Xi’s iron grip on his country is stopping the
Covid U-turn it so desperately needs
Isabel
Hilton
As the rest of the world breaks free of the virus,
China has doubled down on draconian measures
Sun 27 Nov
2022 07.00 GMT
Last week,
Covid-related images provoked outrage on Chinese social media: one showed a
young woman kneeling on the ground with her hands tied behind her back after
she and a friend had picked up a takeaway meal without first donning masks.
Neither had
Covid, neither was even a close contact, but both had been detained by the
increasingly resented “big whites”, the hazmat-suited zero-Covid enforcers who
bound the women’s hands and left them kneeling in the street, an exercise in
humiliation that provoked indignation among China’s netizens.
Meanwhile,
Tianxiacheng community, a residential compound in the central city of
Zhengzhou, gained notoriety after a recording of a message broadcast by the
management company went viral. “Outsiders will be executed on the spot with the
authority of law,” it said. Zhengzhou, already in the spotlight after a mass
breakout from its giant Foxconn iPhone factory, as desperate workers tried to
escape an impending lockdown, is suffering one of China’s larger Covid
outbreaks. It is not alone: Beijing, Guangzhou and several other cities are
contributing to the highest Covid numbers in China since the first,
catastrophic outbreak in Wuhan in December 2019.
On
Wednesday last week, the daily total of cases reached a 2022 record of 31,527.
Not only is popular resentment growing over Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy, and
the economic costs continuing to mount, but its efficacy appears to be breaking
down. Given the growing risks and diminishing returns, why does Beijing
continue to insist on it?
They bound
the women’s hands and left them kneeling in the street, an exercise in
humiliation
Two years
ago, it all looked rather different. Despite today’s signs of weariness and
frustration, zero-Covid was hailed as an example of the superiority of China’s
system of government. It also allowed the government to bury the memories of
the bungling incompetence of the early response in Wuhan – the death from Covid
of the whistleblower Dr Li Wenjiang, the images of the panic that gripped the
city, and of citizens unable to get help for dying relatives.
Beijing
finally moved, imposing a severe 76-day lockdown in the entire province. By
March 2020, it was judged politically and medically safe for Xi to visit Wuhan
to conduct a slow-motion victory lap over the virus. By April, when the
lockdown was finally lifted, zero-Covid was hailed as a triumph; new cases had
dried up and life could return to normal. By August, as the pandemic raged
around the world, images of a mass bathing party in Wuhan, ground zero of the
pandemic, showed tens of thousands of people crammed into a water park,
celebrating the summer with not a mask in sight.
Severe
lockdown, digital enforcement and mass testing had restored social order and
kept China’s death rate low, even as western democracies were struggling with
the first and second waves of the pandemic, a time of mass deaths and
incoherent policy responses. Even today, China has officially reported just
over 5,000 Covid deaths. For more than two years, zero-Covid allowed an almost
normal life to continue within its effectively closed borders, albeit a
normality that might be interrupted by a positive test. Zero-Covid allowed the
government to insist that, unlike western governments, it was keeping its
people safe. The party cared, it said, in ways that liberal democracies
manifestly did not.
Two
developments changed that equation radically: the rapid development of
effective vaccines in the west and the emergence of Omicron and other variants.
China has
developed vaccines and conducted mass vaccinations but has not yet come up with
a native mRNA vaccine and has declined to license a foreign one – apparently
for nationalistic reasons. The net result is that the vaccination programme is
still less effective than it needs to be. The fear that the uncontrolled virus
could swiftly overwhelm the country’s limited medical provision was reinforced
when an outbreak in March propelled Hong Kong briefly to the top of the global
death rate league tables. Like China, Hong Kong has a large elderly population,
many of whom had not been vaccinated.
Omicron
altered the game in a different way. The first and second waves of Covid were
so dangerous that extreme measures seemed proportionate, but the emergence of
less lethal, but highly transmissible variants, which spread rapidly and often
infected without symptoms, made the severe measures – the lockdowns,
interruptions to production, authoritarian controls of every aspect of daily
life – seem out of proportion to the threat.
There are
other signs of a teetering system; since most of the cases are asymptomatic,
they are only detected by constant mass testing, which imposes a heavy burden
for the local authorities, which bear the cost, and the people who must stand
in line for hours every week, wondering if a casual contact could trigger weeks
of enforced internment in a quarantine centre. As the virus is normalised in
much of the rest of the world, a policy that once seemed to guarantee security
to China looks more like trying to bail out a sinking dinghy with a sieve.
It is
difficult to reverse policy in any political system, but it is perhaps hardest
in a top-down authoritarian model. This may seem counterintuitive; after all,
can’t an authoritarian leader do what they like? Up to a point, but several
factors militate against an abrupt reversal of policy: if the leader is
strongly associated with it, as in this case, a U-turn implies failure –
something leaders who seek to maintain a myth of omniscience and
omni-competence find difficult.
There are
other difficulties; in the early 1960s, an estimated 40 million Chinese starved
to death in large part because junior officials had been afraid to report the
truth about farm yields to their superiors. Today, junior officials recognise
the leadership’s commitment to zero-Covid and therefore implement it zealously;
failure to do so, especially if it leads to an outbreak, can be a career-ending
move. Among the mutterings of discontent on Chinese social media are complaints
about the authoritarianism of the “big whites” and opportunistic abuse by other
officials.
Recent
policy announcements seemed to offer hope of change, but it has proved to be
fragile. China has doubled down on a policy that will have no off-ramp until
its vaccines become as effective as western mRNA vaccines. For now at least,
zero-Covid is not going away.
Isabel Hilton is a London-based writer and
broadcaster who has reported extensively from China and Hong Kong
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