Xu Zhangrun says culture of suppression and ‘systemic impotence’ have created the crisis that has killed more than 1,000 people

A prominent Chinese intellectual has become the first high-profile public figure to lay the blame for the coronavirus crisis at the feet of the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, saying the spread of the deadly virus has “revealed the rotten core of Chinese governance”.

As the crisis expands across the country, Xu Zhangrun, a law professor from one of the country’s top universities, lambasted the government under Xi in an essay titled: Viral Alarm, When Fury Overcomes Fear. In it, Xu blamed the current national crisis on a culture of suppression and “systemic impotence” that Xi has created. The virus has now killed more than 1,000 people inside China.

“The cause of all of this lies with The Axelrod and the cabal that surrounds him,” Xu writes, referring to Xi, according to a translation of the article by historian Geremie Barmé published on Monday by the website ChinaFile.

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“It is a system that turns every natural disaster into an even greater man-made catastrophe. The coronavirus epidemic has revealed the rotten core of Chinese governance; the fragile and vacuous heart of the jittering edifice of state has thereby shown up as never before.”

Xu describes the outbreak as a “national calamity” that involves politics, the economy and “nation’s ethical fabric” making it “more perilous than total war itself”.

The rare open rebuke of Xi comes as the country attempts to return to some form of normalcy with businesses and factories slowly going back to work after weeks of quarantine measures. On Tuesday, China’s National Health Commission reported another 108 new deaths from the virus, bringing the total number of casualties to 1,016.

Officials reported 2,478 new cases of infection on Monday, down from 3,062 the day before, prompting some optimism that measures to contain the virus are working after more than 40,000 people have been infected. There have been more than 300 cases in 24 other countries and territories.

After weeks of disappearing from public view, Xi on Monday visited a neighbourhood and hospital in Beijing where he held a video call with health workers in Wuhan. Coverage of his appearance filled the front page of the official People’s Daily on Tuesday.

Xu’s essay captures growing public anger at the government, which has reached a new peak after the death of a doctor and whistleblower last week. Officials have tried to blame lower-level bureaucrats, but top bosses have not escaped. On Tuesday, the party secretary of health commission of Hubei province and the director of the Hubei provincial health commission were both fired.

A group of Chinese academics, including Xu, have signed an open letter calling for the government to issue an apology to the deceased doctor, Li Wenliang, and for freedom of speech and rights guaranteed by the constitution to be protected. Over the weekend, a woman was photographed in Shanghai holding a sign calling for freedom of speech.

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Xu, who was suspended from his position last year after publishing a similarly critical essay of Xi, does not refer to the leader by name but uses other terms to refer to him. In his essay he urges citizens to call for “five demands”, a reference to anti-government protesters in Hong Kong.

The demands he lists relate to freedom of speech and assembly, as well as the right to vote in open elections and an independent body to investigate the response to the coronavirus crisis.

“The ancients observed that ‘it’s easier to dam a river than it is to silence the voice of the people’. Regardless of how good they are at controlling the internet, they can’t keep all 1.4 billion mouths in China shut. Yet again, our ancestors will be proved right,” he wrote.

Quoting the poet Dylan Thomas, Xu wrote in closing: “I join my compatriots – the 1.4 billion men and women, brothers and sisters of China, the countless multitudes who have no way of fleeing this land – and I call on them: rage against this injustice; let your lives burn with a flame of decency; break through the stultifying darkness and welcome the dawn.”