Qin Hui (秦晖) - Globalization after the Pandemic

In the winter and spring of 2020, when the coronavirus erupted in China and then spread around the world, I had already been studying the world of contemporary Chinese establishment intellectuals for some time, mainly by translating and curating important examples of their work and sharing them via my website Reading the China Dream, Why are Chinese establishment intellectuals interesting? Because Chinas rise to superpower status, together with the Wests seeming decline in the first decade of the 21 st century, has convinced many of these intellectuals that world history is at a turning point as important as the moment when, for example, monarchies were replaced by democracies. Their reasoning is that both Soviet communism and American (or more broadly, Western) liberal democracy have failed economically and politically, while China surges forward. This means not only that China is the wave of the future, but also that Chinas (and the worlds) past, present, and future must be revisited, since most peoples basic vision of the world has been fundamentally shaped either by liberalismwhich focuses on the individual and market forcesor socialismwhich focuses on class struggle and the dialectic.

The belief that liberalism and socialism have both lost their explanatory value can be liberating (it is what motivates many postmodernists, after all), and between roughly 2000 and 2015, the world of Chinese establishment intellectuals exploded in a burst of creativity not seen since the Republican Period (19121949) as they sought to rethink the world and Chinas place in it, to reimagine contemporary Chinas founding myths. We are of course free to agree or disagree with Chinese establishment intellectuals, but as the worlds second largest economy and chief competitor with the United States, it behooves us to at least know what they are thinking, because while these figures are not dissidents, they are not propagandists either, as the book translated here richly illustrates.

The events of the spring and summer of 2020, when China largely bested the virus and the West did not, seemed in the eyes of many Chinese establishment intellectuals to confirm their view that China was rising and the West declining. I decided that Chinese intellectual commentary on the coronavirus and its management would likely become an important aspect of the broader ongoing discussion in China, and launched a project to attempt to follow along. The project also yielded the book translated here: by far the most interesting and surprising example of anything I read by Chinese establishment intellectuals talking about the coronavirus.

In this book, Qin Hui, one of Chinas most prominent liberal intellectuals and champions of human rights and democracy, who often publishes, in China, things that look to me very much like dissent, says essentially: it is a fact that Chinas authoritarian regime, through a combination of coercion and science, did a much better job than any major Western country in handling the pandemic, a fact which is destined to make China more powerful and more authoritarian. What are the supporters of democracy and human rights going to do about that? To drive the point home, Qin notes that if any countryor terrorist organizationever weaponizes something like the coronavirus and deploys it in a war, it is clear which side will win. Again, what are the supporters of democracy and human rights going to do about that?