China Fails the Leadership Test on Coronavirus
Global leaders must build a reputation for basic truthfulness, good faith and responsible stewardship.
Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
Global health crises are geopolitical events, and the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus is no exception. That incipient pandemic is not simply testing the global health system. It is also an acid test for a Chinese regime that intends, in the words of President Xi Jinping, to “take center stage in the world.”
Much has been made — appropriately — of how China's authoritarian system has been the taproot of its worst failures in responding to coronavirus. (My American Enterprise Institute colleague Dan Blumenthal has written trenchantly about this point.) Yet the episode also shows why an authoritarian China will struggle to create a constructive, consensual international order, no matter how much power it wields.