Xi Jinping Cannot Get Out of the Zero-COVID or He Will Admit That the Chinese Model Is Not Superior.
Xi Jinping's credibility is at stake in a crucial year for him.
Some 2,000 kilometers away and a huge gap. While in Shanghai, the food-strapped inhabitants screamed their anger at the endless confinement, Xi Jinping visited a tropical forest, a duty-free store, and the free port of Haikou under construction, where he hopes multinationals will set up shop and challenge places like Hong Kong and Singapore.
From the island of Hainan, in the far south of China, the Chinese leader is looking forward to a China that will have reopened its borders and turned the page on COVID-19. But that time has not yet arrived. For now, the fight against COVID-19 requires exceptional and massive measures for Xi Jinping:
“The current global pandemic is still very serious, and we cannot relax our prevention and control work. Perseverance will bring victory.”
There is no way to deviate from the Zero-COVID policy, despite the frustration and doubts mounting among Shanghai's 26 million residents and an economic cost that is becoming heavier every day.
A mortality rate that remains very low is a justification for this strategy
While most countries have chosen to live with the virus, China is closing entire cities in an attempt to stem the resurgence of COVID-19 cases. About 350 million people, or a quarter of China's population, are currently under some form of containment, to varying degrees, some China experts recently estimated.
The Zero-COVID policy, based on systematic health controls (mass testing, generalized temperature taking, etc.), careful tracking of movements, quarantines, and border closures, has been extremely effective over the past two years.
Zero-COVID has allowed Xi Jinping's China to live virtually virus-free, with low mortality (less than 5,000 deaths according to official figures, which are still questionable) and a rapid economic recovery. With the same number of deaths per million inhabitants as in a country like France, China would be today at 3 million deaths from COVID-19!
The elderly remain under-vaccinated
If this strategy is now challenged by the highly contagious Omicron variant, any questioning is quickly censored on social networks and absent from the official media, a sign of the sensitivity of the subject.
Two years after Wuhan, Chinese leaders remain terrified of the spread of the Omicron variant among a population of 1.4 billion people with no herd immunity, whose most vulnerable are poorly vaccinated (only half of the 36 million Chinese over 80 years old are vaccinated and less than 20% have received a booster), combined with Chinese vaccines (the only ones authorized) of questionable effectiveness and an underdeveloped health care system at risk of being quickly overwhelmed.
What happened in Hong Kong reinforced Beijing's view that Zero-COVID should be enforced with the strictest rigor. After two years of draconian restrictions to eliminate any outbreak of the virus, Omicron has swept through the city in recent weeks, causing one of the highest per-capita death rates in the world, due in part to low vaccination rates among the elderly.
Behind the Zero-COVID strategy, the alleged superiority of the Chinese model put forward by Xi Jinping is at stake
But this Zero-COVID strategy reflects more than just a desire to contain the variant and avoid an epidemic shock. Behind this fight against the virus is a political battle, a few months before the crucial 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, during which Xi Jinping intends to maintain his hold on the country and win a third term. Giving up on Zero-COVID could be interpreted as a sign of weakness in this crucial year for the strongman in Beijing.
The Zero-COVID policy is not only the business of the Chinese Communist Party. It is directly linked to Xi Jinping. He is the one who claimed the “victory” against the virus after the Wuhan containment. It is still him who, in February 2022, personally asked the Hong Kong authorities to make the eradication of the virus his top priority. To change course would be to admit failure and send a disturbing message to a population conditioned to see the virus as a deadly threat that has wreaked havoc abroad.
Behind Zero-COVID, then, is above all a battle over governance models.
Since 2020, Xi Jinping has been extolling the superiority of the Chinese model, showing that the Party places the lives of its people above economic considerations, in contrast to Western democracies where the coronavirus has taken countless lives. To give up on Zero-COVID is to give up on the superiority of this political system. Shanghai residents have expressed their frustrations and businesses have warned of the growing economic impact.
But Xi Jinping wants the same victory in Shanghai as he did in Wuhan. Whatever the cost. His credibility as China's leader is at stake here.
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