As I see it | Beijing has costly lessons to learn in the wake of zero-Covid

Name: Excitement and anxiety as China starts to reopen after zero-Covid
Uploaded: 2022-12-13T12:20:30.000Z
Duration: 4 min 41 s
Description: Excitement and anxiety as China starts to reopen after zero-Covid

China was so confident in its big data and social control system that it followed its own course – even as public anger grew

But good governance needs foresight and an ability to shift gears, as well as public trust and a free press where different voices can be heard

Reading Time:3 minutes

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China abruptly abandoned its zero-Covid policy last week. Photo: AFP

Josephine Ma

Published: 8:20pm, 13 Dec 2022

For nearly three years, China’s zero-Covid policy has seen anyone infected – as well as their contacts – tracked down and quarantined, while regular testing has been compulsory for hundreds of millions of people.

These and other measures, over such a long period, were unthinkable in other countries.

But in China they were made possible by a combination of technology and a community “grid” management system of social control. The surveillance system involved big data from phone signals and a health code app to effectively track and control people’s movements, plus tens of millions of grass-roots officials cordoning off neighbourhoods and enforcing mandatory testing during an outbreak.

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Excitement and anxiety as China starts to reopen after zero-Covid

Throughout the pandemic, the ruling Communist Party has hailed its ability to lock down millions of people and identify every case, pointing to the centralised political system as the reason infections and deaths have stayed relatively low – at least until the highly transmissible Omicron strain came along.

Beijing is also proud of the efficiency of its 10-in-one PCR tests – where samples from 10 people are mixed then narrowed down to identify the infected. China was the first country to widely use this method.

And it is proud that makeshift hospitals have been built at a speed that no other nation could match.

All of this explains, at least in part, why China had the confidence to keep its zero-Covid policy long after other countries – such as Australia and Singapore – gave up their containment strategies when Omicron emerged and it became clear that contact tracing and quarantine could no longer beat the speed of transmission.

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.css-1m2rp1p{color:#34b8b5;}As I see it | Beijing has costly lessons to learn in the wake of zero-Covid

As I see it | Beijing has costly lessons to learn in the wake of zero-Covid