China Finally Accepts Reality on COVID
Beijing joins the rest of the world in concluding that the cure is worse than the disease.
Beijing has at last pivoted away from its “zero-COVID” policy after nearly 3 years. Over the past few weeks, the Chinese Government has begun to shed some of its most draconian (some might say authoritarian) “virus-mitigating” measures, including:
The imposition of blanketed lockdowns for localized outbreaks. Now when a Chinese citizen comes down with COVID you can expect the government to limit lockdowns to specific apartment floors or buildings, instead of ENTIRE cities. How reasonable!
The imposition of an ultra-strict testing and quarantine regime. Chinese citizens no longer have to submit their nostrils to the extendo-Q-tip in order to use public transport, or to go to work or to enter the grocery store, the pharmacy, a shopping mall, a restaurant, an open-air park. And those who do test positive for COVID can now recuperate at home rather than be forced—sometimes dragged—into government-run field hospitals that are notorious for overcrowding, poor food and hygiene conditions, and overhead lights that never shut off. Easy to point fingers in retrospect – they were just “following the science!”
The imposition of a mandatory tracking application. The Chinese Government will no longer require its citizens to download a state-run app that tracks their every movement to determine whether or not they’ve ventured near known or likely COVID “hotspots.” Why? It’s redundant. They have Tik Tok, Weibo, and WeChat for that. The intersection of invasive tech and government is just so promising!
The imposition of restrictions on the sale of cold and cough medicine. No – this was not due to “supply-chain shortages” as one might infer; China, after all, produces about 50% of the world’s ibuprofen supply (and supplies about 95% of America’s ibuprofen needs). It’s because the Chinese Government believed its citizens would seek out Nyquil, Advil, and Tylenol as a means to treat or cover up COVID symptoms and avoid being forced into quarantine tents. Jokes were on those “mischiefs” though – just visiting a pharmacy risked alerting authorities via the state-run tracking app. That hazmat-attired authority at your door – that’s you’re doing. Now hand over that Nyquil and flare open those nostrils!
China, it seems, has finally accepted that which the rest of the world has learned to accept (some more begrudgingly than others): that efforts to evade COVID are futile and costly (in more ways than one), and at some point you have to just learn to live with the damn virus.
The proximate cause for China’s abrupt U-turn was intense domestic blowback to the government’s draconian measures that recently came to a head. From late-November to early-December, Chinese citizens around the country mounted some of the most sustained and widespread domestic protests since the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement. The demonstrations were triggered by a fire that erupted in an apartment building in Urumqi, the capital city of China’s far western region of Xinjiang, which claimed the lives of at least 10 people and injured countless others. The whole city had been under a stay-at-home order for more than 100 days, and videos that circulated around Chinese social media (before government censors swept in) appeared to suggest that the lockdowns hindered firefighters from getting on the scene in time, preventing what would have otherwise been avoidable deaths.
Images of a hundreds of thousands of gleeful—and maskless—fans packed into Qatari stadiums for the FIFA World Cup that began to pop up on Chinese social media around the same time only served to enrage protesters further. For nearly 3 years, Chinese citizens had been force-fed propaganda that painted COVID as an existential threat and cast the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the only governing force in the world equipped to safeguard its people from the virus. Far-reaching virus containment measures, so the propaganda purported, were the tools of the competent not the paranoid.
Yet here was Qatar—an inferior country when stacked up against China, the world’s 2nd largest economy—hosting close to 1 million foreigners from all around the world, apparently non-plussed by the virus. And these international visitors were out and about having fun while the Chinese people approached year 4 of the world’s strictest lockdowns, their collective spirits slowly atrophying with every passing day they spent cooped up in their homes. They were fed up. They’d had enough.
As I’ve alluded to before, the biggest national security threat in the eyes of the CCP is not some external actor like the United States. It’s the Chinese people themselves. With the very legitimacy of the party under question, Chinese President Xi Jinping likely felt the need to act – and quick; before the protests spread further.
Economics almost certainly played a part in the pivot too. Xi’s “zero-COVID” policies have stymied his country’s economy and dampened market sentiment. Economists predict China’s economy will grow just 2.8% for 2022 – a measly rate for a country that has grown 9% on average annually (this truly is remarkable) since 1978. Investment in Chinese real estate, a sector that accounts for as much as 30% of the country’s GDP, has plummeted over the past year. Residential property sales are down 28.4% year over year – a particularly devastating metric for a citizenry that relies disproportionately on property investments to accrue wealth.
Economic data for the month of November that came out at the same time the protests were raging on presented an even bleaker picture than CCP central planners had predicted. Retail sales in China fell nearly 6% year over year – almost twice as much as analysts had forecasted. Exports fell by 8.7%. Imports dropped by 10.6%. The unemployment rate ticked up to 5.7%.
The CCP’s social contract with the Chinese people has always been predicated on one central premise: we (The CCP) promise to provide you (the Chinese citizen) with steady economic growth and rising living standards if you promise not to wade into politics and cede your right to privacy to the whims of our surveillance state.
By early-December, though, it increasingly looked like both sides hadn’t held up their end of the bargain. And the mutual culprit for this appeared to be the “zero-COVID” policy – something that both crippled the Chinese economy and irritated its citizenry to the point that they were willing to break the cardinal rule and speak negatively of the CCP.
Propogandists basically changed tack overnight. Whereas for months they’d played up the danger of the Omicron strain and fear-mongered about the risk of “long-COVID” to justify their heavy-handed lockdowns, now they’re claiming that the “pathogenicity of the Omicron strain…[had been] significantly reduced,” and that there is “no need to be nervous or even fearful.”
Once locked in their homes, millions of Chinese are now out and about.
The abruptness of this pivot is truly remarkable. Xi has essentially decided to go 0 to 100, pedal to the metal, no brakes. This lack of a phased reopening has raised the eyebrows of public health officials around the world, especially given the fact that the U-turn is coming during winter, when respiratory illnesses tend to blow up.
One reputable model predicts that around 1.5 million of the some 1.4 billion Chinese will die in the coming months. There’s some room for error in this model and the world may never know the real number since China will likely sugarcoat the data, but deaths are an inevitability. Over 90% of those deaths will occur among China’s elderly population.
Some of these deaths could be attributed to China’s refusal to accept Western mRNA vaccines. While not the miracle cure Western governments have touted, mRNA vaccines are generally thought to be more effective in preventing bad outcomes for those infected with COVID than China’s indigenously produced vaccines are, even though the window of efficacy for these jabs is becoming increasingly small. (The majority of deaths in the U.S. are now among those who’ve been vaccinated – something the White House has been happy to sweep under the rug).
Others will sadly perish, regardless of any medical intervention (vaccines or therapeutics), because their immune systems simply cannot contend with the virus.
The CCP’s strict lockdowns earned the praise of governments around the world early in the pandemic, even as it was also the target of scorn for its inability to prevent the virus from escaping China’s borders and for withholding data that could shed light on the origins of the virus. (The U.S. Intelligence Community assesses there’s a roughly even chance that COVID-19 emerged naturally and spilled over from an animal to a human host OR that it escaped from a Chinese biosafety level 4 lab known for researching coronaviruses that just so happened to be located in the same city where the virus emerged).
Many states in the U.S. sought to follow China’s lead by instituting stay-at-home orders, imposing mask mandates, and investing in contact tracers. These measures, however, were met with mixed success. And some contrarian studies have even suggested that they didn’t do much in the end to curb the spread of the virus nor decrease the overall mortality, though in my opinion the data is too incomplete and the variables you have to control for are too vast to make this judgement.
What’s indisputable is that the highly virulent Omicron variant threw a wrench in pandemic containment playbooks across the country, including in states that had instituted some of the strictest measures. Once it became clear that everyone in the country was eventually going to come down with the virus (no matter one’s vaccination status or how disciplined one’s mask usage), the chorus of Americans considering the cost-benefit tradeoff of nearly 2 years of lockdowns grew. What was previously a concern of the inconsiderate, the selfish, the conspiracy-minded soon became top of mind for a large swath of the country. And many were fed up.
Parents questioned why their kids had been forced into online learning even though they accounted for a segment of the population that had virtually no risk of dying from COVID. Small business owners showed up at city council meetings demanding recognition for the impact forced closures had on their livelihoods. Family members of loved ones who had committed suicide or overdosed on drugs brought attention to the dark side of forced isolations. Regular people who were fired for not taking the COVID vaccine took to Twitter to vent about how ridiculous employer mandates for a shot that doesn’t prevent transmission were (this is the very definition of “virtue signaling”).
Public health officials discounted these worries as “pandemic fatigue,” but the U.S. government got the message. Life became more normal again, and luckily the death rate from COVID only dropped from there.
China, for its part, was able to postpone this sort of reckoning for nearly 3 years because it had far more authority and tools at its disposal to enforce a near air-tight lockdown. Even when the Omicron strain started showing up, they were able to quickly identify and quell small outbreaks and prevent them from coursing through the larger population (their strategy: whack-a-mole).
So it makes you wonder what the CCP’s end goals really were with “zero-COVID.”
Had Xi Jinping’s hubris led him to believe that if he locked down his country for long enough the virus would one day just disappear? Was he just biding his time until a more effective vaccine that actually prevented transmission of the virus hit the market?
In the end, it was the Chinese people themselves who forced Xi to learn a lesson that governments all around the world have already learned: by locking down your country, you’re just forestalling the inevitable. The virus is patient. It’s not going anywhere. It will prey on your elderly, before it weakens. It will find ways to evade your therapies.
So at some point—for God’s sakes—life must go on. Every day is one big risk-management calculation. There are other problems in this world that require our attention.