Five years ago last week, the world shut down. The coronavirus that caused COVID-19 had first emerged in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. By March 2020, it had become a global pandemic leading to mass death and grinding the global economy to a halt, with some labeling it “the most disruptive global event since the Great Depression and World War 2.”
Hoping to prevent those ill with the deadly respiratory virus from overwhelming the capacity of hospital systems, governments around the world sought to “flatten the curve” by mandating the closure of businesses and schools, and ordering people to stay at home. The extent to which governments took such measures varied, both between and within countries. But the overall effect was that for a few months in 2022, the earth seemed to truly stand still.
Even as the pandemic was still unfolding, analysts openly wondered whether it would “fundamentally alter globalization, democracy, capitalism, multilateralism, the predominance of US power, and other core features of the pre-COVID international system,” as one collection of research papers put it. Some asserted it would dramatically change the global order, as it offered an opportunity for China to use its ability to quickly contain its outbreak—as well as its control over the supply of personal protective equipment—to claim superiority over the U.S. and Western countries that struggled to do so. Others saw the pandemic’s impact working in the opposite direction, viewing it as China’s “Chernobyl moment.” By this argument, Beijing’s inability to keep the virus from spreading globally would be a death blow to the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy, just as Moscow’s inability to prevent and address the consequences of the 1986 meltdown of the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, undermined Communist Party rule in the former Soviet Union.
