China needs a timeline for ending zero-Covid to regain public trust

Beijing’s Covid-19 containment strategy relies heavily on public cooperation, but after almost three years of lockdowns, frustrations are mounting
While China is in no position to safely open up right away, it can admit to mistakes, ask for patience and provide a timeline for ending restrictions

Andrei Lungu

Published: 8:15am, 1 Dec 2022

Why you can trust SCMP

As people in China find themselves navigating endless lockdowns, public criticism of “zero-Covid” is increasing. For the Communist Party leadership, this stunning reversal from an initial victory against Covid-19 shows just how bad things can become if you lack a long-term strategy.

After the original outbreak in Wuhan, the party defied preliminary assessments in the West to emerge victorious against Covid-19. This success, contrasted with the tragic toll of the global pandemic, became a new pillar of legitimacy for the party.

But from a geopolitical perspective, Covid-19 was devastating for China: its global image was shattered as nations blamed it for the pandemic. US-China relations deteriorated more in 2020 than in the previous three years and many foreign governments became more hawkish on China. Internally, the party might have won the epidemic, but, externally, China lost the pandemic.

Almost three years later, it seems the party is also starting to lose. Beijing’s anti-epidemic narrative has centred on the efficiency of its political system, which is supposedly better suited than democratic governments to both identify the interests of the people and marshal the resources needed to advance them.

But the endless lockdowns and the tragedies that have emerged from them have slowly undermined this narrative. Instead of an enlightened government that protects its people, Beijing is now pictured as an ideological zealot.

The “dynamic zero-Covid” policy is increasingly seen not as a strategy based on scientific fact, but one driven by political interests.

People hold white sheets of paper in protest of Covid-19 restrictions in Beijing, China, on November 27. Photo: Reuters

After the initial success in containing the epidemic, China’s long-term strategy should have been a large-scale vaccination campaign and the development of healthcare resources.

But the mainland’s headline statistic of a 90 per cent vaccination rate hides a grim reality: about one third of people aged over 80, those most vulnerable to Covid-19, are unvaccinated and 60 per cent haven’t received a booster shot. Just as serious, the government has mostly relied on less-efficient inactivated vaccines, while most other countries have access to mRNA ones.

This leads to the hard truth that China is not ready to reopen. If Covid-19 were to spread uncontrollably, China could risk becoming the country with the world’s highest number of coronavirus deaths, which might top 1 million.

Is China’s obsession with zero-Covid an opportunity for the US?

Mainland China would experience a situation similar to Hong Kong’s fifth wave in the spring. In just two months, Hong Kong, which also had a low vaccination rate among the elderly, recorded around 8,300 Covid-19 deaths, equivalent to more than 0.1 per cent of the city’s population.

A similar proportion among China’s 1.4 billion people would be devastating. Meanwhile, the sacrifices of the past three years would seem in vain. Chinese citizens would rightfully ask themselves, “Why did we suffer so much if we still ended up with more casualties than the US?”

02:13

Over one-fifth of China’s total GDP under lockdown amid record Covid surge, new report finds

At the other end of the spectrum, the party leadership claims China should persist against Covid-19 until the “final victory”. But what is that victory? Is it the day when humanity finally develops a vaccine that provides sterilising immunity? If so, many people in China won’t live long enough to see it.

With distrust and dissent spreading, zero-Covid might fail simply because of a lack of widespread cooperation. It is flabbergasting that, for almost three years, Beijing has held on to the belief that the Chinese people do not care about freedom. Even now, in the face of rising protests, the party leadership has shown no sign of giving up on its approach.

Which Chinese Covid controls are fuelling public anger?

The party still has a chance to avoid both a political crisis and a human tragedy. It can set a clear, transparent timetable for orderly reopening in the spring, approve mRNA vaccines, vaccinate the vulnerable, and build up healthcare resources ready for an inevitable rise in infections.

In the meantime, it can ask the people to bear a few more months of restrictions so as to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths, while recognising that implementing zero-Covid for three years without any reopening strategy has been a mistake.

Regardless of what might happen, the senseless prolonging of zero-Covid and the tragedies that marked this year, from Shanghai, to Guizhou, to Xinjiang, will leave a deep scar on the Chinese people and their relationship with the Communist Party. The party must now decide whether to double down on zero-Covid – even though, without public trust and cooperation, case numbers might already be too high to be controlled any more – or set China on a path to normality.

Either way, the future is likely to be dark. If Sars-CoV-2 spreads uncontrollably through China, hundreds of thousands might die over the next few months. If the party enforces zero-Covid, other tragedies will occur, either as a consequence or by coincidence, and they could lead to widespread unrest and the tragic repression of protesters.

China faces moment of truth on zero-Covid-19 policy

The party still has a chance to both defuse tensions and prevent unnecessary deaths, but only if it accepts that zero-Covid cannot go on forever and sets a clear schedule for reopening.

It is profoundly ironic that a policy that was meant to highlight the superiority of China’s political system might end up undoing it. But what is tragic is that millions of Chinese residents stand to suffer the consequences if Beijing doesn’t move soon to adopt an approach that can stand the test of history.

Andrei Lungu is president of The Romanian Institute for the Study of the Asia-Pacific (RISAP)