Over the past three months, the Chinese government has faced a series of likely debilitating crises. Beyond November, after years of large-scale lockdowns, lockdowns, quarantines and near-constant mass testing, Chinese citizens took to the streets and, for the first time, questioned President Xi Jinping’s leadership. Soon after, in reaction to latent discontent and other pressures, the government practically overnight ended the “zero COVID” measures on which it had staked its public reputation for almost 3 years. Unsurprisingly, what followed was a public physical emergency in which the virus spread to approximately 80% of China’s highly vulnerable population. Hospitals and morgues have overflowed and more than a million people may have died. Most sensible of all, until the end of 2022, economic expansion, long a pillar of the communist regime, had fallen to its lowest point in years.
Instead of going into crisis mode, however, Beijing has largely ignored those setbacks. He did not provide an official explanation for his abrupt reversal of 0 COVID, and withstood the higher death rates that followed basically by suppressing official knowledge and not talking about COVID deaths. On January 14, the government claimed that the viral wave had peaked. And to announce the Lunar New Year a few days later, state censors even introduced a crusade to “prevent the exaggeration of dark emotions. “For the outdoor world, meanwhile, China announced it was open for business and its economy has recovered.
For now, the strategy turns out to have worked. Unlike the 0 COVID measures, the chaos and death that followed the reopening produced few national backlash against the government. Many Chinese seem to have concluded that the fitness crisis is not a big problem; In rural areas, where the fitness formula is weak and the virus proliferates, many other people who developed symptoms or even died did not know they had been infected. In the dynamic environment of Beijing’s reopening, COVID-19 seemed to be temporarily forgotten. “The virus is gone. . . God bless China,” Hu Xijin, former editor of the Communist Party’s Global Times tabloid, wrote on Weibo, China’s social media platform, in late January.
Indeed, Beijing’s reaction to the pandemic, whether before or after 0 COVID, may have significant implications for the one-party state in the long run. On the one hand, over the years, the 0 COVID strategy, sustained at enormous social and economic cost, seemed to have more to do with tightening government control over society than mitigating the pandemic well. Array as the November protests made transparent. And the strategy at the end may not save you from a devastating viral wave. In addition, the high death toll that followed the sudden reopening, and the government’s lack of active engagement, raised additional questions about the regime’s ability to keep the population fit. While the lesson for the Xi regime is that it is strong enough to deal with a major public health catastrophe, the government’s handling of the virus has also made it clear that it is willing to sacrifice effective governance and even The science. for the sake of extending his strength and control. In the long run, by breaking the agreement between Chinese society and the state, this takeover will create new difficult situations for Xi in the next crisis.
The combined human cost of Beijing’s extended COVID-19 measures and abrupt policy change is not negligible. A developing evidence framework shows that in the 3 years that China has maintained 0 COVID, very low rates of infection and mortality from the virus have been achieved at a significant rate of public fitness in other regions. For example, according to data from the National Health Commission, in 2020-2021, deaths from cerebrovascular and cardiovascular diseases in urban spaces exceeded 700,000 compared to 2019 degrees, an incredibly high figure. , even taking into account the length of China’s population. This maximum maximum is likely the result of anti-COVID measures that prevent timely access to physical care.
Beijing’s exaggerated pandemic measures have also had far-reaching mental and economic consequences. In December 2022, some 530 million Chinese were locked up, more than the entire population of the European Union. Regardless of the economic costs, such harsh measures, extended for weeks and months, have also created deep social ruptures. In December, Qiao Zhihong, a leading Chinese psychologist, observed that over the past 3 years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of academics suffering from depression, anxiety, self-control. -harm and suicide. This trend has become even more pronounced in the later stages of the pandemic, when many Chinese began to view government actions, such as the large-scale closure of Shanghai in the spring of 2022, as arbitrary and punitive. Out of step with the rest of the world, those measures were also unscientific and common-sense, with some other people disadvantaged in access to food and even medicine.
The rampant spread of infections and deaths that followed the abandonment of 0 COVID on December 7 in some even more traumatic tactics. According to the government’s official count, 82,238 COVID-19 deaths were recorded in Chinese hospitals between Dec. 8 and Feb. 2. However, anecdotal evidence and knowledge of the lethality of the cases imply that this is a much lower count than the real one. According to Wu Zunyou, lead epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC), as of January 21, more than 80% of the population, or 1. 13 billion people, had been infected with COVID-19. If we use its own case fatality rate for winter, which it estimated between 0. 09% and 0. 16%, reopening would have been linked to at least one million COVID-19 cases. Deceased.
Wu’s knowledge is supported by other models, adding The Economist’s projection of 1. 0 to 1. 5 million deaths, based on assumptions about the unfettered spread of COVID-19 after reopening; British company Airfinity’s estimate of 1. 3 million COVID deaths between December 1 and February 6; and a New York Times analysis, published Feb. 15, also estimated between 1. 0 million and 1. 5 million deaths since reopening. Anecdotal evidence from clinics, hospitals, morgues and obituaries published through state-backed facilities suggests that the true number of deaths could possibly have been closer. to the most sensible of those estimates. Of course, the viral wave is developing in a much larger population, but there are very likely to be more COVID-19 deaths in China in two months than in the United States in three. period of year.
Even leaving aside the human lives lost by strict COVID-zero measures, the estimated deaths the Chinese government claims to have prevented (950,000 in 2020-2021, according to Wu himself) were likely canceled out by the deaths. related to the disorderly and chaotic political reopening. In other words, China spent billions of dollars to maintain an economically disruptive and, in the end, socially harmful COVID-zero program for years only to ultimately suffer the same, if not worse, physical consequences. .
China’s misguided and erratic COVID policies have revealed some basic truths about the Xi regime. For one thing, they showed that unlike his predecessors, from Deng Xiaoping to Hu Jintao, who sought to make decision-making more technocratic and collective, Xi reinforced the anti-scientific and anti-democratic features of the Chinese government. Instead of offering the most efficient and effective responses to the pandemic, many of the 0 COVID measures have served to expand the state’s success. With the onset of the pandemic, Beijing saw an opportunity to continue unchecked surveillance of the population to the fullest. Reuters reported that Chinese provinces spent more than $50 billion on COVID containment measures in 2022; in the 3 years that 0-COVID was in effect, the government is estimated to have spent up to two hundred billion yuan, or $29. 2 billion, on PCR tests alone, according to insights gathered through Hua Chuang Securities and Goldman Sachs. These incredibly expensive and invasive systems have come at the expense of more effective policies, such as comprehensive vaccination systems for the elderly. As Yasheng Huang, a foreign control specialist at MIT, observed, by implementing those successful measures, Xi also broke the post-Tiananmen social contract “in which the Party would respect safe boundaries in exchange for society observing its own. “
However, by restricting the movement and freedom of millions of Chinese citizens for nearly 3 years, Xi has also fallen into a trap. He exaggerated the price of the extent to which preventing the spread of COVID-19 can also be used to justify any measure, no matter how excessive it may be for how long. In fact, the closure of Shanghai in April 2022 had already become transparent that public tolerance was reaching its limit. However, in the absence of effective commentary mechanisms, China’s most sensitive lawmaker transparently did not realize the extent of public discontent until street protests erupted in major cities seven months later, calling for an end to the COVID-0 program and even Xi’s resignation.
The failure of the Beijing government was also manifested in the abrupt replacement policy that followed. Although slow relief in 0 COVID was long overdue, the government resolution of December 7 promptly backfired due to the capricious and reckless manner in which it was implemented. Instead of adopting a step-by-step technique and preparing for replacement, such as vaccinating the elderly or investing in surge capacity in hospitals and fitness clinics, Beijing has just announced that the policy was ending. Worse yet, the government has encouraged a “let it rip” technique for viral spread. Instead of seeking to “flatten the curve,” the strategy that epidemiologists around the world have sometimes advocated, China’s local governments have implicitly encouraged what was called yingyang jinyang, “those who deserve to be inflamed are inflamed,” and kuaisu guofeng, “temporarily bring the population to viral peak. This strategy, combined with shortages of medical supplies, hospital beds, and extensive care equipment, has led to an explosive buildup of COVID-19-related infections and deaths in December and January. And as the virus spread across the country, the government temporarily shifted its policy timeline toward economic growth.
In addition to exposing Xi’s policymaking as fundamentally autocratic, the shift from one extreme to the other has also undermined people’s acceptance as true within the government. After all, Beijing spent nearly three years underscoring the grave danger of the disease and pledging to avoid other countries’ technique of living with the fatal virus, or collapsing, “flat,” as Chinese officials mockingly called it. However, in December, the government suddenly said exactly the opposite: it justified the turn away from 0 COVID by minimizing the severity of the virus, and took exactly the accommodative technique it had once ridiculed.
At the same time, the Chinese government has also reneged on its promise to do whatever it takes to maximize other people’s protection and fitness, abandoning much of the state’s vast testing infrastructure and asking others to take “primary responsibility” for their own fitness. On social media, others shared data about their symptoms, which were more severe than what government fitness experts had described, and mocked official government knowledge about infections and mortality. Public goodwill, the government has just disappeared, just as many Chinese are becoming very weak due to the virus or dying from it. “
Despite tactics in which they have undermined the government’s credibility, Xi’s COVID mistakes do not pose an existential risk to his regime. The government has continued to demonstrate that it can face even demanding situations deep into its force. days to quell the large protests of last November, which represented one of the most demanding situations for the strength of the party since the Tiananmen uprising. And while abrupt, unplanned reopening led to many of the worst outcomes 0 COVID was designed to avoid in particular — an outdated healthcare formula and exponential accumulation of COVID deaths — widespread anxiety and anger did not spark panic or mass protests.
Part of Beijing’s resilience was due to its control of information. Through obfuscation, obstruction and misinformation, the government managed to divert the frustration of other ordinary people from itself. of misleading others about the severity of the virus, and those who were pro-life with COVID-19, who have been accused of pressuring the government to reopen without any preparation. For the vast majority of Chinese who themselves tizhinei (within the system) or who only have access to government-approved information, it was also relatively simple to settle for the narrative that the state had protected others from the pandemic for 3 years, and now it was their turn to protect themselves.
Nowhere was this attitude more obvious than in rural areas. In rural spaces, the fragile formula of physical fitness unfortunately could not cope with the explosive expansion of COVID-19 cases. But encouraged through incorrect information and a fatalistic pandemic technique among guyy local populations, rural spaces have weathered the crisis largely due to underutilization of local fitness services and lack of access to COVID testing. by COVID-19 and hospital deaths were officially recorded as COVID deaths, male deaths simply did not count. “The death of a man is a tragedy,” Joseph Stalin said. “The death of a million is a statistic. “But when China reopened, male deaths didn’t even become a statistic.
By mid-January, it was transparent that COVID-related death rates had peaked and that the government had managed. Despite its discouraging scale, the viral wave was short-lived and its exact extent, for many affected, was uncertain. The result paved the way for the government to use its upcoming annual parliamentary meetings, or “two sessions,” to claim another victory over COVID-19 similar to the one it proclaimed after the lockdown in Wuhan was lifted 3 years ago. It is a brutal demonstration of the ability of a strong authoritarian regime to deal with social crises, even on a large scale, through data and the levers of power.
However, Xi’s immoderate COVID methods have left lasting scars on the Chinese state and its ability to rule. In 2022, China’s economic expansion fell to 3%, the slowest rate of expansion since 1974. be complicated for the burdens of millions of Chinese who have been affected by Beijing’s superior force in the past. Three years to forgive and forget. In addition to eroding public acceptance as true in government, the COVID crisis has made it clear that a political formula that has been tailored to an astonishing single personality is highly vulnerable to disruption, shock, and arbitrary decision-making. For now, as in his government, ordinary Chinese may be satisfied to resume their activities as usual. But unless there are basic adjustments to the highly centralized and customized regime under Xi, there is no guarantee that similar mistakes will not be repeated with even greater consequences in the future.