Remember When Western Technocrats Gushed over China’s ‘Zero Covid’?

A s China’s lockdown-weary population erupted in protests over the past week in response to the Chinese Communist Party’s commitment to its draconian “zero Covid” approach, American media have struck a supportive tone: The uprisings, the New York Times reported yesterday, speak “to the deep well of anger inside China against the country’s exceptionally stringent Covid policies.” In the U.S. political and public-health establishments, too, there appears to be an emerging bipartisan consensus that the Chinese lockdowns have gone too far. This past weekend, Anthony Fauci admitted: “It seems that in China it was just a very, very strict extraordinary lockdown where you lock people in the house but without any, seemingly, endgame to it.” Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Congressman Chris Smith (R., N.J.) released a joint statement urging the U.S. to “be unwavering in our support for the Chinese people as they bravely call for freedom.” Even the Biden administration issued a cautious statement arguing that “it’s going to be very difficult for the People’s Republic of China to be able to contain the virus through their zero COVID strategy.”

This conventional wisdom comes amid overwhelming evidence of the human-rights abuses committed against the Chinese people in the name of zero Covid. Earlier this month, a 55-year-old mother jumped to her death from the top of her apartment, which had been welded shut by CCP officials, in the city of Hohhot. A few weeks later, a fire in another locked-down apartment killed at least ten in Xinjiang, triggering this latest wave of protests: “A video on social media of a woman screaming in the burning high-rise apartment block in Urumqi, capital of far western Xinjiang region, frightened people across China who have been facing rolling quarantines and lockdowns that can cause their apartment blocks to be closed off or blocked by steel gates,” Bloomberg reported.

But the Chinese government’s blatant disregard for human dignity, in its response to the pandemic, has been on display since the beginning of Covid. Reports of Chinese citizens being welded inside their apartments came as early as February 2020, and videos of wanton police brutality against anti-lockdown protesters have surfaced periodically throughout the past two and a half years. While many in the Covid-hawkish wing of American politics now begrudgingly admit that the CCP’s approach goes too far, their long record of public sympathy for China’s pandemic response suggests that the recent shift is motivated more by political expediency than genuine opposition to public-health authoritarianism.

As I noted back in April, “some Covid hawks in the West openly expressed admiration for China’s Covid response,” ranging from the British Medical Journal — which published a “special collection” of articles titled: “The world can learn from China’s response to the pandemic, say experts” — to the Wall Street Journal, which ran a February article titled “China’s ‘Zero-Covid’ Policy Holds Lessons for Other Nations.” But the praise for the CCP’s zero-Covid strategy from Western technocrats has been a consistent feature of pandemic discourse from the outset: In late February 2020, for example, an early World Health Organization (WHO) envoy to China released a glowing report about the country’s pandemic response. (“China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic,” the WHO wrote). The next month, when asked about human-rights concerns arising from China’s approach to lockdowns, WHO assistant director general Bruce Aylward responded: “I think people aren’t paying close enough attention.” The lockdown-related “human rights concerns usually reflect the situation in places like Wuhan,” he said. “These are places that got out of control in the beginning [of the outbreak], and China made this decision to protect China and the rest of the world.” But “they never want to be in another situation like a Wuhan — and they haven’t.”

This line of argument continued throughout 2020. In March, a headline from Yahoo News’s senior White House correspondent read: “‘They know how to keep people alive’: Why China’s coronavirus response is better than you think.” In April, the Nation wrote: “It’s chastening to note that whereas China under Xi has suppressed the latest coronavirus at the human cost of three lives per million population, the United States under Trump is still struggling to overpower it, having already sacrificed 145 of every million Americans.” In June, two public-health experts co-authored a Time op-ed titled “U.S. Response to COVID-19 Is Worse than China’s. 100 Times Worse.” “China orchestrated a massive lockdown with school and office closures and strict stay-at-home orders centered around Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, where the outbreak emerged, even as many around the world decried the actions as draconian,” they argued. But “the U.S., on the other hand, continues to waste valuable time.” In October, a Reuters analysis compared the American and Chinese pandemic responses and found the former’s wanting: “About 11 months after the Wuhan outbreak, China’s official GDP numbers this week show not only that the economy is growing, up 4.9% for the third quarter from a year earlier, but also that the Chinese are confident enough the virus has been vanquished to go shopping, dine and spend with gusto,” the outlet reported. In the U.S., on the other hand, “221,000 people are dead from COVID-19 after a delayed federal response, partisan battles over mask-wearing and lockdowns, and plenty of public events that do not follow public health guidelines.”

PHOTOS: China’s Covid Zero Plan

Continuing into 2021, American readers were treated to headlines such as “Why America Should Look to China to Contain Covid-19” (Forbes), “China eradicated COVID-19 within months. Why won’t America learn from them?”(Salon), and “What the U.S. can learn from China’s response to COVID infections” (NPR). Even this year, as the evidence of the failure of draconian responses piled up, some were still unprepared to let go of the dream of a totalitarian, centrally planned alternative to the American model: In January 2022, former Democratic senator and American ambassador to China Max Baucus told Bloomberg TV: “I take my hat off to how strongly China is working on this — better than we are, frankly, by far.” (Although “there are consequences” to the Chinese approach, he acknowledged). Earlier this month, Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, argued that “the China zero-covid policy has been very successful at keeping the deaths very low,” as “compared to the United States, where we had more than a million deaths from Covid.” Even this week, Washington Post reporter and notorious Covid hysteric Taylor Lorenz — who has favorably contrasted China’s pandemic strategy with America’s on numerous occasions — described the CCP’s zero-Covid approach as “choosing not to kill off millions of vulnerable people (as the US is doing).”

Even as America’s progressive establishment rushes to align itself with the anti-lockdown protesters in China today, the record of the past few years tells a different story. From legacy media to the self-styled experts in various national bureaucracies, the fact is that a certain class of technocrats in the West saw the pandemic as an opportunity to dismantle the long-standing checks on their power. “I think people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March,” the British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson gushed in a revealing December 2020 interview. The CCP, in that sense, was an aspirational model: “It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought,” Ferguson said. “And then Italy did it. And we realized we could.”

In the United States, thankfully, they couldn’t — at least, not to the level that the Neil Fergusons of the world would have liked. But Americans should take note of what’s happening in our counterpart in the Far East, if only because it serves as a potent reminder of just how far its admirers here at home would go, if given the chance.