Weekly dispatch: the Year of the Metal Rat in review

The memorable year of 2020 may have ended on the 1st of January for most of you, but in China it only really ended a week ago. The proximity of the Chinese new year to the Western one, and the fact that the Chinese calendar has no agreed starting point for counting the years, means that people in China often mix the two systems. That's why Beijing was full of people wishing each other a "Happy 2021" on the 11th of February this year.

Funnily enough Chinese astrology had predicted that the last year in the Chinese calendar, roughly equivalent to 2020, might be a difficult one. If you want proof, just look at this article published in early January last year, before Covid-19 became a real concern. The reason is that 2020 was a year of the Metal Rat, meaning that its element was metal and its animal was the rat. Most people know that in the Chinese calendar every year has an associated animal, but not everyone knows that each year also has one of the five elements attached to it. It is the combination of the animal and the element that determines how auspicious a year might be. Years of the Metal Rat are considered to be highly inauspicious, and recur every 60 years; many have pointed out that every one of these years seems to bring disasters in its wake for China: 1960 saw the terrible famine induced by the Great Leap Forward, 1900 the sack of Beijing by the Eight-Nation Alliance, and 1840 the beginning of the First Opium War. 

Personally I am not a believer in horoscopes, either Western or Chinese, and it strikes me that disasters have struck China on quite a few other years over the last two centuries; I also wonder whether these predictions are supposed to be valid for the rest of the world too, or whether Chinese horoscopes, like so much of Chinese culture, are only supposed to work for China. All the same, I can see that if I were an astrologer, the exceptional calamity of the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping through the world on such an inauspicious year would seem like an obvious confirmation of my beliefs (although the pandemic actually took off just before the Chinese New Year of 2020, when we were still in the year of the Earth Pig).

In any case, the year of the metal rat may have been an unmitigated calamity for the world, but in the run up to the spring festival the Chinese media have done their best to paint the year as a success story for China, a time when the nation came together and defeated a terrible plague thanks to its people's sense of sacrifice and discipline and its firm leadership taking wise and decisive action. There is little reason to think most ordinary Chinese reject this view; in fact, it is pretty clear to me they do not.

It wasn't always obvious that things were going to go this way. Just over a year ago, on the day of the death of Dr. Li Wenliang in Wuhan, my WeChat Moments was swelling with open anger and rebelliousness of a kind that I had not seen in years. Chinese WeChat contacts who are normally apolitical or pro-government were suddenly venting their feelings of disgust and disappointment, posting openly subversive thoughts of a kind you don't often see expressed on Chinese social media. Of course my Chinese WeChat contacts are not necessarily representative of broader society, but it's clear that these feelings were widespread, at least among the middle class.

One year on, those feelings of anger and dissatisfaction are gone, dead and buried. It is easy to see what changed people's minds: China's striking success at containing the pandemic, compared with the abject failure of much of the rest of the world to do so. The devastating toll the pandemic has taken on the United States, China's arch-nemesis, has been particularly impactful. The media has done its best to stress the contrast between China's successful handling of Covid-19 and the mess going on in other countries. The fact that China was the only major economy to record any growth in 2020 has never been missing from the triumphalist commentary of the past few weeks.

While you can condemn that commentary as biased and one-sided, the basic point cannot be denied: China has contained this pandemic much more effectively than most countries have done. While the debate in the West revolves around the question of whether to sacrifice public health or the economy, in China there is no need for such a debate: the extreme measures taken to stop the pandemic from spreading have ended up protecting both public health and the economy. Ordinary Chinese are now less able to go abroad than at any point since the end of Maoism; but unlike then, they currently have little wish to do so, seeing China as an island of safety in a world of chaos and danger.

The events of 2020 have probably ended up accelerating a shift that was already underway in Chinese perceptions of their country's relationship to the West and its place in the world. Many have identified the beginnings of that shift with the great financial crisis of 2008, which brought havoc to the US and Europe while largely sparing China. Western officials and diplomats recount how there was a distinct change in the tone of the Chinese officials they spoke to around this time. Suddenly they exhibited far more self-confidence, and refused to even pretend to take Western criticism of their system seriously anymore, believing that governments unable to avoid such a catastrophic meltdown of their own financial system had no business lecturing others. For years they had been preached at about the virtues of free and fair markets, but from what they could see it was free markets that had led to the financial crisis.

This shift in attitudes trickled down to the common people as well. China's economic growth and its new world-class telecommunications and transport infrastructure, which in some ways put Western countries to shame, gave rise to a widespread attitude that the country had "nothing to envy" the West anymore. Living in China, I have observed this change first-hand. When I first came to China after the Olympics, local people would frequently ask me questions along the lines of "why did you move to China? Life in your country must be so much nicer", or "why would you want to move from a rich country to a developing one like China". It is now several years since anyone has asked me anything of the kind. 

Propaganda played its part in fuelling these attitudes, and don't let anyone tell you it didn't; but they have a grounding in fact. Chinese who travel or study abroad see little that would contradict these beliefs, and much that would confirm them. Experiences like changing flights in the crumbling airports of the US or constantly having no reception on their phones in Europe (this never happens in China) helps to convince them that their country is already ahead in many ways. The strengths of Chinese governance are real and getting stronger, even while the nasty sides, which most people here prefer to ignore, get nastier.

And now this. The shambolic and ineffective response to Covid-19 of Europe and North America may well be the last nail in the coffin for the West's reputation in China. If they didn't already, most Chinese now see their system as more efficient and able to deliver better results. The fact that China is one of a small number of countries where there is virtually no risk of being infected by the virus is reinforcing the already widespread perception that China is an oasis of safety, order and progress amidst a world that is 乱, chaotic and dangerous.

Of course, one could make plenty of good counter-arguments. Other Asian countries, some of them liberal democracies, have also done really well at containing the pandemic. There is the issue of the initial cover up in Wuhan, which seems to have been all but forgotten here in China. Pandemic aside, the view of China as a safe and orderly place as opposed to a messy and dangerous Western world is based as much on misconceptions and confirmation bias as it is on facts. While China's infrastructure is impressive, the fact remains that life is more comfortable and stable for most people in the West, average incomes much higher, and the justice systems far more likely to deliver actual justice. 

But while all these counter-arguments make sense to me, they are unlikely to convince the Chinese public even if they reach their ears. Like it or not, many Chinese see their country as engaged in a global competition with the West, and the events of 2020 have helped convince them they are on the right path and have nothing left to learn from their adversary. I would not see this as a problem, if what they were rejecting were things like privatized healthcare, unregulated financial markets and "neoliberal capitalism". Unfortunately, basic liberal ideals like freedom of expression, representative democracy and checks and balances on the power of the state are also seen as inextricably linked to the Western model. If that model is seen as failing to deliver prosperity and safety even for its own people, then liberal democracy loses its appeal and its relevance to most Chinese, which is what has in fact happened. While this trend has been years in the making, the events of 2020 have done a lot to seal it.

This can only be seen as a huge problem, given that those liberal ideals remain as valid now as they ever did, and neither China nor any other country offers a real alternative to the world. If there is any meaning Western societies can draw from the rise of China, it should be an encouragement to do a better job at living up to their own lofty ideals.