SAVING FACE (AND LITTLE ELSE)
No one dares tell China’s Xi the awful truth that zero-Covid isn’t working
WHEN IT FIRST APPEARED in Wuhan in early 2020, China’s authoritarian state crushed Covid-19 and then trumpeted that success to the world. Now, more than two years later, the Omicron variant is running rings around President Xi Jinping’s once triumphant zero-Covid strategy and threatening not just to derail the country but the world in the process.
Today, information filtering out of Shanghai via social media paints a dystopian picture: Footage is circulating on social media of desperate Shanghai residents, who have been banned from leaving their homes and running out of food, howling into the night from their high-rise condominiums as CCP lackeys seal apartment doors shut from the outside. Meanwhile, Covid-positive kids have been separated from their parents. In April, footage from Weibo showed a person in a hazmat suit killing a corgi in the street with a shovel, for fear of the dog spreading the virus after the owner (tested positive) was taken into quarantine. The new directive, apparently instituted by Xi, favours such heavyhanded pandemic control measures.
China’s mastery of censorship and propaganda is now a double-edged sword isolating Beijing’s policy elite and hampering the upward flow of timely and accurate information from the ground. Combined with the country’s political structure where power concentrated in the pinnacle of the system, local government officials concerned about their career advancement rush to jump onto the policy bandwagon of zero-Covid to prove undying fealty to Xi and his favoured policy agenda.
The paradox is also that Xi having amassed so much personal power, and doubling down on the “success” and superiority of his policy decisions also makes him uniquely vulnerable. He is now personally responsible for every high-profile policy failure, whether it is the economy, foreign policy or pandemic response. Yes, and those other policies are failing too: China’s economy is paying the price for the nation’s zeroCovid policy, with industrial output and consumer spending sliding to the worst levels since the pandemic began; not to mention that Xi affirmed the country’s special bond with Russia just before Putin decided to embark on his misadventures in Ukraine.
Epidemiologically speaking, the population, especially its elderly, has little to no protection or vaccination from the virus as the rest of the world returns to normalcy, which paradoxically also makes China’s exit from zero-Covid harder to justify. Under China’s performance-based legitimacy, pivoting away from zero-Covid now would also undermine
Xi as he seeks a third term. The incentive becomes much stronger for the politically ambitious to simply cheerlead Xi’s disastrous decisions just so he can save face and little much else.