Coronavirus as social and economic danger for China

The Chinese tactic at the beginning and even before the virus crown epidemic was to deny or minimize the risks of contagion, evidently due to an underestimation error also linked to the intention to preserve its economy. The rapid expansion, even on a global level, of the virus has forced Beijing to change its attitude, without, however, recognizing its responsibilities, which have been charged to the peripheral organs of power; which is impossible in a country where all information is controlled and centralized up to the highest hierarchies. Thinking that Xi Jinping was unaware of the risks is Beijing's strategy: but it is hardly credible. For now, the political leaders of the regions where the contagion started to pay, who are sacrificed to protect central power. But this provokes the question regarding the effectiveness of the power of control on the peripheries: it is a rhetorical question, the central apparatus could not have known, thanks to the capillary control that extends over the whole territory, typical of each authoritarian power . Having said this, the decision to place the responsibility on peripheral managers, albeit of a high degree, manifests the need to exclude the idea that there are responsibilities of President Xi Jingping from a public opinion that contested the silences of the authorities. But this is only one aspect of the problem: there is a part of the Chinese company, the one that belongs to the productive executive class, which considers the measures taken against the virus to be excessive, because they are too penalizing for the country's economy. What is likely to crack is the social pact between the upper middle class of the population and the political class, a pact founded on the distribution of wealth in exchange for distance from politics. Not that the power and position of the Chinese president are in danger, but the real risk of realizing a presence of dissent no longer appears as impossible, as the situation before the virus crown assured. The time factor for assessing this situation is essential, given that according to Chinese experts, the maximum value of the infection has not yet occurred and will arrive by the end of February. So China will continue to be in an emergency for at least two more months or more. In this period of time, the regime will have to manage a crisis with double significance: health and social, without neglecting the economic aspect and will not be able to do so with repeated punishments of peripheral officials. But also from an international point of view, the Chinese image appears blurred, the alarm of the World Health Organization has proclaimed the crown virus a worse threat than terrorism due to the more than a thousand deaths in a short time and for the most part high spreading capacity of the virus. According to official data, however, mortality would be four per thousand, which is not an irrelevant number, especially considering that it concerns countries mostly equipped to face these emergencies. What worries most is the possibility that the virus arrives in Africa, where health systems are not as solid as those of more advanced countries. As for the economy, it is now a certainty that the effects of the virus crown on the Chinese economy are reflecting on the global one and the world's demand for Beijing is that China supports its productive fabric with specific measures. If these measures are necessary, a sort of moratorium, even limited in time, of the war of duties to give way to the global economy to limit the damages, also in consideration of the approaching shortage of products of the Chinese manufacturing industry towards abroad; the dependence of different industrial sectors, in every part of the globe, of Chinese products, risks decreasing the quantity of finished product in each industrial sector, with the consequent drop in production capable of causing a rise in prices and a consequent global inflation . If this were to occur, the economic backlash for Beijing would be a decrease in the country's growth and, consequently, all over the world, with a compromised credibility for the productive, but above all political apparatus of China.