There’s no need for doomsaying. Unlike China and other autocratic states, the U.S. has the means to overcome its problems.
There’s no need for doomsaying. Unlike China and other autocratic states, the U.S. has the means to overcome its problems.
T rolling is no way to conduct a foreign policy, but President Joe Biden might consider channeling just a little bit of the prankish spirit of his predecessor by offering to send Beijing 1 billion doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines as a goodwill gesture.
If Beijing accepts, then Washington enjoys a major diplomatic triumph and the opportunity to do something good at a minor expense for people who desperately need it. If Beijing refuses out of pride and spleen — which is a near certainty — then Washington enjoys a minor diplomatic triumph at no expense at all and Beijing deepens the trouble it is facing vis-à-vis the restive urban elites of Shanghai and Beijing.
Under the increasingly personalized rule of Xi Jinping, things are grim in China right now — very.
In Shanghai, which has been under a brutal lockdown for weeks, residents including nonagenarians and centenarians have been rounded up and incarcerated in quarantine facilities after testing positive for Covid-19. Drones circle overhead with loudspeakers blaring the message that the Chinese people must “suppress your soul’s desire for freedom.” Shanghai is not enjoying this. The Economist reports that a local rapper called Astro has had an underground hit with an angry anthem denouncing the “White Guards,” as the hazmat-suit-clad enforcers of public health have been nicknamed in an echo of the Cultural Revolution.
And as Shanghai languishes, the people in Beijing have a queasy feeling that they are next.
(Of course Chinese rappers are a big thing, while African-American singers of Huangmei opera are . . . considerably less common. The United States is a cultural powerhouse even more than an economic one.)
It is against this background that Xi is preparing for the coming Communist Party congress, where he will request a further extension of his already-imperial powers. For years, the prestige and credibility of the Communist Party was tied to the quality of life in China, but, as collective leadership has waned and the cult of Xi has ascended, the facts on the ground have become more particularly a judgment on Xi himself. The Biden administration could do worse than to discreetly emphasize to the Chinese people — and to the world — just how bad those facts are, who is to blame, and who benefits.
The situation in China is a man-made crisis — it is a crisis of policy.
While China has relatively high vaccination rates by global standards, Xi Jinping has de-emphasized the vaccine-centered approach to Covid in favor of a so-called zero-Covid program of ruthlessly enforced social isolation and regional lockdowns. Hence, normalization is a long way off for the Chinese. Xi has pursued this disastrous course of action in no small part because the homegrown Sinovac vaccine does not work very well and seems to work hardly at all against the Omicron variant. (I still think The Omicron Variant sounds like the title of a lost Robert Ludlum novel.) Unlike the more effective mRNA vaccines developed by Western researchers, Sinovac is a traditional vaccine that relies on a deactivated virus: an old-fashioned, and not especially effective, approach to a newfangled problem. On top of that, what we euphemize as “vaccine hesitancy” in the West is a deep and strong current in China, especially among the older Chinese who are most vulnerable to Covid-19 — and, no surprise, these older Chinese have relatively low vaccination rates.
China produces some of the world’s best and most energetic doctors, and those doctors provide some of the best health care that can be had — in Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, and the other U.S. cities to which thousands of Chinese physicians emigrate every year. Xi Jinping’s regime does a much better job retaining jailers than doctors, and it shows.
Beijing could make things much better for the Chinese people by importing more Western vaccines — and more Western policies. (They aren’t too proud to steal those things.) But nationalism makes fools of even shrewd men. And so Xi Jinping sticks to what he knows: brutality.
Beyond Xi’s cult of personality and China’s cultish nationalism, Beijing suffers from the familiar delusion of autocratic omnipotence. Because the Chinese state does not have to take into account such pesky concerns as consent, democracy, or human rights, it can act in fast, direct, and unencumbered ways when it comes to things like clearing out a few million villagers or slum-dwellers to build an airport or a sports stadium. It is that broad autocratic scope of action that gives rise to the “China for a day” fantasies of Western progressives who would like to be able to override opposition when they believe that the forces of Truth and History are on their side. (Which is all of the time without exception or question.) Forcibly industrializing and urbanizing an agrarian and rural society — and thereby realizing dramatic economic gains in a short period of time — is the one big trick that totalitarian states can pull off. And even though they can only pull that off once, that is enough to convince credulous progressives and nationalists abroad of the wisdom and efficacy of the illiberal mode of governance. The gullible are impressed.
Beijing is pretty impressed with itself, too.
The Soviet Union once impressed Western admirers in exactly the same way, but China further benefited from very fortunate timing, with its partial embrace of economic modernity coming at just the moment when a confluence of factors (advances in container shipping, the Internet, aging populations in the wealthy countries) amplified the advantages of globalization. And so China went from being a starving country to one that is merely poor to lower-middle-income. Give it another few decades, and it might even catch up to Slovakia, which today remains almost twice as affluent in meaningful (GDP per capita) terms.
The normalization and valorization of autocracy have been bad for the Chinese people. Even worse for the Chinese people, Xi Jinping apparently believes his own hype and thinks he can brute-force his way out of China’s current Covid predicament.
That is not going to work. It never does.
Autocrats never learn that lesson.
Strangely, neither do Americans.
Americans have always had a bizarre and fantastical fear of the Asian Economic Superman, a fearsome figure who is always just about to eat our national economic lunch before things fall apart for him. A generation ago, it was Japan that was going to be running the world and to have us all groveling before the Rising Sun flag. (This was mostly an American delusion; Japan has usually had a more realistic view of its own prospects.) Now, it is China, but China’s star is waning. Someday, it will be India or South Korea. And don’t sleep on nimble Singapore.
We Americans suffer from a pronounced bias toward pessimism, a very strange intellectual defect for a people as inexplicably blessed as we are. We love our disaster porn. It wasn’t that long ago that all the best people assured us that we were at “peak oil” and that the United States would never be able to compete with energy superpowers such as Saudi Arabia. That view found a large and committed constituency — a constituency it still enjoys, even after the facts have discredited the prediction. A few decades before that, all the best people knew to a certainty that The Population Bomb was a work of prophecy and that we’d all be eating each other as hundreds of millions died in the worldwide famines of the 1970s. That belief persists today, too, in spite of the facts.
Somehow, all of that didn’t happen and keeps not happening. But we never stop expecting it to. I have always liked Tom Wolfe’s observation: “The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.” In truth, Europe is mostly doing pretty well, and the darkness of totalitarianism has landed right where you’d expect to find it — right where it has been for decades and decades.
Americans wallow in doom and gloom, even though our fiscal policies belong to a nation of insane pie-in-the-sky optimists. We almost always overestimate the strength of the autocratic regimes and underestimate the strength of the liberal-democratic ones — we did it throughout the Cold War, and we have done it for decades with respect to China. And even among the liberal democracies, we Americans always overestimate the strength of our rivals and competitors and underestimate ourselves. There is much to admire about Japan and much to learn from the Japanese, but nobody is writing science-fiction novels about a world dominated by that aging, complacent, declining country anymore. Ezra Pound thought he saw the future in fascist Italy, while Lincoln Steffens visited the Soviet Union and declared: “I have seen the future, and it works.”
As it turns out, “what works” is the boring old stuff we have here: freedom, democracy, property rights, rule of law, modest regulation and light taxation, free trade, a culture of entrepreneurship, hard work. The United States isn’t the only country that has all that — but we are the biggest country that has all that, and we have oodles of it.
Meanwhile, China’s richest and most sophisticated city is, in effect, a prison camp — although, in one sense, all of China is a prison camp even on a good day, and the situation in Shanghai is only a particularly dramatic illustration of the fact. It is a fact that our foreign-policy apparatus should be highlighting every day of the year. The Chinese system is not built on craftiness and strength: It is built on stupidity and weakness, on fear and stagnation. That news is starting to reach Shanghai.
Covid has been a terrible plague for the free world, too, but the dynamic institutions of the liberal-democratic countries achieve wondrous things when least expected: Covid turbocharged mRNA research, and there is some reason to hope that mRNA technologies will in the relatively near future produce radically more effective treatments for cancer. Fifty years from now, we may look back on the Covid epidemic as a terrible trial that left us dramatically better off in ways that we had not expected it to.
Yes, we have some serious economic problems, especially inflation, and much of our current trouble is the direct result of boneheaded public policy, including extending emergency Covid-mitigation measures far past the point of necessity or prudence. But that will pass, and the United States will thrive; not even the clumsy efforts of Joe Biden are going to be enough to keep us down. That is because in spite of its occasional temptation, the United States is not a strongman society. The president isn’t the country. We can handle the occasional dope, would-be messiah, or fanatic — even three in a row, as it turns out. It is hard to undo the good work of 335 million mostly industrious people with ready access to capital, education, and world markets.
As Covid recedes into memory here in the United States, Shanghai — a city of some 26 million that is more like a small country — is under something very close to martial law. How fares the rest of the strongman world? The allegedly mighty Russian army is seeing its tanks towed off by laughing Ukrainian farmers while rodential expat oligarchs spend their days trying to hide their yachts from Fijian port inspectors. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia is stewing after his fiasco in Yemen and looking to buy his way back into the good graces of the United States. Kim Jong-un is banging his nuclear spoon on his highchair. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan turns out to be not the new Ataturk but the new Hugo Chávez — or, worse for him, the new Jimmy Carter.
And the United States? We have two jobs open for every job-seeker in the market, our shops are busy, and our restaurants are full. We are getting together over $7 coffees to complain about $5 gas. And we may even have done ourselves the great favor of learning from the dislocation and disruption of Covid to appreciate the blessings of normalcy, the little joys and pleasures of private life in a thriving commercial republic that is a lot happier than the cable-news hooters and talk-radio howlers would have you believe. We’re probably headed for a short recession as the Fed tries to remember how to wring inflation out of the economy, but we’ll probably get over that pretty quickly and go back to bitching about $3 gas over $7 coffees.
So, let’s send Xi Jinping a care package. We can afford it, and it would be very amusing to watch him try to figure out what to do about it.
Amusing for us, anyway — less so for Shanghai.