China’s Iron Web: ‘Zero Covid’ Was Meant to Strengthen the Government

C hinese-government statements that “zero Covid” is over has led to a range of reactions, from reports of hearses lined up at crematoria in the large cities to deal with a Covid surge to upward revisions of China’s GDP growth in anticipation that the economy will “open up.” As with everything about the PRC, we will never know the truth. All we know are the talking points that the government in Beijing wants its public or the world to repeat as fact; most news organizations are obliging.

About one thing, though, we should have no illusions or uncertainty. Since its origin three years ago, the pandemic has strengthened the government’s hand in controlling its population through electronic surveillance and other methods. Anti-lockdown demonstrations last month were met with resolve by the police-state apparatus, enhanced by the pandemic health-tracking apps. Follow-on actions — retributions — by the government were immediate and they continue. While the Chinese Communist Party may have made the tactical decision to lift some of the most egregious restrictions, Xi Jinping’s surveillance state has additional tools of control and will apply them aggressively to strengthen his hand. China’s citizens remain inside the “iron web,” entrapped by a digitally driven police state. Covid strengthened the party’s ability to keep them there.

Let’s first dispense with any notion that Xi is weakened by having blinked in the face of protests and demonstrations. Not a chance. Xi’s control over the levers of government is complete and was validated at the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October. Xi was granted power for life not because the party seeks transformation or reform. He is in place precisely because a strongman is what the party decided it needs to face down the country’s severe problems.

It’s worth reviewing some of the circumstances we are seeing since the measures in the name of Covid were ostensibly relaxed. There are reports of empty streets in major cities as people self-isolate in advance of what the government says will be multiple waves of infection in 2023. Disinformation about the virus abounds, with health officials tailoring their messages to accommodate the government’s seeming about-face regarding the danger of the virus. NPR recently cited a prominent PRC public-health official noting that few people infected with the Omicron variant of the virus run the risk of reinfection, just months after the same official touted the zero-Covid policy as the most appropriate way to stop the pandemic.

Outside China, world health officials are warning of challenges to China’s health-care system at the local level, given what they say is inadequate preparation by Beijing and the low level of effective vaccinations in the country. Global markets and economies seem to be factoring in long-term positive benefit to China as it emerges from its lockdown and stokes global demand, even as central banks in developed economies are trying to halt the highest inflation in decades.

PHOTOS: China’s Zero Covid Plan

Early forecasts about a million deaths and an overwhelmed health-care system should be regarded with skepticism. We don’t really know and may never know. Government disclosures during zero Covid were opaque and almost certainly untruthful. Since the pandemic began, the government has acknowledged 5,237 Covid-related deaths, only about as many as in Utah (population 3 million). That should leave us incredulous. Beijing never allowed for the kind of transparency that would give a true indication of the full impact of the pandemic even during the lockdowns. The regime was motivated to prove that zero Covid worked. Citizen journalists and social-media accounts were full of reports that people were being dismissed from testing centers with a diagnosis of the flu or a bad cold, diagnoses that sustained the government’s propaganda line. No meaningful statistics on Covid-related deaths of the elderly were provided. Even the World Health Organization, which has hardly been a paragon of skepticism about PRC claims since the inception of the virus, acknowledged after the restrictions were relaxed that “the explosion of cases in China had started long before any easing of the zero-Covid policy.”

In this sense, Beijing’s treatment of health-related data is no different from the way it presents economic or social data to the world. China has never been truthful about actual GDP growth rates; demographic specialists know that the last nationwide census was inaccurate in terms of population numbers and birth rates. Manipulated disclosure data have been and will continue to be just another tool of the regime’s continuous propaganda campaign versus the world.

Even if the policy helped stem the worst of the pandemic for a while, the primary legacy of the zero-Covid lockdown was the enhancement of state control over the population. The myriad of health-tracking apps provided volumes of data to embellish what already was the world’s largest population-control system, with panopticon-level cameras in the cities, facial-recognition technology, and electronic tracking of everyone through cellphones. The government benefited from this improved surveillance apparatus during the anti-lockdown protests that erupted in November. Many ordinary citizens joined in, taking obvious precautions (masks, VPNs, and other commonsense steps) to avoid detection. A typical reaction from many who are not activists or otherwise accustomed to agitating for change was surprise that the government was able to track them so well that police would show up at their homes. In the aftermath of this crackdown there is a sense that people do not want anything that would cause such an intrusion into their lives again. This is a tool of the police state. It was intended to have that effect — to chill people into fear, in the expectation that it would lead to more public self-censorship.

The reported “suspension” of the use of the health-care tracking app is beside the point. The fox is in the henhouse. One protester told the New York Times that the ordeal had left him “terrified,” adding that “it’s going to be very difficult to mobilize people again.” That’s what the regime expects. The health-care app may be suspended, but it is still there, and control of it is at the discretion of the government, not the individual.

There will be a counterreaction as well. Protesters who are more willing to put themselves at risk got a taste of what can happen through resistance, and the regime clearly was flustered. Undeterred, the government will use all its police-state powers — it already is using them — to locate the protesters, warn them, beat them up, and in some cases arrest them or possibly dispatch some on “self-quarantine” to one of the hundreds of freshly built quarantine camps now dotted across the country.

For most of the Chinese public, there also is widespread fear about the spread of the virus. That is another element of government control. Having been fed a steady government diet of propaganda that they were spared from the worst of the pandemic because of enlightened policies enacted by the regime, the population now is being told that they should prepare for the worst. Think about the U.S. in April 2020: uncertainty, lack of understanding by governed and governing alike, fear and foreboding, no meaningful defense (i.e., no effective vaccine). This has contributed to the self-imposed isolation that replaced the government lockdown. And the CCP would be just fine if a sentiment emerges that maybe “Grandpa Xi” (as the party propaganda often calls him) should have continued with “zero Covid” after all.

Chinese-government officials are stoking this with their dire predictions of “three waves” with countless deaths. People who now test positive for Covid run to hospitals and sit in emergency-room bullpens, sitting close together with IV drips as vitamins and cold medicines are administered. That’s those fortunate enough to be admitted. The rest wait in long lines. This abrupt shift in government propaganda and actions is destabilizing and bound to impact the well-being and mental stability of many — as happened in the U.S. during the depths of the pandemic, when nothing seemed right and the country itself seemed to be teetering that summer of 2020 and subsequently. The poor Chinese public has endured three years of lockdowns; try to remember the sense of helplessness we felt during the on-again, off-again lockdowns, quarantines, masking and unmasking, and social tension. And that was not inside a totalitarian state where every move, every click already is being monitored by the government.

The government in Beijing, like authoritarian and totalitarian regimes everywhere, depends on such measures to sow doubt and distrust and keep people off balance. Think about how the implications of Russian and Chinese interference in U.S. elections have tied up our body politic for nearly a decade. If you do this long enough it can paralyze a population. This has become life inside China’s iron spiderweb.