COVID-19 has brought the world grinding to a halt. As of early August 2020, the greatest public health emergency of the century thus far has registered almost 20 million infected people and claimed over 730,000 lives across all inhabited continents, bringing public health systems to their knees, and causing shutdowns of borders and lockdowns of cities, regions, and even nations unprecedented in the modern era. Yet, as this Article demonstrates—with diverse examples drawn from across the world—there are unmistakable regressions into authoritarianism in governmental efforts to contain the virus. Despite the unprecedented nature of this challenge, there is no sound justification for systemic erosion of rights-protective democratic ideals and institutions beyond that which is strictly demanded by the exigencies of the pandemic. A Wuhan-inspired all-or-nothing approach to viral containment sets a dangerous precedent for future pandemics and disasters, with the global copycat response indicating an impending ‘pandemic’ of a different sort, that of authoritarianization. With a gratuitous toll being inflicted on democracy, civil liberties, fundamental freedoms, healthcare ethics, and human dignity, this has the potential to unleash humanitarian crises no less devastating than COVID-19 in the long run.
States all over the world have reacted to COVID-19 with quarantines of entire cities, provinces, and even nations. Previous studies and preliminary evidence from current lockdowns suggest that emergency measures protecting the public’s physical health by dislocating individuals, families, and social networks could well be causing a devastating public health crisis of mental ill-health in the months and years to come. This article is the first to take a public mental health ethics perspective in examining these lockdowns, the lodestar of which is the right to mental health, rooted in the concept of human dignity. Even the strictest lockdowns are not necessarily unethical but are prone to damage mental health disproportionately, with vulnerable and disadvantaged populations being at particular risk.
This article examines the evolution of the rules that govern central-local government relations in the Chinese political economy. Although the federalism that accompanied China's market reforms has substantially facilitated economic growth, it has also created powerful incentives for local authorities to abuse their powers, significantly increasing the agency costs to the central government of maintaining political stability and creating a national market. This article analyzes the institutional design of the nascent Anti-Monopoly Law (AML), known to officials and academics as China's new ''Economic Constitution''. It demonstrates that the major purpose of the AML is to break up the so-called ''administrative monopolies'', or bureaucratic fiefdoms over local economies. In contrast to existing academic treatment, it will study the AML in the framework of competition for influence over economic policy between rent-seeking central and local actors. It argues that the AML, despite its stated purposes, is indeed designed to reduce the policy-making powers of the regions to the comparative advantage of the central government. The AML can thus be modeled as a new constitutional contract that the center wishes to enter into with the localities in order to repeal the existing rules of decentralization. It will be further shown that the AML, reflecting the allocation of power in the Chinese state, prioritizes the political imperatives of recentralization over the facilitation of competitive markets.
The Basic Healthcare and Health Promotion Law 2019 became the new constitution of China’s health system in June 2020, giving legal effect to ambitious health reform programmes like Healthy China 2030. The concurrent outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 must not distract us from appreciating the fact that this Law will comprehensively overhaul the health regulatory framework of the world’s most populous country during the coming decade, if not beyond. This article offers an original evaluation of the Law in its political context. The Law commendably promises to safeguard the right to health, assist citizens to live a ‘complete cycle of life’, and promote health using the resources of the public health system. However, it is also deeply politicised, guaranteeing extensive and penetrative political control in health campaigns, digitalised health data, the governance of health institutions, and the resolution of medical disputes. This can be explained by the consequential roles played by epidemics in China’s historical dynastic cycles, but even more so by powerful tendencies of centralisation on the part of the Leninist Party-state. The Law’s potential is thus subject to the overriding caveat that the Party-state’s existence and influence over law and public health must be secured.
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