Zero COVID’s Failure Is Xi’s Failure

For three years, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, fought a remorseless battle against COVID-19. He called it a “people’s war”—a national struggle to defeat an unseen foe and save lives. The contest locked families in their homes for weeks, strangled the economy, and closed the country to the world. Other governments that failed to contain the pandemic may be indifferent to death and suffering, the message was, but not the Chinese Communist Party, which cares about life above all else.

And then, poof! Xi gave up.

“Zero COVID,” the policy that mandated all of the stringent lockdowns and rigid quarantines, is dead. Officially, the Chinese government will never admit that. The party paints itself as infallible and won’t acknowledge that it erred. The government insists that the fight against COVID is not over. But the new approach, announced on Wednesday, is no longer fixated on suppressing infections to nil—and to contain them at all. The public quickly realized that, reached its own conclusion about the risk of an explosive