Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Xi, Covid and seasonal schadenfreude

’Tis indeed the season to be jolly.  Over the holidays, we can all put our feet up to view a cracking remake of David and Goliath, ‘The Microscopic Nullity vs Winnie-the-Pooh’, in which a giant bear-like bully has been pushing around 1.4 billion people but cannot prevail against an opponent too tiny to be seen by the naked eye. Inverting the customary balance of power, the narrative arc is classically satisfying: a would-be omnipotent despot is driven to crazed distraction by the sneaky afflictions of the infinitesimal. I’m reminded of a favourite newspaper clipping: ‘Drunk tries to kill spider, sets house ablaze.’

Because you cannot lock up a coronavirus. You can’t censor a coronavirus or send a coronavirus to a re-education camp in Xinjiang. You can’t frighten a virus into submission or downgrade its social credit score.  You can’t force a miserable entity most scientists don’t even classify as alive to proclaim obeisance to the Chinese Communist party. Xi Jinping is facing down his nemesis, and the pesky, invisible speck is winning.

I can’t be the only one who has harboured a lazy, unexamined impression of the Chinese as passive, biddable and cowed. It’s often seemed from afar that these brainwashed automatons will do anything they’re told and will credulously swallow whatever hokum officialdom crams down their throats. This same condescending stereotype has facilitated Harvard University’s poor non-academic personality ratings of East Asian applicants, whose low scores on ‘leadership’ and ‘courage’ help keep these cursed high-achievers from taking over the entire student body. Of course, this crude racial caricature is belied by Tiananmen Square and more recently by heroic protestors in Hong Kong.

Thus it’s also seasonally jolly-making that the starved, imprisoned, muzzled mainland Chinese, their inflamed nasal cavities poked incessantly with swabs much the way bulls are repeatedly lanced in the tercio de veras stage of bullfighting, are finally seeing red.

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