Americans Should Not Be Tempted by China’s COVID Policies
Authoritarian competence might seem appealing for a time. But the costs are too high.
The human capacity to transcend the past and even the present is powerful. Three years after a devastating coronavirus pandemic took hold, nearly every country has dropped restrictions and mostly resumed normal life. The one country where COVID has never seemed to end, however, is China.
After the country’s largest protests in decades, Chinese officials are finally some of their harshest “zero COVID” pandemic regulations. But China’s COVID regime still remains one of the world’s most restrictive, with officials retaining the ability to in designated “high-risk areas.” The adoption of zero-COVID measures and now their have revived a debate over whether autocracies like China are more effective at governance than democracies like America.
