Based on an essay by Yukihiro Hasegawa, this article examines how the spread of the new pneumonia may shake the Chinese Communist Party system and, in particular, Xi Jinping’s dictatorship.
It compares the Wuhan outbreak with the Chernobyl disaster that helped trigger the collapse of the Soviet Union, and analyzes how concealment, information control, and the limits of Communist Party rule have been exposed.

March 11, 2020
In its February 8 article titled “Where Is Xi Jinping?”, The New York Times pointed out that “the scale of dissatisfaction with and potential challenges to the Xi Jinping system can be seen from the references to the Chernobyl accident that have spread online.”
The following is from an essay by Yukihiro Hasegawa, published in the current issue of the monthly magazine Hanada under the title “The Prelude to the Collapse of Xi Jinping’s Dictatorship.”
Anyone who reads this essay alone should understand that those who merely subscribe to the Asahi Shimbun and similar newspapers and watch NHK news programs will simply become information weaklings who know nothing of the truth.
The new pneumonia and Chernobyl.
The new pneumonia is raging.
In China, the source of the infection, not only Wuhan but also major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai have had outings and movement restricted, and economic activity is virtually at a standstill.
This is as of February 15.
Criticism of the Chinese leadership, which allowed the infection to spread, is smoldering beneath the surface like magma.
What will happen from now on?
Since late January, when reports of the new pneumonia began to appear, I have pointed out in several serial columns, on radio, and in YouTube programs that the new pneumonia could collapse China’s Communist Party system, just as the Chernobyl nuclear accident became the trigger for the collapse of the former Soviet Union.
At first, some China specialists laughed it off as “too exaggerated.”
Daisuke Kondo, a journalist whom I invited as a guest on my YouTube program, dismissed it by saying, “That is quite a fantasy.”
I will discuss this in another essay.
But now it is no longer rare to compare the spread of the new pneumonia to Chernobyl and predict China’s fate.
In its February 8 article titled “Where Is Xi Jinping?”, The New York Times pointed out that “the scale of dissatisfaction with and potential challenges to the Xi Jinping system can be seen from the references to the Chernobyl accident that have spread online.”
Indeed, many people around the world feel that, just as the Soviet Union fell, the Xi Jinping system may also fall.
What was the Chernobyl nuclear accident?
The accident occurred at 1:25 a.m. local time on April 26, 1986.
The first report reached the political leadership in Moscow early that same morning.
Mikhail Gorbachev, then general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, wrote in his memoirs that “the Ministry of Medium Machine Building reported it to Ryzhkov, the prime minister, and he informed me.”
This is from the first volume of Gorbachev Memoirs, Shinchosha, 1996.
The great banquet that invited the spread of infection.
According to his memoirs, Gorbachev immediately convened a Politburo meeting and, on the same day, dispatched a government committee headed by the deputy prime minister to the site.
The committee decided on the evacuation of residents on the following day, April 27, and the evacuation began that same day.
But the accident remained concealed both at home and abroad.
The world learned of the accident because an alarm sounded for a worker at a nuclear power plant in Sweden.
Radioactive substances detected from the shoes he was wearing were found not to have come from a Swedish nuclear plant, and from the wind direction, the Soviet Union was suspected.
On April 28, the Swedish government contacted the Soviet government.
The Soviet Union then acknowledged the accident, and only then was it revealed to the world for the first time.
The Soviet Union announced the accident domestically on the night of April 28, two days after it occurred.
Until then, the people had known nothing.
In response to criticism that he had concealed the accident, Gorbachev denied it in his memoirs, saying, “We simply did not know.”
At the same time, he wrote that he could not forget what two members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences said at a Politburo meeting immediately after the accident.
They boasted as follows.
“Nothing terrible has happened. This sort of thing often happens with industrial reactors. Drink two glasses of vodka, have some zakuska, take a nap, and it will all be over.”
Zakuska refers to Russian appetizers.
That was the reality.
Even so, compared with China, the Soviet Union was still better.
After a pneumonia of unknown cause was confirmed on December 8 of last year, doctors in Wuhan spoke on December 30 in an SNS group chat about the possibility of the infection spreading.
Then, on January 3 after the New Year, the city police summoned the doctors and reprimanded them for “spreading information online that was not true.”
One of them, Li Wenliang, later became infected with the new pneumonia and died.
As you know, this issue erupted online, and Dr. Li came to be regarded as a hero in China.
Wuhan City announced the occurrence of pneumonia patients on December 31.
More than three weeks had passed since the patients were first confirmed.
On January 9, a team of experts detected the novel coronavirus, and there had already been deaths.
Nevertheless, on January 18, the mayor held a large banquet in the city attended by 40,000 households.
Now the view that “this banquet became the cause of the major outbreak” is influential.
It can only be called carelessness.
But the mayor must have wanted to keep the grave matter of the outbreak hidden from his superiors.
Face-saving over the risk of spreading infection.
President Xi Jinping gave the instruction to “resolutely contain the spread” on January 20.
The decision to lock down Wuhan was made on January 23, but by then it was already too late.
On January 26, the mayor admitted that “five million people left the city before the lockdown.”
The procedure at that time was also incomprehensible.
If one is going to take a strong measure such as locking down a city, it is meaningless unless preparations are made secretly and the measure is carried out with lightning speed at the same time as the announcement.
However, the leadership announced that “public transportation will be suspended as of 10 a.m. on the 23rd” at 2:05 a.m. on the 23rd, eight hours earlier.
Many citizens fled during that time.
There must have been many infected people among them.
Regarding the blank eight hours, China specialist Homare Endo speculates that it was “to prevent the World Health Organization, WHO, from issuing an emergency declaration.”
I will discuss this in another essay.
Since the WHO emergency meeting was to be held on the night of the 22nd, China wanted to convey the lockdown policy to the WHO before that and avoid an emergency declaration.
If that is true, it means that the Chinese leadership prioritized national face while knowing the risk of spreading infection.
The terrible response was not only by Wuhan City.
It was the same with the leadership in Beijing.
Looking at the sequence of events, Gorbachev begins to look admirable.
In his memoirs, Gorbachev summarized the nuclear accident as follows.
What appeared in an extremely negative form was the closed and secretive nature of the nuclear sector, constrained by the sectionalism of the competent agencies and the monopoly of science.
At the Politburo meeting of July 3, 1986, I said the following.
“What ruled the entire system was the spirit of flattery, obsequiousness, sectarianism and pressure against dissidents, display, and the personal and factional relationships surrounding the leaders.”
The accident was a terrible proof that not only had our country’s technology grown obsolete, but also that the old system had exhausted its possibilities.
It rebounded with enormous weight against the reforms we had begun, and literally knocked the country off its orbit.
China does not learn from the failure of the Soviet Union.
From immediately after the accident, Gorbachev recognized its gravity and intuitively saw that the cause lay in the Communist Party system itself.
That is precisely why he later advanced glasnost, or information disclosure.
Using that as a weapon, he then launched in earnest into the reforms of perestroika.
Those reforms were partially successful.
But he was confronted by a coup by forces that clung to vested interests that had seeped into the bone under the Communist Party system, and in the end Gorbachev lost power.
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, five years after the accident.
Is Xi Jinping learning the correct lesson from the new pneumonia?
Unfortunately, the lesson he seems to be learning is not that “the closed nature and secrecy of the Communist Party system invited the great outbreak of the new pneumonia.”
Rather, it seems to be that “the Soviet Union collapsed as a party and as a state because it embarked on information disclosure and reform.”
Therefore, in order to avoid the collapse of Communist Party rule, he seems to think that, under no circumstances, should China proceed with information disclosure and reform like the Soviet Union.
There are signs of this.
When Dr. Li’s death was reported and he was regarded as a hero online, the Chinese leadership strengthened information control.
While state-run media posted memorial articles for Dr. Li, when citizens posted words of mourning online, those posts began to be deleted one after another.
What does this mean?
It means that the leadership fears that mourning for Dr. Li will turn into a protest movement against the Communist Party.
There is a precedent that the Chinese leadership can never forget.
It is the Tiananmen Square incident of June 1989.
The Tiananmen incident began as a mourning movement for the reformist former general secretary Hu Yaobang, who had died on April 15 immediately before it.
Students mourned Hu Yaobang’s death and gathered spontaneously in Tiananmen Square, seeking the political and economic reforms he had tried to advance.
That became a great wave, and in the end the Communist Party had no choice but to suppress it by force.
This time as well, fearing that if mourning for Dr. Li were left alone “the arrows of protest would be directed at themselves,” the authorities took preemptive action and restricted online statements.
The Chinese Communist Party has learned, in its own way, the two lessons of the Soviet collapse and the Tiananmen incident “correctly” and is responding accordingly.
Compared with the Soviet Union, its response to the crisis is poor.
On the other hand, its suppression of criticism is being carried out even more harshly.
That is China today.
Citizens abandoning the Communist Party.
Will the Chinese leadership succeed in suppressing criticism of the regime?
What I am watching is the fact that citizens have noticed the limits of Communist Party rule.
People in China are now, in various places, arbitrarily blocking roads leading into their own villages and towns.
They are piling up earth, bricks, scrap materials, and the like to block outsiders from entering.
There are even cases in which their own uniformed vigilante groups conduct checkpoints while holding Chinese broadswords.
According to China specialist Sekihei, China originally has a strong clan consciousness based on kinship ties, and even practical social security, education, and justice are handled by the clan living in the same village.
This is from Why Are Good and Evil Reversed Among the Chinese? Clan and Clanism, published by Sankei Shimbun Publications.
The fact that villagers are blocking roads on their own is also an expression of such clan consciousness.
We should see this as them not entrusting governance to the Chinese Communist Party, but beginning their own governance.
The longer the spread of infection continues and the longer village blockades last, the stronger their “self-governance” will become.
That may lead to the weakening of Communist Party rule.
That is one point.
Another point to watch is whether internal strife within the leadership will begin.
It is almost a rule that leftist governments and movements collapse through internal strife.
As I pointed out in my serial article in the February issue of this magazine, regarding the Communist Party’s repression of Uyghurs, the internal documents exposing the reality of the repression to The New York Times were provided by an anonymous member of the political leadership.
He said that his motive was that he “wanted to ensure that leaders, including Xi, could not escape from the crime of mass internment.”
From this alone, it is certain that forces opposed to Xi exist within the leadership.
This essay continues.