By Nectar Gan, CNN
2022 was meant to be a triumphant year for China and its leader Xi Jinping, as it came into force at his point in the decade promising to make the country wonderful again.
Instead, China had its toughest year, Xi, as it reeled from its costly zero-covid policy — months of overzealous enforcement that crushed the economy and stoked historic public discontent — to a general neglect so brutal that it left a fragile fitness formula battling an explosion of cases.
The chaos and disorder contrast sharply with the start of the year, when Beijing showed the good fortune of its Covid containment measures by keeping the coronavirus largely at bay since the Winter Olympics.
In the span of a year, Xi’s signature pandemic politics have shifted from being a source of legitimacy for the ruling Communist Party to a spiraling crisis that threatens to undermine it.
As an unprecedented wave of infections and deaths spreads across the country, many have wondered why after sacrificing so much sub-zero-Covid and waiting so long to reopen, the government, through it all, has allowed the virus to spread through a population with little caution or prior preparation.
As 2022 draws to a close, CNN looks back on key occasions of the year for China’s 0 Covid policy.
The Games proved to be a huge fortune for China’s zero-covid strategy.
In its hermetically sealed and meticulously controlled Olympic bubble, ubiquitous face masks, endless disinfectant sprays, and rigorous daily testing have paid off. All inflamed visitors arriving in the country were temporarily identified and their instances contained, allowing the Winter Olympics to take a stand on a large scale. part without Covid, even as the Omicron variant wreaked havoc around the world.
Good fortune added to the party’s narrative that its political formula is impressive for Western democracies in handling the pandemic, a message Xi had repeated as he prepared for a third term in power.
China’s confidence has also increased that its well-established manual of lockdowns, quarantines, mass testing, and touch-tracking can be an effective defense against the highly transmissible Omicron and involve its spread. In the run-up to the Games, those measures worked. in January to control the country’s first Omicron outbreak in Tianjin, a port city near Beijing.
But it didn’t take long for Omicron to infiltrate the cracks of zero-Covid. By mid-March, China was battling its worst Covid outbreak since the first wave of the pandemic, reporting thousands of new cases per day, from the northern province of Jilin to Guangdong in the south.
Shanghai’s financial center has temporarily become the epicenter. Local officials first denied a citywide lockdown was necessary, but then imposed one after the city reported 3,500 daily infections.
The two-month lockdown has become an obvious symbol of zero-Covid economic and social prices. In the country’s richest and most glamorous city, citizens were subjected to widespread food shortages, lack of emergency medical care, Spartan makeshift isolation services and forced disinfection of their homes. The draconian measures have triggered wave after wave of protests, seriously eroding public acceptance as true in the Shanghai government.
The blockade has also wreaked havoc on the economy. China’s GDP contracted 2. 6% in the three months to June, while youth employment hit a record high of nearly 20%.
But the costly blockade has not led China to abandon its zero-tolerance approach. On the contrary, officials hailed it as a victory in the war against covid. Other local governments have left with the lesson that they will have to curb infections at all costs, before epidemics spiral out of control.
In the run-up to the party’s important national convention, tension has risen.
Having been so strongly connected to zero covid, Xi found himself caught in a trap he had created himself. He could not walk away from it, as the possible spike in infections and deaths posed too great a threat to his authority before securing his shocking third term in Congress.
So instead of vaccinating the elderly and building ample care capacity, the government wasted the months that continued to build larger quarantine facilities, implement more common mass testing, and impose broader lockdowns that, at one point, affected more than three hundred million people.
But even the strictest measures have failed to spread Omicron. In October, China reported thousands of daily infections. Amid growing public frustration, the People’s Daily, the party’s main mouthpiece, insisted that zero covid is “sustainable” and the country. “best choice. “
At the opening of the congress, Xi gave broad to his covid policy, saying he had “put other people and their lives first above all else. “allies, adding those who had unswervingly enforced their Covid policies.
Officials understood the trail and have become enthusiastic about enforcing zero covid, accelerating hopes that the country can open up after the congress.
As restrictions were tightened, more tragedies arose because of the ongoing lockdowns.
Migrants left a closed Foxconn factory en masse and walked miles to escape an outbreak at China’s largest iPhone gathering site. Elderly woman died in quarantine at the hotel after a 12-hour delay in medical care.
Then, in late November, a fatal fire in an apartment in the western city of Urumqi, however, sparked public anger that had been simmering for months. Many believed the closure measures had hampered rescue efforts, despite official denials.
Protests erupted across the country on a scale seen in decades. On university campuses and on the streets of major cities, crowds rallied to call for an end to incessant Covid testing and lockdowns, with some denouncing censorship and calling for greater political freedoms.
In Hanghai, protesters even demanded Xi’s resignation, an act of political defiance to the country’s toughest and most authoritarian leader in decades.
The nationwide protests posed an unprecedented challenge to Xi. By then, Omicron had spiraled out of control, with the country recording a daily record of more than 40,000 infections, and the economic strain was too severe, with local governments running out of cash to pay massive lockdown bills.
In an apparent effort to appease protesters, some cities have begun easing restrictions.
Then, on December 7, the central government announced a radical overhaul of the approach, cancelling lockdowns and allowing citizens to self-isolate at home, abandoning zero-Covid.
Since then, state media and fitness have shifted from preaching the risks of the virus to downplaying its threat.
While the relaxation of suffocating restrictions is a long-awaited relief for many, its abruptness and randomness caught an unsuspecting person off guard and left him to fend for himself.
Over-the-counter fever and bloodless medicines, the purchase of which was limited to zero-Covid, were immediately sold out in pharmacies and online shopping sites. of them elderly. Crematoria are struggling to cope with the influx of corpses.
Amid the chaos, the government stopped reporting most of the country’s covid infections and tightened its criteria for counting covid deaths at a point that, according to the World Health Organization, would “vastly underestimate the true death toll. “
While this resolution took into account public panic, political nuances must also be overlooked.
For nearly three years, the low number of covid cases and deaths in China in countries like the United States has been presented as a measure of the party’s merit and legitimacy.
Now, the true scale of the outbreak and the deaths may deal a severe blow to the credibility of a government that had justified years of painful restrictions on the grounds that they were to save lives.
Some studies have estimated that China’s abrupt and unprepared reopening may result in nearly a million deaths, close to the number of covid deaths in the United States.
As China enters its third pandemic winter, and the darkest, zero-Covid is still dead, but the fallout from its demise will affect the country next year.
El-CNN-Wire™
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