Change May Be Coming in China

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China is signaling that its three-year battle against COVID-19 is entering a “new stage.” What that looks like will have huge political and economic consequences.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

• The GOP can’t hide from extremism
• The most consequential First Amendment case this term
• Brian Stelter: the end of companion television

Playing at the Margins

Could China finally be moving on from its contentious zero-COVID policy? That’s what the government appears to be signaling. The shift would be long overdue, but also fraught with as many political, economic, and social challenges as keeping it in place. Zero COVID—China’s mandate to suppress to grow a mere 3.2 percent this year—seriously sluggish by Chinese standards. Yet President Xi Jinping has insisted zero COVID is best for China and has refused to budge. The tension boiled over this past weekend when protests against COVID controls erupted in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and other major cities across the country. They were tipped off by a fire in a residential building in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region, which left 10 dead. Many Chinese believe COVID restrictions hampered the rescue effort. The government responded as it always does to unrest: Police swarmed the streets of Beijing to suppress further outbursts. But officials have also suggested a shift is in the works. Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, who has been a zero-COVID enforcer, on Wednesday that “as the omicron variant becomes less pathogenic … our fight against the pandemic is at a new stage and it comes with new tasks.” The , a Communist Party–run news outlet, joined in to that COVID had become less dangerous. Such comments represent a departure from the usual messaging that COVID is a killer and that without strict controls, the virus will lead to deaths on an unacceptable scale. Hints of this change were percolating even before the protests. In mid-November, the top leadership announced that it was “optimizing” the COVID strategy by stripping away some of its more excessive strictures. What exactly this new phase will look like is not at all clear. The steps taken so far to ease the policy have been tweaks to the tough system of lockdowns, such as some reductions in quarantine periods. Earlier this week, Beijing authorities said they will not bar the entryways of locked-down buildings—a practice that should have been banned long ago as an affront to both safety and human dignity. More easing is sure to come. Cities have begun COVID-testing requirements, which had become an onerous burden on their finances and their citizens’ patience. China’s leaders seem to be aiming for some sort of halfway state in which they maintain many aspects of zero COVID in a more moderate form, hoping to simultaneously prevent an uncontrolled outbreak and appease public anger. That may not work. As long as the government continues to rely on detentions and shutdowns to fight COVID, the stagnant economy probably won’t be revived, and the people won’t be assuaged. Any easing will almost certainly result in a higher case count and thus greater deaths (made more likely by the government’s of vaccinating the elderly). That’s something the Communist Party seems to fear as a threat to its reputation and rule, and raises the possibility that policy makers would backtrack and reimpose stifling COVID controls. Political pitfalls abound as well. State propagandists have credited Xi personally for guiding the zero-COVID effort, and thus lifting it could appear as an admission of failure or error—unpalatable for a leadership that paints itself as infallible. More important, the Chinese regime and its supporters have marketed the success of zero COVID in containing the virus as evidence that China’s authoritarian political system is superior to other forms of governance, especially liberal democracy. Just in September, Xinhua, the state news agency, that “some governments were either indifferent to rising tallies, sluggish in action or impatient to press on with prudent, restrictive protocols” and so “they are now hastily turning the page when the pandemic is nowhere near the end.” If zero COVID breaks down, so will the narrative of autocracy’s superiority. China’s current COVID predicament is typical of Xi Jinping’s policy making. His penchant for extreme, often ideological positions; state action; and stubbornness in the face of changing circumstances are at the root of not just the COVID problem but also China’s larger economic woes and widening conflicts with most of the world’s great powers, including the U.S. Recently, Xi has shown some signs of softening beyond COVID: He agreed to restore dialogue with Washington on climate change, which he had cut off in August, apparently realizing his hostility to the U.S. had gone too far. Yet, as with COVID, such changes have been at the margins, not the core, of his policies. To get China back on track, he’ll have to display a degree of flexibility and pragmatism that has so far been absent. Until then, the country will remain tied up in knots of his making.