Weibo and WeChat criticized Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy and the suppression of the anti-covid campaign on Sitong Bridge
But as local officials pursue Beijing’s edict of stopping the spread of the virus above all other considerations – the system too, over and over again, has led to human tragedy.
A video of her shouting abuse at the hazmat-suited workers below went viral on Weibo and appears to show the growing public frustration with the Chinese government.
The woman has been under quarantine for half a year since returning from university in the summer, she shouts at the workers. They stare back at each other.
“The issue is Xi Jinping already associated himself with the ‘successful’ model of fighting Covid, so the zero-Covid policy now is a de facto Xi Jinping policy,” said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, adding that China’s handling of the virus in comparison to other countries remains a point of national pride for many Chinese.
That claim comes even as infections flare and a new strain circulates just days before the country’s most important political event, the Communist Party Congress beginning in Beijing on Sunday at which Xi Jinping is expected to cement his place as the country’s most powerful leader in decades.
Observers will be watching the twice-a-decade meeting for signs of the party’s priorities when it comes to its zero-covid stance, which has been blamed for worsening the economy and causing a collapsing housing market.
“Say no to Covid test, yes to food. No to lockdown, yes to freedom. Yes to dignity and not to lie. No to a cultural revolution. No to great leader, yes to vote. Don’t be a slave, be a citizen,” one banner read, while the other called for the removal of “dictator and national traitor Xi Jinping.”
There was a protest on the site of Sitong Bridge and search results for it were immediately deleted by Weibo. Key words such as Beijing, Haidian,warrior,brave man, and even “courage” were restricted from being searched.
Numerous accounts on Weibo and WeChat have been banned after they commented on the protest.
Many spoke to express their support and awe. Some shared the Chinese pop hit “Lonely Warrior” in a veiled reference to the protester, who some called a “hero,” while others swore never to forget, posting under the hashtag: “I saw it.”
Beijing hasn’t given up on Covid-19: Social and economic pressure in the China response to the recent lockdowns of the Central Economic Region
But, now, as Xi steps into an expected new era of his rule, that system – known today as the “dynamic zero-Covid” policy – is facing both social and economic pushback.
More than 300 million people across dozens of cities in China had been affected by full or partial lockdowns at one point last month, according to CNN’s calculations.
The city reported 47 Covid-19 cases on Thursday, one day after authorities ordered six out of its 13 districts to shut entertainment venues such as internet cafes, cinemas and bars. Some of the attractions at the Disney resort have been closed since Sunday.
Spooked by the possibility of unpredictable and unannounced snap lockdowns – and mindful that authorities have previously backtracked after suggesting that no such measures were coming – some people in the city have reportedly been hoarding drinking water.
That panic buying has been made worse by an announcement that Shanghai’s water authorities have taken action to ensure water quality after discovering saltwater inflows to two reservoirs at the mouth of the Yangtze River in September.
The cause of the rise in infections is not known, but authorities are racing to contain the spread of the coronaviruses strain after it was first detected in China.
The country has seen an increase in cases of domestic tourists even though it has banned people from going to China over the Golden Week holiday.
More than 240,000 university students in Inner Mongolia have been locked down on campuses due to the latest outbreak, according to Zhang Xiaoying, a deputy director of the regional Department of Education. And the outbreak on campus has led to punitive action, with one university Communist Party boss being sacked after 39 students from his institution tested positive.
Then there is the situation in far western Xinjiang, where some 22 million people have been banned from leaving the region and are required to stay home. According to an official tally, there were more than 400 new cases in the region on Thursday.
Beijing is unwilling to budge from its hardline stance. For three days this week, the state-run Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily published commentaries reiterating that China would not let its guard down.
The battle against Covid was winnable, it insisted. Other countries that had reopened and eased restrictions had done so because they had no choice, it said, as they had failed to “effectively control the epidemic in a timely manner.”
Meanwhile in China: The Rise of China and Its Impact on the World, Revealing China’s Most Popular Leader, Xi
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During China’s National Day holiday in early October, several expatriate friends and I took our young children – who are of mixed races and tend to stand out in a Chinese crowd – to the Great Wall on the outskirts of Beijing.
A few local families walked past us as we climbed a restored but deserted section of the ancient landmark. Noticing our kids, one of their children exclaimed: “Wow foreigners! With Covid? Let us get away from them. The adults remained quiet as the group quickened their paces.
After being anointed as China’s most powerful leader almost three years ago, he is poised to do it again on Sunday, when he is re-elected as the party chief.
The Great Wall, a top tourist attraction that normally draws throngs of visitors during holidays, was almost empty when we visited because of the policy of zero tolerance for Covid infections adopted byXi when he came to power.
China’s borders have remained shut for most international travelers since March 2020, while many foreigners who once called the country home have chosen to leave.
Authorities had discouraged domestic travel if there was a Omicron variant in the country. They are sticking to a heavy-handed policy of strict mass testing and contact tracing that often locks down entire cities for a few cases.
Unsurprisingly, holiday travel plummeted during the so-called “Golden Week” along with tourism spending, which fell to less than half of that in 2019, the last “normal” year.
Xi: From the Great Wall to the New China: The Realization of National Security and Corruption in a People’s Republic
Mr. Xi’s speech at the opening of the 20th party congress on Sunday made it clearer than ever that China is moving in the opposite direction from liberalization. Obsessed with national security, he is more focused on quashing all ideological and geopolitical challenges than on reform and opening up, the policies that brought China out of poverty.
The country’s internet filters and censors are the most extensive in the world, and have been fortified for years by the cyber police. Now supported by artificial intelligence, censors quickly scrub clean any posts seen as contradicting the party line – including on Covid.
On the Great Wall, the local child had made comments that reflected that. There is a danger in the “blame the foreigners” sentiment when it’s taken advantage of by adults in powerful positions.
A history paper released recently by a government-run research institute has gone viral as it, like Xi, upended a long-held consensus. Instead of denouncing the isolationist policy adopted by China’s last two imperial dynasties as a cause of their backward turn and eventual collapse, the authors defended its necessity to protect national sovereignty and security when faced with Western invaders.
The emperors of those dynasties rebuilt parts of the Great Wall but they failed to reverse their country’s decline. The high-tech tools that China’s current ruler has are better than the tools they had at their disposal. It seems that his walls will help him realize his ultimate goal, a rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
The speech that Mr. XI gave to the Communist Party congress contained just three references to market reforms, while a longer written version excluded more than a dozen others. He extolled state projects in space and computers, and pledged to create a larger role in the public sector, instead focusing on issues of national security and corruption.
When he did talk about markets, the message was established rhetoric. He lauded “socialist market economic reform,” while also arguing that China’s economy should “give full play to the decisive role of the market in resource allocation.”
They included a professor at the party’s top academy who helped train thousands of high-ranking cadres. An economist who would win China’s top economics prize for 2012. A young historian planning to teach a class about contemporary Chinese history, including sensitive periods like the Cultural Revolution.
The party has made a lot of progress under his leadership and he used the term new era 39 times in his speech. But for some Chinese, it has been a dark era — a shift away from a system that, while authoritarian, tolerated private enterprise and some diversity in public opinion, to one that now espouses a single ideology and a single leader.
China’s advanced online platform has given consumers unparalleled convenience to shop, dine and travel. Now, those technologies play a role in constraining daily life.
In order to track citizens and designate whether they are cleared to enter various places, a system is being put in place that is never before seen in China.
Across the country, basic activities like going to the grocery store, riding public transport, or entering an office building depend on holding an up-to-date, negative Covid test and not being flagged as a close contact of a patient – data points reflected by a color code.
If you’re going out in public, it’s a risk, as being placed under a doctor’s order, barricaded into a mall or office building, and being tested positive for HIV, is something that can happen at any time.
“(You see) all the flaws of big data when it has control over your daily life,” said one Shanghai resident surnamed Li, who spent a recent afternoon scrambling to prove he didn’t need to quarantine after a tracking system pinned his wife to a location near to where a positive case had been detected.
Li, who’d been with his wife at the time but received no such message, said they were eventually able to reach a hotline and explain their situation, ultimately returning her health code to green.
The Essence of Persistent Zero-Covid: Preparing for a Global Warfare of Disease Control in the Era of the Party Congress
“The essence of persisting with dynamic zero-Covid is putting people first and prioritizing life,” read a recent editorial in the People’s Daily – one of three along similar lines released by the party mouthpiece last week in an apparent bid to lower public expectation about any policy changes ahead of the Party Congress.
“What makes you think that you won’t be on that late-night bus one day?” read a viral comment, which garnered more than 250,000 likes before it was censored – one of a number of glimpses into rising frustration with the cost of the policy.
There was a rare political protest in Beijing last week that saw banners hung from a bridge on the Third Ring Road that was part of a social control policy.
The opening of the party’s five-yearly leadership shuffle was attended by 2,300 mostly surgical-mask clad Communist Party members. The party has protected the people’s health and safety to the greatest extent.
The impact of those controls is becoming sharper, as lockdowns – which have repeatedly left people struggling for access to food and medicine and grappling with lost income and a mental toll – have become more frequent.
In the run up to the Party Congress, controls amplified – as local authorities around the country sought to tamp down on outbreaks coinciding with the major political event.
The threat posed by Covid is reduced because of the higher vaccine coverage. He said that maintaining high vaccine coverage was key for a plan to transition away from zero-covid, adding that the point had already been crossed.
“One scenario is that (China) might drop the zero-Covid policy, but some of the key components of the policy might be retained and repurposed,” said Huang, pointing to Xi’s focus on maximizing security in China, including via high tech means.
Outside experts say that, since the virus will stay in circulation beyond China, keeping tight controls and closed borders is just delaying the inevitable, and the focus should be on preparing, for example through raising elderly vaccination rates and increasing ICU capacity, as well as getting or expanding access to the most effective vaccines and treatments.
China has relied on homemade shots to fight its vaccinations since it backed a massive campaign in the early 20th century.
“The vaccines take time, the ICU expansion takes time – and if you don’t see effort to prepare for the change, that implies that they are not planning to change the policy any time soon,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
China’s Outbound Importance of the COVID-19 Outbreak in the Light of Social Protests and a Comprehensive Reinvestment Strategy
Already the health code system has been used to diffuse social protest – with petitioners who lost their savings in rural banks barred from protesting after their health codes inexplicably turned red.
Last month, China’s outbound shipments contracted 8.7% from a year earlier, much worse than October’s 0.3% drop. When the Chinese economy came to a near halt because of the initial coronavirus outbreak, it was the worst performance since February 2020.
Outbound shipments shrank in October after rising in September and well below analysts’ expectations, according to official data. It was the worst performance in more than a year.
The data suggests demand remains weak, putting more pressure on the country’s manufacturing sector and threatening a revival of the economy in the face of continued COVID-19 curbs.
Chinese exporters weren’t even able to capitalize on a further weakening in the yuan currency and the key year-end shopping season, underlining the broadening strains for consumers and businesses worldwide.
“The weak export growth likely reflects both poor external demand as well as the supply disruptions due to COVID outbreaks,” said Zhiwei Zhang, chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management, citing COVID disruptions at the Foxconn factory, a major Apple supplier, in Zhengzhou as one example.
Apple said in a statement it expects lower-than- anticipated shipments of high-end iPhone 14 models after a production cut at a plant in China.
We think that exports will continue to fall in the coming quarters. The shift in global consumption patterns that pushed up demand for consumer goods during the pandemic will probably continue to unwind,” said Zichun Huang, economist at Capital Economics.
“We think that aggressive financial tightening and the drag on real incomes from high inflation will push the global economy into a recession next year.”
The world second-biggest economy is stuck in a rut and isn’t expected to get out of it until the final quarter of 2022, according to October factory and trade figures.
Chinese policymakers pledged last week to prioritize economic growth and press on with reforms, easing fears that ideology could take precedence as President Xi Jinping began a new leadership term and disruptive lockdowns continued with no clear exit strategy in sight.
“We are too depressed to work”: A Chinese politician tells us about his “political depression” after the China trade conference
The overall trade figures resulted in a slightly wider trade surplus of $85.15 billion, compared with $84.74 billion in September, missing a forecast of $95.95 billion.
When the ability to govern decreases, even in the absence of a specific policy from the top, the ineptitude, brutality, and ignorant officials will brew disasters for the common people they rule over.
Many business people have lost money because of “zero- Covid”, a government policy that locked millions of people out of their homes for weeks at a time as the government tries to eliminate the coronaviruses.
Despite many conversations over the years, we never talked about politics. I was surprised when he called after the party congress to talk about his “political depression.” He said he used to be very nationalist and believed that the Chinese people were the most hard working in the world. Now, he and many of his friends spend most of their time hiking, golfing and drinking. “We’re too depressed to work,” he said.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/07/business/xi-jinping-china-party-congress.html
A Tech Entrepreneur in China: Dealing with Covid Lockdowns and the Economic Decline during the November 2016 Political Reheating Phase of the Second Great Wall Wall
Until a year ago, his start-up was doing so well that he was planning to take it public. Then he lost a big chunk of his revenues and his new hires sat idly with nothing to do when cities were locked down under the “zero-Covid” rules. He said he has no choice but to move his family to North America because he has to lay off a lot of people.
The tech entrepreneur from Beijing who texted me after the party congress recounted a chilling experience. In May, when there were rumors that Beijing could be locked down, he felt he could not tell his employees to leave work early and stock up on groceries. He was worried that he could get reported for spreading rumors since people had been taken into custody by the police. They were only told to leave early if they had things to take care of.
November’s economic slump happened before Beijing abruptly eased its repressive pandemic restrictions earlier this month. Top leaders signaled at an important political meeting last week that they will shift focus back to growth and seek a turnaround of the economy next year.
A number of indicators pointed to a decline in economic activity last month. Retail sales in November were lower than a year ago. The retail spending decline was the worst since May when Covid lockdowns wreaked havoc on the economy.
Investment in the property sector, which accounts for as much as 30% of China’s GDP, plunged by 9.8% in the first 11 months of the year. Property sales in value went down more than 26%.
The Rise and Fall of Consumption: Implications for the Next Twenty Years of the Covid Epidemic in the Philippines, according to Fu Jiaqi
“In November, Covid outbreaks spread to most parts of the country, forcing residents to cut travel and stay at home, which hit consumption heavily,” Fu Jiaqi, a statistician at the NBS, said in a statement on Thursday accompanying the data release.
He said personal interaction was greatly affected by consumption activities. The Catering sector’s revenues fell last month.
Big ticket items like cars, furniture, and high-end consumer electronics, saw their sales plunge as consumers were wary of spending during a weak economy. Spending on household appliances and devices went down more than 18%. Car sales dropped over 4%.
The State Council and the Communist Party’s Central Committee issued a plan on Wednesday to boost domestic demand and investment in the next twenty years. It cited rising external risks, including global economic and geopolitical uncertainties.
But experts have warned that the country is poorly prepared for such a drastic exit, having fallen short on bolstering the elderly vaccination rate, upping surge and intensive care capacity in hospitals, and stockpiling antiviral medications.
According to the professors at the University of Hong Kong, a nationwide reopening could lead to over 700 deaths per million people.
The surge of infections would “likely overload many local health systems across the country,” said the research paper, released last week on the Medrxiv preprint server and which has yet to undergo peer review.
Simultaneously lifting restrictions in all provinces would lead to hospitalization demands 1.5 to 2.5 times of surge hospital capacity, according to the study.
China faces an infection crisis: the first wave of the lunar new year virus is expected to last for three months beyond the December 7 mass lockdown
With fourth-dose vaccination coverage of 85% and antiviral coverage of 60%, the death toll can be reduced by 26% to 35%, according to the study, which is funded partly by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Hong Kong government.
The deaths were the first to be officially reported after the lifting of restrictions on December 7. Chinese social media posts show demand for Beijing funeral homes and crematoriums has gone up in recent weeks.
An employee at a funeral home on the outskirts of Beijing told CNN they were swamped by the long queues for cremation, and customers would need to wait until at least the next day to cremate their loved ones.
Other major cities are also facing a surge in infections. In the financial hub of Shanghai, schools have moved most classes online starting from Monday. In the southern metropolis of Guangzhou, authorities have told students that are already taking online classes and pre-schoolers not to prepare for a return to school.
In the megacity of Chongqing in the southwest, authorities announced on Sunday that public sector workers testing positive for Covid can go to work “as normal” – a remarkable turnaround for a city that only weeks ago had been in the throes of a mass lockdown.
Chinese experts have said that the worst is yet to come. Wu Zunyou, the chief epidemiologist at the Chinese CDC, said the country is being hit by the first of three expected waves of infections this winter.
Speaking at a conference in Beijing on Saturday, Wu said the current wave would run until mid-January. The second wave is expected to last from late January to mid-February next year, triggered by the mass travel ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday, which falls on January 21.
Every year, hundreds of millions of people who have left their hometowns to build a life in China’s fast growing cities pour into trains, buses and planes to see their family – a weeks-long travel rush known as the largest annual human migration on Earth.
2022 was supposed to be a triumphant year for China and its leader Xi Jinping, as he began his second decade in power with a pledge to restore the nation to greatness.
The Covid crisis that China faced during the Winter Olympics: From the Olympic bubble to the First Term of the Third Term in Liaoning, China
In its tightly sealed, meticulously managed Olympic bubble, the ubiquitous face masks, endless spraying of disinfectant and rigorous daily testing paid-off. Even as the Omicron variant raged in the world, the Winter Olympics were largely free of Covid thanks to the rapid identification and handling of any infections arriving in the country.
The success added to the party’s narrative that its political system is superior to those of Western democracies in handling the pandemic – a message Xi had repeatedly driven home as he prepared for a third term in power.
But it didn’t take long for Omicron to seep through the cracks of zero-Covid. By mid-March, China was battling its worst Covid outbreak since the initial wave of the pandemic, reporting thousands of new cases a day, from northern Jilin province to Guangdong in the south.
Not being able to get out of a trap of his own making, he tied himself closely to zero- Covid. It was too dangerous for him to leave it, as there was a risk of infections and deaths posing too great a risk to his authority.
And so instead of vaccinating the elderly and bolstering ICU capacity, authorities wasted the next crucial months building larger quarantine facilities, rolling out more frequent mass testing, and imposing wider lockdowns that at one point affected more than 300 million people.
The migrant workers left their locked- down factory to escape the outbreak at China’s largest iPhone assembling site. The boy died of gas poisoning in a hospital after he was blocked from being brought to the hospital. A 4-month-old girl died in hotel quarantine after a 12-hour delay in medical care.
Then, in late November, a deadly apartment fire in the western city of Urumqi finally ignited public anger that had been simmering for months. There were many people who believed the lockdown measures had hampered rescue efforts.
Protests erupted across the country, on a scale unseen in decades. On university campuses and the streets of major cities, crowds gathered to call for an end to incessant Covid tests and lockdowns, with some decrying censorship and demanding greater political freedoms.
In the city, protesters demanded that the most powerful and authoritarian leader in decades step down.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/27/china/china-2022-zero-covid-intl-hnk-mic/index.html
The impact of the government’s zero-Covid ban on the world economy and its prospects for the reopening of the next few years
On December 7th, the government announced a drastic change of approach, which was effectively abandoning zero- Covid.
While the easing of restrictions has long been welcomed by many, the sudden nature of it has left them unprepared and left them to fend for themselves.
Over-the-counter cold and fever medicines – which had been restricted from purchase under zero-Covid – sold out instantly at pharmacies and on online shopping sites. Huge lines are forming outside thefever clinics and emergency rooms of the hospital. There are a lot of bodies in crematoriums.
The World Health Organization warned that it would greatly underestimate the true death toll, because the government narrowed the criteria for counting deaths from Covid infections.
If the true scale of the outbreak and deaths are accurate, it’s a serious blow to the government’s credibility because it’s justified by the need to save lives.
Beijing’s recent pivot from its stringent zero-Covid strategy — which had long choked businesses — is expected to inject vitality into the world’s second-largest economy next year.
And with the global economy now facing significant challenges, including energy shortages, slowing growth and high inflation, China’s reopening could provide a much-needed and timely boost.
Economists say the process of reopening might be choppy and painful, with the economy in for a bumpy ride in the first few months.
The Chinese Economy in the Spotlight: How is China going to respond to China’s crisis in the last three-year economic crisis?
Many people have been driven indoors and emptied of shops and restaurants because of the rapid spread of infections. Factories and companies have also been forced to shut or cut production because more workers are getting sick.
The economy is expected to recover after March. In a report, HSBC economists projected a contraction in the first quarter but 5% growth for the rest of the year.
Construction of pre-sold homes across the country has been halted due to the crisis in the industry. That triggered a rare protest by homebuyers this year, who refused to pay mortgages on unfinished homes.
While Beijing has made efforts to rescue the sector, statistics still paint a gloomy picture.
At the policy meeting, which took place earlier this month, the leaders promised to focus on boosting the economy next year, along with new measures that will help the property sector and boost market confidence.
According to Capital Economics analysts, the measures announced so far aren’t enough to drive a turn around, but policymakers have said that more support is on its way.
But in recent months, the trade sector — which makes up around a fifth of China’s GDP and supplies 180 million jobs — has started showing cracks from a global economic slowdown.