Žižek on China and COVID-19: Wuhan, authoritarian capitalism, and empathetic socialism in NZ

On my visit to the city Wuhan in 1999 I was invited to the philosophy department at Wuhan University to give a couple of lectures on Wittgenstein. The city was in the middle of a merger of three university institutions. I was impressed by the number and variety of Western philosophy journals, more than any Western university library I had seen in my career. My memory is of an old city that had incredible charm that spoke to the old imperial China. It was in the process of modernization and like an ancient dragon waking up from sleep it was about to spread its wings. Today Wuhan is the capital of Hubei province with a population of nearly twelve million. Its name is a conglomeration of three towns –Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang—and it is the hub of Central China. It was designated as a UNESCO Creative City in 2017. Its history stretches back into antiquity to the Shang Dynasty 3500 years ago. The city has taken on a forbidding connotation for the Western press that associate it with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in November 2019 and the city went into lockdown in January. The virus had likely jumped on to humans from wild animals sold as food at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a live animal and seafood market in Jianghan District. The WHO was notified about an outbreak of pneumonia on December 31 and some forty people were identified with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), most of whom had been to the market. On January 1 the market was closed and on February 24 the trade and consumption of wild animals was banned in China.¹ Now there is significant evidence that it did not begin in Wuhan although the wet market may have been one of the centres for spreading it (Letzter, 2020). While most scientists agree that the virus originated in bats it is there is not conclusive evidence that it began in Wuhan in either the wet market or the lab (Readfearn, 2020).

Engaging in the politics of naming Donald Trump had no such scientific scruples and early on he racialised the virus and created public paranoia by calling it ‘the Chinese virus’, ‘the Wuhan virus’ and ‘Kung flu’. Reportedly he used the expression more than 20 times between March 16 and March 20 (Viala-Gaudefroy & Lindaman, 2020). The president repeatedly lied about the COVID-19 pandemic. His accusations against China are part of a larger ecology of lies concerning the nature of the outbreak, the blaming of the Obama administration, testing, travel bans, taking the pandemic seriously, the Defence Production Act, the State’s resources, Democrats and so on (Paz, 2020).

It’s becoming impossible not to draw the comparison between the management of the COVID-19 by the Chinese Government and Trump’s administration, once one has cleared away the conspiracies and false information and racial paranoia pumped out about ‘the Wuhan virus’. The naming calling really only extends the rhetoric of trade wars by pointing the finger at China and making a series of unsustainable accusations. It is part of a more sophisticated rhetorical attack on China and part of a style of politics that rests on the idea that if you repeat a lie three times people will believe it. The fact is that despite the early suppression of information China has managed the crisis efficiently and is virus free while the Trump administration has bungled it from start to finish, acting against its own scientific advisors and is seemingly willing to sacrifice American workers and front line staff, often Black and Latino shop workers already disproportionately affected by health disparities. Yuwa Hedrick-Wong (2020) argues that ‘Trump’s Attack On China Could Ruin His Re-Election Bid’.

The Far-Right, to whom Trump makes frequent appeals, seem to have a death wish or is intent on using the crisis to promote civil unrest with at the expense of dying from COVID-19 while asserting the right of freedom of association. The Left too has decided to demonstrate their solidarity in spite of the virus when it came to Black Lives Matter peaceful public protests that signal a new historically era of Black civil rights. It may be enough to help to get rid of Trump at the next US elections in November although there are worrying signs that Trump is militarizing the protests. There are some signs that these protests are a much broader public movement than the struggle during the 1960s providing a unifying ethos against police brutality and a justice system that still carries the seed of slavery that has not yet been effectively recognized or dealt with.

The comparison between China and US on the treatment of the virus has not escaped one of my favourite philosophers, Slavoj Žižek, one of the most well-known and entertaining intellectuals of our time. In ‘My Dream of Wuhan’ Žižek (2020) manages to draw out a lesson for Communism:

Full unconditional solidarity and a globally coordinated response are needed, a new form of what was once called Communism. If we will not orient our efforts in this direction, then Wuhan today is maybe the image of a city of our future, https://www.welt.de/kultur/article205630967/Slavoj-Zizek-My-Dream-of-Wuhan.html

I think he has a point, if not about Communism then about a form of collective self-interest, about collectivity in the sense of national self-interest, and about the ethics of collectivity in a time of crisis. And he notes the ‘racist paranoia’ at work and the enigma of the obsession with COVID-19 when there are more severe epidemics going on. (About the latter claim I’m not so sure). For all its strengths and attractions of individual and personal rights under liberalism liberal democracies have not been effective in managing the crisis. Libertarians, by contrast, have created a constitutional fire fed by the Far-Right who insist on their second amendment right to carry arms even at a time of national crisis and holding rallies and protesting against social distancing. There have been many rhetorical strategies to avoid responsibility: COVID-19 is considered ‘a little flu’ and some critics claim there are and have been many worst viruses, more lethal and more infectious. The public health authorities have experienced strong anti-science and anti-vaccination reactions and the constant stoking of conspiracies. The ruthless calculus of ‘opening up’ is a perfect governmentality strategy with its prudential rationality that calculates how many people need to be sacrificed to keep the economy open.

Whatever the implication that Žižek draws it is apparent that China managed the crisis efficiently, even if the real numbers of infections and deaths are higher than those reported. Does this speak to the nature of true Communism? I don’t think so. It speaks more to a one-party authoritarian State. Throughout the global crisis my wife Tina and I have lived in Tairua, a small village on the East Coast of the Coromandel Peninsula in the North Island of NZ. We arrived in early December and this is the longest we have been in one place in the last twenty years. It has been like a spiritual retreat but we have been lucky because we live in a small island territory with only five million people.

The government is a Labour-led Coalition headed by Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister, who justly has received international praise for her handling of multiple crises that have struck NZ over the last few years: first, the Muslim massacre in Christchurch where fifty-one people were murdered while at prayer; second, the White Island eruption that killed twenty-one tourists on December 9th 2019; and, the COVID-19 crisis that struck soon after. Ardern has shown genuine empathy to the victims of these crises and she is also genuine if not a little ingenious when at the height of the crisis she asked ‘team’ New Zealand ‘to be kind’ to one another. The results have been impressive even compared to its close neighbour Australia with only 1547 confirmed cases and twenty-two deaths (as of 16 July). With military control of the international borders NZ seems one of the safest places on earth. Should we call it Communism? I don’t think so. Maybe we should call it ‘Empathetic Socialism’?

There was an attempt to introduce universal free testing and NZ bought home NZ citizens free of charge. The government provided contact tracing and made virus data publicly available. It also made available handsome wage subsidies and provided financial support to families and businesses.² The government is now focussed on its wellbeing budget priorities and also on rebuilding the NZ economy.³ None of the plans or strategies could be described as Communist. The NZ Labour Party advertises itself as socialist party with its tradition roots in activism for workers’ rights and democratic reform. It was the party of the welfare state and the party describes itself as having established ‘Kiwibank (as part of their coalition with the Alliance), the Superannuation fund, and Kiwisaver; decriminalisation of prostitution; legalisation of civil unions; and the introduction of the Working for Families package and interest-free student loans’.⁴

One of the big differences with Communism is that NZ is that it is a constitutional monarchy based on a parliamentary system of government using a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) voting system making it unlikely that any one party will win a majority of seats. It is pluralistic multi-party system rather than a one party-state. Given the legacy of our heritage as a British colony and also the importance of concepts of individual liberty, freedom of expression and other freedoms, with established limits on the State, it is improbable that New Zealanders would ever accept any form of Communism. Within this historical scheme it also developed its own constitutional perspective of the New Zealand’s system of government to honour the Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti o Waitangi) that governs the relationship between Māori and others (Pakeha).⁵ Labour is a traditional Western socialist party in a coalition with NZ First with Winston Peters as leader, probably the most experienced politician in NZ, and the Green Party that has matured since the late 1990s. It’s a coalition government that demands communication and cooperation, and is therefore far removed from Communism. The style of government also sits well with a modern mixed economy based on private ownership, although the NZ is too dominated by Australian oligopolies in retail banking, insurance, and supermarket chains. Rio Tinto, who operate the Alumina smelter at Tiwai Point has just announced it is closing down after years of government support and hundreds of millions of tax-payer dollars.

It’s not clear to me why Žižek on China is complementary on the one hand and damning on the other. In recorded videos he speaks of China’s system as ‘authoritarian capitalism’ – what he regards as the worst of both systems.⁶ Žižek discusses China's rise to power and the future of democracy arguing that democracy and capitalism are splitting. He asks ‘Would you like to live in a world where the only alternative is either Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism or Chinese-Singaporean capitalism with Asian values?’ and he goes on to argue ‘if we do nothing we will gradually approach a kind of a new type of authoritarian society’.⁷ (See also Yiwu & Solomon, 2011). In one of Žižek’s (2018) latest books Living in the End Times he engages the theme of ‘the end times’ of a world at the hands of the ‘four riders of the apocalypse.’ Žižek is an Hegelian Marxist superstar that has renovated dialectical materialism, strongly influenced by Jacques Lacan and is a close colleague with Alain Badiou, the brilliant French philosopher who still hankers for Maoism. He is a prolific author with more than fifty books,⁸ including Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World (2020) that argues a ‘new form of communism’ is required that can avoid global catastrophe only by shifting away from market mechanisms to a ‘global organisation that can control and regulate the economy’.⁹ This rather alarmist and naïve argument is high on Hegelian totalising theory but rather limited when it comes to economics. It is inspired by a Hegelian-Lacanian ontology that underlies his political philosophy and hangs on to the Marxist notion of ideology, the transparent subject and the French structuralism of Lacan and Althusser which is still a potent mix in contesting that we live in a post-ideological world.

His new form of communism is best represented by the World Health Organization (WHO), yet one of the most difficult challenges for WHO and any other world organisation is that it is itself a product of a world system that reflects old Cold War rivalries and the recent deepening of US-China tensions . Surely, Žižek is right to insist on the notion of ideology here? The US, UK and Australia, in particular, are developing an orchestrated campaign based on the Five Eyes intelligence system¹⁰ as a platform for extending the trade wars as in the recent British banning of Huawei 5G technologies¹¹ and, ultimately, raising the prospect of a new Cold War.

Žižek on China has not led to universal agreement, not that it was designed to do so. Žižek iconic style of philosophizing is almost as important as his content. If it doesn’t lead to controversy, then it is not successful. It is part of his style to be provocative. Alex Lo (2020) is one critic who thinks he gets it wrong. He begins by citing Žižek, thus:

Let me bring together the three notions from the title [of today’s debate]: happiness, capitalism and communism in one exemplary case: China today. China in the last decades is arguably the greatest economic success story in human history. Hundreds of millions were raised from poverty into middle class existence. How did China achieve it? The 20th century left was defined by its opposition to the two fundamental tendencies of modernity: the reign of capitalism with its aggressive market competition and the authoritarian bureaucratic state power.

Today’s China combines these two features in their extreme forms: strong authoritarian state and wild capitalist dynamics. They do it on behalf of the happiness of the majority of people. They don’t mention communism to legitimise their rule. They prefer the old Confucian notion of a harmonious society.

Lo (2020) concedes that Žižek’s introductory remark was ‘clever and insightful’ but argues:

China today really ties together capitalism, Marxism and happiness, or the utilitarian principle of pleasure for the greatest number of people, which in real life, must also mean pain and/or unpleasantness for some people.Like any self-respecting Hegelian-Marxist-postmodernist, Zizek is all theory and no data. But what he said could be quantified. In 1999, just 2 per cent of the population were classified as middle class but this rose to 39 per cent by 2013.¹²

Modern China is most misunderstood by Žižek because, as Alex Lo (2020) argues, he misunderstands ‘it’s China’s bourgeoisie, not the proletariat, who will determine the future.’ This is a departure from standard Marxist fare. There surely is some measure of truth in Lo’s remarks when it is realized that China’s over 550 million strong middle class (some 40% of the population) which expected to grow to over 750 million in the mid-2020s has more purchasing power than its counterpart in the US and EU combined.¹³ In the same way that Marxist theory did not fit the role of the Chinese peasantry in the 1940s and 1950s, it may be that the Chinese middle class also does not fit snugly in Marxist theory, with or without Chinese characteristics. While the common belief of the last 20 years in the West is that economic growth, a growing middle class, and the rise of entrepreneurs inevitably will lead to democracy is a form of wish-fulfilment and there are no signs that this is in the process of occurring. By contrast the Chinese middle classes support the Communist Party and does not behave in the way prescribed by Marxist theory or in the same way that its American and European counterpart does. Chinese consumers also are very sophisticated and Western multinationals fall over themselves to compete for market share with local Chinese brands.

In the post-COVID-19 environment of ‘opening up’ the economy China is the first to recover to buy up distressed assets in other parts of the world. China also seems prepared to accept the mantle laid down by the US current administration to follow a hybrid trade-diplomacy hardball game, lacing its foreign policy with sanctions and rewards of the rebirth of China's economy in areas of tourism, aviation, higher education while buying up Australian iron ore and coal despite the current tensions. It seems that China’s economy is rebounding with strong employment and stable supply chains, unlike the US economy where historically high unemployment is likely to prevail for some time and the middle class might vote with its feet in the November elections. In the meanwhile, the US is ratcheting up the anti-China rhetoric in an attempt to slow down China’s development and also steer Trump to victory in the November elections.

Michael A. Peters Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China [email protected]

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The WHOS provides a timeline at https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/27-04-2020-who-timeline—covid-19?gclid=Cj0KCQjwpNr4BRDYARIsAADIx9yAJrXBkre46WjKwB62ATYLPNx-YQvCWot9LPSIX8eSTR1zRSAwBNgaAuLPEALw_wcB

2 https://covid19.govt.nz/?gclid=CjwKCAjwr7X4BRA4EiwAUXjbt8lu0xCF_QT7XEJcJPQbzvBAxS_kz0SYxL56R0pOu-RX5oDG1qDKXRoCPmwQAvD_BwE

3 https://treasury.govt.nz/publications/wellbeing-budget/wellbeing-budget-2019

4 https://www.labour.org.nz/history

5 https://www.newzealandnow.govt.nz/living-in-nz/history-government/the-treaty-of-waitangi

6 Slavoj Zizek — China and the Future of Marxism & Democracy, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVsLGiXGQn0; China is a political tragedy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = hswrSsggyNA.

7 Slavoj Zizek: Capitalism with Asian values, https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/talktojazeera/2011/10/2011102813360731764.html

8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek_bibliography

9 https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-slavoj-zizek-s-brutal-dark-formula-to-save-the-world-1.8898051

10 https://www.gcsb.govt.nz/about-us/ukusa-allies/

11 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53403793#:∼:text=The%20UK's%20mobile%20providers%20are,from%20their%20networks%20by%202027.&text=It%20follows%20sanctions%20imposed%20by,security%20threat%20%2D%20something%20Huawei%20denies.

12 https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/3007373/why-modern-china-most-misunderstood

13 https://www.forbes.com/sites/helenwang/2016/01/19/chinas-middle-class-has-become-a-major-pillar-of-its-economy/#72cd45123d4c ; https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/