俄罗斯和中国都暴露了威权政权的弱点
汤马斯椰簳蔑툲022年4月19日
专栏作者
China and Russia Are Giving Authoritarianism a Bad Name
Pool photo by Sergei Ilnitsky
The last decade looked like a good one for authoritarian regimes and a challen
ging one for democratic ones. Cybertools, drones, facial recognition technolog
y and social networks seemed to make efficient authoritarians even more effici
ent and democracies increasingly ungovernable.
过去的十年对于威权政权来说似乎是美好的十年，对于民主政权来说却是充满挑战的十年
。网络工具、无人机、面部识别技术和社交网络似乎让有效率的威权主义者更有效率，让
民主国家越来越难以治理。
The West lost self-confidence — and both Russian and Chinese leaders rubbed i
t in, putting out the word that these chaotic democratic systems were a spent
force.
西方失去了自信——俄罗斯和中国领导人更是火上浇油，说这些混乱的民主制度是一种强
弩之末。
And then a totally unexpected thing happened: Russia and China each overreache
d.
然后发生了一件完全出乎意料的事情：俄罗斯和中国都不自量力了。
Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and, to his surprise, invited an indirect war w
ith NATO and the West. China insisted that it was smart enough to have its own
local solution to a pandemic, leaving millions of Chinese underprotected or u
nprotected and, in effect, inviting a war with one of Mother Nature’s most co
ntagious viruses — the Omicron mutation of SARS-CoV-2. It’s now led China to
lock down all of Shanghai and parts of 44 other cities — some 370 million pe
ople.
普丁入侵乌克兰，令他惊讶的是，这带来了与北约和西方的间接战争。中国坚持认为使用
本地解决方案来应对大流行是足够明智的，却使数百万中国人受保护不足或得不到保护，
实际上引发了与新冠病毒奥密克戎变异株——大自然最具传染性的病毒之一——的战争。
现在，它导致中国封锁了整个上海和其他44个城市的部分地区，人口合计约3.7亿。
In short, both Moscow and Beijing find themselves suddenly contending with muc
h more powerful and relentless forces and systems than they ever anticipated.
And the battles are exposing — to the whole world and to their own people —
the weaknesses of their own systems. So much so that the world now has to worr
y about instability in both countries.
简而言之，莫斯科和北京都突然发现自己要与比预期中更强大、更无情的力量和系统抗衡
。战斗正在向全世界和它们的人民暴露它们自身系统的弱点。暴露如此之多，以至于世界
现在不得不担心两国会发生动荡局势。
Russia is a key supplier of wheat, fertilizer, oil and natural gas for the wor
ld. And China is the origin of, or a crucial link in, thousands of global manu
facturing supply chains. If Russia is locked out and China is locked down for
a prolonged period, every corner of the planet will be affected. And that is n
o longer a remote possibility.
俄罗斯是世界小麦、化肥、石油和天然气的主要供应国。中国是数千条全球制造业供应链
的源头或关键环节。如果俄罗斯被孤立，中国被长期封锁，地球的每一个角落都会受到影
响。这种可能性不再遥远。
Let’s start with Putin. He lulled himself into thinking that because his army
had smashed a bunch of ragtag military opponents in Syria, Georgia, Crimea an
d Chechnya, it could quickly devour a country of 44 million people — Ukraine
— that over the last decade had been moving to join the West and was tacitly
being armed and trained by NATO.
先说普丁。他自欺欺人地认为，只因他的军队在叙利亚、乔治亚、克里米亚和车臣粉碎了
一群鱼腩对手，它就可以迅速吞噬一个有4400万人口的乌克兰。但在过去十年里，乌克兰
一直努力加入西方并悄悄接受北约的武器和训练。
It’s been a military and economic debacle for Russia so far. But just as impo
rtant, it has exposed precisely how much Putin’s “system” is built on both
lying upward — everyone telling superiors what they want to hear, all the way
up to Putin — and drilling downward, tapping Russia’s natural resources, en
riching a few Russians, rather than unleashing the country’s human resources
and empowering the many.
到目前为止，这对俄罗斯来说是一场军事和经济崩溃。但同样重要的是，它准确地暴露了
普丁的“体系”是如何建立在向上说谎——每个人都对上级说他们想听的，层层向上，直
到普丁——和向下剥削——利用俄罗斯的自然资源，让少数俄罗斯人富裕起来，而不是发
挥该国的人力资源并赋予大多数人权力。
Putin’s Russia is basically built on oil, lies and corruption, and that is no
t a resilient system.
普丁的俄罗斯基本上是建立在石油、谎言和腐败之上的，这不是一个稳健的体系。
You could see it right from the eve of the war when Putin conducted a national
ly televised meeting of his top national security advisers, and none other tha
n Sergei Naryshkin, chief of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, appeared
confused over which lie Putin wanted to be told.
在战争的前夕，你就可以看到，当时普丁与他的高级国家安全顾问举行了一次全国电视转
播会议，除了俄罗斯外国情报局局长谢尔盖楝ソp什金以外，似乎没人对那些谎言表现出
困惑，那些话都是普丁希望听到的。
Putin said the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk should be al
lowed to become independent states, and then he polled these advisers for conf
irmation. But Naryshkin seemed to think Putin wanted to be told that the two p
rovinces should be annexed to Russia. As Naryshkin stammered over the wrong an
swer, Putin, without a hint of irony, twice snapped at him to “speak directly
” — as if that were possible anymore in Putin’s Russia. Only after Naryshki
n gave Putin the lie he obviously wanted to be told did Putin snarl, “You can
sit down now.”
普丁表示，乌克兰东部的顿涅茨克和卢甘斯克州应该被允许成为独立的国家，然后他对这
些顾问进行了意见调查以获得确认。但纳雷什金似乎认为普丁想听他们说，这两个州应该
被俄罗斯吞并。当纳雷什金因错误的答案而结结巴巴时，普丁没有一丝讽刺的意味，两次
让他“直说”——说得好像在普丁的俄罗斯还存在这种可能似的。只有在纳雷什金向普丁
说了他显然想听到的谎言之后，普丁才厉声说：“你现在可以坐下了。”
How many Russian military officers watching that humiliation were ready to tel
l Putin the truth about Ukraine once the war started going badly? When the Rus
sian military was up against foes in Georgia, Syria, Crimea and Chechnya, Russ
ia could just indiscriminately bomb its way out of any problem. But now that P
utin’s military has found itself in a war with Ukraine’s highly motivated ar
my and its homegrown weapons industry, backed with some of NATO’s best precis
ion weapons and training, the rot has really started to show. Russia’s tank a
nd logistic forces were mauled into multiple junkyards of burning hulks in wes
tern Ukraine.
在看到这样的羞辱之后，有多少俄罗斯军官会在战场出现颓势后去跟普丁说实话？在与乔
治亚、叙利亚、克里米亚和车臣作战时，俄军可以用狂轰滥炸解决一切问题。但现在普丁
的军队发现，他们面对的是一支士气高昂的军队，有自己的兵器工业，还拥有最精良的北
约精确武器和训练，败象正在渐渐显露。俄罗斯的坦克和后勤力量在乌克兰西部被敲打成
了一堆堆燃烧着的废铜烂铁。
And it is impossible to exaggerate how incompetent the Russian Navy had to be
to allow the command warship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva missile
cruiser, to be so badly damaged, reportedly by two Ukrainian-made anti-ship cr
uise missiles, called Neptunes, that the Moskva sank into the sea off Ukraine
last week — the biggest loss of a naval ship in battle in 40 years.
俄罗斯海军居然能让他们的黑海舰队指挥舰“莫斯科号”导弹巡洋舰受到严重损伤——据
报导是被乌克兰制造的两枚名为“海王星”的反舰巡航导弹击中，这艘舰艇上周在乌克兰
附近海域沉没——这是40年来一艘海军舰艇遭遇的最严重损失，这种无能的程度怎么说都
不为过。
For the Russian flagship in charge of coordinating all of the air defenses for
the flotilla, and itself carrying 64 S-300F Rif air defense missiles, to be t
aken out by enemy anti-ship missiles had to have been the result of a cascade
of systems failures in detection and response to an attack.
作为负责协调这支小型舰队的防空力量的旗舰，“莫斯科号”携带有64枚“S-300F暗礁”
防空导弹，这样一艘船被敌军的反舰导弹击毁，只有在攻击探测和反应上存在一连串的系
统失灵才会这样。
Moreover, Neptune missiles are not necessarily “ship killers.” They were mor
e likely designed to be “mission killers” — to disable the radar and electr
onics of sophisticated destroyers like the Moskva — not specifically sink the
m.
此外，“海王星”导弹都谈不上是“舰船杀手”。这种导弹更多的是作为“任务杀手”来
使用——让“莫斯科号”这种装备精良的驱逐舰丧失雷达和电子能力——而不是直接把船
击沉。
So I pity the commander who had to tell Putin that Russia’s meanest, monstrou
s warship in the Black Sea, rumored to have been his favorite, had been sunk b
y a Ukrainian missile fired in war for the first time.
那位据说深得普丁器重的指挥官，现在要去告诉他，俄罗斯在黑海最凶悍、最庞大的战舰
，被乌克兰的一种首次在战场上使用的导弹击沉了，我还是挺同情这位指挥官的。
China is a much more serious country than Russia: It is not built on oil, lies
and corruption (though it has plenty of the latter), but on the hard work and
manufacturing talents of its people, directed by a top-down, iron-fisted but
eager-to-learn-from-abroad Chinese Communist Party. At least, eager in the pas
t to learn, but less so lately.
中国是个比俄罗斯正经得多的国家：它不是靠着石油、谎言和腐败（尽管也不少）建起来
的，而是靠人民的勤奋和制造上的天赋，它的领导者中国共产党采用自上而下的铁拳统治
，但同时也乐于向外国学习。至少过去是这样，最近几年学习热情有所减退。
China’s economic success, and the sense of pride it has generated, seems to h
ave lulled its leadership into thinking it could basically go it alone against
a pandemic. By producing its own vaccines, rather than importing better ones
from the West, and by repurposing its highly efficient system of authoritarian
surveillance and control to curb travel, do mass testing and quarantine any i
ndividuals or neighborhoods where Covid-19 appeared, China bet on a “zero Cov
id” policy. If it could get through the pandemic with fewer deaths and a more
open economy, it would be another signal to the to the world — a big signal
— that Chinese communism was superior to American democracy.
中国的经济成功以及这种成功所带来的自豪感似乎让领导层错误地认为，它可以独力应对
一场大流行。他们生产自己的疫苗而不是从西方进口更好的疫苗；利用高效率的威权主义
监视和控制系统在发现新冠疫情的地方制约人的出行，进行大规模检测，并对个人或街区
进行隔离，从而把赌注压在“清零”政策上。如果它能在保证更少的死亡和更开放的经济
的情况下挺过一场大流行，那将是向世界发出的又一个信号——一个重大信号——中国共
产主义要优于美国民主。
But Beijing, while scoffing at the West, became shockingly negligent about vac
cinating its own elderly. That did not matter as much when China was able to s
tem the spread of earlier variants of the coronavirus with tight population co
ntrols. But now it matters, because China’s Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines ap
pear not nearly as effective against Omicron as the mRNA vaccines made in the
West, although they still are effective at reducing hospitalization and death.
In China today, more than 130 million people “aged 60 and above are either u
nvaccinated or have received fewer than three doses,” putting them “in great
er danger of developing severe Covid symptoms or dying if they contract the vi
rus,” The Financial Times recently reported, citing a University of Hong Kong
study.
但在嘲笑西方的同时，中国在国内老年人疫苗接种的问题上却出现了令人震惊的疏忽。当
中国还能通过严格的人口管制来阻止新冠病毒早期变异株的传播时，这种疏忽后果并不严
重。但现在却要紧起来，因为中国的国药和科兴疫苗哪怕仍能有效减少住院和死亡，但针
对奥密克戎变异株的效果似乎远不如西方的mRNA疫苗。英国《金融时报》最近援引香港大
学的一份研究报导称，在如今的中国，超过1.3亿的“60岁及以上人群要么未接种疫苗，
要么接种疫苗不到三针”，这导致他们“如果感染病毒，发展成新冠重症或死亡的风险变
得更高”。
This has led Beijing to opt for that total lockdown of Shanghai, which has bee
n so poorly managed that residents have reportedly had to scramble for food.
这也让中国选择全面封锁上海，其封锁措施如此失当，以至于有报导称居民都不得不争抢
食品。
Dr. David L. Katz, a U.S. public health and preventive medicine expert who wro
te one of the most prescient early guest essays in this newspaper about managi
ng Covid at the onset, explained to me that the problem with having the kind o
f draconian lockdown policy that China maintained is that you are guaranteeing
that your population develops little native immunity from having acquired and
survived the virus. So, Katz said, if the virus mutates globally, as it did w
ith Omicron, and you have “a less than effective vaccine, virtually no natura
l immunity in the population, and millions of elderly unvaccinated, you’re in
a bad place and there is no easy way out.”
美国公共卫生和预防医学专家戴维微岁肵鰴掑h曾在本报发表最具先见之明的早期客座评
论之一，介绍了如何在疫情暴发之初妥善控制传播。他向我解释称，中国坚持这种严格封
锁政策的问题在于，其人口必然难以产生群体免疫，因为他们没有感染病毒，并从中康复
。因此，凯兹说，如果病毒像奥密克戎那样在全球范围内发生变异，而你的“疫苗效果不
佳，人口几乎没有天然免疫力，又有数以百万计的老年人没打疫苗，那么你的处境就会非
常糟糕，而且没有轻松的出路”。
You can’t fool around with or propagandize away Mother Nature; she’s mercile
ss.
The moral of this story? High-coercion authoritarian systems are low-informati
on systems — so they often drive blind more than they realize. And even when
the truth filters up, or reality in the form of a more powerful foe or Mother
Nature slams them in the face so hard it can’t be ignored, their leaders find
it hard to change course because their claims to the right to be presidents-f
or-life rest on their claims to infallibility. And that is why Russia and Chin
a are both now struggling.
本文的寓意何在？高压威权系统都是低信息量的系统——因此它们往往比自己意识到的更
盲目。即便真相滤出水面，或是现实变成了更强劲的对手，大自然狠狠打在他们脸上以至
于无法忽视，它们的领导人都很难改变方向，因为这些人声称，他们之所以有权做终身领
袖，靠得就是他们的永远正确。这就是俄罗斯和中国如今都陷入困境的原因。
I am worried sick about our own democratic system. But as long as we can still
vote out incompetent leaders and maintain information ecosystems that will ex
pose systemic lying and defy censorship, we can adapt in an age of rapid chang
e — and that is the single most important competitive advantage a country can
have today.
我的确对我们的民主制度深感忧虑。但只要我们还能把不称职的领导人选下去，并维护好
能够揭露系统性谎言且凌驾于审查之上的信息生态系统，我们就可以适应这个瞬息万变的
时代——而这正是一个国家今天所能拥有的最重要的竞争优势。
汤马斯微椰簳蔑툨Thomas L. Friedman)是外交事务方面的专栏作者。他1981年加入时报
，曾三次获得普立兹奖。他著有七本书，包括赢得国家图书奖的《从贝鲁特到耶路撒冷》
(From Beirut to Jerusalem)。欢迎在Twitter和Facebook上关注他。
翻译：纽约时报中文网
点击查看本文英文版。
https://cn.nytimes.com/opinion/20220419/china-russia-putin/zh-hant/dual/
俄罗斯和中国，当今的最高领导人都想当终身的皇帝，所以采取极端的高压统治，连“起
来！不愿做奴隶的人们”的中国国歌歌词都可以被封锁，二国底层人民的声音真的发不出
来！！