The relationship of unequals has seen both Beijing and Moscow wrongfooted by the crisis
Philip Stephens
© Ingram Pinn/Financial TimesAutocrats are not immune. Coronavirus is a globalist — what a former British prime minister called “a citizen of nowhere”. Blind to national frontiers, it is equally heedless of the nature of political systems. Democracy is no protection. Nor equally is tyranny.
A fashionable narrative says the pandemic marks another turn of the ratchet towards authoritarianism. Despots are seizing on the global emergency to harden repression at home and advance their interests abroad. Technology is being harnessed to surveillance.
The leaders of the world’s liberal democracies are left to confront societal and economic fractures inflicted by Covid-19. Take China, the story goes. With the west distracted, President Xi Jinping has grabbed an opportunity to tighten Beijing’s grip on disputed islands in the South China Sea, to arrest pro-democracy leaders in Hong Kong and to intimidate Taiwan.
Further afield, China has been building soft power by providing aid to nations struggling to get a grip on coronavirus. At the other end of the “strongman” spectrum, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, has assumed emergency powers to sideline parliament. Autocratic-minded leaders elsewhere — Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Narendra Modi in India — ride roughshod over civil rights.
The mistake is to misread such power-grabs as evidence that the pandemic naturally entrenches illiberal regimes. In most cases, it is easier to make the opposite case. Mr Xi has recovered his balance since the virus first swept like a fire through the Chinese city of Wuhan.
More striking than his recovery, however, was the fragility exposed by angry public protests over the authorities’ initial handling of the outbreak. It was more than two months before the Chinese president was confident enough to visit the epicentre of the outbreak. The backlash coincided with months of pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong and a sweeping election victory for pro-independence politicians in Taiwan.
Mr Xi is often styled the most powerful Chinese leader since chairman Mao. Instead, the early response to the pandemic spoke to the brittleness of his power.
The fate of many Chinese emperors through the centuries shows their authority to have been absolute until the moment of their fall. Beyond Asia, coronavirus has also crystallised a shift that has left Beijing almost friendless in the west.
There is no need to swallow the myriad conspiracy theories promoted by US President Donald Trump’s supporters to consider that China’s first response to the virus was concealment. Its subsequent threatening diplomacy, aimed at absolving the regime of all responsibility, serves only to reinforce talk of a cover-up. Australia, at the head of calls for an international inquiry, accuses China of “economic coercion”.
The suspicions run with the grain. Predatory investment and trade policies and military operations in the South China Sea have transformed European attitudes. In the words of one senior EU diplomat, the starting point for European policy towards China was, until quite recently, an eagerness to engage. Now it begins with pushing back.
No more so than in Britain. David Cameron’s government lauded a new “golden era” in Sino-British relations. Now, Boris Johnson faces a backlash within his ruling Conservative party against China’s investment in communications and energy infrastructure.
Mr Xi’s ally Vladimir Putin is a still bigger loser.
The revanchist Russian president had marked out 2020 to solidify his own position and Russia’s great power status. A plan to extend his presidency for another dozen years beyond 2024 would win ringing endorsement in a national plebiscite.
Moscow would host a summit of world leaders. Coronavirus has forced the cancellation of both events. A failed price war with Saudi Arabia has seen a collapse in the oil price to levels far below the $40 a barrel assumed by the Russian government in setting its annual budget.
The result, as the Kremlin admits, is an economic crisis worse than that of 2009. Russia’s military entanglements in Syria and Ukraine now look very expensive.
All the while, China’s supposedly equal alliance with Moscow looks more like strategic encirclement. The Belt and Road Initiative has underscored Beijing’s claim on central Asia. Mr Xi’s long-term ambition to make China the pre-eminent Eurasian power would supplant Russia in Europe.
How long, one wonders, will Mr Putin be content to be so obviously the junior partner in such a relationship of unequals? He cannot expect any help from his admiring imitator Mr Orban.
Hungary is a shrinking state, advancing under Mr Orban’s leadership towards inexorable demographic decline.
None of the above should be taken as reassurance that liberal democracies will emerge fit and well from the pandemic. The crisis has tested to the limits, and sometimes beyond, the west’s rhetorical commitments to mutual support and collaboration.
Germany’s go-it-alone response to the virus has scarcely promoted confidence in European solidarity. Mr Trump has abandoned all pretence of US leadership.
If the global balance of power between despots and democrats does change in the aftermath of the crisis, it will be not because the pandemic favours the former, but because the latter has messed things up.
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