The coronavirus crisis could be China's Chernobyl

To judge by the Chinese authorities’ inept handling of the coronavirus outbreak, Beijing may well need to put its plans for world domination on hold.

It is all very well for China’s communist rulers to embark on the biggest military build-up seen in peacetime, or to seek to consolidate the country’s economic prowess with the construction of the ambitious Belt and Road initiative.

But Beijing’s prospects of becoming the world’s pre-eminent power appear far less convincing when set against the background of the woeful incompetence that has characterised the regime’s response to coronavirus.

It is not just that a failure to initially grasp the significance of the virus has resulted in the country being brought to a virtual standstill. Or that it has been forced to pump an estimated £22 billion into the economy to prevent a financial crisis, as well as a public health one that has to date claimed more than 1,000 lives.

It is the fact that, due to the rank incompetence of the communist bureaucrats responsible for running the country, the rest of the world now finds itself having to cope with a potential pandemic that, had they responded sooner, may well have been avoided. The virus has so far resulted in about 300 other cases being reported in 24 other countries, including at least eight in Britain.

Chinese officials will no doubt contend that, in an age when global travel is the norm, it is nigh on impossible to conduct effective health screening of the estimated 5 billion passengers that pass through the world’s key hubs each year.

The problem with this argument is that it conveniently overlooks the fact that the Chinese authorities were warned well in advance about the potential implications of the virus by a doctor in Wuhan, but dismissed his claims as scaremongering.

Now, following the death from the virus of 34-year-old Li Wenliang, the regime is having to deal with a national uproar over the doctor’s treatment, with ordinary citizens comparing Beijing’s handling of the crisis to that of the Chernobyl disaster.

Some have even dared to utter calls for free speech, a concept that is robustly resisted by the country’s ruling elite.

Add to this the woeful lack of transparency that has defined Beijing’s response from the outset, and it is clear that authorities have succeeded in creating a self-inflicted crisis that poses fundamental questions about their fitness to govern.

For those of us in the West who have raised concerns about the ultimate ambitions of China’s authoritarian rulers, the fact that Beijing is so patently struggling to contain a home-grown health crisis provides a degree of reassurance about the limitations of their powers.

Yet, while Beijing’s handling of the coronavirus has made it an international laughing stock, maintaining China’s global credibility is the least of the worries facing the country’s beleaguered president, Xi Jinping.

Mr Xi, who has described the outbreak as “a major test of China’s system and capacity for governance”, has been accused of going into hiding as the scale of the crisis has unfolded, leaving it to more junior – and more expendable – members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to be the public face of the government’s response.

This has resulted in unprecedented criticism of Mr Xi, with one prominent university law professor, Xu Zhangrun, publishing an article in which he described the outbreak as a “national calamity”. He claimed that the crisis had “revealed the rotten core of Chinese governance”.

Indeed, the outbreak is being seen in some quarters as representing the biggest challenge the country’s autocratic rulers have faced since the Tiananmen Square protests more than 30 years ago. And, just as happened in 1989, all the indications are that the authorities are determined to use brute force to quell any attempt to defy the government’s will.

This would explain the rough treatment being meted out to anyone suspected of carrying the virus, with video footage emerging of citizens being dragged from their homes by police wearing hazmat suits and taken to specially built quarantine compounds.

For, while the rest of the world frets about the possibility of dealing with a deadly pandemic, the overriding priority of China’s rulers is to maintain the CCP in power at all costs. And to this end they are prepared to go to any lengths, from restricting access to entire provinces to detaining civil rights campaigners, in their quest to stay in power.

It was only three weeks ago, after all, that Mr Xi appeared before an adoring audience in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People where, to mark the Lunar New Year holiday, he declared, “Every single Chinese person, every member of the Chinese nation, should feel proud to live in this great era.”

Today those bold words will have a hollow ring for many Chinese who will instead be questioning whether a government that cannot take care of even their basic health needs deserves their support.