China’s mismanaged exit from its “zero-Covid” policy is subjecting its people to widespread disruptions and health risks. It is also exploding a myth that Beijing’s leadership, packed with technocrats and able to exercise authoritarian decisiveness, is inherently superior to western democracies when dealing with crisis scenarios.
As Covid-19 sweeps through the country’s biggest cities, the lack of preparation for China’s opening from strict pandemic controls is becoming painfully clear. Residents of Shanghai, Shenzhen and other cities reported that pharmacies had sold out of fever medicine and Covid tests, while blood banks are battling supply shortages.
Streets in Beijing remain empty and most businesses are closed, with unofficial estimates suggesting about 40 per cent of Beijing’s 22mn people have contracted the Omicron variant. In many other cities, people are sick or staying at home to avoid infections and schools are moving lessons online so that students and teachers can shelter from the wave of contagion.
The scenes of distress not only reflect poorly on President Xi Jinping, who has been widely hailed by state media as the “commander-in-chief of the people’s war against Covid”. They also raise questions about the capacity of China’s administration to make wise and timely decisions.
This is not an academic point. If the world’s emerging superpower — one that exploits a deep sense of historical injustice to fuel its rivalry with the west — is falling prey to the narrowing perspectives of concentrated power, then the risks that Beijing poses to global stability will grow.
With China so central to several of the world’s potential geopolitical flashpoints — on the Korean peninsula, across the Taiwan Strait, in the South China Sea, on its Himalayan border with India and in other arenas — the wider world has a legitimate interest in the quality of Chinese decision-making.
This is not purely a foreign policy concern. Some of the protesters who took to the streets in more than 20 Chinese cities last month to raise grievances about Beijing’s stifling “zero-Covid” regime chanted slogans calling for free speech, the rule of law, democracy and human rights.
Over the course of almost three years of dealing with the pandemic largely through urban lockdowns of varying intensities, China has had ample time to prepare itself for an exit strategy. Yet it has failed to ensure that its most vulnerable age cohort — the 267mn people above 60 — is adequately vaccinated against the virus. Some 32 per cent of this cohort are insufficiently protected, according to official figures.
Beijing also rejected consistent calls to supplement its homegrown vaccines by using foreign mRNA jabs manufactured by Pfizer, Moderna and other groups. This failure to admit highly effective foreign medicines reveals Beijing’s willingness to put national pride before the health and economic welfare of its population.
To be sure, muscular social controls did an impressive job of containing the virus’s spread in early 2020 after its initial outbreak in Wuhan, and China’s official Covid death toll of 5,235 is much lower than that in other large countries. But the current rushed and poorly co-ordinated transition from “zero-Covid” towards living with the virus is undermining China’s own claims to “put people first”.
Simply refusing to report a sharply rising death toll does not obscure a looming humanitarian crisis. With perhaps as many as 1bn people set to travel over the lunar new year holidays starting on January 21, the current wave of infections is only likely to swell.
