My Take | State competence is more important than democracy
- The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that the so-called Asian century is not about dominance or hegemony, but the ability of the region’s governments to take care of their own people relative to their Western counterparts
It’s often observed that with the Covid-19 pandemic, Asian countries have outperformed Western ones as many manage to keep deaths low and the economic damage minimal.
This may be surprising as we are accustomed to thinking the West ought to be better equipped to deal with pandemics and other natural disasters because of its advantages in science and democracy.
That may well be true in the past century, but if we look a bit further into the early 19th and 18th centuries, the governments in Asian countries such as Korea, Japan and dynastic China often performed reasonably well in dealing with disasters including pandemics and famines, relative to their Western counterparts.
This may be due to their state capacity, which had reached a high level, especially with the imperial Qing court during the 18th century, until its decline and fall after Western incursions in the following century.
It’s part of a general historical narrative that southern China has always been a hotbed of diseases, waiting to break out and spread to other countries. This may have more to do with deteriorating state capacity during those particularly turbulent times in China’s modern history.