China is back in lockdown
That will hurt business and cause global fallout. Matthew Partridge reports
China has embarked on “its most extensive lockdown in two years” in Shanghai in an attempt to contain the Omicron variant of the virus that causes Covid-19, says Didi Tang in The Times. The city, home to 26 million people, has previously managed smaller outbreaks with “limited lockdowns of housing compounds and workplaces”, but the government has decided to go further, locking down the city’s Pudong financial district and nearby areas this week, and placing the rest of the city into a five-day lockdown from Friday. Residents will be required to stay at home or in their offices, and there have been reports of panic buying, with supermarket shelves cleared of food, drinks and household items.
Zero-Covid’s last gasp
Shanghai isn’t the only place to be affected. The large cities of Shenzhen and Shenyang, as well as the entire province of Jilin, have also been locked down in recent weeks, says The Economist.
The restrictions will be a dampener on business sentiment, which has already been knocked by smaller-scale rolling lockdowns. China’s purchasing managers’ index for emerging industries, such as green technology and biotech, is now giving the worst reading since the index was launched in 2014. The pain will also be felt abroad – Shanghai is “deeply entangled in global supply chains”.
China is deluding itself if it thinks that such measures will help it eliminate the virus, says the Financial Times. It only takes one missed case to renew the outbreak. And even if it did succeed in eradicating the virus domestically, the fact that the highly infectious Omicron variant is now endemic across most of the world means that even the strictest lockdowns can only delay the moment when the disease spreads through the population. The utility of China’s zero-Covid strategy is “coming to an end” and it is time for China to prepare for an exit. It should focus instead on vaccines – more than 130 million Chinese aged 60 and above are not fully vaccinated.
Keeping a lid on social strife
The Chinese government does gradually seem to be softening its policy, say Amy Qin and Amy Chang Chien in The New York Times, and there are signs that the “public’s patience is wearing thin”. This has prompted Xi Jinping, China’s president, to order officials to “limit the economic pain” from Covid-19 restriction, and the government is starting to copy policies common in the rest of the world, such as allowing the use of test kits at home and dropping some of the more extreme requirements.
All the evidence suggests that China must “edge away from zero-Covid”, but Beijing is “unlikely to abandon the strategy before the year’s end”, says The Guardian. The hope is that lockdown and restrictions will buy time for “more effective domestically produced vaccines” – the country has refused to accept Western ones. The government also fears that a large-scale viral outbreak will threaten social stability before this autumn’s national congress, where it is assumed that Xi will break precedent by claiming a third five-year term. China “is likely to creep towards living with the virus long after others have cast off all restrictions”.