Beijing battles ‘crisis of Chernobyl proportions’ in coronavirus outbreak
- Public fury is growing, with calls for more freedom of speech, but observers don’t expect any dramatic changes
- Xi Jinping has been mostly absent from view, as heads start to roll in Hubei province
Right in the centre of China, the city of Wuhan in Hubei province has also been at the heart of some key political events in the country’s modern history.
It was where a nationalist revolution began in 1911 that overthrew the Qing dynasty, ending thousands of years of imperial rule. And from where supreme leader Mao Zedong famously swam across the Yangtze River in 1966 at the age of 72, as he launched the Cultural Revolution – a decade of social and political turmoil which left wounds that remain unhealed.
The crisis has been referred to as “China’s Chernobyl” – the 1986 nuclear accident in the former Soviet Union that was worsened by an opaque system and incompetent crisis management – and is the worst the ruling Communist Party has seen since 1989. It is certainly the worst under strongman leader President Xi Jinping.
“This is clearly a crisis of enormous proportions,” said Dali Yang, a political scientist with the University of Chicago. “Failure … will be blamed on the system and especially on Xi, who’s staked out his personal leadership role.”
Yang said although the Chinese government’s propaganda machine was trying to spin the outbreak into a show of the country’s strength, it would not convince everyone.