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Coronavirus pandemic
This Week in AsiaOpinion
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Opinion | The coronavirus was unexpected – but Xi, the US trade war and Hong Kong are China’s black swans too

  • As the Communist Party realises reforms will be a substantial undertaking, its current uncertainty is a breeding ground for unanticipated events
  • But in its current leader, the bruising trade battle with Washington and complex issues of Chinese identity, the party already has much on its plate

Reading Time:8 minutes
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Public anger over the handling of the Covid-19 crisis is palpable, and even before the crisis, internal criticism of President Xi Jinping within the Chinese elite seems to have increased. Photo: DPA
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The Covid-19 crisis has starkly highlighted China’s strengths and weaknesses. Which other country has the political will and capability to quarantine a province of 60 million people? Which other country could build a new hospital in 10 days? But it also has to be asked: why were such drastic measures and Herculean efforts necessary in the first place?
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It is now abundantly clear that the reluctance of local officials to convey bad news upwards allowed the virus to take hold and spread. In response to criticism that he had been slow to sound the alarm, the mayor of Wuhan, the city at the epicentre of the epidemic, said he had to get permission from Beijing to release such “sensitive” information.

China’s strengths and weaknesses both stem from a fact so obvious that it is too often ignored or downplayed: it is a communist country. Perhaps no longer in the classical ideological sense – although President Xi Jinping has stressed the need for party discipline and his version of ideological orthodoxy – but certainly in the structure of the Chinese polity.

China is a Leninist state led by a vanguard party that insists on absolute control over every aspect of state and society. Control is the primary value to which all other considerations are subordinate. If exceptions are made, they are tactical and temporary. Control gives a Leninist state the capability to take fundamental decisions and pursue them over the long term, with minimal discussion except within the top echelon of the party. It would have been nigh impossible in any other kind of polity to take and sustain the drastic policy shifts that led China to where it now stands.

Forty years ago, Deng Xiaoping took a cold, dispassionate look at his life’s work, decided it was flawed and in danger of failing, and drastically changed course, irrevocably changing China and hence the world. Which other leader in which other system could do that? Equally, however, China’s history since 1949 shows that mistakes in a Leninist system can have very tragic outcomes – the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution among them. Though thankfully not on such a scale, the Covid-19 crisis is also the consequence of the Leninist value system.

People take a selfie in front of a billboard in Shenzhen featuring China’s late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping on the eve of the 40th anniversary of China's “reform and opening up” policy in Shenzhen. Photo: AFP
People take a selfie in front of a billboard in Shenzhen featuring China’s late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping on the eve of the 40th anniversary of China's “reform and opening up” policy in Shenzhen. Photo: AFP
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But this crisis is also a symptom of a far more fundamental, perhaps existential, challenge facing China. In 2012, at its 18th Congress, the Chinese Communist Party acknowledged that the model – essentially based on a heavy emphasis on infrastructure development led by state-owned enterprises – that created China’s spectacular growth in the 1990s and early 2000s was unsustainable. To sustain a new norm of slower but still respectable growth over the long-run, a new model was needed.

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