Chinese authorities are scrambling to keep pace with the coronavirus outbreak and contain the damage done to the national economy while attempting to avoid political embarrassment at home and abroad.
“This is a crisis for us, and it is also a major test,” Chinese President Xi Jinping said in an unusual Sunday speech.
His remarks included an acknowledgment that the outbreak revealed “obvious shortcomings,” a rare admission of error from the authoritarian leader that came just days after Xi made a point to defend his performance in another address.
“It’s the first time that, really, the Communist Party has taken a black eye in really a profound way,” retired Air Force Gen. Rob Spalding, a China expert at the Hudson Institute, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s exceptional in that they’re admitting that they’ve done a poor job of handling it.”
The authoritarian leader paired that rare admission of error with a message urging Chinese officials to “prevent economic growth from sliding out of a reasonable range,” an exhortation that triggered an easing of restrictions in several provinces outside the epicenter of the outbreak.
“The medium- and long-term impact of the coronavirus has increasingly become a concern, especially whether the coronavirus will dampen the global supply chain or weaken China’s international role,” Wu Qi, an analyst at the Pangoal Institution in Beijing, told the South China Morning Post.
Xi acknowledged as much in his speech, saying, “It is unavoidable that the novel coronavirus epidemic will have a considerable impact on the economy and society. As long as we can turn the crisis into an opportunity to restore production and social life in an orderly fashion … we will be able to achieve the economic and social development goals set for this year.”
Those economic setbacks are a two-fold problem for a regime that derives its legitimacy in large part from the provision of economic prosperity at a time when global competition with the United States is worsening. Xi and Chinese diplomats have cited the government’s mass quarantines and rapid construction of special hospitals as evidence of the government’s efficiency, but the outbreak triggered a wave of domestic anger over the government’s punishment of the doctors who first sounded the alarm.
“It’s actually a really effective method of deflecting criticism for the central party authorities by essentially blaming it on local authorities,” Spalding said. “It’s one of the pressure releases of their system.”
