The eighteenth-century French philosopher Joseph de Maistre once wrote that ‘every nation gets the government it deserves.’ While the quip clearly does not do justice to the many civically minded citizens in both Australia and China, the recent run of calamities has shown some surprising and remarkable similarities between the two systems.
Since late 2019, both President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Scott Morrison have come under fire for their shortcomings in times of national crisis. China as a hotspot of COVID-19 and Australia with the quartet of severe climate change, a lengthy drought, an horrific fire season and the inevitability of the coronavirus crashing onto our shores.
And yet, giving Maistre some due, the Chinese public has largely accepted the governing of the Party under the attitude that ‘if the Party lets me get rich and stays out of my personal life, I’ll keep ignoring what it does in places like Xinjiang’, while the Australian voting public decisively re-elected Morrison’s party at the last election, to the amazement of even the politicians themselves.
Both leaders have worked hard at marketing a cult of personality — one as ‘Papa Xi’ and the ‘Chairman of Everything’ (in the memorable phrase of Australian Sinologist Professor Geremie Barmé) and the other as a daggy dad Scomo from the Shire, complete with miracle-working cape hidden under his baseball cap. To have their public personas challenged by the people must be galling for both.
In Xi’s case he simply disappeared from public view for an extended time and in the last week of January the government-run newspaper, The People’s Daily, did not run his image on the front page for several days. In China, this is highly unusual for a leader still in charge. Previously, when high-ranked officials vanished it meant that they were about to be purged, but in this instance it was a deliberate act of distancing and of trying to protect the leader from the virus’ fallout.
Since the early weeks of February, however, Xi and his officials have been seeking to re-cast his earlier actions as heroic struggles against the tide of contaminants, making black become white and deception become decisive moves. While it is known within China that Xi knew at least by early January and likely even in late December of the new virus — because heroic citizens like ophthalmologist Li Wenliang had alerted their colleagues to the new strain of an illness — it was not until the 23rd of January that Wuhan and other cities were put into lockdown. By early February the recasting of government intervention was well underway.
'These circumstances have shown that in many ways a semblance of leadership has taken precedence over substantive acts, and arguably the people of each nation have some complicity in the slow creep of this reality.'
Likewise in the middle of December, at a time when the nation was burning, Scott Morrison went on an overseas holiday, choosing of his own volition to scarper. The ubiquity of social media, however, meant the Australian leader’s Hawaiian sojourn was widely broadcast at the same time as communities sought shelter on beaches and kangaroos fled across blackened paddocks. While Xi Jinping could operate in stealth (in Beijing high level secret political meetings were being held to discuss the ongoing response), the fact of Morrison’s absence was ever present. His government has been in hyper-drive since, seeking to replace images of shakas with serious faces indicating that decisive management is taking place. These circumstances have shown that in many ways a semblance of leadership has taken precedence over substantive acts, and arguably the people of each nation have some complicity in the slow creep of this reality.
It is of course true that citizens have been seeking to hold each of their governments to account. In China this has been to the detriment of scholars like Tsinghua University professor Xu Zhangrun and rights lawyer Xu Zhiyong, both of whom have bravely criticized Xi’s rule. Likewise, in Australia mass public rallies and attempts by seasoned journalists such as Katharine Murphy and Leigh Sales to keep a laser focus on the issues of substance and not the spin reveals a deeply concerned populace.
Even so, it is also true that in both nations people have also been highly focused on personal and material wellbeing. In China this manifests as a thirst for luxury car ownership, overseas travel or the sending of children abroad for study, while in Australia key election issues were the rarified question of franking credits, the protection of outdated industries and the supposedly prohibitive cost of action on climate change (rather than the demonstrable cost of inaction) such that, in the end, it could be argued that that old cynic Maistre might have been onto something. The leaders we have are also the leaders we have allowed.
Dr Jeremy Clarke, PhD, is the founding director of Sino-Immersions Pty Ltd, a China consulting company, and a Visiting Fellow in the Australian Centre on China in the World, Australian National University.
Main image: A mural by artist Scott Marsh depicting Prime Minister Scott Morrison on holiday in Hawaii is seen on December 26, 2019 (Getty images/Jenny Evans)