Very few have access to what goes on at the heart of China’s policy-making, so everything that happens is often unpredictable. As many prepared for a new massive curfew in Beijing in early December, similar to what they experienced in Shanghai for more than two months in the spring, the exact opposite happened. Just as China decided overnight on January 23, 2020 to seal the city of Wuhan from the astonished gaze of the rest of the planet, on December 7 the communist government suddenly ended the ironclad anti-pandemic policy that had been sweeping the country had dominated the lives of its citizens for nearly three years.
Voices inside and outside the country believe things could have been done better, with a greater collection of medical resources, an accelerated vaccination campaign among the most vulnerable – only 42.3% of those over 80 are getting the booster dose – and a phased strategy in which it might have been more convenient to wait for winter and the Chinese New Year, a festive period that falls on the 22nd of origin where sanitation tends to be more scant.
But it remains to be seen whether the U-turn and the associated wave of departures will see the country’s President, Xi Jinping, who was appointed Secretary-General of the XX for a third term in October to the cusp of power by a number of politicians from his faction. For Willy Lam, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the abrupt change shows that the Xi administration “does not care about the enormous loss of life”. Willy cites studies that predict the deaths of more than a million people in the coming months, “mostly elderly people”. Health consultancy Airfinity estimates that 1.7 million will die by April 2023.
This analyst concedes that there is “enormous public support” for lifting the restrictions, particularly among young people “who are fed up with three years of extreme lockdown policies.” But he believes it was a wrong decision: “Xi Jinping should have chosen a better occasion after the winter and proper preparation.” In his opinion, the change in direction has been influenced by Xi’s concentration of power unprecedented since Mao Zedong and economic suffocation after a disruption-ridden 2022: GDP growth is expected to hover around 3%, a far cry from Beijing’s 5.5% had suggested.
“The party leadership was very concerned about the poor economic figures,” said Willy. Now they hope that activity in the factories will pick up again and this will allow young people to find work. In 2022, youth unemployment will hit historic records at almost 20%. But the decision, he concludes, “was not even consulted with party officials, let alone public opinion.” “The Party’s and Xi’s reputation and authority have been severely damaged.”
sudden change of course
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Few knew how to foresee the change of course. Just nine days before the end of the zero-Covid policy, for example, the US diplomatic mission in China warned its citizens that the authorities would be expanding restrictions that include “residential quarantines, mass testing, lockdowns, transportation disruptions, detention and possible family separations.” “; encouraged them to keep a 14-day supply of medicines, bottled water and groceries.
The capital of 22 million people had just felt the hit of social protests on a political scale unheard of in the Xi era; a revolt against the restrictions that has even claimed the overthrow of the president. Shortly before, there were other sparks, but without political depth: among the migrant workers (from other provinces) locked in Guangzhou, one of the country’s industrial vectors, and among the employees of the world’s largest iPhone factory in Zhengzhou, from closures affected. Also in the remote province of Xinjiang, after a building fire killed a dozen people in late November, many citizens blamed overzealous sanitation efforts. The province is home to the Uyghur minority, against whom Beijing could be committing “crimes against humanity,” according to a report released this summer.
The cocktail of victims and their explosive potential began to become unmanageable for Beijing, observes a professor at a university who uses the tools of Marxist analysis to describe society’s reaction to “authoritarian” government: There were the capitalists, the petty bourgeoisie and also the class workers, in addition to the ethnic minorities. For the intellectual, who teaches in Beijing and wishes to remain anonymous, the demonstrations were the key to change. But the propaganda, he concludes, was responsible for immediately changing history and attributing the reopening to other factors, such as the decreasing virulence of the Covid and the economy.
Beijing responded with a strong police presence. Then with timid gestures of reopening. And when he finally dropped the anti-pandemic wall, the president didn’t even make an appearance. On December 7, the same day as the policy change, Xi traveled to Saudi Arabia to meet King Salman bin Abulaziz al Saud, among others. The silence about a central politics associated with his character surprised many. It took more than three weeks to pronounce it. “Our country is great,” he finally said in his traditional New Year’s speech on December 31st. “It’s natural for different people to have different concerns or take different viewpoints on the same issue.” Many interpreted the words as a reference to the protests. And he added: “We have entered a new phase of the Covid response in which difficult challenges remain.”
Almost overnight, China went from zero covid to so-called full covid, with a tsunami of infections, a spate of hospitalizations and likely deaths. The official figures include just 32 deaths from the coronavirus in the month since reunification: an average of just over one death per day in a country of 1.4 billion people. Authorities, on the other hand, are handling astronomical numbers internally of up to 250 million infected people in the first three weeks of December alone, according to recordings of a meeting of the National Health Commission revealed by Bloomberg.
lack of transparency
The World Health Organization has for weeks criticized Beijing for a lack of transparency on data on hospital admissions and deaths, sparking the wrath of China, which ensures information is shared “openly”. The restrictions that countries like the United States, Japan, Italy and Spain have begun to impose on travelers from China, in addition to the relevant recommendation from the European Union, threaten to open a new front in disputes between China and the West. . .
The data sent by Beijing is “pure bullshit,” says a Western health source based in the Chinese capital, which has first-hand knowledge of the testimonies of the country’s medical staff. “There is no doubt that there is a massive wave with very, very high infection rates” and “a huge excess mortality among older people”. As his Chinese colleagues tell him: “Of course people die. Of course, the pavilions are completely overcrowded. Of course they turned all other rooms into Covid rooms and stopped all kinds of selective interventions. Of course there will be people who will suffer because they will not be able to get the care they need for other conditions.”
Despite the lack of reliable and systematic communications, images of overcrowded hospitals, overcrowded morgues and overcrowded crematoria circulate on social media and in Western media. Even China’s state-run newspaper Shanghai Daily this Friday published a video with harsh images of a hospital in the financial capital that admits 1,700 patients a day. “There are too many critical patients,” says one nurse.
apparent normality
Beijing is back to normal, at least on the surface. The frozen lakes are teeming with people sliding, the kids are back at school, there’s a significant bustle outside bars and clubs at night, and rush hour traffic has regained its slow, heavy force. But there are flashes that show something else is happening beneath the surface. “We work non-stop,” says a health worker on Thursday as she and her colleagues get into the emergency vehicle. You’ve just left a suburban hotel and convention center that’s now been converted into an emergency room of sorts. About 20 ambulances are parked in front of the door. The team gets in, turns on the lights, and exits the parking lot.
“It’s chaos. Hospitals are going through a systemic collapse, they are under a huge wave of new coronavirus infections, they are running out of beds,” describes a Beijing artist in his 30s who took part in the blank sheet protests. In his opinion, people are not too happy about the reopening. “We don’t have messenger RNA vaccines, and neither can we get Paxlovid and Veklury. [medicamentos occidentales para tratar la covid]. Getting ibuprofen or similar is extremely difficult. If you catch the Covid, all you can do is wait for it to heal or get worse.
Deng Libo, 45, a migrant worker who chains jobs in Beijing and lives in a small shack on the outskirts of town (for which he pays around 70 euros a month rent), is in favor of the change of strategy. With the restrictions, he concedes, life was “very limited” and his income quite “unstable”. “But reopening also comes with a cost.” As the Chinese New Year holiday approaches, Deng has returned to the small village in Jilin Province where he originally came from. He is confident things will be “much better” in terms of revenue when he returns.
The wave of infections may have started to decline in the capital, according to the western health source. But the influx of seriously ill patients has not subsided, he adds. For this expert, it all boils down to one point: “There was never a reopening strategy,” he says. “The biggest mistake is that they didn’t plan what was going to happen for a year,” he adds. “They weren’t ready and could have been. It was very clear that the various pillars of the reaction needed to be built. They’ve only focused on one thing, stopping the virus, but they’ve never focused on protecting people with vaccines, strengthening hospital capacity, changing the way hospitals work…”.
The key question is whether all of this will take its toll on Xi. This source ponders the answer at a popular cafe in Beijing’s diplomatic district; There is a lot of activity at the next tables. “We’ll have to see that,” he replies. “I think there are sections of the population that have lost a lot of trust and trust in the system and in the leaders, and now even more so. Is this a threat to the current system, to the leader? I do not know. Chinese society has been going through incredible waves of… pure bullshit.”
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