bought the rest of the world more time.
Though the virus has spread to nearly two dozen countries, 99 percent of cases
are in mainland China. The exact nature and scope of the coronavirus remains
unknown. But the political cost of an authoritarian approach to public crises
is high.
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