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After micromanaging the coronavirus strategy for almost 3 years, the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, let the population improvise.
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By Chris Buckley, Alexandra Stevenson and Keith Bradsher
The southwestern city of Chongqing was the last front line of Xi Jinping’s “zero covid” war, until it embodied China’s potentially devastating sea change that cracked the Communist Party’s edifice of absolute control.
Last month, the city experienced one of the largest outbreaks in China, when national leader Mr. Xi ordered officials to continue mass testing, lockdowns and quarantines. Chen Min’er, Chongqing’s party secretary, devoted to the quarterfinals and ordered the prompt structure of a quarantine hospital designed to hold up to 21,000 beds.
“Let’s make the decision to fight and win this war of annihilation in the face of the pandemic,” Mr. Chen, a protégé of Xi, told officials on Nov. 27. “Not a day late. “
But 10 days later, China abandoned the “zero covid” strategy on which Xi had staked his reputation. Now the country is facing a wave of infections, and Xi has left officials struggling to deal with disorder and uncertainty.
China’s party-led media described the update as a stressful but considerate exit, paving the way for smart economic conditions. Warnings about coronavirus risks have temporarily disappeared, replaced by official claims that the Omicron variant is benign. , the government has saved many lives, the People’s Daily said Thursday in a lengthy article protecting Beijing’s pandemic strategy as “totally correct. “
In fact, a review of how the update has spread in Chongqing shows a government defeated by a cascade of covid outbreaks, confusion over rules, economic hardship and then occasional political protests.
Xi had contrasted his earlier pandemic good fortune with the “chaos of the West,” and presented it as evidence of his grand narrative of an emerging China: orderly, secure, forward-looking. But he had no plans for a measured “zero covid. “withdraw, leaving a bewildered population to improvise after 3 years of micromanagement.
The government is rushing to approve vaccines and obtain Western medicines after avoiding them. Authorities, long focused on getting rid of cases, are struggling to mobilize resources to deal with an explosion of infections. Even the Chinese Communist Party, a virtuoso in controlling the narrative. , has difficulty promoting political change among concerned residents.
This weekend, the streets of Chinese villages remained quiet, unless there are crowds of people in hospitals for covid testing or treatment, a revival of Wuhan 3 years ago, when that village was the first to fall prey to the virus.
“In general, it’s been chaotic and, of course, one component of that is the positive number: about a third of people, judging by my friends,” said Tan Gangqiang, a counselor in Chongqing who has helped citizens cope with stress. . of closings, and now, of sudden openings.
“There are many other people who have been living under official propaganda for a long time, so after being released, they don’t know what to do,” he said. “There are even some who are waiting for the government to repair the controls. . “
Xi’s own formula for fending off Covid would possibly have inadvertently prepared China for this shaky and potentially devastating turn.
It has turned China’s intense top-down mobilization in opposition to the pandemic into a display of the party’s organizational strength. For two years, his Covid war was widely accepted by the public, but eventually the effort exhausted staff, strained local finances, and seemed to stifle attempts to discuss, let alone conceive, a measured transition.
Xi is unlikely to have a successor and may remain in power for at least a decade. But the scars of an abrupt replacement can fuel distrust of your dominant style.
“The saw speed of this replacement is partly the extent to which it is the resolution of a type. But they’re also officials looking to please this guy and looking to run where you think he’s headed: sprint, actually,” Jeremy L. said Wallace, an associate professor at Cornell University whose book, Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts, examines China’s political transformation under M. Xi.
Many felt refreshed in the air after protests in Chinese cities last November against pandemic restrictions. However, few people expected a reversal of the “zero covid” strategy enshrined as imperative to protect China’s other 1. 4 billion people from a typhoon of infections.
On November 28, during the protests, China’s Xinhua news firm called the strategy a “magic weapon for victory. “
Around the same time, Sun Chunlan, the Chinese vice premier overseeing Covid policy, said to stand firm.
Then, when he met on November 30 with fitness experts and officials who had been advocates for 0 Covid, the tone changed.
“Our fight against the pandemic is at a new level and comes with new tasks,” Sun said at the National Health Commission meeting. Surprisingly, he did not use the term “zero Covid,” one of the first signs that the country is abandoning its long-standing approach.
Even before the protests, the strategy had been put to the test. By the end of November, epidemics were sweeping more than two hundred cities. On November 7, the national government showed 5,496 cases of Covid; As of November 27, there are almost 40,000, a record of daily instances in the country.
PCR grouped controls that were a “zero covid” pillar (checking samples from 20 or more people in the same control tube as a quick and affordable way to locate infections) have ceased to be performed in some cities. Too many positive effects obstructed trackingcheck the queue to identify carriers. In Beijing, the effects took days to return.
“It’s in too many cities, it’s spreading too far,” said Rodney Jones, principal at Wigram Capital Advisors, a firm that has closely followed cases in China. “It’s a question of when they would recognize this reality. “
The economy has also been hit. Shoppers stayed home, cooped up or looking to avoid quarantine by walking through a designated viral hotspot. Retail sales fell only about 6% in November from a year earlier. Real estate costs continued their long decline.
Xi argued that Covid controls, while cumbersome, have China’s economy and health the envy of the world. But the misery was beginning to translate into one of the party’s greatest fears: the unrest of the workers.
In central China, thousands of employees clashed with police at an iPhone factory over overdue bonuses and handling an outbreak.
In Hâizhu, a textile production district in southern China, staff flocked to the streets due to food shortages and the difficulties of lockdown. Migrant staff, who depend on paints for their livelihood, have been unemployed for weeks.
“I couldn’t make a living this year,” said Zhou Kaice, a street doorman in Chongqing. “Some bosses I worked for for a few days, but then they closed through lockdowns. “
Despite the tensions, officials have insisted that China will have to win its war against the pandemic. Throughout November, provincial leaders declared their commitment to “zero covid,” occasionally citing Xi as their cornerstone.
“If pandemic controls were relaxed, infections would inevitably be created,” a Xinhua editorial said on Nov. 19. “Economic and social progress and the physical health and protection of the public would be severely affected.
Even if city leaders understood the challenges, the Shanghai holiday was a warning against experimenting with Covid politics. Officials there first tried to avoid a citywide shutdown that would drag the Chinese economy into action, preferring finer closures. An early lockdown zone implemented for a single milk tea shop.
But as cases of the fast-spreading Omicron variant multiplied, central government officials changed course and demanded a total closure of the city, which lasted two months.
“Many officials would have looked at Shanghai and it was still ‘zero covid’ no matter what,” said Patricia Thornton, a professor of Chinese politics at Oxford University. “War is binary: either you are at war or you are not at war. “
Sun continued to insist when he traveled to Chongqing last November because of his anti-pandemic measures, adding the hospital under construction. The city’s efforts to identify and isopantize other inflamed people have yielded results, he said.
“The immediate part of the epidemic has been well contained,” Sun said, according to a report released on Nov. 27, the last day of his visit.
By then, the most widespread protests in China since 1989 had begun. Students, staff and owners in Beijing, Shanghai and opposed Covid checks, angry through a fireplace in western China that many say despite official denials had killed. Citizens trapped in their apartments through lockdowns.
“I tell you, in this world there is a disease, and that is poverty and lack of freedom, and we have children,” said a boy from Chongqing whose tirade went viral in China.
“Give me freedom or give me death,” he shouted, the Chinese edition of the American revolutionary war cry.
Xi told European Council President Charles Michel on Dec. 1 that the protests were primarily motivated by frustrated youths who had borne the brunt of the blockades, according to two officials familiar with the talks. they to destabilize the country.
But the speed of the government’s moves belied. Six days after the meeting with Michel, China’s National Health Commission issued a new set of 10 regulations that dismantled “zero covid” well.
As economic and epidemiological realities forced leaders to rethink their controls on the pandemic, the protests appeared to raise fears that continued restrictions could spark more protests, without quelling the virus.
“The scale of the protests seemed to send a harsh message that ‘enough is enough and it’s time for change,'” said Dali Yang, a political science professor at the University of Chicago who has studied China’s handling of the pandemic.
In the days that followed, the government issued many new regulations: encouraging vaccinations, building regulations for nursing homes and other vulnerable sites, preparing villages for infections. His message about Covid, especially the rapid variant, went from alarm to tut-tut in front of all fears.
“The virulence of the Omicron strain of the novel coronavirus has obviously decreased, and most inflamed people have only mild symptoms or no symptoms,” Wang Guiqiang, a medical expert, said at a government press conference a day after the rule change.
For now, most people stay home, either because they have covid or because they fear catching it. But if the deaths are sudden, public anger can reignite again. Upcoming infections may hinder an immediate economic rebound.
In Chongqing, at least some medical groups left the newly built quarantine hospital, its long-term use is unclear. A doctor at a city hospital said on social media that “primary care has skyrocketed” with Covid patients, and doctors and nurses in the respiratory disease department became infected. Chen, the secretary of the city department, was moved to another city on Dec. 8 as part of a broader reorganization among local leaders.
“A lot of other people told me I gave up just before dawn,” said Sisi Shi, a business owner in Chongqing, who this month closed a restaurant she owns in another Chinese city, Dali. “But in my opinion, even with the opening, there will not be an instant recovery, because there will be wave after wave of shocks. “
Additional reporting and through Li You, Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Olivia Wang.
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