Virus shows failures of China, not its success

By Chen Jun-kuang 陳俊光





The pandemic has taken a turn for the worse in Europe and the US, and even British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been diagnosed with COVID-19.

Members of the 50 Cent Army and other Internet users with red-tinted glasses are spreading the view that this proves the failure of democracy and the success of China’s authoritarian regime, while praising the effects of the Wuhan lockdown. Are they right?

The US and European democracies have responded appropriately to epidemics in the past and they successfully eradicated smallpox and the bubonic plague, but the current response has been chaotic. This merely shows that the root of the problem is not to be found in democratic countries, but rather in the contacts between democracies and authoritarian regimes.

The reason the epidemic has spread so rapidly in Europe and the US is that they so readily trusted China’s totalitarian regime and its subsidiary, the WHO, and delayed their responses.

Democratic Taiwan remains wary of China and does not easily trust any Chinese information, and that is the cause of its success in handling the pandemic.

Late last year, doctors in the Wuhan area started mentioning a new infectious disease, but they were silenced by the Chinese government. It was this attempt at maintaining stability that caused the world to miss the possibility to move first.

Had it been possible to wipe out the virus before it started spreading, Wuhan would never have had to be locked down.

If doing so would still have been necessary, it could have been done at an earlier stage and the global pandemic could have been avoided.

Where there is authoritarian government, there is special privilege: Senior Chinese Communist Party officials were allowed to leave the city before the lockdown and they carried the disease to the rest of the world.

It is precisely because there is no government of, by and for the people in China that Chinese do not — and rightly so — trust their authoritarian government or unite in the fight against the epidemic as Taiwanese have. That is the reason for the chaos as Wuhan residents did what they could to escape, while authorities and residents in the areas surrounding the city did what they could to stop them.

Since China has covered up the truth on so many occasions, the claim that China has defeated the virus rings false. Considering that the accuracy of the coronavirus tests China is exporting is lower than 30 percent — less accurate than flipping a coin — that raises questions about the accuracy of the number of verified cases in China.

In comparison with China’s controls on freedom of expression, the public announcement that Johnson was diagnosed with the disease is proof of confidence in the system, and the fact that the announcement did not lead to domestic chaos and party infighting is proof of the system’s stability, and the quality of its politicians.

Just think what would happen if Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) or Russian President Vladimir Putin were diagnosed with COVID-19. Would that be made public? If such news were leaked, is it possible that it would not lead to factional power struggles or even power grabs by local strongmen trying to set up their own fiefdoms?

All this is enough to show that if a democratic country wants to protect the safety and health of its citizens, it is necessary to be on guard against totalitarian states.

Ideally, people would live in a world where all dictatorships have disappeared; that is the only way to build a world where all humanity would have a chance to be healthy.

Chen Jun-kuang is an attending physician in Shin-Kong Wu Ho-Su Memorial Hospital’s psychiatry department.

Translated by Perry Svensson