China Briefing | Non-Chinese vaccines, foreign treatment pills, self-test kits: how China should optimise its Covid policy to tackle Omicron-fuelled outbreak

China incensed by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman’s comment suggesting battle to contain latest Covid outbreak stems from inherent weakness of autocratic government

Allowing for imports and manufacturing of foreign mRNA vaccines could increase China’s 40 per cent booster rate, all from domestically made shots

Reading Time:5 minutes

An illustration picture shows vials with Covid-19 Vaccine stickers attached, and syringes, with the national flag of China, on November 17, 2020. (Photo by JUSTIN TALLIS / AFP)

Published: 9:30am, 2 Apr 2022

Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate and a media columnist, is someone Chinese officials and state media have learned to both love and hate.

His tomes, including the Essentials of Economics, have a massive fan base among college students and policymakers, and he was a coveted speaker at leading universities and seminars before US-China relations turned sour.

In recent years, some of Krugman’s sharply-worded columns for The New York Times, particularly those aimed at laying bare the Donald Trump administration’s policy follies, have made delightful reading for Chinese leaders who promptly ordered state media to translate them for public consumption.

Nobel laureate for Economics Paul Krugman. This week, mainland Chinese media criticised him for his assessment that China’s zero-Covid policy was failing during latest outbreak due to low vaccination rates. Photo: SCMP/CY Yu

One example is Krugman’s article published in February, in which he took another swing at Trump’s trade war against China and called it his big China flop. “So Trump was a chump; the Chinese took him to the cleaners,” he wrote.

Barely one month later, Chinese leaders apparently took serious offence at his column taking a shot at President Xi Jinping and China’s zero-Covid policy at a time when the Omicron-fuelled outbreak has forced many of China’s bigger cities, including Shanghai, to impose large-scale lockdowns.

On March 28, in a seemingly synchronised move, a number of leading Chinese media outlets – including the People’s Daily, Xinhua, China Daily, and the China Youth Daily – simultaneously ran commentaries blasting Krugman and his column.

Published on March 18, Krugman’s column headlined “Another Dictator Is Having a Bad Year” described China as experiencing a disastrous failure of its Covid-19 policy and said the lagging vaccination rates among China’s elderly was a sign of broad distrust of the government with officials unwilling to tell Xi the truth.

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