Deng Xiaoping witnessed the precipitous collapse of the Soviet Union, and believed that the lessons to be learned were economic in nature. Many were indeed economic, but the most important lesson was not. The major reason for the Soviet Union’s demise, which Gorbachev himself realized, was the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl.
Chernobyl, if you’ve seen the HBO series or know anything about it, demonstrates perfectly the flaws inherent in the Soviet system, in that the Communist party ethic deploys denialism in order to protect itself from responsibility. “It’s not that bad,” is all that anyone ever says, even while people’s insides were melting and birds were dying outside. Things came to a head when the Swedish government contacted the Russians and wanted to know what was going on. Up to that point, information was suppressed, scientists were being prevented from sharing their information (or even working at all), and the people in the surrounding areas were left to the mercy of the burning nuclear plant.
The coronavirus presented the same challenge to Xi Jinping, who—of course!--harassed the doctor who discovered it and denied that anything was happening. When the virus escaped China, he was forced to lock down Wuhan and build two hospitals in a week, even though it was far too late.
The Atlantic had a great article about how Xi’s digital panopticon has been set up in such a way that he might not have been able to understand or react to what was happening. This is not a new problem, the article goes on to explain, as the Great Leap Forward (Mao’s catastrophic agricultural program that killed 30 million people) was also the result of this same phenomenon:
“On August 4, 1958, buoyed by reports pouring in from around the country of record grain, rice, and peanut production, an exuberant Chairman Mao Zedong wondered how to get rid of the excess, and advised people to eat “five meals a day.” Many did, gorging themselves in the new regime canteens and even dumping massive amounts of “leftovers” down gutters and toilets. Export agreements were made to send tons of food abroad in return for machinery or currency. Just months later, perhaps the greatest famine in recorded history began, in which tens of millions would die because, in fact, there was no such surplus.”
The article closes by explaining that Emperor Zhu Di during the Ming dynasty faced yet another problem: Lower-level officials were preventing certain people from petitioning the government, essentially preventing the emperor from helping his own people.
What does this mean for the United States? We are not in a good position, which is a colossal understatement. While I cannot give a proper rundown of all of the things that have happened since January 21st, 2017, suffice it to say that, according to the Washington Post, President Donald J Trump has lied—and I quote—sixteen thousand, two hundred and forty-one times (16,241 times) as of January 19, 2020. Compounding that, like Jared Kushner in the Middle East, he has had the infinite wisdom to propose drastic cuts to the CDC and other public health programs and has placed Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the government’s response to the coronavirus. To make matters more interesting, Rush Limbaugh has accused Democrats of “weaponizing the common cold” against President Trump, and called for one of the leading experts on infectious diseases at the CDC to be fired because she is allegedly Rod Rosenstein’s sister.
Does this resemble a government interested in and capable of protecting its citizens from a pandemic? In the words of a young Saurolophus in the animated film The Land Before Time, “Nope, nope, nope!” What happens instead, however, will be exciting. Trump has set himself up perfectly to fall as gracelessly and pathetically from power as possible, and the credibility of the party to which he belongs will be so thoroughly annihilated that they will have to concede quickly or face violence as a significant percentage of the population falls ill (because the CDC has been purged of competent people and his cronies are incapable of doing those jobs) and society faces collapse. We know how this ends, and it will be entirely Trump’s own fault.
