China’s Public Puts on a Show of Zero Covid for an Audience of One
Mao didn’t care that people starved to death or that the country was thrown into chaos in those two disastrous campaigns. Mr. Xi doesn’t seem to care that his campaign has been extremely disruptive even as the coronavirus has become much milder, if more transmittable.
His strategy has contained the pandemic. China reports fewer than 2,000 new cases each day of late, most of them asymptomatic. The country has reported 5,226 Covid-related deaths since early 2020 and none since May, according to the National Health Commission.
China’s authoritarian approach proved especially effective in much of 2020 and 2021, when the United States and Europe were struggling with high death and infection rates. Mr. Xi has been using the temporary success as evidence that China’s top-down governance model is superior to that of liberal democracies. He refuses to abandon his old playbook of lockdowns, mass testing and quarantines in favor of learning to coexist with the milder variants that emerged this year.
As of Tuesday, 49 Chinese cities were imposing some sort of lockdown measures, affecting around 292 million people, up from 161 million in the previous week, according to the investment bank Nomura. It’s taking a serious economic toll. At the beginning of the year, Nomura expected China’s economy to grow 4.3 percent in 2022. After successive rounds of lockdowns, it lowered its forecast to 2.7 percent.
The Communist Party has defended its policy, saying that relaxing the Covid restrictions could cause widespread infections in a country with limited medical resources and a large population of older people, among whom 15 percent are not fully vaccinated. The party said it would crack down on any speech or behavior that distorted, questioned or disapproved of the policy.
Many Chinese buy into the narrative and willingly act as foot soldiers in the party’s fight against the virus.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/09/business/china-covid-zero-xi-jinping.html