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The COVID-19 pandemic may seem like an unprecedented challenge to both democracies and autocracies. It's actually an old problem in a new guise. Throughout history societies have faced the question of how to respond to emergency threats from abroad. These threats have come in the three categories of war, famine, and pestilence—sometimes known as the last three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.1 As societies encountered these threats, they also faced crucial questions about the relative benefits of autocracy versus democracy in dealing with emergencies. In what follows I draw on several of the lessons from my recent book to show what history has to say about this issue.2
I propose first that we can learn a great deal about the politics of emergency by comparing China and the West, then and now. The comparison will therefore be between western countries and the prime example of an autocratic regime with high state capacity. Over the last few months many have contrasted the effectiveness of China's COVID-19 mitigation efforts with the way that the federal government in the United States failed to take decisive action. This makes it feel like a point scored for the authoritarians. But there are other ways in which the Chinese Communist Party's response to the crisis was clearly ineffective. Suppression of information allowed the Wuhan outbreak to occur in the first place. In the United States, though the Trump administration chose to ignore the pandemic for a long time, information about it circulated widely and freely. This would seem like a strength of democracy.
I argue that the differences in COVID-19 responses that we are seeing today are not new, nor are they attributable to the particular personalities of Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. They are in fact very deeply rooted in history going back a thousand years or more. We can see this by looking not only at epidemics but also at historical evidence on famines—an emergency associated with another of the four horsemen. A thousand years ago the Chinese state had the ability to respond to famines, but it could also ignore them. States in medieval Europe, where decision making was collective with rulers and representative assemblies, could not suppress information about a famine, but nor...