China Briefing | China needs a national Covid vaccine mandate. One bungled roll-out in Beijing doesn’t change that
- The Chinese capital’s attempt to compel residents to get vaccinated was met with such a backlash that the authorities are unlikely to try it again soon
- But that would be a great shame. China must educate its citizens about the importance of vaccines if it ever hopes to find a way out of the pandemic
There’s an old Chinese saying about “issuing an order in the morning and rescinding it in the evening” that’s used to mock impulsive officials for making snap decisions that they are later forced to retract just as abruptly – causing widespread confusion and denting government credibility.
Examples of such sudden U-turns abound, and the bureaucrats who make them deserve all the humiliation they receive for pushing ill-conceived and unpopular directives.
But every so often they will bungle a well-intentioned decision that has far-reaching implications, eliciting more feelings of disappointment than ridicule.
That’s what happened with the Beijing municipal government’s recent flip-flop on a vaccine mandate at a time when the whole country is struggling with an untenable zero-Covid policy in the face of the highly-contagious Omicron variant.
On July 6, a senior official from Beijing Municipal Health Commission surprised the whole nation by announcing that the capital city’s residents would need to show proof of vaccination, starting from the following Monday, to enter gyms, cinemas, and other public spaces.
Apparently, Beijing intended to become China’s first major city to deploy a vaccine mandate – a practice adopted in many other parts of the world – and set an example for other cities to follow.
But how the municipal officials misjudged the public mood. The immediate outcry, not only from residents of the capital but also the rest of the country, forced the authorities to back off their vaccine mandate on the night of July 7, and offer reassurances that people would still be still able to enter the capital’s public spaces with proof of a negative virus test and a temperature check as had been the norm.