Xi admits no doubts on policy
China's leader, Xi Jinping, waved at crowds of giddily cheering students. He held meetings with Olympic Games officials, economic policymakers and European leaders. He toured a tropical island.
But there was a revealing gap in Xi's busy April itinerary, exposing the predicament that COVID-19 is creating in a politically crucial year when he hopes to extend his hold on power. He stayed behind the scenes when it came to China's biggest, most contentious lockdown in the pandemic.
Throughout April, Xi gave no public speeches focused on outbreaks in China as its biggest city, Shanghai, shut down to try to stifle infections and then Beijing went on alert after a burst of cases. Nor did Xi directly address the 25 million residents of Shanghai who have been ordered to stay at home for weeks, despite their complaints of scarce food, overwhelmed hospitals and confusing zigzags in mass quarantine rules.
“He wants to deliberately keep a certain distance” from Shanghai, said Deng Yuwen, a former editor of a Communist Party newspaper who lives in the United States. “No doubt, he's doing a lot about fighting the pandemic behind the scenes, but of course he does not want to be directly drawn into the mess in Shanghai.”
Xi's orders have instead been passed through subordinates or meeting summaries. They have cited his demand to stick to a “dynamic zero-COVID” goal: essentially ensuring no cases in a population of 1.4 billion by strict mass testing and isolation of infections or close contacts. On Friday, the Communist Party Politburo — a council of 25 leaders, including Xi — renewed its commitment to that goal, noting the rising economic risks from COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine.
The outbreaks in Shanghai, Beijing and other cities are testing Xi's acumen and authority before an important Communist Party congress late this year. While he is nearly certain to win a groundbreaking third term as party general secretary, Xi also wants to ensure the leadership is dominated by officials who will defend him and enforce his agenda.
To secure that outcome, Xi wants to demonstrate serene political mastery, and until lately, the zero-COVID strategy has been a signature achievement: an effective, if expensive, and generally popular vow that China would avoid mass sickness and deaths.
After Communist Party officials initially downplayed the virus in early 2020, Xi built China into an epidemiological fortress, stifling infections and protecting the economy while the United States suffered nearly 1 million COVID deaths.
Now there is no easy way out of that fortress. Xi's leadership has been so invested in showing that China could handle its own pandemic needs that the government held off from introducing mRNA vaccines developed abroad, which are generally more effective than China's homegrown vaccines. China's vaccination of the aged has also lagged.
Without the necessary defenses, the country could face surging cases that, even with omicron's lower virulence, officials warn could overwhelm hospitals. But China's goal of eliminating virtually all cases risks turning into a costly, contentious task with no end in sight, if outbreaks of omicron keep prompting measures that freeze up whole cities.
“This policy was a demonstration that the government puts the health and the welfare of the Chinese people first,” said Patricia Thornton, a professor at the University of Oxford who studies Chinese politics and society. “That's becoming a much more difficult story for Xi Jinping to tell.”
The closings and demands for constant checks and vigilance, especially in Shanghai, have ignited public frustration, exhausted local officials and medical workers, and sapped economic momentum.
While residents under China's past lockdowns have complained about draconian restrictions, this time there are more critics and bolder ones, including economists and business executives, arguing that “zero COVID” has become untenable in the face of the new variant.
“COVID is not the only illness threatening the lives of the public,” Liang Jianzhang, co-founder of Trip.com Group, a big Chinese travel corporation, wrote in a recent article in Chinese Enterprise News. “Sacrificing everything in the pursuit of extreme `shock' measures is not the comprehensive victory that we truly need.”
The unexpected turbulence of 2022, including China's tortuous positioning over Russia's invasion of Ukraine, is still extremely unlikely to deny Xi a third term.
He is China's most powerful leader in decades, and the ire in Shanghai shows no signs of escalating into any challenge to his rule. In other cities and towns there continues to be acceptance, if not enthusiasm, for strict controls.
But extended economic damage and social tensions from long shutdowns could soften Xi's power to corral elite support behind his picks for the next leadership lineup, said Minxin Pei, a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California who studies Chinese politics. Xi is likely to stay dominant no matter what, but dominance can rise or fall by increments, and the officials around him matter.