[As
the Communist Party cements control, more officials worry about pleasing their
bosses than taking care of the people.]
By
Li Yuan
Wuhan’s mayor blamed higher-ups. A senior
disease control official blamed layers of bureaucracy. A top government expert
blamed the public: The people, he said, simply didn’t understand what he told
them.
As China grapples with a mysterious
coronavirus outbreak that has killed at least 490 people and sickened
thousands, the country’s 1.4 billion people are asking what went wrong. Senior
officials are engaging in an unusually blunt display of finger pointing.
So many officials have denied responsibility
that some online users joke that they are watching a passing-the-buck competition.
(It’s “tossing the wok” in Chinese.)
The Chinese people are getting a rare glimpse
of how China’s giant, opaque bureaucratic system works — or, rather, how it
fails to work. Too many of its officials have become political apparatchiks,
fearful of making decisions that anger their superiors and too removed and
haughty when dealing with the public to admit mistakes and learn from them.
“The most important issue this outbreak
exposed is the local government’s lack of action and fear of action,” said Xu
Kaizhen, a best-selling author who is famous for his novels that explore the
intricate workings of China’s bureaucratic politics.
“Under the high-pressure environment of an
anticorruption campaign, most people, including senior government officials,
only care about self-preservation,” Mr. Xu said. “They don’t want to be the first
to speak up. They wait for their superiors to make decisions and are only
accountable to their superiors instead of the people.”
The Chinese government appears to be aware of
the problem. The Communist Party’s top leadership acknowledged in a meeting on
Monday that the epidemic was “a major test of China’s system and capacity for
governance.”
Growing numbers of people are questioning the
government’s decisions as China enters a period of virtual shutdown. As the
virus spread, officials in Wuhan and around the country withheld critical
information, played down the threat and rebuked doctors who tried to raise the
alarm. A reconstruction of the diseases’s spread by The New York Times showed
that by not issuing earlier warnings, the Chinese government potentially lost
the window to keep the disease from becoming an epidemic.
The outbreak has undermined the myth that the
Chinese political elites win assignments and promotion purely on merit. China
has sold this system as its own unique innovation. Developing countries have
sent thousands of their government officials to China to learn its model of
governance, a political system that offers security and growth in return for
submission to authoritarian rule.
People in China are now questioning that
premise. They are focusing much of their anger on Xi Jinping, China’s top
leader and the person many blame for creating a culture of fear and
subservience within the Chinese government.
Few people dare to question Mr. Xi openly,
for fear of provoking censors or the police. But after Mr. Xi disappeared from
public in recent days, some social media users began asking euphemistically,
“Where is that person?” They are also posting online and sharing pictures of
former leaders at the site of past crises.
Critics say quietly that, under Mr. Xi, the
party began promoting loyal political cadres over technocrats — the experts and
skilled administrators who were the backbone of China’s bureaucracy in 1990s
and 2000s, when the country grew the fastest.
Those officials could often be corrupt, but
even the party’s fiercest critics sometimes acknowledged that they got things
done. Liu Zhijun, the former railway minister, is serving a lifetime sentence
for taking bribes and abusing power. He also oversaw the creation of China’s
high-speed rail system, which vastly improved life in the country.
The wok tossing in China stems in part from
the tension between the technocrats, who hold a large number of positions with
China’s provincial and national disease control centers, and the political
cadres — the mayors, governors and the provincial party secretaries. The
outbreak and lack of disclosure suggest that the political cadres are winning.
In fact, even the technocrats are becoming cadres because none of them had the courage
to tell the public what they knew about the virus.
Chinese officials are spending as much as
one-third of their time on political studying sessions, a lot of which are
about Mr. Xi’s speeches. Political loyalty weighs much more in performance
evaluations than before. Now the rule of thumb in Chinese officialdom seems to
be demonstrating loyalty as explicitly as possible, keeping everything else
vague and evading responsibility at all costs when things go wrong.
The Chinese people may be paying the price.
The failures span the system.
Zhou Xianwang, Wuhan’s mayor, said he didn’t
disclose the scale and danger of the epidemic earlier because he needed the
authorization from higher up. But he could have done something without sharing
much information, including telling the residents to wear masks, wash hands
frequently and stop big gatherings such as the potluck banquet attended by over
40,000 families just a few days before his city of 11 million was locked down.
When information began to dribble out, it was
vague and misleading. In a series of online notices issued between Dec. 31 and
Jan. 17, local officials disclosed they were treating pneumonia patients but
didn't say when or how many.
The National Health Commission, the ministry
with the authority to declare an epidemic emergency, didn’t issue its own
notice about the outbreak until Jan. 19. But the notice essentially kicked
blame back to the local authorities. The first sentence cited a rule that
required the commission to work with local officials on epidemic prevention.
A top government health adviser, Wang
Guangfa, who had reassured the public that the disease was controllable only to
be sickened himself, said in an interview after he recovered that he had
limited information at the time. He also defended his phrasing as a
“misunderstanding” by the general public, saying most outbreaks of infectious
diseases are controlled in the end.
Local officials don’t seem to have local
people at the top of their list of priorities. In an interview with state
television, Ma Guoqiang, the Communist Party secretary of Wuhan, acknowledged
that Wuhan residents “are a little anxious and a little nervous” and said he
would mobilize all party cells to comfort them.
“But the most important comfort,” he added,
“came from Party Secretary Xi Jinping.”
Mr. Xu, the novelist, said Mr. Ma’s remarks
demonstrated how officials had more concern for pleasing their bosses than
taking care of the people they allegedly served.
“If they can rearrange the order in their
hearts," Mr. Xu said, “we’ll see a very different governance style.”
As they try to contain the spread, local
governments are showing that they are better at looking busy than they are at
finding a solution. Many are now finding ways to track down and even expel
residents from Hubei Province to keep the coronavirus from spreading. Tracking
potential spreaders is sound policy, but punishing or persecuting them risks
driving them underground, making it even harder to fight the outbreak.
Even outside the hardest hit areas, local
officials are showing they don’t make rules with the well-being of the people
in mind. A video that went viral across China showed a couple stuck on a bridge
connecting Guizhou Province to the city of Chongqing. The two governments had
halted travel between them, and the couple — she from Guizhou, he from
Chongqing — had no place to go.
On social media, low-level cadres are
complaining that they are receiving so many instructions from the higher-ups
that they spend most of their time filling out spreadsheets instead of getting
real work done. In a social media post headlined “The Formalism Under the
Mask,” the author wrote, “Most people in the system don’t do things to solve
problems. They do things to solve responsibilities.”
After the epidemic, the Chinese leadership
will have to punish a few officials, even severely, to save face and win back
some credibility. But for people who are suffering from the epidemic and the
failure of governance, the Communist Party may have a hard time winning them
back.
“I know before long this country will go back
to being a peaceful, prosperous society. We will hear many people screaming how
proud they are of its prosperity and power,” a Wuhan resident wrote on the
social media site Weibo. “But after what I have witnessed, I refuse to watch the
applause and commendation.”
