The End of Zero-COVID in China Marks the Total Failure of Xi Jinping.
Like any tragedy, this one is played out in three acts. Victory in 2020, doubt in 2021, and failure in 2022.
The silences of propaganda are sometimes deafening. The disappearance of references to the zero-COVID strategy in the Chinese media since December 7, 2022, says more about the 180-degree turn taken on that day than the convoluted speeches of experts and officials who, since then, have been desperately trying not to lose face.
The more the days go by, the more the management of the COVID-19 pandemic by Xi Jinping and the CCP looks like a long descent into hell. Like any tragedy, this one is played out in three acts. Victory in 2020, doubt in 2021, and failure in 2022.
Both the queues in front of Beijing's crematoria and the precautionary measures currently being taken by various countries in the face of the risks of a new “Chinese variant” of COVID confirm this humiliating outcome. If at the end of December 2022, life is starting to return to normal in Beijing, schools remain closed, pharmacies are under-stocked, hospitals are overflowing and, faced with the overcrowding of crematoria, cab drivers make you understand that for a few hundred dollars, they are ready to transform their car into a hearse and take the body of a deceased person to the neighboring province of Hebei.
However, in 2020, after a catastrophic beginning of the year, Chinese propaganda had shown exceptional efficiency. It had almost succeeded in making people forget the initial procrastination of officials in the face of this new virus, the slander against the courageous doctors of Wuhan who had sounded the alarm, and the astonishing banquet to the glory of the party to which 40,000 Wuhanese families were invited on January 18.
Act One: Xi Jinping boasts about winning the war against COVID
The containment of this city of 11 million people from January 23 to April 8, 2020, was a thunderclap. The arrival of 42,000 doctors and nurses presented as “volunteers” from all over the country and the construction of hospitals in record time would impress the world.
Received by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, in Beijing, on January 28, 2020, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), even genuflected in front of the president, who is also the secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party.
The symbolism is strong. Far from asking him to account, the highest international medical authority paid tribute to the work accomplished by China. The Chinese also seem satisfied. “I was suspicious of the Communists. I thought they would sacrifice the city to save the country. On the morning of January 23, I wanted to flee with my husband and our son, but we were forced by the police to turn back. I was afraid at first, but I admit that, in the end, it was rather well handled,” a wealthy Wuhanese woman told Western media in September 2020.
Contrary to what some Westerners predicted, Wuhan will not be Xi Jinping's “Chornobyl moment,” the beginning of his downfall. Quite the contrary ...
In June 2020, China published its first White Paper and claimed victory. “Under the strong leadership of the CCP Central Committee with Xi Jinping as its core, China has established an effective system. It is this highly effective system that has enabled China to win the all-people war against the virus,” the paper explains.
As the rest of the world is affected by the virus and the West discovers with amazement both their unpreparedness and their dependence on the Chinese pharmaceutical industry, the Communist regime keeps staging its triumph and projecting itself into the post-COVID era.
On September 8, 2020, Xi Jinping, who presides over a ceremony for the “heroes” of Wuhan inside the Great Hall of the People, receives a standing ovation. On September 22, 2022, speaking by video from Beijing to the United Nations General Assembly, the Chinese leader is confident. “At present, the world is confronted with the COVID-19 pandemic and faces profound changes never seen in a century,” he explains.
A diplomatic formula that means that, for the Chinese president, the West is declining and Asia is emerging. A few sentences later, Xi Jinping drives the point home: “COVID-19 is a major test of countries' governance capacity.” This autocrat has never hidden it: in his eyes, in an increasingly unpredictable world, democracies are less effective than authoritarian regimes. The COVID crisis is further proof of this.
Act Two: Vaccine diplomacy and doubts in China
In this context of a new ideological cold war, the race for vaccines will be a decisive issue. Having few patients, China tested its vaccines in the rest of the world. This policy gave birth to vaccine diplomacy. It will be an undeniable success for Beijing. But in December 2020, when the first vaccines arrived on the market, China made a decision that was unprecedented in the world.
Instead of focusing on the elderly, who are considered to be at greater risk, it will only vaccinate adults between the ages of 18 and 59. And not just any adults: on December 15, 2022, it is targeting as a priority “people who handle imported cold chain products, customs officers, medical personnel and people working in public transportation and fresh produce markets.”
For Xi Jinping and the CCP, the virus can only come from abroad.
After virtually closing its airspace to the rest of the world on March 27, 2020, Beijing, therefore, incriminates imported products. Norwegian and Chilean salmon, Argentinean and New Zealand beef, American pork, shrimp and mackerel from Ecuador, Russian chicken feet and squid, Argentinean chicken wings, Indonesian fish, and even American beer cans...
There are countless imported products on which China claims to have found traces of the virus. It doesn't matter that no other country in the world has made a similar discovery or that the WHO indicates on its website “that there is no evidence to date that viruses causing respiratory diseases can be transmitted through food or food packaging,” China persists and signs. Despite the people's victory against the virus, it is still circulating. Certainly less rapidly than in the rest of the world, but still.
In January 2021, the 11 million inhabitants of Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei, were confined for three weeks after the discovery of a hundred positive cases. In the spring of 2021, two provinces, Liaoning and Anhui, reported several cases and increased local confinements. Even if, officially, China records almost no death due to COVID-19 between April 2020 and April 2022, the country is gradually put on the defensive.
At the end of March 2021, “Doctor Tedros” himself started to distance himself from Beijing. Receiving the report of WHO experts sent to China to investigate the origin of the virus, the head of the organization was extremely cautious: “Although the team concludes that the leakage from a laboratory is the least likely hypothesis, this requires further investigations, with potentially additional missions. All hypotheses remain on the table.”
A blow that is all the harder since “Doctor Tedros” was considered to be pro-Chinese.
As the confinements multiply, the Chinese experts begin to divide. Zhang Wenhong, one of the country's leading epidemiologists, dares to point out that even if the virus comes from abroad, China will not be able to stay closed forever. “The new coronavirus is becoming a permanent virus, and we need to prepare for a long-term response,” he explained in the Spring of 2021.
A thinly veiled criticism of Xi Jinping's zero-COVID policy, which will lead to him being dragged through the mud by nationalists. Accused of plagiarism, he will be the subject of an internal investigation by his university, Fudan, from which he will emerge cleared a few weeks later.
Certainly, as Zhang Wenhong advocates, China is vaccinating. But too slowly. In June 2021, Zeng Yixin, vice chairman of the National Health Commission, hopes to achieve vaccination of “70% of the target population by the end of the year.” The “target population,” is, working people. With only Chinese vaccines. Because if the virus can only come from abroad, the remedies can only be Chinese. Although the Fosun laboratory has signed an agreement with the German BioNTech, this vaccine will never receive the green light from the Chinese health authorities.
On the other hand, at the highest level of government, the virtues of traditional Chinese medicine are constantly being emphasized. “Since Xi Jinping is here, it works very well for us,” said a professional in the sector in May 2021. Both on social networks and within the government, the nationalists are on a roll. The most aggressive diplomats seem to have carte blanche.
On May 26, 2021, Zhao Lijian, spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, did not hesitate to relay conspiracy theories. “If the American side wants to ask for a fully transparent investigation into the origins of the virus, it should follow China's example and invite WHO experts to the United States, open Fort Detrick [a military laboratory located in Maryland], and its biomedical laboratories all over the world,” he said.
Beyond the controversy, China maintains its zero-COVID strategy in order not to contradict Xi Jinping. However, even before the arrival of the Omicron variant, this strategy shows its limits.
In Ruili (267,000 inhabitants), a small border town on the edge of Burma, local officials issued an SOS in October 2021 after three months of containment. In November 2021, 44 cities in 20 provinces were affected in various ways. Xi'an, in the center of the country, recorded more than 1,600 cases of COVID-19 and in December 2021 experienced the largest containment since Wuhan. Twelve million people are locked in their homes for about three weeks. The refusal of the hospital authorities to let in a woman who was about to give birth and who would lose her child, as well as the difficulties of supply, outraged the population.
On social networks, the hashtag “difficulty to buy food in Xian” is clicked 370 million times. As elsewhere, officials are sanctioned, but anger is rising and the Chinese are beginning to judge the country's health policy as excessive.
Act Three: The Omicron wave overwhelms Xi Jinping and the CCP
This one will not resist to Omicron, spotted in China at the end of December 2021. The Chinese leaders are then caught between a zero-COVID policy that is redoubling in intensity as the 20th Congress of the Communist Party approaches, to be held in the fall of 2022, and a variant that is spreading extremely rapidly.
In order not to lose their position, they are forced to take extreme measures. And sometimes to lie shamelessly. The article in the China Daily announcing, on March 24, 2022, that “Shanghai has no plan to confine the city” will remain in the annals. The 25 million Shanghainese will be confined from March 27 to June 1, 2022.
At the end of April 2022, Li Bin, vice minister of health, acknowledged that “since the end of February, the highly transmissible Omicron strain of the virus has caused frequent and widespread outbreaks, posing the most serious challenge since Wuhan.”
But there is no question of changing policy: that would be to make Xi Jinping lose face. Only the Premier, Li Keqiang, dared, at the end of May 2022, to go to Yunnan, ostensibly remove his mask in public and promise increased support for business. This was the umpteenth coded distancing from Xi Jinping, who calls for “resolutely fighting” any questioning of the zero-COVID strategy.
But the Prime Minister, who took the lead in March 2022 and announced his departure a year later, is isolated.
After Shanghai, dozens of other cities will in turn be partially or confined. Traveling within the country is a real obstacle course, with each city and each district putting in place its health control measures. The almost daily tests imposed on the population in the main cities will remain for a long time the symbol of a policy that has become financially and socially untenable.
The prize for absurdity goes to the Xiamen authorities, who, in August 2022, will start testing live fish, without anyone in charge finding fault with this.
Unfortunately, Ubu often gives way to Kafka. In Guizhou, 27 perfectly healthy people died in mid-September 2022, when the bus in which these “contact cases” had been loaded at night to be sent to quarantine was overturned. An accident that shocked the Chinese even more, as buses are theoretically not allowed to circulate at night, but the authorities had ignored it, in the name of the zero-COVID policy.
Similarly, the fire in Urumqi (Xinjiang) of a confined building whose inhabitants were locked out of their homes, which killed at least ten people, provoked major demonstrations throughout the country at the end of November 2022, probably prompting the authorities to finally abandon a policy that had run out of steam, for economic as well as social, and even purely sanitary reasons.
Since mid-November 2022, both Guangzhou and Beijing have been suffering from a major outbreak of COVID, leaving the leaders with a delicate choice: either to confine two cities of more than 20 million inhabitants each - including the capital, with all the symbolism that goes with it - or to let the virus circulate. The latter option was chosen, with the consequences that we know: the outbreak of the virus is such that hospitals are overwhelmed and the authorities consider it “impossible” to quantify the epidemic.
Li Bin's statements show that some people had been aware for several months of the impasse in which they found themselves. But the interests of the party took precedence over those of the country, and no one could admit this, or even prepare for the future.
Besides, spending their money and energy on testing and confining the population, the cities were not in a position to invest in intensive care units and projects beyond Xi Jinping's zero-COVID policy. Even vaccination and pharmacy supplies were considered incidental. As if this strategy had become not a stopgap, but an end in itself.
This is China's problem: the country has a plan for almost everything, but Xi Jinping is infallible, so unfortunately it has no plan B.
Some reading
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