In the U.S.S.R. in 1986, as in China today, a public health disaster exposed the limits of dictatorial rule

See From Chernobyl to the Coronavirus by Yaroslav Trofimov of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Fear of Chernobyl had overcome fear of the state, and nothing was the same ever again. A dictatorship built on coercion and lies faces existential risks when it’s confronted with something scarier than its machinery of repression. In the summer of 1986, Ukrainians started openly talking about ecology and nuclear safety, and those conversations rapidly morphed into an independence movement that rejected both Communism and Moscow’s rule.

The Soviet insistence on going through with Kyiv’s May Day parade after Chernobyl, forcing tens of thousands of children to march through radioactive dust, found echoes in last month’s decision by Chinese authorities to hold a mass Lunar New Year potluck banquet in Wuhan’s Baibuting district, with residents sharing dishes prepared by some 40,000 families.

Three weeks earlier, a handful of local doctors had informed colleagues online about the outbreak of unusual pneumonia cases. These whistleblowers were visited by the police and warned to stay silent or else. Such secrecy robbed ordinary residents of Wuhan of the opportunity to protect themselves, allowing the virus to spread unchecked across the country and beyond. Baibuting became one of the epicenters.

Parallels with Chernobyl can only go so far, of course. Unlike the stagnant U.S.S.R. of 1986, China is a robustly growing economy. President Xi Jinping, unlike the Soviet Union’s last leader, the reformist Mikhail Gorbachev, has intensified the Communist Party’s authority and repression of dissent since coming to power in 2012. On Thursday, Mr. Xi ousted the two top party officials in Wuhan and the surrounding region, replacing them with loyalists."

"“Two weeks have been squandered that could have allowed health authorities and the government to contain the spread of the virus,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations and a specialist in Chinese affairs. “Now the Chinese people are demanding some real change, but whether it is going to be delivered, whether the government will draw some real lessons from this crisis, that remains to be seen.”"

"Back when information flows were more easily contained, the Soviet Union rarely acknowledged plane crashes, submarine disasters or train wrecks. Even today, few people know about the 1957 disaster near Kyshtym in the Urals, when a Soviet nuclear-weapons facility caught fire, scattering nearly half as much radiation as the Chernobyl reactor did three decades later. Nobody knows for sure how many people died from radiation exposure."

"Moscow didn’t officially acknowledge the Kyshtym explosion until after Chernobyl."

"China’s media were instructed not to cover the SARS outbreak, so as not to distract attention from the annual National People’s Congress. As a result, hundreds of infections spread to Beijing. The government didn’t swing into action until Jiang Yanyong, a surgeon at an army hospital in the Chinese capital, circulated a letter describing the true scope of the epidemic.

It took less time for Beijing to adopt drastic measures this time. But the Wuhan coronavirus has also proved much more contagious than SARS and has already claimed a higher death toll. Unlike the late Dr. Li in Wuhan, Dr. Jiang, the hero of 2003, wasn’t personally infected. But he hasn’t been heard from during the latest coronavirus outbreak. Deemed ideologically suspect in Mr. Xi’s China, he is currently reported to be under house arrest."