An outbreak of the coronavirus presents Chinese President Xi Jinping with one of the worst domestic political crises of his tenure as leader of the Chinese Communist Party.
“I think it’s a terrible blow, coming at exactly the wrong time for Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party,” the Hudson Institute’s Rob Spaulding, a retired Air Force general who helped write the Trump administration’s national security strategy, told the Washington Examiner.
The outbreak has marred celebrations of the Chinese New Year and undermines the upbeat image Beijing has projected about the People’s Republic of China.
“It is going to introduce a lot of political pressures on Xi,” Dean Cheng, a China expert at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner.
Spaulding agreed, although both men cautioned against construing the crisis as an existential threat to the regime.
“I’m not saying that the Chinese Communist Party is all of a sudden going to collapse,” the retired general said. “What’s going to happen is Xi Jinping’s detractors are going to have increased sway within the party, and then you begin to create fissures within the party, more so than they currently are.”
That analysis is perhaps corroborated by the reaction of local authorities in the city where the outbreak originated. The mayor of Wuhan offered to resign over the slow pace of information about the illness but shifted the blame to the Chinese Communist Party authorities in Beijing.
“As a local government official, after I get this kind of information, I still have to wait for authorization before I can release it,” Mayor Zhou Xianwang told state-run media. “This is one thing people didn’t understand at the time.”
Approximately 50 million in China have been quarantined, while the United States and other countries are considering a travel ban. Political ramifications of the outbreak could depend on how much economic harm the outbreak causes.
“That would be big factor for Xi’s power,” an official from an Indo-Pacific country told the Washington Examiner. “We don’t know how powerful and devastating its effects would be.”
Chinese authorities continued speaking about “the great achievements” of the government as recently as last week while telling foreign journalists not to visit Wuhan.
“In 2020, we will meet the target of poverty eradication, complete the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects, and contribute even more to human development and progress,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters last week. “My colleagues and I will work together with all journalist friends to tell and present this great historical process.”
The pledge was coupled with a reminder that journalists must not “forget to wear masks when you go out.”
The virus could play into national attitudes overall, one expert said.
“You’ve presumably then got Chinese [people] wondering, on the 70th anniversary, are things better?” Cheng said. “Yeah, they’re better than they were in grandpa’s time, sure — ‘We have electricity; we have literacy’ — but every country, no matter whether you’re authoritarian or democratic, always has a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately problem with their population, and the answer here is, ‘We’ve got a lot of problems here.’”
