China: the zero-Covid policy backfires
Across the world, people are once again taking holidays, working in offices and eating out in restaurants, said Helen Davidson in The Guardian. “Faced with the seemingly unstoppable Omicron variant”, they’ve resolved to live as normally as they can with Covid-19. But in China, it is a different story. Beijing’s “zero-Covid” policy means that a single case will trigger the imposition of restrictions, and with Omicron now cropping up in multiple provinces, it is estimated that 340 million people are back in full or partial lockdown. In Shanghai, residents of areas deemed high risk have been literally fenced into their homes, said Mike Liu in The Times. And with compulsory testing in force, people live in fear of an official in a hazmat suit (a “Big White”) knocking on their door and sending them to an over-crowded quarantine centre. The sick are going untreated, because many hospitals are closed; and all over Shanghai people are going hungry, because shops are only offering deliveries, and there are too few drivers to serve the 26 million people stuck at home.
With fears that Beijing could be the next city to fall into crippling lockdown, persisting with the zero-Covid approach looks like insanity, said Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph. But President Xi Jinping is trapped in a cul de sac. For two years, state-run media has hailed China’s low Covid death rate as a vindication of his leadership. Xi can’t afford to admit now that his zero-Covid policy was a mistake; and nor can he change course, said Gideon Rachman in the FT. Lulled by its early success in containing Covid, China has been lax about vaccines: a large minority of over-60s have not been fully jabbed, and China’s vaccines are not thought to offer as much protection as foreign ones. Officials fear that if Omicron is allowed to let rip now, millions could die.
Xi will not risk revising his policy until after the Party Congress this autumn, where he hopes to extend his grip on power, said Eyck Freymann in The Wall Street Journal. And even then, he might not wind it back, in spite of the damage it must be doing to China’s economy: the 45 cities under lockdown last week represented 40% of the country’s GDP. It may be that in future, the Party derives legitimacy less from GDP growth than from protecting its citizens. If so, that will have ramifications well beyond China’s borders, said Mattie Brignall on Reaction. Already, reduced consumer demand in China and congestion at its ports are threatening to derail the global economic recovery. If the disruption continues, we could all be looking at a very different future.