The government of China has shrugged off and moved on from the failures of its Covid policies, but those may have left permanent scars on its ability to govern.
China’s Hidden COVID Catastrophe | Foreign Affairs - Yanzhong Huang:
February 16, 2023 - "In late November, after years of large-scale lockdowns, closures, quarantines, and almost constant mass testing, Chinese citizens took to the streets and, for the first time, called into question the leadership of President Xi Jinping. Soon after, in response to the simmering discontent and other pressures, the government ended, virtually overnight, the 'zero COVID' measures it had staked its public reputation on for nearly three years.... [W]hat followed was a public health emergency in which the virus spread across some 80 percent of China’s highly vulnerable population. Hospitals and morgues overflowed, and more than one million people may have died. On top of all this, by the end of 2022, economic growth ... had fallen to its lowest level in years.
"Yet instead of going into crisis mode, Beijing has largely shrugged off these setbacks. It offered no official explanation for its abrupt reversal of zero COVID, and it weathered the high death rates that followed mainly by suppressing official data and not talking about COVID fatalities.... And ... state censors even launched a campaign aimed at 'preventing the exaggeration of gloomy emotions.' To the outside world, meanwhile, China announced that it is open for business and that its economy is back.
"For now, the strategy appears to have worked. Unlike the zero-COVID measures, the chaos and death that followed reopening produced little domestic backlash against the government. Many ordinary Chinese seem to have concluded that the health crisis was not a big deal; in rural areas, where the health system is weak and the virus ran rampant, many people who experienced symptoms or even died were unaware that they had been infected. In the go-go atmosphere of Beijing’s reopening, COVID-19 seemed to be quickly forgotten....
"In fact, Beijing’s response to the pandemic — both before and after zero COVID — could have significant implications for the one-party state over the long term. For one thing, as the years wore on, the zero-COVID strategy, sustained at enormous social and economic cost, seemed to have more to do with tightening the government’s grip on society than with effective pandemic mitigation, as the protests in November made clear. And the strategy was ultimately unable to prevent a devastating viral wave.... Moreover, the high death toll that followed the sudden reopening — and the lack of active government engagement — raised new doubts about the ability of the regime to keep the population healthy.... [T]he government’s handling of the virus has also made clear that it is willing to sacrifice effective governance and even science in the interest of extending its power and control. In the long run, by breaking down the trust between Chinese society and the state, this power grab will create new challenges for Xi when the next crisis comes....
"The combined human toll of Beijing’s prolonged zero-COVID measures and its abrupt policy U-turn is by no means small. A growing body of evidence shows that during the three years that China maintained zero COVID, the very low rates of infection and mortality from the virus were achieved at significant cost to public health in other areas. For example, according to data from the National Health Commission, in 2020–21, deaths caused by cerebrovascular and cardiovascular diseases in urban areas increased by 700,000 over 2019 levels.... This very likely was the result of anti-COVID measures preventing timely access to health care....
"The rampant spread of infection and death that followed the abandonment of zero COVID on December 7 was in some ways even more traumatic.... According to Wu Zunyou, the chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC), by January 21, more than 80 percent of the population, or 1.13 billion people, had been infected with COVID-19. If we use his own case fatality ratio for the winter, which he put at between 0.09 percent and 0.16 percent, the reopening would have been associated with at least one million COVID deaths. Wu’s data is supported by other models, including the Economist’s projection of 1.0 to 1.5 million deaths, based on assumptions about the unencumbered spread of COVID-19 after the reopening; the British-based Airfinity’s estimate of 1.3 million COVID deaths between December 1 and February 6; and a New York Times analysis, published on February 15, also estimating between 1.0 and 1.5 million deaths since the reopening..... Of course, the viral wave was playing out over a far larger population, but it is very likely that there were more COVID-19 deaths in China in two months than there were in the United States over the span of three years....
"[T]he estimated deaths the Chinese government claims to have avoided — 950,000 during 2020–21, according to Wu himself — have very likely been canceled out by the deaths associated with the messy and chaotic policy reopening. In other words, China spent billions of dollars maintaining an economically disruptive and ultimately socially damaging zero-COVID program for years only to suffer the same, if not worse, health consequences in the end....
"Despite the multiple ways they have undermined the government’s credibility, Xi’s COVID blunders do not pose an existential threat to his regime. The government has continued to show it can cope with even deep challenges to its rule.... Still, Xi’s extreme COVID strategies have left lasting scars on the Chinese state and its ability to govern....[I]t will be difficult for the hundreds of millions of Chinese who were affected by Beijing’s power overreach over the past three years to forgive and forget. In addition to eroding public trust in the government, the COVID crisis has made clear that a political system that has been tailored to a single superordinate figure is highly susceptible to disruption, shocks, and arbitrary decision-making. For now, like their government, ordinary Chinese may be glad to return to business as usual. But barring fundamental changes in the highly centralized and personalized rule under Xi, there is no guarantee that similar catastrophes will not be repeated with even greater consequences in the future."
Read more: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/chinas-hidden-covid-catastrophe
"Through the Storm: A look back into China's 3-year battle against COVID-19," China Global Television Network [state-run media], February 2023:
No comments:
Post a Comment