Xi's communist malfeasance and misrule fueled China's coronavirus disaster: Sen. Ben Sasse Chinese citizens deserve a truly clean, adaptive and responsive government with real transparency and democratic accountability.

Ben Sasse | Opinion contributor

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The coronavirus outbreak sweeping across China, and now threatening dozens of other countries, including the United States, is not just a natural disaster. It is the deadly consequence of the Chinese Communist Party’s malfeasance and misrule. And, as has been the case for so much of the CCP’s seven-decade hegemony, the cruel irony is that the people of China are its main victims.

More than 42,000 Chinese people have been diagnosed with coronavirus since the outbreak began in the city of Wuhan in December — many times the number who contracted SARS in 2002-03 worldwide.

More than 1,000 people have died, and nearly 60 million people are in lockdown. In Wuhan and surrounding areas, undersupplied doctors are wearing rain jackets for want of biohazard gear, citizens fear imminent food shortages and local crematoria are working around the clock to dispose of bodies.

It did not have to be this way. As The New York Times reported, the first case of coronavirus appeared in early December. But Chinese officials did not act for more than a month. When a Wuhan doctor, Li Wenliang, tried to warn his medical school classmates that an unfamiliar illness was ravaging Wuhan Central Hospital, he and his classmates were silenced by local authorities, who threatened to punish anyone “spreading rumors" and "disrupting social order.”

By the time authorities finally acknowledged what was happening, a full blown epidemic was underway. "At critical turning points,” wrote The Times, “Chinese authorities put secrecy and order ahead of openly confronting the growing crisis.”

In an additional tragic turn: Dr. Li contracted coronavirus while treating patients. The ophthalmologist died last Friday at the age of 34.

Dr. Li’s courage and commitment to human life made him a hero to the Chinese people and an enemy of the Chinese Communist Party.

'Clean,' 'adaptive,' and 'responsive' are only CCP's lies

Secrecy, denial, and coercion are not bugs in Xi Jinping’s regime. They are core features. The CCP, concerned first and foremost in its own survival, has had to renegotiate a fragile social contract in recent years, staking its continued right to rule on ensuring that the lives of Chinese citizens are safe, healthy and prosperous.

Xi, the party overlords in Beijing and their apparatchiks in China’s provincial and municipal governments have promised that the Chinese government can be “clean,” or free of corruption. They promised to be “adaptive” to crises and changing societywide conditions. They promised to be “responsive” to the demands of the citizenry, especially China’s rapidly expanding professional class — its millions of attorneys, journalists, scientists, doctors and more, who are increasingly part of a global exchange, and whose demands for efficient social services (good schools, reliable clinics, etc.) resemble the demands of the Western upper-middle class.

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What has happened instead? Literal plagues have laid waste to the population. Toxic environmental conditions prevail across the country, especially in China’s major cities, where air pollution is so bad that it obscures sunlight.

The government’s efforts to silence increasingly vocal political dissidents and religious minorities have exposed a cross-country network of internment camps, a government-sponsored slave labor industry and a horrifying black market in organ harvesting that serves wealthy party members and their family and friends.

And the government’s attacks on Hong Kong’s semiautonomous status have spurred prolonged, intense protests that have startled party leadership.

Chinese citizens deserve real transparency, accountability

These episodes, and others that have flown under the radar of international news media, have brought sharply into question whether the Chinese system, as it is constituted, can really be “clean,” “adaptive” and “responsive.” And rightly so.

When “east, west, south, north and center, the party leads everything,” as the CCP declared in 2017, it cannot simply slough off responsibility for fatal mistakes and grave mismanagement. But it also can’t cop to its failures. If the tyrants in Beijing acknowledge their mistakes, they chip away at their own right to rule. Inevitably, their response is to sweep problems under the rug and demand even greater control over the lives of 1.4 billion Chinese citizens — evermore invasive surveillance, evermore complete submission to CCP ideological propaganda. This is a risky game.

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There is a better way, of course. Real transparency and democratic accountability help to prevent these sorts of nightmares. Truly clean, adaptive and responsive government is most likely where information can flow freely, where governments are honest and where the people can hold their leaders responsible — and replace them with genuine alternatives. A system that prioritizes and protects the inviolable dignity of its citizens, rather than the perpetuation of its ruling cabal, is the only one where real civic health is possible.

Communism is the perfect incubator for the coronavirus. China’s predatory system preys on its own people. Trials become tragedies, crises become catastrophes, and the bosses in Beijing exploit their own failures as cover for new and worse abuses.

America and her allies should be clear about what is happening. China’s people are sick because the Chinese system is.

Ben Sasse, a Republican, represents Nebraska in the U.S. Senate. Follow him on Twitter: @SenSasse