From the Intelligence, I'm Jason Palmer. This is the eighth and final episode of a new podcast series from the Economist.

The show is called The Prince, and it's about the leader of China, Xi Jinping.

If you haven't heard the previous episodes, you can hear the whole series now by searching for The Prince on your podcast app.

A couple of years ago, a hit HBO series caused a stir in China.

Chernobyl dramatized the famous nuclear meltdown in Soviet Ukraine in the 80s.

In the last episode, a nuclear physicist, played by the British actor Jared Harris, testifies at a trial in the incident's aftermath.

He says the government lied about how its own failings led to the disaster.

Soviet leaders had downplayed the meltdown as it was happening, leading to delays in evacuations that exposed millions to harmful radiation.

The Soviet Union's mishandling of Chernobyl fueled distrust of the government, hastening its collapse five years later.

Flash forward a few decades to 2020, a year after the Chernobyl series came out.

People on Chinese social media started quoting the show, including that line about a debt to the truth.

As a way of criticizing the Chinese Communist Party's covert response.

It had also suppressed early information about the disaster, infuriating millions who were left to bear the consequences.

Even President Trump's national security adviser, Robert O'Brien, caught on to the Chernobyl analogy.

The cover-up that they did of the virus is going to go down in history along with Chernobyl.

We'll see an HBO special about it 10 or 15 years from now, and so we're in a different place with China as we speak today.

Maybe they knew how much the comparison would hurt. Xi Jinping was haunted by the collapse of the Soviet Union 30 years earlier, determined never to be China's version of its last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.

And now, China was facing another crisis that, like Chernobyl, cut straight to the heart of the party's credibility.

Keep the faith, he told health care workers in Wuhan, the city where the outbreak began.

We will win this battle.

Wuhan will win. The whole of China will win.

I'm Sulin Wang from The Economist. This is The Prince, a podcast about China's leader, Xi Jinping.

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