For three years, Chinese President Xi Jinping has waged what he has called a “People’s War on COVID-19,” an uncompromising crusade to prevent the spread of COVID-19 infections that has become a nationalist Cree rallying crusade and a symbol of Chinese pride. At the time, his government subjected citizens to intense virtual surveillance, common severe lockdowns, and the constant risk of being confined to quarantine services in the event of a positive test. These measures have had the effect of saving you from epidemics in China of the magnitude of those that have occurred in other countries, such as neighboring India or the United States. But the policy proved unsustainable due to the overzealousness in its implementation and the uncontrollable contagion of Variant Omicron. In early December 2022, after a series of ordinary public protests and sustained monetary pressure on local governments tasked with administering COVID-19 testing, Beijing suddenly abandoned its “zero COVID” policy and let the virus go wild.
The public aptitude prices of this resolution are bleak. Government statistics in China are notoriously unreliable, yet the most productive unofficial estimates put the number of new infections at around a million a day. The virus is so out of whack that, according to the British newspaper The Guardian, nearly 90% of other people in Henan province (a sum larger than the entire population of Germany) are now infected with COVID-19. Low vaccination rates among the elderly in particular are expected to contribute to the high number of deaths. The official death toll remains low, but videos on social media of crowded crematoria in major cities offer a glimpse of a darker truth. Worse yet, hordes of migrant staff are expected to return to rural villages in late January for the Lunar New Year celebration, likely to end soaring infection rates in the countryside. Rural spaces don’t have the same healthcare resources as big cities, so an incoming wave of COVID-19 will hit the rural population hard: experts have estimated that China will see 25,000 deaths a day through the end of this year. January.
The political prices of Xi’s resolution may take some time to clarify. In the coming years, the Chinese economy may simply and Xi may even succeed in reaching out to the West, but the Chinese Communist Party can still pay for its mismanagement of the pandemic.
The drastic reversal of COVID-19 is very important for the CCP. Although it can never be called democratic, the party cares a lot about how it is perceived by citizens. China’s leaders seek to bolster the party’s ruling legitimacy by investing in propaganda, exposing the party’s ideology, and demonstrating how the state responds to the wishes of the people. They do so because they depend on the tacit consent and even voluntary participation of society to control force and enforce their policies. The radical reversal of 0 COVID would possibly appease some of the angry protesters who took to the streets to reject lockdown measures in November, but fear and dissent have increased. Public trust in the party is eroding. Three years of 0 COVID, and no significant push to vaccinate the population, have left China very unprepared for what is to come, with millions vulnerable to the devastating virus. Xi is taking China down an unknown path, which may also take a heavy toll on the party in its ability to govern.
The authorities signaled the abandonment of 0 COVID with a marked change in state propaganda. The motto “Be the first to blame for your own health” is now ubiquitous. Chinese celebrities have appeared on national television to convince the public that the Omicron variant of COVID-19, now endemic in China, is not a cause for concern. Authorities have removed the word “pneumonia” from the official description of COVID-19 infection, as if not mentioning an imaginable outcome of the virus would make it difficult to understand the risk posed by the virus. Under the 0 COVID restrictions, the government would circulate anyone who tested positive and move them to remote quarantine facilities. Authorities no longer classify other people with asymptomatic cases as COVID-19 patients; instead, those patients are asked to self-quarantine. Before the 0 COVID uprising, Chinese citizens had to queue regularly at checkpoints, often late at night and early in the morning, to get the necessary negative checkpoints to enter public places. During the night, most of the control stations were dismantled. The state left other people to fend for themselves.
Some are increasingly desperate. The severe shortage of medical resources is now affecting the country; People have a hard time finding painkillers and non-unusual flu remedies in pharmacies. Many have turned to classical Chinese medicine as a replacement for classical treatments. Others are luckier. The wealthy and those with connections in Hong Kong or Macau have been able to offload occasional drugs and messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines that remain unsuccessful among the general public in mainland China. In an ostensibly communist country, the existing health crisis highlights the disparity between the haves and have-nots.
The hospitals of the 0 COVID regime now abandoned by the onslaught of the virus, to the maximum by mistake; Those who wished to access hospital care had to test negative in the PCR, an impediment that ended up preventing many pregnant women and other elderly people with health problems from receiving timely treatment. Instead of relying on medical personnel, China’s heavy-handed technique of restricting the spread of COVID-19 relied on mobilizing resources outside of the official hospital formula to combat the virus in the most primitive way. The government’s vast grassroots apparatus has rallied millions to take on the daily task of administering COVID-19 checks, locking up others by quarantining residential blocks and sending the inflamed to medical centers. impromptu quarantine. An official estimate suggests that 4. 9 million grassroots party organizations participated in the effort, which mobilized more than 4 million network employees in 650,000 urban and rural communities across the country in the fight against COVID-19. Since the abandonment of 0 COVID, the government has fired many employees who had been hired to enforce the confinement measures of the network.
In other countries, trained fitness professionals are tasked with fighting the virus. This was not the case in China. what I have called its “everyday state power”: its ability to penetrate society and unite other people to enforce everyday state policies. allowed China to impose 0 COVID for so long.
Xi’s abrupt change in attitude flooded hospitals that, unsurprisingly, were unprepared for the sudden demand for medical care and were forced to turn away patients. Doctors, nurses and other medical personnel are getting sick, resulting in staff shortages. Intensive care beds are scarce, and the situation is most serious in rural areas where medical resources are inadequate compared to what is found in metropolitan areas that are better funded through China’s decentralized health system.
The anger and anxiety of the is palpable. Many Chinese citizens are still recovering from the intellectual exhaustion of 3 years of intermittent closures. Some public intellectuals have even demanded an apology from the party for the collective trauma caused by zero-COVID policies. The sudden abandonment of restrictions has created new grievances, with the public angered by empty pharmacy shelves, inaccessible hospital care, long waiting lists at crematoria, lack of reliable state information and contradictory official rhetoric insulting their intelligence.
Certainly, the United States and other countries suffered similar shocks to their fitness formulas and saw social unrest play out at the height of the pandemic. But the developing tensions in the China formula stick to the intense tension of 3 long years of stifling restrictions. Many citizens have had enough. The first visual symptoms of dissent emerged during a poorly controlled lockdown in Shanghai in the early summer of 2022, when angry citizens went online to express their anger. A few months later, in November, protests broke out in major cities in aid of victims of a fire at a residential building in Urumqi that is commonly home to the Uyghur ethnic minority. Subsequently, academics from many elite universities staged regular protests and chanted anti-regime slogans, a sight not seen since the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The public is now frustrated by the change abrupt political and extraordinarily poorly prepared physical preparation. formula that is not able to cope with the growing demand for care. Straws pile up on the camel’s back.
Since it came into force more than a decade ago, he has strived to tame the symbol of a benevolent leader who is not only close to his people but also to other people: a guy who comes from the masses and relies on the wisdom of the masses to tell his policies. He invoked this symbol to imbue his government with ethical legitimacy, even as the Chinese state has infringed on civil liberties and cracked down on ethnic minorities.
It is difficult to calculate the damage Xi has already suffered and the party’s reputation. China lacks credible opinion polls, but social media paints the image of a fed up and disillusioned country. which resembles and derives from the English word “run”, which means “to flee”) and bâi làn (“to let rot”), which in combination refer to the austere vision of others about the destiny of the country and the resigned confidence that little can be done to it. Emigration to greener pastures is no longer the exclusive preference of wealthy Chinese. Exasperation is not exclusive to young people either. These two feelings have now permeated the general population. In recent weeks, an increasing number of violent protests and riots have targeted police and other party-state officials.
The existing debacle poses the biggest serious challenge to date for the party-state under Xi. Historically, the CCP has relied on intense political campaigns to deal with crises, a “comprehensive society” technique that mobilizes all available resources in spaces lacking special assistance. Such campaigns require the collective fighting spirit of the country to triumph over a crisis. This is how the regime dealt with the SARS outbreak in 2003 and the first COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019 and early 2020. Through propaganda and resource mobilization, the government has encouraged citizens to adhere to government restrictions and public fitness measures. But 3 years of 0 COVID have left the public besieged and jaded. In addition, the spread of COVID-19 infections across the country means the state can’t simply divert resources to deal with hotspots, as the virus is now everywhere.
More broadly, China’s daily formula of governance, its daily state power, is based on public acceptance as true. The CCP relies on the voluntary participation of society as a whole to implement its policies. accept as true because Xi’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis may shake the very foundations of this formula, with broad implications beyond the war on the virus.
In China’s decentralized system, Beijing blames the local government when things go wrong. Local governments are the escape from herbal disasters, man-made injuries and epidemics. Leaders in Wuhan, for example, were punished for “failing to report” the initial outbreak of the virus. This strategy allowed the regime to shirk the duty of calamities that claimed many lives, such as the Wuhan epidemic, and spare it any erosion of its legitimacy that would result. The COVID-19 crisis, however, would possibly become an exception. Xi has clung to 0 COVID not only as his signature policy, but also as evidence of the superiority of the Chinese system. Now that the total edifice of politics has collapsed, it’s hard to see what it will look like. able to pick up the pieces. The general accusation of this error is not yet transparent: the emerging social discontent may also, in all likelihood, weaken the team spirit of the party elites, but it is hard to believe that the popy would emerge unscathed from this crisis he himself created.