Analysis | China’s blockades bring the pandemic full circle

Instead of Wuhan, where the coronavirus emerged more than two years ago, the current city in focus is Shanghai Coastal Metropolis, which is nearing its fifth week of choking. The city is the latest manifestation of China’s brutal “zero hash” policy that imposes widespread restrictions on local populations to eradicate hard-to-imagine infections in many communities elsewhere.

The 26 million residents of China’s financial capital have been ordered to stay at home, barring periodic mass tests. Those who test positive are moved to quarantine centers, some of which have living conditions with 24/7 lighting and tens of thousands of beds with no privacy. In recent weeks, over 340 million people in China have been under some form of blockade.

Meanwhile, life in most of the rest of the world seems mostly normal, even with many Western countries reporting far more daily covid infections than China. Antonio p. President Biden’s chief medical adviser Fauci said this week that the United States has finally emerged from a “full blown epidemic phase” that has killed nearly 1 million people in the country. “We are really in a transition phase, from slowing numbers to hopefully more controlled and endemic,” Fuchs told the Washington Post.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that around 60% of the country is currently infected with Covid. The EU estimates this figure to be between 60 and 80 per cent for its population. There were the European countries one by one. Removal of restrictions on Covid In preparation for the summer of tourism and travel. Although the death toll is much higher than China’s, many Western societies are seeing that it is possible to continue living in the coveted shadow, thanks to vaccines and increased herd immunity.

In China this is impossible. The absolute dogma of “zero coid” brought by the government to the government of the country is to undermine the strict quarantine regimes that the government imposes on all communities, but the new strains of coronavirus are less deadly and dangerous if they are more contagious. “China was the first to hit the pandemic and the last to break out,” said J ვ rg Wutke, head of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce of the European Union. He told a Swiss specialized publication.

The Chinese government in Shanghai also sees the power of censorship and repression tested within its own borders. Chinese social media has aroused public anger at its blockade rule and misery, food shortages and deplorable status of some quarantine centers, and government censorship is playing to remove these videos and messages.

This moment recalls the early stages of the diffusion in Wuhan; In December, authorities silenced a local doctor who was trying to warn others about the dangers of the virus until the danger was clear, and then he complied.

“Censorship is more effective than two years ago, but it shows its limits,” said Xiao Qiang, a researcher on Internet freedom at the University of California, Berkeley. He told the New York Times. “They can’t solve the problem. People see that the government can bring this mistake to disaster. “

This is a real problem for Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is closely related to his “zero hash” policy. For months, this approach seemed safe deep in the pandemic. While countries from North America to South Asia have been ravaged by the virus, China has distanced itself. Wuhan, the first epicenter of the outbreak, held an epic summer party in the summer of 2020, at a time when transatlantic travel was practically at a standstill. The “people’s war” against the “invisible enemy” has been won, as the Xi government describes its anti-Covit efforts.

But now things are different because the Omicron version violates the Chinese protection. Being locked up in Shanghai is a hammer, perhaps ineffective and profoundly damaging from an economic point of view. The maintenance of zero Covidy, including the possible initiation of a new curfew in Beijing, where cases are on the rise, has led to increased public anger and further economic slowdowns at home and abroad.

Currently, some analysts see a revolutionary collapse of state politics. “We think China’s economy is at its worst in 30 years,” Weijing Shan, founder of Hong Kong and president of one of Asia’s largest private equity firms, told brokers in a video conference. Received by the Financial Times. “Market sentiment for Chinese equities is also at its lowest point in the last 30 years. I also think that popular dissatisfaction in China is at the highest level in the last 30 years. “

Ditching existing measures, just as the governments of Australia and New Zealand finally decided to do after the spread of the infection became too difficult to contain, carries risks. One thing is that the rise in new cases may be due to the “relative weakness of Chinese-made vaccines and low vaccination rates in the elderly,” as James Palmer noted in Foreign Policy.

But above all, the end of “Bare Zero” will be the admission of failure of the autocrat, who always seems to have to seem infallible. “The ruling Communist Party of China admits that it does not actually have a system superior to the Western liberal democracies.” Written by Minxin Paym, Professor of Government, in Nikkei Asia Review. “As a consistent advocate of a zero-sum COVID strategy, President Xi may have to take responsibility for maintaining the current trajectory despite mounting evidence of its volatility.”

“Over the past two years, the party leadership and the government have built a narrative that China is coping with the epidemic far better than the collapsing West.” Vutke said. “Now this narrative is exploding in their faces.”