China’s leaders have a story to tell. They say the Communist Party leads the nation on behalf of the Chinese people and that it does so much more effectively than Americans and Europeans at home.
So-called Western democracies are marked by greed, arrogance and dysfunction. Americans, who cannot even agree on the legitimacy of their current president, want to tell us what is best for our people. Europeans, who built their prosperity on the basis of the enslavement of their former colonies, want to lecture us on human rights.
There is no better current example of the clear superiority of China’s political system, Chinese leaders argue, than the benefits of its life-saving “Covid zero” policy. According to official Chinese statistics, Covid has killed less than 5,000 Chinese citizens in a country of 1.4 billion people.
Yes, the Covid zero policy has imposed lockdowns and forced tens of millions of people to undergo coronavirus detection tests, but are these people now less “free” than the nearly 1 million Americans killed by Covid? American and European leaders, they say, protect the privacy of their citizens, while Chinese leaders protect the lives of their own.
Western officials point out that China’s limits on freedom of expression and information allow Chinese officials to hide the real scale of their country’s problems, in part to escape responsibility for their own mistakes.
They also remind the world that Covid appeared in the Chinese province of Hunan and that when Chinese doctors began to speak publicly about the risks of the disease, the Chinese public security service summoned Dr. Li Wenliang and accused him of “making false statements” and disturbing “social order”.
The decision of Chinese authorities to hide the truth about Covid and the dangers that the virus posed ensured the spread of the disease around the world. When the death of Dr. Li resonated heavily on Chinese social media, the state declared him a hero.
This political background is crucial to understanding the political strengths – and potential economic repercussions in China and around the world – of China’s ongoing battle against Covid-19.
The scale of this battle is unprecedented in history. The cities of Jilin (3.6 million inhabitants), Tangshan (7.7 million), Changchun (9 million) and Xuzhou (9 million) are under lockdown. But it is the near-total closure of Shanghai, China’s financial capital and largest city with more than 25 million people, that has attracted the most international attention.
The number of Chinese citizens now infected with the omicron variant has been rising. Because so few Chinese have been infected, few have developed antibodies that can protect them. And China has yet to develop vaccines with the high success rates of the innovative messenger RNA vaccines used in the United States and Europe. In response, the Chinese government has confined more than 50 million people to their homes without an effective plan to provide them with food and medical care for other problems. The lockdown in Shanghai has lasted longer than the state initially promised.
China relaxed the Covid zero policy in small ways, but it could do so much more. It could, for example, authorize Chinese state media to inform the public that the omicron is less dangerous than previous variants of Covid and is less likely to result in the hospitalization of those infected.
It could accept more infections and even more deaths, to reduce the harmful effects on public health and economic damage caused by the confinement of much larger numbers of people. But doing these things would recognize that the government needs to change course and allow citizens to question the infallibility of their leaders’ judgment.
This dilemma comes at a politically complicated time. Later this year, the Chinese Communist Party is expected to break with its past practice to grant Xi Jinping a third term as the nation’s supreme leader. The Chinese economy has been slowing for years, with rising wages weakening the low-pay manufacturing model that created the conditions for China’s historic rise from poverty to the world’s largest middle class.
The damage caused by Covid to the rest of the world has also slowed the global economy that fueled China’s rise. Russia’s war in Ukraine has created even more economic uncertainty. Now China’s own Covid zero policy has led to lockdowns that will push growth even further down. And the impact will be felt around the world.
It’s a warning that arguments about the relative merits of the Chinese and Western political systems miss a common problem: economic fallout and potential political turmoil, like Covid, doesn’t care much about borders.
