I can remember when James Palmer, the deputy editor of Foreign Policy, jabbed at me for calling China’s official Covid-19 statistics “insanely implausible,” insisting, “China did, in fact, get the pandemic under control with draconian lockdowns. Pretending that didn’t happen just reinforces the belief of the Chinese public in Western bias and prevents them accepting *good* coverage. That you don’t like it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
Whatever else you want to say about Palmer, he does keep a close eye on China, and he wrote up this update of how the lockdowns are going:
The entirety of Shanghai is now under lockdown after a previous experiment to shut the city down one half at a time failed to contain a growing COVID-19 outbreak. Some residents have now been under lockdown for over three weeks, with a succession of smaller lockdowns limited to particular districts or compounds. In China, lockdowns are stricter than in many other countries: It can entail a complete ban on leaving one’s home or being limited to one excursion every few days for food.
National coronavirus cases continue to climb steadily, with numbers doubling roughly every five days. Shanghai remains the epicenter of the outbreak, with over 83 percent of cases, although numbers are also growing in neighboring provinces. Mass testing in the city is uncovering a very high number of asymptomatic cases, suggesting that other regions with lower rates of testing probably have large numbers of undetected cases. (China also uses a very particular definition of “asymptomatic” cases, excluding many that would be considered symptomatic in other countries.) The number of deaths remains officially very low, though deaths in old age facilities are likely being underreported.
Conditions in Shanghai’s isolation wards are worsening, with reports of food and water shortages and fighting among residents. The authorities have just reversed policy on one of the worst decisions, the separation of children from uninfected parents, after a wave of online anger. The sporadic killing of dogs in coronavirus-hit households—not official policy, except briefly in one city—has also prompted rage. Lockdowns of hospitals and prioritization of COVID-19 testing have also caused serious health care problems, while an angry call from an official at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention complaining about government policies went viral before being censored.
And he wrote all of that before the reports of rioting over food shortages.
Hey, help me out here, does all of that living nightmare constitute the Chinese government having the pandemic “under control” as we were told, or did all of those “Covid zero” policies just delay the reckoning? Trying to stop the spread of this variant is like trying to stop the spread of the common cold. If other countries had tried to lock down entire cities during the usual cold and flu seasons, they would run into the same problems. A zero-Covid philosophy makes no sense in these circumstances, but Xi Jinping and the rest of the government cannot admit to themselves, their citizens, or the rest of the world that their approach isn’t working anymore.
Authoritarian regimes are more brittle than they look; they are sustained by fear and the ruled people’s sense that for all of his flaws, the autocrat knows what he is doing and can deliver something worthwhile – stability, order, safety, prosperity. Thus, autocrats need their publics to believe that “Dear Leader” has everything under control and has all the right answers. Admitting that the zero-Covid philosophy is destined to eventually fail would represent the Chinese government telling the Chinese people that their massive sacrifices in the past two years were a waste, and that China did not, in fact, get the pandemic under control with draconian lockdowns.
PHOTOS: Shanghai Lockdown
All the spin in the world can’t alter what those of us outside China can see: the leaders in Beijing are flailing right now. The Chinese-made vaccines either barely work or don’t work against Omicron. The virus offers a minor threat to most healthy people, but the number of elderly and immunocompromised in Shanghai and the rest of the country would likely overwhelm the Chinese medical system. (Shanghai’s convention center is being converted into a temporary hospital with more than 40,000 beds.) Remember that while the Chinese statistics are indeed implausible, there are still many, many Chinese whose immune systems have never encountered Covid-19 before, so they have no existing natural immunity. The city’s trade center, with the busiest port in the world, has ground to a halt, exacerbating the existing global supply chain problems.
And the richest city in China is facing overwhelming food supply problems and the risk of large-scale starvation. This is your country on autocracy, devastating self-deception, and obsessively stubborn Covid-19 policies.
That warning from a surveillance drone warning people to go back inside from their balconies– “control your soul’s desire for freedom” — makes a really succinct national motto.