China’s protests against Zero Covid show cracks in the country’s narrative

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In June, President Xi Jinping defended China’s “zero Covid” strategy as “Correct and effective. Doing nothing—or “laying flat,” as Xi called it—would have meant devastation.

Currently, protests They are challenging China’s strict covid lockdown policies, and through that, the story told by the Chinese government about its correct and effective control of the epidemic. This narrative goes to the heart of the image China is trying to sell at home and, to some extent, abroad: Beijing’s success against Covid-19 also proves the legitimacy and superiority of its ruling model. Especially compared to liberal democracies, such as the United States.

“There is a very strong desire from Beijing to tell not only the Chinese people — but also to show the world — how responsible the Chinese government is to its people, and how the Chinese government makes all the hard decisions, implementing all the pressures,” said Yun Sun, senior fellow and director of the China Program at the Stimson Center. difficult, in order to protect human lives.”

The Chinese government thought it had a compelling case, at least in the early stages of the pandemic. after Beijing Early failure to identify and contain Covid-19The Chinese government has put in place aggressive policies — mass testing, strict quarantines, and surveillance — to try to keep Covid-19 cases at or near zero. That means far fewer cases, and far fewer hospitalizations and deaths. Compare that to the United States, which has struggled to contain Covid-19 and has been riven by political divisions, which together It leads to a chaotic mix of politics along with hundreds of thousands of deaths.

As the United States and many other countries dealt with waves of restrictions, reopenings and returns, China has begun to return to It’s almost as usual in early 2021. Although there is ample reason to doubt China’s official Covid-19 statistics, The country has recorded about 30,000 deaths Compared to more than a million in the United States – but also much less than in Western European countries, or even those democracies close to them, Like Japan. Each has a much smaller population than China.

The Chinese government wanted to “make the argument that in the capitalist United States, in a democracy, they let loose because the government needed to force you back to work, and they didn’t really care about the human cost of that,” Jacob said. Stokes, a senior fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Program at CNAS. “And there is an element that they really believe in.”

But once on the path to zero covid, China did not have an easy way out. As other countries have invested in vaccination campaigns and begun to fully reopen, China has committed to keeping the number of cases and deaths low well into 2021 and 2022, which means Cities close in the millions and need to reintroduce the testing and quarantine measures that sounded so often hypothetical And the It was cumbersome and imposed real costs. The recent protests began after deaths occurred in a fire in Urumqi, Where the population was under lockdownunleashed outrage over whether China’s promise — that its model protects the public — remains true.

The Chinese government has sold an account of how to successfully defeat Covid. Then the narrative moved away from her.

This narrative was crucial for President Xi. It makes up for the early failures that followed the outbreak in Wuhan. It justifies the economic slowdown in China. It justifies brutal actions, public sacrifice, and mental and emotional harm. Ultimately we care about you, the Chinese public, about your health and safety. China management framework Covid-19 as a demonstration of responsibility, stability and leadership in the world, and that to the public. A questionnaire since early in the pandemic It showed that the Chinese public saw China’s handling of Covid as an indication of its global rise, especially compared to the chaos in the United States.

But now it appears that China’s victory had serious limitations – namely, that China had no real exit plan from this strict containment strategy, especially with the development of Covid-19 and with omicron variants, become more transmissible. The vaccination campaign in China has also faltered. Its vaccines are not effective Many of its elderly residents remain unvaccinated. Chinese government actively It promoted misinformation about mRNA vaccines Most used in the West, which closed a road that would have helped fight the virus, made them more dependent on local shots.

The Chinese government “had a little arrogance, I think, about the extent to which this model meant that they would always be better at this than the rest of the world,” Stokes said. “Because that became part of the political debate, I think it may have overshadowed the public health policy process.”

The The government appears likely to ease even the most stringent of its Covid-19 policiesand mitigate some Lockdown and testing restrictions. But it also could potentially mean an increase in cases, and depending on how much of an opening that really is, it could be a huge spike in the population that has it. Huge immunity gap compared to other countries around the world. And if that is the case — that Covid-zero has not mitigated the worst of the pandemic, but instead has delayed and delayed it, with the Chinese government never using the time to prepare for real transmission away from it — this is undermining the “correct and “effective” narrative of zero- Covid.

“Given the fact that China is basically experiencing a modicum of devastation in terms of health effects, it would really crush the narrative. I think that narrative is important,” said Jeremy Lee Wallace, an associate professor at Cornell University who researches China and authoritarian regimes.

However, the protesters’ defiance also shows that China’s Covid narrative is already beginning to erode. But after three years, the pandemic and circumstances have evolved. The Chinese economy has faltered, Weakening the other bargain of China’s authoritarian regime, and sacrificing political and civil liberties for the promise of economic growth and stability. That frustration is spreading, especially now, with the rest of the world largely opening up, China remains largely locked down and locked down. The Chinese government could try to censor that – say, trying to crop Roaring, maskless World Cup crowds on TV — but it’s impossible to completely disguise it.

“In the early months of the pandemic, the Chinese government showed, on the surface, competence only in terms of keeping numbers down — but these efforts are clearly not very costly,” said Joshua Bion, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Survey How Covid-19 has affected foreign policy sentiment among the Chinese public in 2020. “They put a real burden on the livelihoods of ordinary people, and that is what we see being expressed against the government and on the streets in Beijing.”

The Chinese government cares more about its domestic audience. But these protests are affecting their global image – and their ambitions

As the experts said, the domestic audience is most important here, but the Chinese government also sees value in convincing the rest of the world to buy what you’re selling. And in the early stages of the pandemic, it wasn’t exactly a hard sell — and it may have helped other countries, too Defense and promotion Strict lockdown and travel policies.

But using China’s Covid success in contrast to other countries, especially liberal democracies, it was always clear that this was top-down politics. Although Beijing tried to place some blame for Covid’s successes and failures on local officials, it ultimately tied Zero-Covid to its centralized system, and Xi Jinping himself – Who, by the way, is now captain for life. China’s insistence on its own uniqueness has also made it vulnerable in other areas, and its rejection of it is evident Western-made vaccines They may be more effective than the current crop of Chinese-made vaccines, the adoption of which would at least help speed up vaccination efforts, especially among the most vulnerable.

All of this may hurt some of China’s powers of persuasion with the rest of the world. some scholars They argued that Xi wants to remake the world around China’s leadership, to use its power to reset the global agenda so that it aligns with its interests, not those of the United States. China has used its economic clout, especially in the developing world, to try to make this happen, but it has also used those epidemiological contrasts with the West to bolster its image as a more reliable, stable, and less chaotic partner.

This is especially true in the global south, where China has invested a lot in trying to expand its reach. “What image does China present to the Global South at this moment? They often suggest that they have a better ‘democracy’ than the West, and that they have some knowledge of Chinese governance that they want,” said Joshua Eisenman, associate professor of politics at the Kew School of Global Affairs. Sharing with Developing Countries.” at the University of Notre Dame.

“I think we have to ask if that effort has been ruined here, because it’s unlikely that anyone looking at the coronavirus crackdown in China will say, ‘Get some of that.'” ‘

And while it’s unclear how these protests will end, and how much of a challenge they will present to Xi’s regime, they are a reminder that as much as the Chinese government represses and censors its population, there are limits to its reach. . “I think the protests have really made it clear that China is not a bloc — not everyone agrees with Xi Jinping and Xi Jinping all the way,” Wallace said. There are so many diverse opinions within China, and that people have their own ideas about their priorities for freedom in public health and their willingness to speak up. And people are willing to do that even in this very closed country.”

As Wallace said, this has important implications for global perceptions of China, not so much as whether the regime is weak or strong, but even in an authoritarian country, not everyone goes along with the images — and narratives — that the Chinese Communist has spouted. The party sought to create.

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