China is easing some of the world’s most stringent anti-virus controls and authorities say new variants are weaker.
But they have yet to say when they might end a “zero-COVID” strategy that confines millions of people to their homes and set off protests and demands for President Xi Jinping to resign.
“China is not ready for a fast reopening yet,” Morgan Stanley economists said in a report Monday. “We expect lingering containment measures. ... Restrictions could still tighten dynamically in lower-tier cities should hospitalizations surge.” Ahead of the protests, the Communist Party promised to make “zero COVID” less costly and disruptive but said it was sticking to the overall containment strategy.
Travelers at the Chinese capital's train stations and three airports are required to show a negative virus test within the previous 48 hours. Elsewhere, Guangzhou and other cities said areas deemed at high-risk for infection still face additional curbs.
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China’s COVID trapLONDON, U.K.—“Our COVID-19 policy is the most scientifically effective, the most economical, and yields the best result,” insisted the People’s Daily newspaper in China after mass public protests against the government’s zero-COVID policy last weekend. If President Xi Jinping believes that, he is in for a lot more trouble. The protests were unprecedented in their scale and daring. They broke out spontaneously in 12 cities across China after 10 lockdown-related deaths in the remote province of Xinjiang. All sorts of people took part, from students to workers to pensioners. A few even called for the dethroning of Xi and the Communist Party. That doesn’t mean the regime is on the brink of collapse. Public anger at the endless lockdowns and the resulting loss of income is strong, but the regime’s surveillance technology is excellent. There was relatively little official violence last weekend, but many of the protesters will have an unpleasant visit by the police in the coming days. Xi’s problem is that the protests will probably recur and may well escalate because over-long mass quarantines and lockdowns are a non-political issue that can unite almost everybody against the government’s policy. Or rather, against Xi’s personal policy, for he has deliberately chosen to portray zero-COVID as the greatest achievement of his time in office. That made sense in the first year of the pandemic, for China’s relentless lockdowns and mass testing campaigns saved a great many lives. Total COVID-related deaths in China have been around 5,000 out of a population of 1.4 billion. The United States, with less than a quarter of China’s population, had more than one million COVID deaths. Xi and his propagandists naturally used this contrast as evidence that both Chinese medicine and the Chinese political system were superior to their Western equivalents. Was he even aware that the zero-COVID policy could only be a stopgap until effective vaccines were developed, never a lasting solution? H
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