Chinese embassy raps ex-Singapore diplomat Bilahari Kausikan for ‘smearing’ China’s political system

Bilahari Kausikan argues in op-ed that coronavirus crisis reflects Beijing’s dilemma of balancing political control and economic efficiency

Chinese embassy condemns article as an attempt to smear and misinterpret China’s politics and leadership

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Chinese President Xi Jinping gestures near a heart-shaped sign and the slogan “Race against time, fight the virus” during an inspection of Chaoyang District’s centre for disease control and prevention in Beijing on February 10. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 7:00am, 26 Feb 2020Updated: 9:10am, 26 Feb 2020

The Chinese embassy in Singapore has rapped a former senior diplomat in the city state for an op-ed where he argued, among other things, that the coronavirus epidemic had dented the Chinese Communist Party’s credibility with its citizens.

Bilahari Kausikan, who retired as permanent secretary of the Singapore Foreign Affairs Ministry in 2013, described China’s handling of the crisis as a consequence of its Leninist value system, where a vanguard party has absolute control of state and society.

He said this system meant Beijing had the political will to order a lockdown of the epicentre of the Covid-19 contagion – Hubei province – and to build new hospitals rapidly, but had also caused reluctance among lower officials to sound the alarm to their higher-ups as the virus spread.

The virus crisis also reflected the CCP’s fundamental dilemma of how to strike a balance between political control and economic efficiency, and it was unclear how it and President Xi Jinping would face this challenge, he said.

The Chinese embassy, in a post on its Facebook page on Tuesday night, characterised Bilahari’s commentary as a bid to smear and misinterpret China’s politics and leadership, likening it to the “stereotype cliché of Western anti-China voices”.