The biggest cause of China’s stubbornness on covid is President Xi Jinping, who has made pandemic controls into a political campaign and loyalty test
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskAdaptable, evidence-driven and willing to trample the odd freedom for the greater good, Dr Wu is a symbol of much that China’s boosters admire about the country’s system of government. For four decades the world has gasped at China’s economic rise. Technocrats get much of the credit.
That record leaves outsiders baffled by China’s current approach to the pandemic, which is causing unsustainable damage to the economy while inflicting pain on tens of millions of locked-down citizens. For foreigners who thought they understood how the party derives legitimacy from competence and economic success, these are confusing times. Suddenly, officials do not look adaptable or open to foreign know-how.
China’s highest decision-making body, the Politburo’s standing committee, defensively declared on May 5th that relaxing controls would lead to “massive numbers of infections, critical cases and deaths”. This is correct, but ignores the extent to which it is the party’s fault. Abandoning pandemic controls risks disaster because China has a weak hospital system and old people with lots of chronic ailments. But above all, it is because China has not fully vaccinated 100m citizens over 60.
Yet rather than set China’s propaganda juggernaut onto an all-out vaccination drive, leaders have wasted months. Resources have been poured into mass testing sites and what the head of the National Health Commission ominously calls “permanent” quarantine hospitals. China has not approved any mvaccines, the most effective kind, essentially because the only two versions available are Western-made.
. A new essay on containing the pandemic in, a leading party journal, mentions Mr Xi 13 times, and the need to vaccinate old people once. At its meeting on May 5th the Politburo’s standing committee pledged to fight “any attempt to distort, question or dismiss China’s anti-covid policies”. Like Dr Wu, Mr Xi has proved sceptical foreigners wrong about pandemic controls. China’s lockdowns broke the country’s first wave of covid in 2020, despite Western doubts.
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