China keeps up zero tolerance as others try to live with virus

Wang Lijie TAIPEI, TAIWAN — planned to spend three days in the Gobi Desert last month to take in the area’s famous poplar forest as its trees turned a golden yellow.

Instead, the Beijing resi- dent has been stuck for more than three weeks, much of it in quarantine, after author-

ities discovered a cluster of COVID-19 cases in a nearby city. He was among more than 9,000 tourists who became trapped in Ejin Ban- ner, a remote part of China’s Inner Mongolia region that is in the Gobi.

As vaccination r ates rise in many parts of the world and even countries

that previously had strict COVID-containment strat- egies gingerly ease restrictions, China is doubling down on its zero-tolerance policy.

China pioneered that approach — of strict lock- downs, multiple rounds of mass testing and centralized quarantine — during the world’s first major outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan.

And it continues now, even as it says it has fully vaccinated 77% of its 1.4 billion people and started giving booster shots.

“The cost is truly rather high, but compared with not managing it, relaxing (the zero-tolerance policy), then that cost is even higher,” Zhong Nanshan, a top government doctor, said in a recent TV interview.

The impact of the restrictions is not widespread — but unpredictable. Unlucky travelers can find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, like the tourists in the Gobi Desert, some of whom were bused 18 hours to finish their quarantine in another city. People from Beijing have complained online about leaving for a work trip and not being able to return home.

In a sign of the effect the regulations can have even on thriving businesses, the wildly popular hotpot restaurant chain, Haidilao, decided to shutter 300 outlets in part because of the pandemic

and is scaling back a plan to add 1,200 new ones. The strain has been particularly felt in places like Ruili, a city in the southwest that has been locked down repeatedly this year.

But for authorities in Beijing, control over the virus

has become a point of pride, a potent tool of propaganda — and proof, they say, of a superior form of governance. They often trumpet their success at keeping deaths relatively low, especially in contrast to the United States, whose COVID-19 response the Foreign Ministry spokesman has called a “total failure.”

China has reported about 4,600 deaths — compared to more than 755,000 in the U.S., a country with less than a quarter the population.

“It’s becoming part of the official narrative that promotes that approach and links that to the superiority of the Chinese political system,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

It’s impossible to tell how much popular support the policies have since criticism is often censored. When Zhang Wenhong, a doctor in Shanghai who has been compared to American health official Anthony Fauci, briefly raised the prospect of living with the virus, he was shut down by official criticism and a plagiarism investigation.