THE PAST YEAR will be forever linked with China. It was the year when a rising global power, already causing jitters in the West by challenging American supremacy and democratic values, became linked in many people’s minds with a far clearer, more immediate and for many people more terrifying threat. The global pandemic was not a cataclysm of China’s design. But China was where, in December 2019, the first cases of a mysterious new pneumonia were detected and a culture of secrecy initially prompted officials to play down the danger and stifle news of the outbreak. Even after they acknowledged the scale of the crisis in January, some analysts in the West wondered, briefly, whether the novel coronavirus would threaten the Communist Party itself. In February the death from covid-19 of a whistleblowing doctor caused an outpouring of rage in China that must have unsettled China’s leaders.
But, strikingly, China’s covid-era politics has not been troubled by public anger, or division within a beleaguered leadership over how to respond to the disease. If anything the party has emerged stronger and in higher public esteem than it was a year ago. In late January it switched from hesitancy and obfuscation to all-out mobilisation with the aim not merely of keeping the disease at a manageable level but of crushing it entirely. China’s success in achieving this, and in restoring near-normal life in the country without a resurgence of the coronavirus, proved a godsend for the party’s propagandists. No massage of the truth was required to highlight the contrast between conditions at home and the prolonged agonies of countries in the West. The party’s efforts helped it to tighten its political grip and breathe new life into its grassroots organisations.
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