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It may seem preposterous to suggest that the outbreak of the new coronavirus, Covid-19, has imperilled the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, especially at a time when the government’s aggressive containment efforts seem to be working. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the political implications of China’s biggest public health crisis in recent history.

According to a New York Times analysis, at least 760 million Chinese, or more than half the country’s population, are under varying degrees of residential lockdown. This has had serious individual and aggregate consequences, from a young boy remaining home alone for days after witnessing his grandfather’s death to a significant economic slowdown. But it seems to have contributed to a dramatic fall in new infections outside Wuhan, where the outbreak began, to low single digits.

Even as China’s leaders tout their progress in containing the virus, they are showing signs of stress. Like elites in other autocracies, they feel the most politically vulnerable during crises. They know that, when popular fear and frustration is elevated, even minor missteps could cost them dearly and lead to severe challenges to their power.

And ‘frustration’ is putting it mildly. The Chinese public is well and truly outraged over the authorities’ early efforts to suppress information about the new virus, including the fact that it can be transmitted among humans. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the uproar over the 7 February announcement that the Wuhan-based doctor Li Wenliang, whom the local authorities accused of ‘rumour-mongering’ when he attempted to warn his colleagues about the coronavirus back in December, had died of it.

With China’s censorship apparatus temporarily weakened—probably because censors hadn’t received clear instructions on how to handle such stories—even official newspapers printed the news of Li’s death on their front pages. And business leaders, a typically apolitical group, have denounced the conduct of the Wuhan authorities and demanded accountability.

There is no doubt that the authorities’ initial mishandling of the outbreak is what enabled it to spread so widely, with healthcare professionals—more than 3,000 of whom have been infected so far—being hit particularly hard. And despite the central government’s attempts to scapegoat local authorities—many health officials in Hubei province have been fired—there are likely to be more questions about what Chinese President Xi Jinping knew.

Not surprisingly, Xi has been working hard to repair his image as a strong and competent leader. After the central government ordered the lockdown of Wuhan in late January, Xi appointed Premier Li Keqiang to lead the coronavirus taskforce. But the fact that it was Li, not Xi, who went to Wuhan seemed to send the wrong message, as Xi realised in the subsequent days.

On 3 February, at a Politburo Standing Committee meeting, Xi took an unusually defensive tone in a speech that smacked of damage control. While Xi admitted that he had learned of the outbreak before he sounded the alarm, he emphasised his personal role in leading the fight against the virus.

On 10 February, Xi made a series of public appearances in Beijing, aimed at reinforcing the impression that he is firmly in command. Three days later, he sacked the party chiefs of Hubei province and Wuhan municipality for their inadequate handling of the crisis. And two days after that, in an unprecedented move, the CCP released the full text of Xi’s internal Politburo Standing Committee speech.

Though Xi has apparently regained his aura as a dominant leader—not least thanks to CCP propagandists, who are working overtime to restore his image—the political fallout is likely to be serious. The profound uproar that marked those fleeting moments of relative cyber freedom—the two weeks, from late January through early February, when censors lost their grip on the popular narrative—should be deeply worrying to the party.

Indeed, the CCP may be highly adept at repressing dissent, but repression is not eradication. Even a momentary lapse can unleash bottled-up anti-regime sentiment. But what might happen to the party’s hold on power if Chinese were able to speak freely for a few months, not just a couple of weeks?

The most consequential political upshot of the Covid-19 outbreak may well be the erosion of support for the CCP among China’s urban middle class. Not only have their lives been severely disrupted by the epidemic and response, but they have been made acutely aware of just how helpless they are under a regime that prizes secrecy and its own power over public health and welfare.

In the post–Mao Zedong era, the Chinese people and the CCP have adhered to an implicit social contract: the people tolerate the party’s political monopoly, as long as the party delivers sufficient economic progress and adequate governance. The CCP’s poor handling of the Covid-19 outbreak threatens this tacit pact. In this sense, China’s one-party regime may well be in a more precarious position than it realises.

The Covid-19 crisis heralds a decade of strategic volatility.

Now that the virus has emerged from China, societies, governments and international institutions must brace for contagion of all kinds—health, environmental, financial, cyber and the risk of conflict. The intense connectivity that has facilitated flows of trade, investment, resources, information and, above all, people now judders with vulnerability.

This international health emergency is a black swan event, an improbable catastrophe obvious in retrospect. It’s perhaps better termed a black elephant: a discontinuity so big and so inevitable that nations and corporations chose not to see it coming.

The crisis will shake up our Indo-Pacific region. The rapid evolution of this two-ocean strategic system and its accumulation of risk is the subject of my new book, Contest for the Indo-Pacific: why China won’t map the future (soon also to be released internationally as Indo-Pacific empire: China, America and the contest for the world’s pivotal region).

Any book making claims about this uncertain decade is a gift to fate. Mine went to print at the start of January, when knowledge of the true nature of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan was so suppressed it may not have reached even the Chinese leadership.

This book is not so much about today’s problems as about how the reinterpreted past and plausible projections of the future can illuminate policy choices in the present. Current events amplify its main contentions.

We need to transcend the false binary that the Indo-Pacific dynamic is purely a contest between China and America. The Indo-Pacific has long been a place of multipolar connectivity and contestation, a melting pot of many entrepôts, where risk of all kinds ignores imagined boundaries.

The book revisits the deep history of maritime Asia to underscore that this has never been a China-centric region. The Indo-Pacific is too vast for hegemony, and this empowers middle players such as Australia, Japan, Indonesia and India with more agency than they once appreciated.

Addressing the threats to health and social order is the priority, but governments must also anticipate cascading shocks to the balance of power among nations, and the credibility and legitimacy of governments to their own populations.

Translating human anxiety and suffering into the lexicon of geopolitical competition, threat and, it has to be said, strategic opportunity is a delicate matter.

The outbreak has caused lasting damage to the People’s Republic of China, which was already weaker than it liked to look.

The shock is rattling China’s economy, exposing the fragility of the strategic weight that has intimidated so many other countries in recent years. Even as China’s navy, air force, fishing fleets and paramilitary coastguards extend their Indo-Pacific push, new data reflects an extraordinary decline in commercial shipping to and from Chinese ports.

Companies are desperately reconsidering supply chains. Diversification is now necessity, not just strategic aspiration. Suddenly the logic of many belts and many roads is plain.

Domestically, the disaster is shaking confidence in Xi Jinping’s leadership, and in the competence and intent of the Chinese Communist Party.

This is a deeply human tragedy, and the sacrifice and stoicism of medical professionals and ordinary people in China, and now many other infection zones, is to be admired. So too was the willingness of citizens like the late Dr Li Wenliang to risk everything in the name of truth, trying to provide early warning to each other, the authorities and the world. Covid-19 is a reminder that China will struggle to maintain the internal obedience and international sway it needs for its Indo-Pacific strategic ambitions.

Internationally, China’s response hurts its image as a robust partner in tackling shared threats, a stark signal for countries that had blithely tied their fortunes to Xi’s strategy for geoeconomic influence. Beijing has long encouraged narratives that the Belt and Road Initiative will bring health benefits, among many other gifts.

Suddenly, from Iran to Italy and beyond, China’s expanding power and influence looks much more double-edged, as Parag Khanna, author of The future is Asian, has been among the first to acknowledge, in a confronting article noting the parallel Silk Road transmission belts for coronavirus and the 14th-century plague.

Covid-19 arrived in a time of deep mistrust and rivalry.

China’s new normal has been to proclaim a relentless rise, asserting its interests against others, from the South China Sea to cyberspace. Its repression and censorship have become both tools and terrain of struggle against democratic nations and Chinese dissidents alike. It’s becoming clear that such truth suppression sabotaged the response to a local epidemic, with worldwide repercussions.

Now we see the party-state stumble, in need of help, pivoting to protect itself and the world from a common threat.

Of course, the other big powers in the Indo-Pacific have their own maladies. The United States is desensitised to political trauma within, struggles to convince allies the great republic doesn’t mean what the president says, and is yet to define a true strategy for competing with China in a post-primacy future. We must await another bad dream election to grasp how, when and whether America’s still-colossal power will adapt.

Normally a summit of the world’s two largest democracies would be a rallying point for world order and liberal values. Not so President Donald Trump’s visit to India, though it did affirm that a China-wary India no longer hesitates to embrace American power.

India, for all its youth and diversity and promise, is in conflict with itself. Mobs extolling Hindu extremism brought carnage to the streets to Delhi, at the very least on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s watch.

It will become incredible, literally, to build international partnerships of mutual respect and rules-based stability—principles underscoring the Indo-Pacific solidarity of India, America, Australia, Japan, Indonesia and others—if those values are not guarded at home.

China’s woes are no time for democratic self-satisfaction.

Powers like Australia must demonstrate a creative mix of resilience and partnership with diverse nations in a multipolar Indo-Pacific including, on some issues, China. The early activation of pandemic response is a smart example of independent Australian foreign policy: swayed by neither America nor China, or by hesitant and compromised international institutions.

Australia has exercised global leadership, grounded in national interest and values, on other shared challenges such as in deciding to ensure the security of telecommunications and internet-of-everything infrastructure.

Australia should do all it can to help other nations: if pandemic preparedness were not part of its development-and-security pivot to help South Pacific neighbours, it now urgently should be.

There’s sadly little sign yet that the common threat of contagion risk in health, environment, finance, cyber or other security matters is reducing strategic rivalry. For the middle players that want strategic competition to be managed in ways short of conflict, now’s the time to emphasise coexistence and cooperation based on shared interests, mutual respect and honest communication.

In 1348, after the plague reached England and France amid their Hundred Years’ War, there ensued effectively a seven-year truce. Exhaustion, depopulation and quarantine drove this peace, more than any enlightened statecraft. Still, it’s a reminder that a profoundly human crisis is a chance for nations to reorder their priorities and how they define their interests.

It shouldn’t be beyond the wit of 21st-century diplomacy to draw from coronavirus at least something of a vaccine against other strategic shocks.

By any reasonable standard, Australia is a long way away from most other countries. Sydney is closer to the South Pole than it is to Singapore. Direct flights from Washington or Brussels to Canberra remain beyond our technical capabilities; there is always a layover somewhere.

For better and worse, geography is less important than it used to be. Australia may be remote, but it is already on the front line of two global challenges that will shape the international agenda in the decades ahead. Spend a few days in the country and you’ll quickly realise that its politics are all about China and climate change—and sometimes a combination of the two. Pretty soon, the same will hold true for many other countries around the world.

Among the world’s democracies, Australia is perhaps the most dependent on China economically. It is the world’s largest net coal exporter, and its biggest customer is China. It is thus also more dependent on fossil-fuel exports than many other countries; and yet it stands to lose more than others as the real-world costs of climate change come due.

Still, the Australian economy is unique among industrialised countries in that it has grown continuously for almost three decades without a recession. Australian governments implemented reforms to open up the economy just when China was embarking on its meteoric rise. For 30 years, Australia, with its abundant supply of energy and other resources, has been able to surf on a growing wave of Chinese demand.

This arrangement was nothing if not convenient. Given the two countries’ relative proximity, Chinese tourists and immigrants started to flock to Australia. Chinese students became mainstays at its universities. The money just kept rolling in, and Australian property prices duly rose.

But then China became more assertive in its economic and foreign policies. Journalists started to expose what looked like attempts by Chinese actors to buy political influence in Australia. And these revelations led to questions over whether Australian university curriculums are avoiding topics that could irritate China (and Chinese students).

In any case, Australians suddenly realised that their close dependence on China had made their country vulnerable. Australian policymakers have since been addressing the threat. In August 2018, Australia became the first Western country to indicate that it will not allow Chinese vendors to supply its 5G network (though the government’s statement doesn’t mention any country explicitly, its meaning is clear).

The Chinese leadership was not amused. High-level bilateral contacts have since been frozen, though economic links have remained intact. Australians are becoming increasingly nervous about the future. Will Chinese money keep rolling in freely, or will the Chinese regime start to use Australia’s economic dependence as a weapon, as it has done previously against Japan and South Korea?

Confronted with these new pressures, Australia has become increasingly dependent on its security relationship with the United States. But with Sino-American relations deteriorating, it is unclear whether Australia can manoeuvre the gap between the 21st century’s Scylla and Charybdis. Were it to incur the wrath of either power—or of both at the same time—its long economic honeymoon would probably come to an end.

Complicating matters further is the climate policy challenge. Whereas previous Australian prime ministers fell on their swords in an effort to develop a realistic energy and climate agenda, the current Australian government has been accused of dragging its feet on the issue. Indeed, when he was treasurer, Prime Minister Scott Morrison famously waved around a lump of coal in parliament to show that it was nothing to be afraid of. After a long ‘black summer’ of unprecedented bushfires, he is unlikely to repeat that stunt.

Just as Australia must address its dangerous dependence on China, so must it start taking climate change seriously. Neither problem admits of easy policy solutions, and other Western democracies that depend on China economically will not be spared similar dilemmas.

Australia’s experience offers valuable lessons for us all. It is the proverbial canary in the coalmine. Policymakers and political leaders everywhere need to engage in an honest assessment of the risks posed by a rising China and a warming planet, and we all must start phasing out fossil fuels.

Australia now finds itself on the front line of these two major issues. The rest of us will join it there soon enough.

Imagine if the US Congress, in addition to the 535 elected members that fill its halls, also included a few dozen unelected representatives each year who were citizens of foreign countries. These foreign representatives, milling about the Capitol, would be invited not to represent the countries they came from but rather to do the opposite—to offer advice to Congress about how to more effectively expand US influence in their home countries, and then return home with a promise to help carry out the US mission abroad.

Congress, of course, doesn’t have such a system.

But China does. Since 2001, one of China’s two pseudo-legislative bodies has invited special ‘overseas delegates’ from countries around the world to attend its annual two-week legislative session. The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) is a political advisory body that, along with the National People’s Congress, meets during the ‘two sessions’ each March. There are around 2,200 members in the current body, though that number can vary.

These overseas delegates are a way for Beijing to draw on the talent and connections of overseas Chinese to help expand the party’s influence and popularity abroad.

Activities under the united front system have risen in both scope and importance under President Xi Jinping. Between 2015 and the end of 2018, the centre of the united front system, the United Front Work Department, was restructured and several new bureaus were created. Overall, the reorganisation reflects a greater emphasis on united front work relating to religion, ethnic affairs and overseas Chinese.

The CPPCC is a bedrock institution of the united front. Its delegates are taken from different groups in society, including minority political parties, religious groups, ethnic minorities, the sciences, the arts, agriculture, industry, business and technology. The CPPCC has one national body, but there are also bodies at lower levels of government, from the provinces to prefectures to townships. About two-thirds of delegates are members of the Chinese Communist Party.

The benign way to state the purpose of the CPPCC is that it works to give every part of society has a voice in governance. A more strategic interpretation of the CPPCC’s role, however, is that it co-opts emerging leaders from every part of society to make sure that no group is ever outside the guidance of the party.

The united front’s emphasis on exercising influence over Chinese abroad is also manifested in a unique feature of the CPPCC—its ‘overseas delegates’ (海外代表).

Most CPPCC delegates comes from China. But since 2001, the CPPCC has included around 35 delegates each year from among the Chinese diaspora. On the national level, unlike regular CPPCC delegates, they can’t vote, and each overseas delegate only serves in that role for a single annual session. (On local-level CPPCCs, it seems that overseas Chinese with foreign nationality can sit as regular CPPCC delegates and hold those positions year after year.)

The criteria the party uses to select these delegates, and their purpose, aren’t a secret. Xu Guanghua, who in 2014 served as the deputy head of the Committee of Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and Overseas Chinese Affairs of the CPPCC National Committee, explained how overseas delegates are chosen: ‘There are several standards we consider. They need to have expertise in a certain sphere, have the capability to participate in politics, stay influential among overseas Chinese, and most importantly, love China.’

Excerpts from a 2014 Global Times article about overseas delegates provide a clear picture of how the party views the role of CPPCC overseas delegates—as a way to win over and to influence overseas Chinese communities.

Influential overseas Chinese selected to give advice at CPPCC session

Among the approximately 2,000 members of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), one group is quite special. It was a group of 35 Chinese-looking ‘foreigners.’ Initially from China, they had all acquired foreign nationalities.

This overseas delegation consisted of 35 Chinese elites from 21 countries, who were invited to offer advice and suggestions during the 2014 CPPCC session …

Chen Xiongfeng, deputy director of the Consular Protection Center under the Foreign Ministry and former consul general of [the] Chinese embassy in the US, participated in the recommendation process.

‘There are 60 million Chinese living overseas. This is a group of people who do have clout in the mainstream societies of the countries they live in,’ Chen said …

‘Chinese elites abroad increasingly know how to use local platforms to deal with problems and exert their own sway, and they truly know what China should do to build its “soft power” while going global,’ he added.

Overseas delegates aren’t mindless vectors of the Chinese government’s expansive political desires; they are often well-known members of overseas Chinese communities who hope to improve the lives of Chinese abroad by bringing their perspectives to Beijing. They may have no intention to expand party influence, and may accept the invitation purely for the rarity of the experience, or for other reasons.

One overseas delegate, Chen Zhuogang, has lived in the US for 39 years, according to a March 2019 interview with the California-based pro-Beijing newspaper Qiao Bao. He carefully prepared for his time as a delegate by speaking with numerous members of his community in Texas, where he lives. According to Qiao Bao, Chen ‘communicated with the major local overseas Chinese communities before the trip, listened to suggestions and requirements, and prepared to bring these voices to the conference’. The issues most frequently raised among those he spoke with included difficulties in securing the necessary paperwork to visit China and concerns about the availability Chinese-language education for their children while living abroad.

These are perfectly legitimate concerns for any group of expats. But another top concern among those in Chen’s community was ‘preserving the rights and interests’ of Chinese abroad. This vague phrase has been used to refer to the Chinese government’s ability to protect overseas Chinese who may be in harm’s way due to war or natural disaster—but also as a justification for behaviours by Chinese companies or individuals abroad that could be interpreted as aggressive or even abusive. In February 2019, for example, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang denounced US security warnings on Huawei and other Chinese telecom companies as a violation of ‘Chinese companies’ legitimate rights and interests of development’. The phrase has also been used to justify the sometimes violent or obstructive demonstrations on Western campuses staged by patriotic Chinese international students, such as during the Hong Kong–related protests in Australia in August.

Overseas delegates tend to fall into one of two categories: people who are leading members of overseas united front–linked organisations, such as peaceful unification societies; and overseas Chinese who have made outstanding accomplishments in their fields, and who may or may not have had any previous links to the united front. The latter category includes scientists, people with government connections, and successful businesspeople.

Overseas delegates from the US have included an award-winning scientist in California, a local community and political organiser in Maryland, and even one senior adviser to the US Federal Reserve Board.

Gerry Groot, head of the department of Asian studies at the University of Adelaide, told me in an interview that being chosen as a CPPCC delegate grants prestige.

‘The United Front Department has seen these people as being influential and important in their communities, and is seeking to increase or deepen their ties to China, as the ancestral land’, said Groot.

‘In rewarding them, those people get status in their communities back home, and in many cases it increases their influence back home. And that means that these people go back much more committed to supporting the party than they were.

‘If you’re a soldier in China, applying to leave the army is likely to leave a black mark on your social credit score.’ This was the striking opening line of a Sixth Tone article from April 2018 reposted on the Chinese military’s official website. The article was about the use of a social credit system by the People’s Liberation Army. However, it garnered surprisingly little attention for such a hot topic.

Excellent research has already been done on the various prototype social credit systems in China, but a big gap in that research is the question of how a social credit system might be applied to the PLA, particularly at a time when President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party are increasingly concerned about the military’s loyalty to the party.

The 2015 Chinese defence white paper stated that the PLA is enjoying a period of strategic opportunity and can therefore modernise through ongoing reforms. However, China has faced growing domestic and international criticism and pushback in recent months. The CCP is trying to put out fires on multiple fronts: continued freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea; a slowing economy; crises in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Taiwan; and the coronavirus outbreak.

The PLA is being pushed to be combat-ready as soon as possible, but military reforms haven’t been welcomed across the board. Changes in promotion structures, preferences for highly skilled labour and a new focus on high-tech joint operations have challenged the ways in which the PLA has operated for decades. However, the party’s longstanding battle to ensure that its army is loyal to it is an increasing priority under Xi, and the CCP continues to emphasise that the party controls the gun: 党指挥枪 (dang zhihui qiang). Under Xi, disloyalty to the party has been made illegal in order to protect the CCP’s power.

In the light of that threat perception, the PLA version of a social credit system seems to be a new tool for punishing betrayal, dissuading dissent and rewarding allegiance to the military.

The Sixth Tone article reports that 17 military personnel were ‘blacklisted’ in China’s social credit system in Jilin City and restricted from travelling by air and rail and from seeking civil service employment. Their names and addresses were posted in Chinese news articles and on the WeChat account of the Jilin City military recruitment office. They apparently ‘lacked the willpower to adapt to military life’. According to the article, they were prohibited from taking out loans and insurance policies and banned from enrolling in educational institutions for two years.

Similar examples have been reported in other provinces, where one-off punishments such as fines have been accompanied by permanent ones. For instance, two men in Fujian Province were punished by having their registration documents permanently marked with a note that read, ‘refused military service’.

More recently, in March 2019, Weihai City prefecture in Shandong published its own ‘Implementation Plan for the Evaluation of Personal Credit Scores in the Field of National Defense Mobilization’, which outlined how a social credit record could be used as both a carrot and a stick in domestic military matters. Punishments were listed for those deemed to be acting against national defence interests.

China’s 2019 defence white paper and other government documents state that ‘China’s national defense is the responsibility of all Chinese people’, so punishments for disloyalty aren’t directed solely at soldiers but also at civilians.

Until Xi’s reforms, the PLA was left to set and manage its own institutional priorities, but now it has to address corruption and tackle vested interests to take the military modernisation program forward. It seems that the application of a social credit system in the military is a potential additional measure to enforce strict compliance with new military guidelines.

The social credit system, which both co-opts and coerces, might also be used as a recruitment tool as the PLA competes against China’s private sector for highly skilled graduates. Weihai City’s system not only rewards those who join or extend their service in the military with bonus social credit points for them and their families, but also punishes those who do not.

Weihai’s military-related social credit system is integrated into the city’s ‘credit joint disciplinary mechanism’. Those who contribute positively or negatively to national defence have points added to or deducted from their personal records. Credit records are reportedly correlated with overall credit ratings, from AAA (integrity model) to D (dishonest). The repercussions of dissent extend beyond the soldier to his or her immediate family members. The naming and shaming is also becoming ever more public: transgressions are announced not just on government websites (such as the local military recruitment offices and the prefecture’s Credit China website), but also on social media accounts.

The link between Weihai’s social credit score and national defence suggests that the PLA is also more concerned about its ability to mobilise the military in a national crisis than previously thought. If Xi’s anticorruption campaign was also a tool to address the CCP’s control over the military, then the targeting of those in PLA logistics roles further suggests a concern in the military’s leadership about the force’s ability to mobilise when needed.

Just as a civilian social credit system might be used by the party-state to incentivise or force individuals, companies and other entities to ‘act in line with policies, directions and will of the CCP’, the military equivalent could be used to similar effect in the PLA.

It’s important to note that the PLA’s experience with social credit is based on isolated pilot projects and not a complete institution-wide program. However, the published examples indicate that those projects might be a strong indicator of a future system by which the PLA’s leadership ensures that the PLA remains the party’s army.