On the menu today: China’s cities are filling up with large, loud, and surprisingly defiant public protests against the country’s draconian “zero Covid” policies. It raises the question of whether Xi Jinping and the yes-men around him are so stubborn and so obsessed with never admitting error that they’re almost self-destructive, and whether the U.S. and the world are dealing with a rising autocracy that is powerful but dumb.
Can We Have That Global Reckoning over China’s Covid Policies Now?
“Foreign country rocked by widespread protests” isn’t always consequential news, but it is when the foreign country in question is China, and the issue driving the protests are the seemingly never-ending lockdowns and restrictions pushed by the government’s obsessive “zero Covid” policy:
Demonstrations occurred throughout the weekend in both Beijing and Shanghai. According to eyewitness accounts, there were also protests in the eastern city of Nanjing and in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic. Video footage and photos circulating on social media, which The Wall Street Journal wasn’t able to independently verify, suggest protests broke out in several other cities, including Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province.
There are good reasons to fear China. The country has the largest standing military in the world and the world’s largest navy. It is dramatically expanding its nuclear arsenal. Its human-rights record reads like a demon’s resume and it’s currently committing genocide, but somehow its economic, diplomatic, and cultural power is so strong that the regime has defenders in the West who shrug off the ongoing use of concentration camps. The country has made little secret of its desire to conquer — or, in its own words, “unify” with Taiwan, by force. And in the last few years, you may have noticed that its virology labs don’t seem all that safe and secure.
But for all of the menacing, saber-rattling, relentlessness, and ruthlessness, Chinese ruler Xi Jinping and his surrounding yes-men also seem . . . well, kind of dumb sometimes. If not dumb, then they’re prone to sticking with a decision or policy that isn’t working, even as the evidence of how that decision or policy can’t work piles up and the situation gets worse and worse. They’re self-destructively stubborn, and so fearful of appearing flawed that they can never admit a mistake and keep doubling down on their original decision, attempting to gaslight everyone into believing it is a huge success. (Kind of like deciding to dine with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes.)
The unsustainability and abusiveness of the draconian “zero Covid” policies was self-evident from the first videos on social media of Wuhan officials welding the doors of apartment buildings shut, locking the residents inside during the first coronavirus outbreak. The Chinese Communist Party’s zero-Covid policies envision the entire country as a prison, themselves as the wardens and guards, and all other citizens as prisoners until further notice.
We’ve had this argument for nearly three years now. It wasn’t that long ago that China had convinced much of the world that its strict, sweeping-lockdown approach worked better than the Western world’s ad-hoc, improvised response to the pandemic. Back in February 2021, the New York Times wrote a much-disputed article under the headline, “Power, Patriotism, and 1.4 Billon People: How China Beat the Virus and Roared Back.” “Why the World Needs China’s COVID Zero Policy,” declared Bloomberg News on February 8 of this year.
And when I doubted the accuracy of China’s released Covid statistics, indicating that a country of 1.4 billion people had just a handful of cases in an entire year, James Palmer, the deputy editor of Foreign Policy, jabbed at me for calling China’s official Covid-19 statistics “insanely implausible,” insisting that, “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.”
By the way, I don’t really care if China “accepts good coverage.” It’s not my job to placate the fragile egos in Beijing, or make sure that what I write — e.g., “There’s no way a country with more than a billion people had only a handful of cases of a supremely contagious virus” — doesn’t offend some government official. Maybe James Palmer thinks we all have a responsibility not to ruffle any feathers among Chinese officials by doubting their BS statements, but he’s wrong. The moment a journalist starts thinking, “What will the Chinese government think about this? Will they get mad at me or my employer if I write this?” the process of self-censorship has begun.
The people who said “zero Covid doesn’t work” were right. The people who said “zero Covid works” were wrong. We need a giant flashing neon sign in Times Square to ensure that everyone knows this and that no one forgets it.
Now, the U.S. response to Covid-19 had more than its share of problems. It is worth noting that the virus had likely arrived in the U.S. long before the U.S. government could mobilize a response, and the Chinese health officials stopped communicating with their American counterparts when it mattered most. Chinese authorities in Wuhan and later in Beijing knew they were dealing with a dangerous and contagious virus, and instead of warning the world, they chose to allow contagious carriers to travel around the world. The Chinese government did not admit the virus was contagious until January 21 — even though doctors in Wuhan were catching the virus from their patients! By then, it was far too late; cases had been reported in Japan, South Korea, and Thailand, and the virus was spreading, undetected, all around the world. There was never a realistic scenario in which the U.S. could have prevented Covid-19 from coming to its shores and starting to spread among its population.
But we’ve made vaccines that mitigate the worst effects of infection available since early 2021. We’ve had intense and loud arguments about getting people to accept those vaccinations, to the point of firing public employees who wouldn’t get the shots. Officially, 98 million Americans have had Covid-19, but at this point, it is hard to believe that any Americans other than recluses and hermits have had zero contact with the virus or any variant.
And now, in late November 2022, Covid is largely an afterthought in our country. Americans are still getting infected, still feeling sick, still isolating from others, and then moving on with their lives and their acquired immunity until the next variant comes along. We don’t just have a vaccine and boosters; we’ve got an Omicron-focused booster.
Heck, if you visit the CDC website this morning, the lead item is about “RSV Prevention,” referring to Respiratory Syncytial Virus, a common respiratory virus that usually causes mild, cold-like symptoms. (Most people recover in a week or two, but RSV can be serious, especially for infants and older adults.) Over the weekend, I joked that the clearest sign that the pandemic is over is the fact that Dr. Fauci “science is sexy” coffee mugs are now 50 percent off.
The argument is over, and it’s been over for a long time: “Zero Covid” doesn’t work. You can’t stop a virus that spreads as easily as the common cold; you can only prepare your body to deal with it.
Alas, the Chinese government that put so much time, effort, money, and resources into researching these viruses — and who chose to put these labs researching communicable diseases right in the middle of major population centers – didn’t do such a great job in developing vaccines. (This raises the question of what the point of all of that research into easily spread bat viruses was.) From the very beginning, the available data on the Chinese vaccines from non-Chinese medical experts indicated that the Chinese vaccines were hit-or-miss at best:
You remember Sinopharm, right? That’s the Chinese-made vaccine that trials found prevents hospitalization 79 percent of the time! Oh, just note that “the trial was not designed and powered to demonstrate efficacy against severe disease in persons with comorbidities, in pregnancy, or in persons aged 60 years and above.” So, we’re not sure how effective the vaccine at protecting people who are old or who have comorbidities, which are admittedly two of the groups most vulnerable to COVID-19. Look at the bright side though: Sinopharm keeps four out of five young healthy people out of the hospital!
And then there’s Sinovac, which is like Sinopharm, just, well, not as effective. That’s the vaccine which Brazil’s Butantan Institute found had an efficacy of 51 percent against symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection, and it is slightly less effective against two of the variants.
Even with those 50-50 effective vaccines, China didn’t get those shots into the arms of the most vulnerable: the elderly. In China, the older you were, the less likely you were to be vaccinated, at least as of April of this year.
China could be in our condition. Lord knows the U.S. has doses of our own vaccines that Americans won’t accept. Other Western countries such as Germany are almost begging China to start using Western mRNA vaccines to ensure that its population is protected and can get its economy humming again.
But using a Western mRNA vaccine would be seen as an admission that the West did something better than the Chinese did, and thus, Xi Jinping cannot allow it. He’ll accept more severe cases, more deaths, more strain on health-care facilities, more economic harm, and more protests before he’ll admit that Western vaccines are effective.
Like I said, kind of dumb, don’t you think?
ADDENDUM: Over in the Washington Post, “some guy” looks at the election results in Colorado and concludes that the in-your-face “angertainment” style preferred by Lauren Boebert and some other Republicans doesn’t merely repel independents and energize Democrats . . . it alienates a small but key chunk of GOP-leaning voters as well.
Yes, the game was played in what felt like a monsoon, both teams started backup quarterbacks, and it wasn’t all that competitive down the stretch. Still, my Three Martini Lunch co-host Greg has better reasons to expect bigger things from Justin Fields than I have to expect bigger things from Zach Wilson.