An elderly woman receives a dose of the Covid-19 vaccine on December 21 in Guizhou province. STR / AFP
After three years of tightly controlling people’s lives, portraying Covid-19 as a deadly threat and mocking the “chaos” reigning in the United States, Chinese propaganda at the time of opening is struggling to find the tone. On December 7, China announced the end of its zero-Covid policy: no more widespread testing, no more isolation centers for the sick, no more quarantine for whole cities. Also, no more daily counts of infected people since testing is no longer mandatory. In these conditions, the virus is spreading with extraordinary speed, generating a first wave more like a tsunami in a population that has never experienced Covid-19 before.
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As elsewhere, hospitals are beginning to saturate and crematoria are full. But this new situation is more difficult to defend for a regime that has made the small number of victims a source of legitimacy in recent years, even if these policies have been costly for a large part of the population deprived of their liberty.
One of the symbols of this 180-degree turn in official communication is one of the new popular slogans: “Everyone is responsible for their own health. The news first appeared in a letter to citizens of Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei, south of Beijing — an area that had already halted mandatory PCR testing on Nov. 13 before pulling back amid confused citizens. The same slogan then appeared on December 1 on Canton Tower, the tallest skyscraper in the capital Guangdong, one of the first cities in China to relax controls in the face of Covid-19. It has since been taken up everywhere, displayed on banners in yellow sinograms on a red background, and reaffirmed by authorities, for example accompanied by a message advising students to exercise to boost their immune systems. A few weeks earlier, in mid-November, a series of editorials in the very official People’s Daily still called for the “determined application of zero-Covid political dynamics”.
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The state, which itself meddled in the intimacy of the Chinese without giving them a choice to “protect” them from an ever-increasing propaganda threat, today advises Chinese citizens to fend for themselves. The message is bad. “They really opened up the country overnight, without any preparation, without staff training, without preparing enough medicines. And without preparing the population to fight the fear people have of the virus after three years of demonizing it, says Mr Zhang, a 49-year-old Beijing native whose mother died of Covid-19. An overcrowded first facility had refused to take in his mother, who lost valuable hours before she could access care. “All this for: They should have stopped with zero Covid last spring. I don’t see what good these eight months of zero Covid policy have done for them,” he sighs.
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