China Briefing | China may never abandon zero-Covid publicly, but an easing is inevitable

Name: Residents locked inside homes with wires and bolts due to Covid-19
Uploaded: 2022-05-07T01:30:19.000Z
Duration: 1 min 27 s
Description: Residents locked inside homes with wires and bolts due to Covid-19

Any easing of coronavirus curbs will be done with extreme caution ahead of China’s 20th party Congress this autumn – too much political capital is at stake

Beijing eventually relented on its Big Tech crackdown and is likely to do the same with zero-Covid. Just don’t expect much fanfare, or a sudden change

Reading Time:5 minutes

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A health worker wearing personal protective equipment stands at a Covid-19 testing site outside a shopping centre in Beijing on Thursday. Photo: AFP

Wang Xiangwei

Published: 9:30am, 7 May 2022Updated: 10:45am, 7 May 2022

Since the highly contagious Omicron variant began spreading late last month in Beijing, a dark joke has been making the rounds that the Chinese capital, where the highest echelons of power live, should go through a Shanghai-style hard lockdown – the earlier the better. Only then will China’s leaders be likely to rethink their Covid-19 strategy.

Of course, the municipal government of Beijing is trying hard to avoid the fate of Shanghai, one of China’s most important manufacturing and financial centres, where six weeks of lockdown have caused widespread anger and anxiety about the devastating personal and business costs of the zero-Covid policy.

Since May 1, Beijing has ordered its 22 million residents to go through at least three rounds of mass testing with three more rounds under way. In addition, the authorities have reopened a makeshift hospital with 1,000 beds; banned dining in restaurants, closed gyms and other indoor entertainment venues; instructed schools to go online; and asked residents to show proof of a negative test taken within 48 hours to enter public spaces including supermarkets.

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Residents locked inside homes with wires and bolts due to Covid-19

On Thursday, local authorities placed the city’s Chaoyang district, where many foreign businesses and embassies are located, under a soft lockdown, asking people to work from home and suspending public transport with subway stations closed. People who still needed to visit their offices were encouraged to drive and avoid gatherings.

Despite Beijing registering daily new cases in the double digits, its officials have sounded a grim warning amid the latest outbreak. The unspoken message is that even tougher measures including a hard lockdown for Beijing remain a menacing possibility.

But China’s leaders are very unlikely to give up on the zero-Covid strategy even if they have first-hard experience of a hard lockdown themselves.

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