In view of Covid-19, I feel compelled to look back at the SARS crisis 2002-2004. The epidemic was stylized by mass media across the globe as the first abstract menace of the twenty-first century. Today, it is considered a warning example for vulnerability in the age of globalization. Marshall McLuhan already gestured towards this in 1962 with his concept of the global village, theorizing that such vulnerability has many aspects. Not reducible to the rapid spread of a contagious disease, the vulnerability of the networked, globalized world has as much to do with the ever-accelerating spread of media information as a catalyst for mass paranoia, in turn creating the basis for autocratic tendencies.
Unsurprisingly, academic analyses of the SARS crisis in Hong Kong such as those undertaken by Lu Yen Roloff and Claire Hooker and S. Harris Ali show how that ‘crisis’ was instrumentalized to advance illiberal security politics. Their research reveals that in doing so, ‘crisis management’ enabled a shift of political power towards the autocratic, coupled, for instance, with the curtailment of civil and human rights. Given that this shift occurred in times of neoliberal restructuring, the question was how such developments would impact democracies – a question that also inevitably emerges under the conditions of the Covid-19 outbreak in 2019-2020.
Instrumentalizing vulnerability in China
To answer it, one turns almost automatically to China. The country is celebrated as a functioning system and the World Health Organization has authorized an official report that supports this view. Problems are hardly scrutinized in this context. Still, there are many indicators of, for instance, autocratic tendencies in China. Reportedly, the management of the “coronavirus crisis” has deepened human rights abuses, including “arbitrary detention, crackdown on freedom of speech and lack of access to information.” All of this is symbolically underscored by the nomination of a former police chief as the new Communist Party Secretary of Hubei – the first epicenter of the Covid-19 outbreak – and the repression of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
