Afsan Chowdhury:

CHINA’S brand as a very secure and strong state mechanism was enormously strengthened as a result of the Covid crisis. Although China was the spawning ground of the global virus, it appears to have overcome it and was on its way to health even as the world suffered.

The west in comparison looked vulnerable, even fragile, as the health system almost collapsed under the weight of the virus management. Thousands have died in the United States, the leader of the western world and China’s greatest foe. But China seemed to be unscathed and ready to jump into the global economy’s driver seat.

Xi Jingping was seen as a hero of the eastern world because he had finally proved to the world that China was now the big power that mattered. It gladdened many hearts in the east because western domination that had gone on for several centuries seemed to be finally facing its foe that would dethrone it.

Xi seemed to glow in his grab for total power as he took over for the historic third term changing rules and norms. He was saying ‘economics is politics’, which was the new dogma. And then Covid hit China with venom that left China’s reputation of vulnerability poked with holes. Not as big as western media would like to say but the net does look frayed.

The virus worries world

THE United States, Japan, South Korea, India and Taiwan, to name a few, have recently reintroduced Covid tests for travellers from China. Many are worried that the deadly new Covid variant might have already emerged in the countries listed as ‘unchecked’ zones.

Chinese official sources (National Administration of Disease Control and Prevention) have said that about 248 million people, or 17.6 per cent of the 1.4 billion population, had been infected between December 1 and 20.

There is speculation that China is going for a herd immunity growth strategy which means that the objective is increased infection of the population. They argue that once that is achieved, the focus can shift towards economic development in the next year. However, others fear that the victim burden would be so high that China’s hospital health structure could collapse.

Reports of stretched funeral and hospital services are now common but very little data have emerged which China watchers think are reliable.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organisation has said that the WHO was very concerned about the situation in China. He said that China should share its data and conduct the studies the WHO had requested. The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said that the lack of transparency from China could delay the identification of new Covid variants that pose a threat to global public health.

Something went wrong, but what?

GIVEN the politico-ideological structure, information sharing is not part of the China state objective. Thus, speculations become an inevitable by-product. The problem is that such speculations cause no gain as the Chinese people are victims of the system which delivers much but increasingly seems it has few gaps in the state service delivery system.

The issue is not just about the efficiency of the state but the ‘ideology’ of the state that drives the service delivery system. Chinese socialism is far removed from the orthodoxy that produced the structural inefficiency that killed the Soviet Union. As an ideology, the biggest test is economic health and Russia failed there. Thus, the demise was the result of the ideology and its demise too.

China had learnt those lessons well and was driven by the need for efficiency to succeed as a state. This is why the end of the radical statism of the cultural revolution and the later Gang of Four group’s activities led by Left extremists were inevitably snuffed out by the public demand for services and its fundamental contradiction.

The Deng era basically underwrote the new socio-capitalism that rose after that. Market force-driven production structure led the transition or inaugurated the new era, but it left the socio-political structure intact in its older form, never very efficient.

That dual model has served for long but is not doing too well after such a long period of supply-demand free interactions with the public, the consumers of governance. Thus, while the economics part of the state has worked, its governance part is now suffering as the political and the administrative structure has not adjusted to new demands and changes.

What next for China?

CHINA may well have reached a point where it needs to do a Deng for its official and governmental service delivery mechanism, and structure. The current leadership moved away from the earlier state-owned industry-led model for economic development which shows the capacity for change. But the method for a change which included a forcible removal of older leaders, including Hu Jin-Tao, from the Congress signifies the limits of the current Chinese governance model, rooted in its orthodox socialist past.

Whether the current Covid crisis will appear as a wakeup call for the leadership to revamp its state management system remains to be seen. If it does not happen, mishaps are likely to occur more frequently than now.

Afsan Chowdhury is a researcher and journalist.