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Security guards walk past barriers surrounding a community under COVID-19 in Beijing, May 31, 2022. Credit: Bloomberg/Getty Images
In mid-May, I headed from London to Slovenia to interview ukraine’s men’s soccer team as they bid to triumph at the Qatar World Cup in November. It was a four-day mission that required exercise stations, airports, and taxi ranks : however, at no point did I be asked to show a negative COVID-19 test, my vaccination status, or even wear a face mask. with every day. It was just as refreshing and disconcerting, as if Europe had forgotten that the pandemic had never happened and was still happening.
It was this holiday when an alert broke out on my phone: China, on May 14, announced that it was pulling out of hosting the Asian Football Confederation Cup, the continent’s first foreign football tournament, due to a COVID-19 outbreak that, on that same day, was guilty of only 65,000 cases and forty-five deaths nationwide. That China is still committed to a strict zero-COVID policy aimed at eliminating any and all infections, rather than mitigating serious illnesses and deaths, was no secret. after the severe confinement suffered by the 26 million citizens of Shanghai, its largest city, during the last two months. Still, it was unexpected because Beijing, not long ago, hosted the 2022 Winter Olympics without sowing a primary epidemic and Chinese leaders enjoy the prestige that comes with those major sporting events. But what struck me the most was the timing: the cancelled tournament didn’t start until June 2023.
What this suggests is that China does not aim to follow the West in a vaccine-driven “living with the virus” dynamic. This is bad news for China’s own economy and for any dwindling hopes around the world of avoiding a global recession. Over the more than two decades, China has contributed a quarter of the world’s GDP growth; at the time, the first quarter of 2020 was the only one in which its economy did not grow. Now, however, more than two hundred million Chinese are living under pandemic restrictions, hitting an economy that is already slowing. April retail sales fell 11% year-on-year, while home sales, which account for more than a fifth of GDP, fell 47% in the same period. Unemployment in a pattern of 31 primary Chinese cities is now the highest to official knowledge since records began in 2018. Scenes from early May of staff wrestling with public fitness officials at a factory that makes Apple MacBooks in Shanghai after they were denied permission to leave their workplaces. lounging in on-site bedrooms highlights the developing frictions between economic priorities and public fitness.
“Ordinary Chinese have felt the Party’s brutal authoritarianism in a much more direct and non-public way than many people, especially young people, have felt before,” said Astrid Nordin, Lau’s chair of Chinese foreign relations at Kings College London.
Read more: China, cut off from the world, is now the last major country to pursue a “zero COVID” strategy
Since China began market reforms in the late 1970s, its ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has based its legitimacy on better livelihoods. But over the past two years, President Xi Jinping has seized on China’s luck to beat the virus as a test. of the superiority of its political formula over the West. These two lucky ones are now in direct conflict. On May 25, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang held an emergency assembly with more than 100,000 party members in which he warned that China’s existing economic problems were in some respects greater than the initial effect of the pandemic in 2020 and said that the annual expansion of 5. 5% the goal was more unlikely to achieve. . .
“The economic crisis due to draconian measures to control the epidemic shows the disorder, poor coordination and miscalculations of the leaders at the top,” says Valerie Tan, a policy analyst for Chinese elites at the Mercator Institute for Chinese Studies in Berlin. Despite everything, we are witnessing the full manifestation of this ideological turn of Xi Jinping. “
However, no one expects Beijing to abandon its 0 COVID policy anytime soon. This is particularly sensitive for Xi in the run-up to the 20th CPC Congress in the fall, when the strongman is expected to assume a third five-year presidential term. breaking the long-standing conference that leaders serve only two. The prospect of COVID-19 being unleashed when it reaches this historic milestone will not be tolerated. On May 5, the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the CPC, China’s most sensible political body, said 0-COVID “determined through the nature and purpose of the Party,” thus expressly linking it to the legitimacy of the CCP, while noting that loosening controls would lead to “a number of infections, critical cases and deaths. “
Despite the ideological nature of China’s COVID-0 obsession, this grim diagnosis is not hyperbole. According to a study published May 10 by researchers from Shanghai Fudan University, Indiana University and the U. S. National Institutes of Health. it can lead to 112 million instances and 1. 5 million deaths in just 3 months. This is mainly because China has not fully vaccinated one hundred million of its 264 million citizens over the age of 60, or 38%. In semi-autonomous Hong Kong, a wave of the highly transmissible variant of Omicron has led to some of the world’s worst death rates in recent months, with 95% of deaths among those over 60 who had not been fully vaccinated.
Read more: How Hong Kong is china’s biggest COVID-19 challenge
In this sense, China is a victim of its good fortune in stopping the spread of less transmissible variants and its retrospective propaganda. Seniors who didn’t want to travel abroad didn’t see the need to get vaccinated against a virus the state had triumphantly declared. defeated. Meanwhile, due to a pernicious combination of national security and national pride, China has not approved any foreign vaccines, meaning it does not have access to the most effective types, which are those based on mRNA technology. Local opportunities have asymmetry efficiency.
It’s not that I’m in a position where zero-COVID is the absolute law of the land. Even the most productive COVID-19 vaccines do not eliminate transmission, but they slow the spread and particularly decrease the severity of symptoms. However, this makes them incompatible with any COVID-0 strategy, which does not distinguish between mild or severe cases, nor between young and old. The policy targets contagion, norms, not disease or death. “That’s why it’s so political,” says Dr. Yanzhong Huang, a senior global fitness researcher at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. “Unless they give up their zero COVID mentality, there is no way out. “it is not sustainable.
The Chinese public is aware of this fact, and court cases over the government’s handling of the pandemic are common, even on the country’s heavily censored social media. This led to a new official edict: jingmo, or silence. In other words, stop growling. At the May Fifth assembly of the Politburo Standing Committee, Xi pledged to crack down on “all words and movements that distort, doubt and deny our epidemic prevention policies. “The CCP’s ideological newspaper, Qiushi, on May 16, wants to build more “permanent” quarantine hospitals and that weekly tests “normalize. “
Not hosting the AFC Cup would likely not do much damage to China’s global reputation. But the slow blockades, which are immobilizing Chinese factories, with cascading adverse effects along global supply chains, will cause trading partners to look elsewhere. In Shanghai, China’s largest city responsible for a fifth of the country’s foreign shipments, the average wait time for import boxes was 12. 9 days on May 12, up from 7. 4 days six weeks earlier, according to Project 44 shipment tracking. More than a portion of them According to a recent survey through the local American Chamber of Commerce, U. S. corporations in China have delayed or reduced their investments in China due to the blockade measures.
Thanks to existing measures, “China can be seen as a less reliable business spouse than before,” says Kings College’s Nordin. “The question is how much less reliable than other imaginable alternatives. “