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How Red Emperor Xi Jinping cynically used Covid to create the ultimate Big Brother society: From ferocious lockdowns to apps that spied on citizens' every move... and up to a million Muslims herded into concentration camps
All dictators know that there is no such thing as a disaster that cannot be turned to their advantage. This was certainly the case for Xi Jinping, supreme leader of China, when, in December 2019, doctors in Wuhan, a major city on the Yangtze River, began to see patients suffering from coughing and shortness of breath and showing symptoms of a severe viral attack. Some were dying.
Covid had struck, a new virus which would develop into the greatest global disaster of the early 21st Century. Millions of people died. The world came to a standstill. It signalled the end of liberal globalisation and the beginning of a dark new age of distrust and war.
The calamity began in the reign of Xi, the self-appointed Red Emperor, who determined from the outset that the Chinese response would be led by politics, not science.
Xi, the self-appointed Red Emperor, determined from the outset that the Chinese response to Covid would be led by politics, not science
Funeral home staff remove the body of a suspected Covid victim in Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak, in 2020
The results were fateful, ominous and far-reaching for the people of China, though not for him.
Knowing that Covid could be transmitted between humans, his immediate response was to issue an ‘important instruction’ ordering officials to start prevention and control measures. Three days later the Wuhan ‘epidemic command centre’ banned the city’s 11 million residents from leaving and ordered the suspension of all public transport.
Soon a sequence of draconian ordinances forbade people from leaving their homes and brought regular daily life to an end. Police, security guards and informers enforced the rules. The world had a new paradigm: lockdown.
The regime found that fear was the most useful tool. So were coercive measures as people were herded into compulsory quarantine camps. Supplies of food ran low.
Propaganda frightened the population into compliance, even though WHO, the World Health Organisation, said in official statements that 80 per cent of cases were mild and that most deaths were among the old and those who were already sick.
There was a clampdown on information. A doctor in Wuhan who revealed medical details about the first cases on online chat groups was hauled in by the police and reprimanded for ‘spreading rumours’.
When a university team became the first to share the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus with scientists around the world, the authorities shut their workplace down for ‘rectification’.
Xi moved fast, keen to be seen to be taking action. He sacked the Communist Party secretary of Hubei Province, of which Wuhan was the capital, as well as two top health officials in the province. The party secretary of Wuhan itself was also fired, for allowing two mass political meetings to go ahead as the outbreak exploded.
He sent Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan to take charge in the city, which she did with an iron will.
She became the face of the national policy of ‘Zero Covid’, descending on cities around China to order harsh restrictions and to punish officials.
A tide of online posts voiced fear whenever she appeared, and anger at her callousness, but the leader applauded her.
For Xi, Covid was a gift. His state security system seized the opportunity to introduce techniques of digital surveillance and control never before seen in China, putting the population under tighter surveillance than ever.
No citizen was free to move without an app on their phone that told the state where they were, what they bought and whom they spoke to. Every train, taxi or aeroplane trip, every hotel stay or restaurant meal left a trove of data.
Spectral figures in white hazmat suits bullied residents, and a web of informers tipped off the authorities to any trouble.
The psychological and political gains for the regime were so great that its leading figures boasted that China now controlled its people more efficiently than the totalitarian system in North Korea.
They watched with particular satisfaction as Covid delivered a win for Xi in Hong Kong, the restless Special Administrative Region and former British Crown Colony handed back by Britain in 1997.
There, mass pro-democracy demonstrations protesting at attempts to assert Beijing’s authority had been turning violent. Just months earlier, masked protesters had fought the police, hurled petrol and acid bombs, defaced Chinese banks and set fire to barricades.
An affronted Xi had come close to ordering a military crackdown and only held off after entreaties from pro-Beijing billionaires, fearful of the damage that would be caused to Hong Kong as a global financial centre.
But there was no holding back after Hong Kong had its first case of Covid, giving the Chinese authorities the excuse they needed to bring public politics to an end.
They banned gatherings of more than eight people, shut down any nightlife, restricted social contact and all but sealed the city off from the outside world.
Then they copied mainland China by building quarantine camps and herding people into them on pain of fines or imprisonment.
Police and prosecutors in Hong Kong went on to break the opposition with mass arrests and theatre-of-the-absurd trials worthy of any courtroom in mainland China. The targets included Jimmy Lai, the most famous media executive in the city, whose pro-democracy tabloid, Apple Daily, was shut down. He faced life in prison. So did the gifted student leader Joshua Wong. Dozens more were put in the dock for their political activities.
The subjugation of Hong Kong was a clear victory for Xi.
It was more conspicuous than his other testing ground for total control, the far-west region of Xinjiang. There, behind the veil of ‘Zero Covid’, the regime was able to conduct unseen the most effective repression of a troublesome group in any modern state.
The victims were members of the Uighur, Kazakh and other minorities, most of them practising Muslims. They were long distrusted by Beijing for their passive resistance to Communist rule and subject to fearsome reprisals for violence by a handful of extremists against Han Chinese settlers. A mass of leaked documentation shows that Xi directed officials to organise detentions of up to a million people, in facilities that the Chinese state described as ‘re-education’ centres and opponents called concentration camps.
A Chinese policewoman wears a pair of smart glasses containing a facial recognition system
A bank of CCTV screens are monitored in a mansion block in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Covid delivered a win for Xi in the restless former British Crown Colony
Prisoners who got out spoke about brainwashing, torture, beatings and rape. There was compelling testimony from Muslim women of forced abortions and compulsory sterilisation, the latter classified as a crime against humanity by the International Criminal Court.
Men told of sleep deprivation and brutal questioning, not about terrorism but about their private religious beliefs.
Men and women alike were packed on to trains and sent to work in factories. Xi’s officials described it as job training, but human rights activists said it was forced labour, and campaigned for global businesses to stop using the workforce in supply chains.
The US and Europe placed sanctions on individuals and companies, but enforcement was piecemeal and difficult. Most of the world, including the nations of the Islamic Conference, showed no signs of caring for the Muslims of Xinjiang. In practice, no sanction made a difference.
A pall of darkness fell across Xinjiang, making its remote mysteries more difficult than ever to fathom. Xi’s underlings dismissed all the accusations as lies, while Xi never deigned to mention the subject.
The lesson he absorbed from the apparent indifference shown by the rest of the world was that power works. He was still courted by world leaders, who realised they had little choice but to deal with a great world power with him at the helm.
The end of ‘Zero Covid’ in 2022 was as arbitrary as its beginning.
In the autumn, Xi won a third term as head of the Communist Party, telling the party congress that the ‘all-out people’s war’ against Covid was a great achievement. Behind the scenes, however, his minions were already planning to end it, perceiving that the Chinese people had had enough.
Their endurance had been tested to the limit with a ferocious two-month lockdown on the 25 million citizens of Shanghai, which left people howling in despair from their windows. In the streets, desperate youngsters waved blank white sheets of paper to express their inability to speak out; social media was consumed by a cascade of misery.
Businesses warned of an economic slump and officials reported unrest among workers locked up in factories and unpaid for months. Cities were broken financially by the costs of mass testing and paying the white-clad bullies who kept the people in line.
For once the regime listened, the first clue coming when Xi appeared in public without a face mask.
Soon after, mass testing, lockdowns and bans on travel were ended. The last restrictions were lifted early in 2023 when Xi praised the pandemic policy as ‘completely correct’ and hailed ‘a decisive victory’.
Which, for him, it was. Covid had given him even more control over his nation. When, with the crisis officially over and the country back to normal, some foreign media reported a surge in cases that ‘overwhelmed’ hospitals and crematoriums, the regime censored the news and banned the publication of statistics.
Xi had one other ‘victory’ from the Covid crisis. He used all his wiles and power to divert international accusations that China was responsible for the outbreak.
The virus was widely believed to have started in the market in Wuhan, a throwback to an older China where exotic animals were sold for food, including badgers, bamboo rats, porcupines, hedgehogs and all kinds of birds and poultry. And bats, which were known to harbour the virus and somehow had passed it across species to humans.
This was an explanation that suited Xi because it suggested this was a random natural event. But was this really true? Because also in Wuhan was a laboratory in which an eminent scientist called Dr Shi Zhengli was studying rare and dangerous coronaviruses and collecting samples.
Spectral figures in white hazmat suits spray disinfectant in the playground of a school in Shandong province in 2020
Here was fuel for a controversy with incredibly high stakes.
If the virus had leaked from a laboratory, China might face unlimited financial, legal and political liabilities. Internet sleuths and a few scientists began to speculate that Covid did not come from the market but had been spread by a careless technician or by a lab worker who had contracted it.
At first this was a minority view, labelled as a conspiracy theory. But then the dispute turned into a test of wills between a rigid, secretive authoritarian system and its international partners which persists to this day, destroying trust and reputations on all sides.
Shortly after the first outbreak, WHO sent a delegation to Beijing. They met Xi and returned praising ‘the commitment from top leadership and the transparency they have demonstrated’. Xi even invited WHO to send a team of international experts to learn from China’s experience and thus to ‘guide global response efforts’.
But when those experts arrived in Beijing, they found they were part of an orchestrated propaganda exercise.
They were split up and taken on tightly controlled visits to the southern province of Guangdong and to Sichuan in the south-west. ‘Select team members only’ – three foreign and three Chinese – were allowed to go to Wuhan. They were there for less than 48 hours and got to see just two hospitals. They held a workshop with ‘relevant departments’ of the ‘prevention and control mechanism’ – a euphemism for security – and had a ‘feedback meeting’ with a Chinese minister.
It was all straight from the police state handbook.
Not surprisingly they reported back that Xi’s government was rolling out ‘perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history’.
But as Covid continued to creep across the world, the scale of the calamity brought a political backlash as nation after nation demanded to know how, where and why it had started.
They wanted an expert inquiry to find the answers in China, and another WHO team was sent.
One of the WHO members had links to Dr Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and had worked with her on research into bat coronaviruses. Questions were raised about his suitability to investigate whether the institute was to blame for a pandemic that killed millions – but he was allowed to go anyway.
When this second team came back after another choreographed sequence of meetings and inspections, the entire process vetted by China’s Ministry of State Security, it announced that ‘a laboratory origin of the pandemic was extremely unlikely’.
In Beijing, the Chinese media acclaimed the findings.
A demonstration of facial recognition technology at the China Public Security Expo in Shenzhen
In the outside world, there was dismay, amid concerns that the team had not had access to complete, original data and samples.
It was claimed that the group had hardly examined the lab origins hypothesis and had come to its conclusions by a show of hands in a room where the Chinese experts on the team were monitored by Chinese government commissars. This verdict turned out to be too much, even for WHO, which until now had leaned heavily in favour of Xi’s response to the pandemic.
The head of the organisation effectively disowned the findings of his own mission to Wuhan, stating that all hypotheses about the source of the pandemic remained open. He called for further analysis and studies but, surprise, surprise, there has been no further WHO mission to China to set the record straight.
The pretence that Xi’s government was co-operating with a genuine inquiry was well and truly over. As for the crucial matter of where Covid came from – animal market or laboratory? – that remains, thanks to Xi and his regime’s muddying of the waters, unresolved to this day.
© Michael Sheridan 2024.
- Adapted from The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping And His New China by Michael Sheridan, to be published by Headline Press on August 29 at £25. To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid to 01/09/24; UK p&p free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.