Xi Jinping wants to be both feared and loved by China’s people

IF CENSORS IN communist-led regimes are good for anything, it is spurring creativity. With a new coronavirus stalking China, netizens have been heaping praise on “Chernobyl”, an American-made television drama about the Soviet Union’s worst nuclear disaster. Their aim is to sneak discussion of the outbreak onto China’s tightly policed internet. In less hectic times censors would swiftly stamp out such impertinence. For the parallels with the reactor explosion in 1986, and the official cover-up that followed, are painful for China’s Communist Party bosses, whose system of government was cribbed from Soviet designs. But pointed comparisons keep popping up on China’s social media. One urges Chinese viewers to learn from “Chernobyl” that a free flow of information offers more security than aircraft-carriers, Moon landings and other signs of superpower might. Another contrasts a soothing interview granted to state television by the governor of Hubei, the province where the epidemic began, with a speech by the hero of “Chernobyl”, a Soviet scientist, about the costs of official lies.

Parallels are likely to continue in the real world. Back in the 1980s, Kremlin leaders scapegoated local officials and engineers, coolly blaming them for the disaster and denying a wider cover-up. In recent days, Chinese state media have dropped heavy hints that the mayor of Wuhan, the industrial city where the virus was first detected, will lose his job. When Li Keqiang, China’s prime minister, was appointed to oversee virus-control work, cynics suggested that his role was to take the fall should the outbreak spark a pandemic—in effect, to protect President Xi Jinping.