The Ideological Convergence of Health & Political Theory From Outside: Congressional-Executive Commission on China Hearing--"China’s Zero-COVID Policy and Authoritarian Public Health Control"

 

Pix Credit here

I have been following the work of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) for some time (see posts at CECC). It represents an important source of emerging priorities for policy making, and certainly an important space where constraints on such policy making is developed, for the President in the exercise of his (and eventually her) executive authority over foreign policy.  It also serves in a leadership role and a an influential guide to the private sector, aligning public power and private interests.  It is aided in this effort by a well selected group of experts and academics who share a fidelity to the core ideology the CECC and its political aims.

 

For some time, the CECC has been engaged in a process of differentiating Chinese Marxist-Leninist ideology and its expression as policy from that of US liberal democracy.  In that respect the effort mimics and amplifies (from an oppositional starting point) the efforts at the heart of the development of a Socialist path to law, norms, culture, politics, and economics that have been undertaken under the leadership of Xi Jinping.  In this, at least, the United States and China share a mutual interest in sharpening the gap between their respective systems, their ideologies, and the core premises form which each orders reality.

It comes as no surprise, then, that in typically Leninist fashion both sides of this effort conflate policy with politics, and each seeks to paint that conflation as antithetical--and indeed threatening--to the good order of the other.  The secondary objective aid the internationalism of both.  It is necessary to paint the other side in shades of the normatively disagreeable in order to make one's own side more palatable.

 What had been a heated and eventually unresolved debate among different groups in each state respecting COVID policy born of a need to balance and value economic stability, the reduction of mortality, and nationalism in the technologies of vaccination, has become weaponized as objects of ideological warfare. On both sides. And thus the conflation of authoritarianism and the Chinese path toward COVID containment from the US side that recasts policy choices as objects of fidelity in both systems. In both cases, then, COVID policy choices were quickly embedded in, and served as evidence of, the (now inevitable) differences between systems and the way those differences made the choices of both inevitable.  Of course that is fantasy: there were a range of plausible options that might have been adopted in each system other than the ones taken.  But having made their choices--each system now clothes them in a paramount expression of the triumph of their respective ideologies.

To underline this point in the US, the CECC has announced its hearings on China’s Zero-COVID Policy and Authoritarian Public Health Control. The point is made quite bluntly (as bluntly as it has been made from the opposite perspective  by Chinese officials): "response to the COVID-19 pandemic has featured entrenched patterns of authoritarian control characterized by top-down governance and harsh local implementation, secrecy around scientific data, rigid adherence to policy protocols that have jeopardized vulnerable communities, and pervasive censorship and criminalization of criticism." (CECC Hearings Announcement).

Details follow below. The underlying ideological theater on both sides remains unchanged.  But the masses require management--in both systems.  And management through narrative construction and the infusing of language and linguistic connections, proceeds apace.

 

 

China’s Zero-COVID Policy and Authoritarian Public Health Control

 

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

 

Virtually via CECC’s YouTube Channel

 

The People’s Republic of China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has featured entrenched patterns of authoritarian control characterized by top-down governance and harsh local implementation, secrecy around scientific data, rigid adherence to policy protocols that have jeopardized vulnerable communities, and pervasive censorship and criminalization of criticism. The Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has repeatedly touted the zero-COVID policy as a Party success story. At the 20th National Party Congress in October 2022, Xi described it as the “people’s war to stop the spread of the virus,” and signaled its continuation.

 

Implementation of the zero-COVID policy has exposed planning and emergency management shortcomings and human rights violations in locations under full and partial lockdown, such as Shanghai, Jilin and Xi’an, and more recently in Lhasa and in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. News and social media highlighted food shortages, fatalities related to hospitals unwilling or unable to admit patients with urgent conditions, and limited access to medical care for vulnerable populations. Coercive isolation and quarantine controls to prevent community transmission have included taping up entrances and erecting fences to prevent residents from leaving their homes and forcing both COVID-positive and -negative residents to transfer to makeshift quarantine facilities. Cases of deaths in connection to these rigid control measures have been reported in China, many of which could have been prevented.

 

This hearing will feature the analysis of China experts in public health, information control, and authoritarian politics to examine the zero-COVID policy and its implementation, and to pay tribute to Chinese citizens who have risked their freedom to criticize it. 

 

The hearing can be viewed via the CECC’s YouTube Channel.

 

Witnesses:

 

Yanzhong Huang, Senior Fellow for Global Health, Council on Foreign Relations

 

Sarah Cook, Research Director for China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, Freedom House

 

Rory Truex, Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University