Can the Corona Virus Strengthen China’s Authoritarian Regime?

The opinions expressed by authors in these commentaries do not necessarily represent the views of the China Institute or the University of Alberta.

In its race to combat the Corona COVID-19 virus China has embarked on a draconian path. It started a “people’s war” against the virus, locked down cities and provinces, and has sought to use its giant industrial complex to try to limit the virus’ spread. After weeks of ever-increasing numbers of infections and fatalities, we see, at least according to official Chinese governmental data, that the proliferation of the virus, and its lethally has peaked.

In its efforts to contain and battle the virus, the Chinese government has deployed a wide array of high-tech solutions in tandem with limiting population movement. It has, among others, developed and widely deployed the Alipay Health Code, developed by Ant Financial, a sister company to tech giant Alibaba, in initial cooperation with the local government of Hangzhou, where both the Alibaba and Ant Financial headquarters are based. As The New York Times reported in an article, the app sends user data – including locations and identifying code numbers – to the police and other authorities. Not to be outdone, China’s other tech giant, Tencent, which owns Wechat, is working on digital health (and tracking) systems, in collaboration with the government, which sends similar information.

Combined with the government database of travels within the nation, as well as hotel stays, linked to national identity card numbers, these empirically observable efforts suggest that Chinese government is endeavoring to implement a nation-wide system, in the name of containing of the virus. As such, the health scare has created the latest node in the (further) rise of China’s networked authoritarianism model. Until now, much of the high-tech surveillance blanket was limited to “hotspots of trouble” – from Tibet, where after the uprisings and incidents between 2012 and 2015, the government implemented regional wide surveillance systems, to Xinjiang, where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has created a high-tech mass-surveillance blanket, supported by a region-wide police presence, and in combination with forced-labor, re-education and training camps, and prison systems in which millions of Uighurs, and others, have vanished.

The CCP actively lauded, and defended these efforts, in the name of stability maintenance” (維穩) through which, in the words of Xu Zhangrun, it created a state of “big data totalitarianism” and what has been called Beijing’s “Data Leviathan.” Yet, the more forceful, all-encompassing side of this network as witnessed in Xinjian and Tibet – China’s two largest provinces that together cover 30.14% of the country and account for 1.8% of the total population – had yet to be expanded to the rest of the country. Despite the obvious economic and human-related downsides of the virus outbreak and its persistence, COVID-19 has presented the Xi regime and the CCP with an opportunity to consolidate and proliferate this model further, encompassing most, if not all of China. Accordingly, the virus can be used as an expedient affair for deepening totalitarian control, and abolishing what remained of the already-limited-free, individual space within the state. 

We find this to be the case given the heterogenous purposes of dictatorships, which can only truly be realized if the continuation of the regime is guaranteed and secured. In other words, all subsequent aspirations and goals are dependent on regime security. While COVID-19 may be considered as a quasi-internal security threat – one that is shared by other nations and governments – and does not pose the same kind of threat as a popular revolt or uprising by the people. In such cases, dictators do not always pursue policies that area state economy-advantageous. However, this is not always the case. On the other hand, COVID-19 cannot be treated entirely as an external security threat to which states typically respond by prioritizing economic and military development. We therefore see the Xi regime, as both rational a preoccupied with survival, responding to the COVID-19 pandemic as something that falls between an internal and external security threat (though leaning slightly more towards a threat from within the state), borrowing characteristics from both to yield a window of opportunity to entrench control under the guise of protecting the people.

 The 2002 SARS outbreak in China put the gaps of China’s mass-surveillance and sate control apparatus into sharp focus. This is one of the reasons why the CCP has responded differently and so aggressively in contrast to what was seen during the SARS outbreak and spread. While arguments might seek to uphold China’s progress in addressing outbreaks, the sudden emergence of COVID-19 reveals some of the direct benefits that dictatorships can extract from health emergencies when placed in a security context. China’s economic costs of the pandemic have been optimistically set at between 5-6% – approximately half of the state’s 2009 and 2010 exceptional growth, around 2-2.5% below the average for the 2012-2019 period.

 The argument developed so far suggests that while economic costs of COVID-19 are not sever enough to cause major concern for China, and the spread of COVID-19 does not warrant concern that the internal security of the regime is threatened – in fact, the disease has done much to limit individual agency who have become increasingly reliant on the capacities of the state to protect them – the pandemic exposes a unique opportunity for the CCP.

 To further advance necessary justifacatory basis for implementing security policy, we posit that COVID-19 in a regime-state security context can be cast as a similar imperative as terrorism for building the necessary structure for full-spectrum surveillance of China’s citizens using drones to enforce quarantines, lockdowns, mask-wearing, and so on. What we see afterward is the impossibility of de-escalating the security imperative and returning to a state of “normalcy,” even for contemporary dictatorships. When health crises are treated with the severity as any one of the CCP’s “three evils,” they are elevated to the level of existential threat, necessitating beyond-normal politics and policy responses.

 Events and practices observed in China since December 2019 can lead to the general conclusion that China has moved past developing and implementing surveillance high-tech model security and control in troubled spots, to a nation-wide level. Using the virus, the CCP appears to be acting on its concern over regime-survival. For a long time, the regime would not extend beyond its social contract, and seek not to intrude on the limited freedom/surveillance model too much, however, the virus-scare in combination with China under Xi, it might be the right moment. This might also point to future CCP trajectories and responses to issues impacting states such as climate change, recessions/depressions, and further health crises. Dictators have been shown to act with partial responsibility for broader society beyond the state but in ways that are either predominantly or concomitantly self-serving. The COVID-19 case and China’s response suggests a plausible pathway with which the CCP has the ability to control the population, deter unrest and enhance stability-maintenance. 

 Every new innovation introduced to combat the virus also tells of just how invasive and controlling Xi’s reign has become. Whether medical or social or economic, quarantines and lockdowns can gain time that enables governments to seek solutions – but they are not enduring solutions in and of themselves. Recent decades suggest many Chinese have tolerated the political excesses of Big Brother, even when they disliked them. However, in return, Big Brother was expected to protect lives and livelihoods from economic, social, environmental, and health threats. Whether people think that deal still stands may determine if they can pull off the swift economic recovery that China, and the world, needs. 

 
Dr. Tobias Burgers is a project assistant professor at the Cyber Civilization Research Center, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan.

Dr. Scott N. Romaniuk is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Security Studies at the China Institute, University of Alberta.