Charles Wooley: Chinese President Xi Jinping fails the pub test

The Chinese Government’s early reaction to and handling of the coronavirus outbreak did not go down too well with its own citizens

President Xi Jinping talks to students from Scotch Oakburn College at Hobart’s Government House during his visit to the state in 2014.

IN THE 10th century the warring nations that had constituted ancient China came up with the notion of “The Mandate of Heaven”.

For China to become one country and not just a geographical expression encompassing any number of warring feudal states, the new doctrine said there must be at any time only one legitimate ruler.

Good rulers were blessed by the gods. Cruel and despotic ones, on the other hand, lost favour with the gods and lost their divine mandate.

There never were gods of course but, in a roundabout sense, the Mandate of Heaven was as close to democracy as China has got.

The shortcomings of a bad leader would be so apparent that the people would become restive and start reading the tea leaves. When that happened, conditions were right for the fall of one dynasty and the rise of another.

The Mandate of Heaven is the Chinese equivalent of Australia’s “pub test”. When ScoMo celebrated electoral victory it was, in his own words, “a miracle”. Possibly being a Pentecostal Christian he really believed his god had chosen him.

But surely the cynical 21st century advertising man in him would have given at least half a thought to the fact that Labor had tried to sell a crummy product to the Australian public and the mob had sussed it. Even though the seers and the political classes had not.

No Mandate of Heaven, or anywhere else, for Bill Shorten. He was a dud for many reasons, but mainly because the people saw through him. ScoMo was an unknown product reasonably packaged. What choice did we have but to try him? Not much to choose from — but at least we had a choice.

One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about China is they love a beer just as much as we do. After a few beers people everywhere tend to speak the truth — “in Cascade veritas” or “in Tsingtao veritas”.

President Xi Jinping during his visit to Hobart in 2014.

After a few grogs, humans tend to say what they really think, and the word out of heavily-censored China is that the mob is angry. Too many people have relatives among the 60 million or so people locked down in Wuhan and they reasonably enough don’t trust anything the government tells them.

As a rule of thumb, nowhere in the world, not even here in Little Cuba, should you believe anything government tells you. But one happy difference is that I can say that here in print without dire consequences. Another is that, in theory at least, we can change leaders at the next election, but to turn that theory into practice we need a serious inquiry into whether the Liberals “bought” their narrow majority last time round.

I will leave my idealistic fellow commentators Greg Barns and Simon Bevilacqua to rage eloquently about the farce of the last election. Here I will stick to the realpolitik of China, where farce is no laughing matter.

And where, sadly, because I am a foreign journalist, I am unlikely ever to enjoy another Tsingtao at the Wuhan beer festival. Unless President Xi Jinping loses the Mandate of Heaven.

I saw Xi Jinping close-up when he visited Hobart in November 2014. The second most powerful man on earth appeared to be an ordinary, pleasant enough fellow if a touch inscrutable. He had the avuncular air of a man who would be kind to animals and children, which now sits uneasily with the fact that he presides over a totalitarian regime imprisoning dissidents and ethnic minorities in secret concentration camps.

We didn’t know all of that back in 2014, when our leaders simply fell for the Emperor’s charms, offering him dairy farms, the use of an enlarged international airport, sundry real estate (including waterfront properties) and, most importantly, entree to Antarctica and its mineral wealth.

The latter — not nice views, pinot noir and soft cheese — was the real reason for the Presidential visit to our small island at the end of the Earth. It is why China continues to court our naive leadership, which is disinterested in human rights and democratic niceties and has a yen only for the yuan.

In China, back in March 2018, the halo of the Mandate of Heaven slipped a tad. That was when Mr Xi declared himself President for Life after the National People’s Congress voted to remove the two-term limit on leadership.

Donald Trump joked at the time, “Hey that’s not such a bad idea.” Well, I think he was joking.

Effectively, Xi is now the most powerful ruler since Mao and, although some brave Chinese lawyers and academics voiced misgivings, there has been no debate. Online censorship in China has blocked any discussion of the matter.

To know what people really think, you would have to go to the Wuhan Beer Festival.

Interestingly, out of 2964 delegates at the NPC, only two of them voted against the lifetime presidency. Three abstained. Where are the feckless five now?

The pub test was failed again, early in the novel coronavirus crisis. The regime prevented an early release of information and pressured the World Health Organisation not to declare a world emergency.

But the most unfavourable public reaction arose from the treatment of the young Wuhan medical doctor, Li Wenliang. He first blew the whistle about a “mysterious virus” and later contracted it and died.

It was his shameful treatment by the authorities which has caused most public anger. For alerting his colleagues to what was really happening, Li was arrested and made to sign a confession that he had been “spreading false rumours”.

Liberty, sadly, often requires martyrs.

An online protest campaign supporting Dr Li Wenliang received 1.5 billion views — even in China there were far too many people for state security to interview. For the regime, it should have been unsettling, suggesting that even if the leadership claimed the Mandate of Heaven, it had failed the pub test.

Racial differences are literally skin deep. Genetically, we are all basically the same people who came out of Africa two million years ago. Widely dispersed across the planet, all of us carry the restless gene for freedom which, in the long haul of history, might never be eradicated.

We hope within months science will create a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.

But let’s hope there will never be a cure for the freedom virus.