“[Moving] away from zero-Covid is the only wise approach to transcend this human rights dilemma,” he told the commission.

Sarah Cook, Freedom House’s research director for China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, told the panel that Chinese officials had gone to great lengths to restrict the information available to the Chinese public and the international community about the conditions in lockdown areas.

The commission, which monitors China’s human rights and rule-of-law record, is an advisory body to Congress and the executive branch; its members have had significant influence on China-related legislation in recent years.

There has been increasingly public discontent within China about Beijing’s restrictive approach to contain the pandemic.

Latest official data, released on Tuesday, also showed that China’s fragile economic recovery was again disrupted in October as coronavirus lockdowns hit consumption and manufacturing.

Beijing on Friday announced changes to its Covid restrictions, with the aim of reducing their economic and social impact – a move some observers believed would pave the way for further easings.

A task force of the State Council, China’s cabinet, announced 20 measures, including steps to make it easier for overseas travellers to enter the country; one move was to cut the time foreigners must spend in a central quarantine facility from seven days to five.

Investors ‘not convinced’ despite China easing some zero-Covid, property curbs

Experts also told the CECC that more effort should be made to restore in-person engagements between representatives of the two nations.

Rory Truex, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, said public health under the zero-Covid policy had become a cover for Beijing not only for expanding surveillance and political control of its citizens but also for making it difficult for foreigners to go to China.

Truex said it would be “critically important” to use the Biden-Xi meeting to resume people-to-people exchanges, getting Americans back in China.

“It’s important for American national security to have Americans going to China studying Chinese and learning about the country,” he said.

What it’s like to live under zero-Covid in China – the good and the bad

“It is also in our interest to have Chinese citizens coming here, studying at our universities, perhaps assimilating and becoming part of our expert core.”

Huang and Truex agreed that the new 20-point package did not mean the end of zero-Covid policy in China.

“The objective is to optimise zero-Covid, not to abandon,” Huang said.

Hopes rise of changes to China’s Covid controls as rules start to ease

He contended that Beijing regards how to respond to Covid-19 as a competition between the Chinese and Western political systems. Abandoning the zero-Covid policy, he said, would be tantamount to admitting failure.

Huang also argued the zero-Covid policy had an unintended effect of sustaining an “immunity gap” between China and the rest of the world; Beijing has relied on less effective domestic vaccines but is reluctant to accept foreign-made ones.

“That immunity gap significantly increases the risk of the healthcare system being overwhelmed by a rapid surge of cases should policy relaxation occur,” he said.

Truex said zero-Covid should be understood as a political campaign in which lower-level officials struggle to achieve targets, falsify data and engage in performance to show their zeal to central leadership.

But it would be difficult to reverse course since the policy was tied personally to the party leader.

“If I were to say as a political scientist, what is the principal weakness of the Chinese political system, I would say that this is one of them,” he said.