The Chinese government’s aggressive locking down of Shanghai should “dispel the notion that the Chinese government is a contagious disease management role model for the West,” as Jim Geraghty put it. A certain kind of technocratic mind, usually also of a left-leaning cast, has professed admiration for the supposed ability of the country’s government to contain Covid. Well, when residents of the nation’s wealthiest city are forbidden from leaving their homes, starve, are compelled into crowded quarantine facilities if infected with Covid, and get the pets they are forced to leave behind beaten to death by lockdown enforcers . . . maybe we can abandon this admiration.
Another recent development ought to weaken a different case for the Chinese government, a case that even finds purchase among some ostensibly right-leaning individuals: i.e., that it represents a kind of assertive, confident patriotism we could use more of ourselves. Well, it’s a funny kind of patriotism that, er, demands the censorship of a country’s national anthem. But that is what is happening in China right now, as references to a politically inconvenient line from that anthem are being forbidden on Chinese social media:
The first line of the Chinese national anthem is a rousing call that reads: “Stand up! Those who refuse to be slaves!”
Now, it appears that the line has been barred on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform, amid increasing outrage and frustration over the authorities’ handling of Shanghai’s harsh COVID-19 lockdown.
Searches on the platform for a hashtag referencing the lyrics appear to have been blocked over the weekend, with users receiving the message “no results can be found” when they attempt to do so.
This action does not suggest a confident regime, one that “offers a considerable amount of freedom if one has the right definition for it,” as one observer has argued. It conveys rather the opposite: a brittle, stifling, authoritarian apparatus that can seem strong but is ultimately weak because it fears its own people. So much so that it would suppress the very symbols of its national character when it feels threatened.
Let these dual myths of China’s government as a model of technocratic efficiency and as a paragon of patriotic sentiment perish amid its oppressive Covid response.