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Xi’s Covid Retreat Shows China Masses They Have Real Power
By Bloomberg NewsDecember 7, 2022
Workers remove a testing booth from a site in Beijing on Dec. 3.
Photographer: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
For months, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s government insisted that his Covid Zero policy would “stand the test of history,” and vowed to punish anyone who questioned the approach.
Yet mere days after spontaneous street protests broke out seeking an end to constant testing and lockdowns, with some taboo-busting demonstrators calling for Xi himself to step down, the Communist Party is swiftly moving to dismantle the core pieces of a strategy that made China a global outlier.
China on Wednesday eased a range of Covid restrictions, including allowing some people to quarantine at home rather than in centralized camps and scrapping test requirements to enter most public venues. That followed previous moves by major cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen to wind back mass testing and sweeping lockdowns that pushed China’s economic growth to near a four-decade low.
The abrupt U-Turn amounts to a de facto admission of failure by Xi, who spent his first decade in office consolidating power and moving to stop Chinese people from organizing even for seemingly innocuous activities, like picking up trash. Now they suddenly have a new template for pushing back against the party that could potentially be applied to a wider range of grievances, including their ability to have a say in a political system now dominated by Xi alone.
“Politically the biggest problem for Xi is perhaps the consequence of backing down from public demands,” said Weifeng Zhong, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. “Now that people have seen that chanting ‘Down with Xi Jinping’ can get them what they want, we should expect more disobedience down the road.”
Investors had anticipated China would ease Covid restrictions after Xi secured a third term at the party congress in October, and authorities issued new guidelines on Nov. 11 aimed at reining in excessive Covid curbs. But as cases surged with colder weather, cities reverted to broad lockdowns and mass testing in all but name, sparking public anger.
It was only after protests flared at the end of November before authorities began to shift course more rapidly, with softer rhetoric toward the dangers of Covid in state media and official statements followed by the sweeping changes Wednesday that jettisoned the key Covid Zero tenet of forced isolation.
Chinese officials downplayed a link between easing Covid controls and the protests. Liang Wannian, head of a National Health Commission expert panel, told a briefing Wednesday that the new measures aim to make China’s Covid control more scientific, targeted and feasible.
“This new optimization is not completely relinquishing control, but a proactive rather than reactive adjustment,” he said.
While Covid Zero is easily the biggest headache facing China’s 1.4 billion people, it’s far from the only one. Xi has ordered sweeping crackdowns on sectors like education and tech, moved to restrain civil society and reversed modest advancements made in gender equality. At the same time, the middle class has endured a property-market crash and one of the world’s worst-performing stock markets.
One of the main challenges for Xi, who is set to rule for the foreseeable future after putting his allies on the top leadership body in October, will be winning over China’s younger generation who grew up during some of the country’s most open and wealthy years. Last week, Xi told European Council President Charles Michel the protesters were “mainly students and teenagers” frustrated with the pandemic, according to a European Union official.
‘Political Depression’
The general frustration among younger people in China has spawned numerous descriptors, including “lying flat” and “political depression,” or zhengzhi yiyu. On Wednesday, a Politburo meeting helmed by Xi urged officials to “spur entrepreneurial vitality to get things done from the whole society,” a possible nod to the broader malaise gripping the nation.Li, an advertising worker, joined Shanghai’s protests at Wulumuqi Road late last month after she saw photos circulating of the gatherings on WeChat. She brought candles to honor the victims of a fire in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, that served as the tipping point for hundreds to hit the streets in various cities across China.
China is “destroying itself, damaging its economy, its people — everything,” said Li, who asked to only be known by her last name for fear of reprisals.
Even before the recent wave of protests, signs were emerging all over China that discontent had reached a breaking point.
Shanghai saw clashes between citizens and health workers and a wave of anti-government posts on social media during a two-month lockdown earlier this year. In October, a lone protester put up banners calling for the end of Covid Zero and the removal of Xi at a busy traffic junction in Beijing. Last month, violent protests erupted at Apple Inc.’s main iPhone-making plant as anger at lockdowns boiled over.
Once taboo, more people are speaking up in a country where a massive surveillance system and a rigorous censorship apparatus is designed to keep the masses quiet.
“While the recent protests may not change much how China is governed, they caused Beijing to accelerate its pivot away from a Covid-Zero policy, showing that Chinese people have not lost all agency in their relationship with the government,” said Neil Thomas, a senior analyst at Eurasia Group, a political risk advisory and consulting firm.
Besides street protests, the excessive Covid restrictions are teaching China’s people how to organize themselves and become aware of their rights. On the same weekend street protests took hold, dozens of residential communities in Beijing successfully negotiated with local police and neighborhood committees to end lockdowns.
In doing so, residents would quickly share success stories on WeChat along with the strategies they employed, such as calling in the police and demanding to see official documents, as well as primers on how to interpret certain laws and regulations. They also shared templates of letters calling on authorities to keep Covid patients at home rather than sending them to makeshift hospitals with poor conditions.
Signs are emerging that such tactics could spread. On Sunday, students in Wuhan held a peaceful protest demanding transparency regarding a university’s Covid Zero rules.
Even as Xi moves to ease Covid restrictions to stem anger in society, he faces the risk of a skyrocketing death toll if he goes too fast. China’s vaccination rate among the elderly remains comparatively lower than other nations in the region that opened up after pursuing Covid elimination, while hospital and ICU capacity is also lagging. Feng Zijian, a former deputy chief at China’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Wednesday that 80%-90% of the Chinese population may eventually be infected with Covid-19.
That would undermine Xi’s main justification for Covid Zero — that it was ultimately a more humane and moral policy than the one employed in the US and Europe, which saw many elderly people perish from the virus in the early days of the pandemic.
“The biggest failure by far was to make Covid Zero a point of pride ideologically in a competition of systems, showing China in state media and public messaging to be superior to the ‘failed West,’” said Frank Tsai, a lecturer at the Emlyon Business School’s Shanghai campus. “This from two years ago made it hard for the party to back down.”
The Communist Party leaned heavily on censorship and its official media to control the narrative over Covid Zero, noting the dangers of opening and vilifying other nations as irresponsible. Yet that eventually fell apart as Chinese citizens saw other nations open up, including tens of thousands of maskless fans watching the World Cup.
In the end, the public played a role in prompting Xi to change the rhetoric around Covid — and accede to their demands.
“Xi looks like the emperor without clothes on,” said Tsai. “He was untouchable, until actually he was shown to be touchable after all.”
