“What bothered us most about the Government is that they treated us like idiots”. This quote is attributed to a German worker during the twilight of the communist regime in East Germany. Somebody should make the same claim but this time to Communist top leaders in Beijing. It is time we have a debate about the consequences to have a superpower under an authoritarian and secretive regime operating within the post-Cold War international system.
There is no doubt that around the world, the efforts and personal sacrifices of the valiant people of Wuhan have been widely recognized. The desperate efforts to contain the disease and treat those who were infected by the virus by the Chinese medical community will be remembered as an example of the remarkable capacity that China possesses to contribute positively to the world’s wellbeing. Doctor Li Wenliang’s martyrdom at the hands of the communist regime in sounding an alert and treating his colleagues and community makes it very clear. But Dr. Li was a physician and not a political scientist; were he more politically aware, he would have known that the biological coronavirus that he so desperately tried to make the authorities aware of had been hybridized with the political virus called communist secrecy. The recent affirmation made by the German magazine Der Spiegel that Xi Jinping personally requested to the World Health Organization to delay a global warning about human to human transmission, besides to make WHO an accomplice of such practices, only reinforce the problem. In other words, the central problem here is the lack of transparency in the Chinese communist regime.
This should not come as a surprise. Although firmly of the prejudices of his time, sixty-four years ago, George Keanan, in his famous long telegram, had already offered good elements of where to set the foundations of our mistrust on a Communist regime:
In atmosphere of oriental secretiveness and conspiracy which pervades this Government, possibilities for distorting or poisoning sources and currents of information are infinite. The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth–indeed, their disbelief in its existence–leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another. There is good reason to suspect that this Government is actually a conspiracy within a conspiracy.
Considering the CCP’s performance until now in coping with the coronavirus pandemic, Keanan’s assessment of the Soviets acquires terrifying new contours. It was not the Chinese people that tried to cover up the initial phases of the pandemic when they first became aware of it. This was a result of a historic and perverted need of Communist regimes to display a layer of cohesiveness and solidity to make every single social problem understood as a conspiracy to overthrow the government or embarrassing those at the top of it. So far, this was exactly what Beijing apparently did, or is trying to do.
Add to that, in a moment where monitoring – and therefore information – is the fundamental weapon against the virus, the world has been forced into a state of disbelief with every Chinese report about the situation on the ground. The numbers released by Beijing authorities simply do not add up and, as with most other official data, to make things worse they are nearly impossible to check. It is true that not all Western democracies are in consonance with the ideals of transparency and accountability, but it is hard to believe that a similar phenomenon in Western Europe or North America would illicit a similar misinformation campaign. With mass media based on the idea of a free press, together with the scrutiny of opposition powers, the constant shadow of brave whistle-blowers and social groups pushing for their own agendas, someone would expose the story and it would quickly bespread from social networks to mainstream media, and from there straight to the government agendas.
For too long, based on the course of other former authoritarian nations, Western powers have indulged in wishful thinking about China, imagining a delayed democratization or, at least, flexibilization of the Chinese regime as a result of its economic development and its integration into the world supply chain. The Western liberal order did not compromise in bringing most of its erstwhile rivals in the Soviet-orbit into the fold of liberal democracies, as if by phagocytosis. This was accomplished by a guided transformation of their entire political systems. The Russian refusal to do so explains in part its current international marginalization. Although the some sectors of the American political elite still hold on to their radical views about the welfare state—seeing it as a branch of socialism—the truth is that former authoritarian countries had to spontaneously, or under pressure, adopt not only a veneer of the liberal economic model, but to embrace its values as well. Failure to do so has been used as an explanation, in the hallways of power in Brussels and Washington, for those states’ incapacity to be fully integrated into the European Union system and into the global economy as well. If it is true that in Beijing there is an anxiety about what is thought to be a long-delayed unification with Taiwan, the same anxiety happens in the West about the long-awaited democratization of the Chinese regime. So far, the characteristic secrecy of the Chinese manner of practicing government had, until now, been a Chinese issue. But the Coronavirus episode has made it a global problem. As it is in Washington, from now on what happens in China does not stay in China, and that is the price for any nation with superpower aspirations. The leaders inBeijing seem to either refuse to accept, or refuse to understand, this fundamental feature of the global order.
That is the reason for Mearsheimer’s thesis that a revisionist China is inevitable, in the sense that CCP seems more desirous to reform the international system so that it mirrors their model, than the other way around. Unable and unwilling to go through such a flexibilization process, China literally bought its ticket to ride to the world liberal order imagining that loans and abundant investments in infrastructure around the globe would do enough to ease these ideological tensions. But the coronavirus era is showing us that this is not entirely the case.
Thus, this event more than any other makes it clear that membership in the globalized world in which we live carries with it responsibilities—and not just rights—on the part of its participants. China is one of the most tightly integrated economies—by design, in fact—in this globalized world, and thus far, the more responsible, albeit smaller, nations of the world have not pushed the communist giant to wield its power more responsibly. China’s CCP regime has a high degree of power and influence outside of its borders, and it therefore has the duty to use this power not just for the furtherance of its own rule, but for the betterment of the global order – or, at the very least, in a way that does not lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of victims in other countries. Until that day, the pressure must be kept on the regime to take accountability for its failures, and designation of this pandemic as the CCP Virus is but a small step in that direction.
