Catastrophic success

For two years, it seemed as though China’s ruthless covid-19 policy had paid off. After stumbling in its initial efforts to stem the pandemic, China’s rulers fixed a simple numeric target—zero covid cases—and made sure everyone knew they had to reach it.

The results looked severe to Western eyes, but they stopped the virus’ spread. They also gave China a propaganda victory, emboldening their claims that authoritarian governments could solve social problems better than liberal democracies, which in worrying too much about people’s civil rights ended up killing them instead.

Now, the costs of the China’s rigidity are becoming apparent. New variants are much harder to control; more than half of China’s largest cities have seen lockdowns. Weeks after its lockdown began, some in Shanghai remain trapped in their apartments indefinitely, with many growing increasingly angry and hungry.

A slew of figures shows a cratering economy in April. China’s refusal to change course demonstrates the weaknesses, not the strengths, of China’s system. Once its leaders have settled on a number like zero, it’s very hard for them to change.

China’s leaders have managed their fractious underlings by giving them clear numeric targets. Central leaders set GDP growth targets for provincial officials, who then do the same for city leaders in their region, and so on with counties down the line. Promotions followed from strong performance on these metrics, demotions from failure.

For decades this limited quantified vision worked to produce strong GDP performance. But over time problems accumulated. The predictable result, as my research demonstrates, was that lower officials juked the stats. Some simply faked the numbers, and others used policies, such as boosting construction, that increased short-run GDP at the cost of mounting debts to fund vacant airports, little-used highways and empty buildings on the edge of shrinking cities.

Such efforts to hit their targets happened because these officials had more reason to care about their superiors than the people their policies affected.

Now we are seeing the same dynamic unfold with the zero-covid policy.

The policy’s key strength was its clear numeric target, which China’s leaders used to measure their subordinates’ performance. But this success has proved increasingly catastrophic. It has led officials to produce questionable numbers (the official death rate is remarkably low), to separate parents from their children, to withhold medical care from those with other ailments, and to confine citizens—with a food system near the breaking point—to try to achieve an increasingly impossible goal.

China’s regime is trapped by its previous success. It has centered much of its propaganda on the superiority of zero-covid and the Chinese system of rule. Altering the policy might be taken as an implicit admission that the Chinese model is not so successful after all.

One key lesson is that complex authoritarian systems such as China are less nimble than they seem at first sight.