What is happening in China shows that a zero-covid policy cannot actually be implemented. The Chinese Communist Party really believes in social engineering, that is, large-scale interventions to modify people’s behavior. It also believes in grand plans in general.
At the same time the Chinese Communist Party is aware of the limits he can have, the state of the infrastructure and the contradictions that permeate Chinese society.
These two parameters also defined the way in which he dealt with the pandemic. In particular, the Chinese government, when it found relatively early that it was facing an epidemic of a coronavirus and had the first data on transmissibility and mortality, decided to activate protocols that it had anyway designed since the SARS era and which were basically strict quarantine and lockdown protocols.
This was also based on the awareness that the Chinese health system, with its great disparities and fairly large degree of privatization, would not be able to withstand a large number of cases.
Against this background the logic of strict lockdowns, like that initially of Wuhan, the use of applications that were anyway used to record data, the relatively greater than in Europe to close borders, external and internal and an ability to unfold a support mechanism, it was thought to be a one-way street.
And indeed in 2020 it appeared that this strategy could be effective, contain the pandemic in Wuhan and keep rates very low in other areas.
The problems that remain after the first phase
At the same time there were other problems: the Chinese vaccines did not prove to be as effective, while the coverage rates did not reach the desired results. China avoided a second major horizontal lockdown in the winter of 2020-2021, but this was largely a result of small dispersal and closed borders, combined with the ease of quarantining entire districts, cities or regions.
But there was a problematic horizon. Sooner or later most countries realized that there could not be a policy that would aim at very large sections of the population never encountering the virus. After all, even mRNA vaccines have been shown to be more effective at limiting severe disease, but not transmission, especially since new variants of the virus began to appear. As a result, and after finding that even within strict restrictions the spread continued (with the exception of naturally isolated island countries), a policy was gradually adopted which aimed simply to make the virus endemic, encountering a degree of immunity in the population supported both in vaccines and natural disease.
China, however, precisely because it had a higher degree of isolation and more measures avoided this kind of dispersion that in other countries leads to a more endemic situation. This meant that she had, and still has, a horizon where without action, even with increased vaccination, she would have quite high morbidity and mortality rates. Essentially, she had gained time, but she had a horizon in front of her that would have a burden on the health system and deaths.
This, as we have already mentioned, also had to do with the real limits of the Chinese health system, which in critical statistics still lags behind developed countries.
But a treaty that would more closely resemble how other countries experienced the pandemic could not be accepted by the Chinese Communist Party. Let’s not forget that China may not have a “parliamentary democracy”, but the CCP is always interested in having some sort of substantive legitimacy. And to some extent this relies on projecting the image that he can succeed where others fail. Or, to put it another way, in the “social contract” that offers Chinese society an “uncontrollable” pandemic could not be accepted. And this is especially important for Xi Jinping himself who has been called upon to deal with the pandemic along the way to secure a third term as leader.
Going beyond the limits of the zero-covid strategy
This explains why the Chinese government ultimately insisted on a zero-covid strategy. Of course, he tried to make it more flexible, mainly by trying to limit it only to the areas or even the districts where there were cases. However, it did not cease to be highly authoritarian in its application and created serious problems for those who had to undergo the restrictions, in a country that does not actually have an adequate social protection network. Moreover, it appeared that there could not be the kind of well-organized solidarity recorded e.g. in the case of Wuhan.
This can also explain the reactions that exist at the moment, which reflect a real dissatisfaction and fatigue with the restrictive measures. Of course, for the data of such a large country, the mobilizations remain small, but they are a real symptom.
Obviously, they do not threaten the dominant political position of the Chinese Communist Party and Xi Jinping himself, but they show that a certain concept of management is not guaranteed to pass. Especially when, in contrast to the first phase of the pandemic, we have less of an effort to mobilize and participate and more of an authoritarian implementation.
In reality, China is faced with the politically painful realization that a zero-covid policy is not feasible in such a large country and that on the contrary, under certain conditions such a policy can also create problems, e.g. thereby extending the length of time a country can maintain restrictions and increasing the overall health, social and economic costs it will be required to pay.
Attempting more flexible management
It is interesting that the official strategy “Dynamic zero-covid strategy” which means trying to limit the economic and social impact.
This is mainly described as an attempt at more “targeted” measures, so that the number of those affected is limited and they can be more easily removed.
However, in practice it appears that this flexibility is probably not applied, judging by references to the need to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach that considers the same measures to be appropriate in every case. This now includes instructions on what the authorities should not do, such as not to seal and nail the doors of quarantined buildings or arbitrarily extend the extent of restrictive measures. It also includes targeted lifting of restrictive measures to avoid protests.
All this is made more pressing by the fact that now the centers of dispersion concern the capital as well as critical industrial areas, which means that the restrictive measures have a more overall economic impact.
The size of the protests
It is true that the protests so far have formed a rather contradictory coalition, ranging from internal migration workers at the largest iPhone factory protesting unpaid wages and poor working conditions to residents of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province. with the large concentration of Uyghurs protesting because they see the measures as being responsible for the difficulty of putting out a fire in a residential building that killed ten people, in the elites of economically developed cities like Shanghai who can no longer take the restrictions.
Of course, they are not the only mobilizations and in fact in China there are various protests all the time, they just usually remain localized and around specific issues. This time opposition to the measures seems to be a common element, but it would be a mistake to think that in itself points to some kind of regime crisis. On the contrary, it is possible that “corrective” interventions will also be used as a “legitimizing” mechanism, as has been done in the past.
