The stories from Shanghai, a city of 25 million entering its fourth week of COVID-19 lockdown, have been harrowing.
Millions have been confined to their homes, their movements monitored by pandemic police in white hazmat suits. Almost 300,000 people who’ve tested positive or had contact with someone positive have been forcibly moved to spartan quarantine centers.
Videos on social media have shown people fighting over food or screaming for help from their apartment windows: “Save us! We don’t have enough to eat!”
For two years, China’s response to the pandemic has been the draconian approach known as “zero COVID.” It succeeded in stopping the virus’s spread in 2020, when no vaccines existed and exposure was more often fatal.
Now, though, most infections stem from the relatively mild omicron variant, and an enviable 88 percent of people in China are fully vaccinated. Still, the government’s response has been total lockdown.
The result has been the needless disruption of millions of lives and a blow to the world’s second-largest economy, with effects that ripple across the world.
In Greater Shanghai, China’s economic capital, workers cannot reach their jobs. Construction projects have halted. Assembly lines for Apple and other major brands have suspended operations.
Supply chains are in chaos. Truck and train traffic have plunged. And according to unofficial reports, hundreds of container ships are stuck unloaded in the region’s ports.
The problems aren’t confined to Shanghai. Japan’s Nomura Bank reported last week that 45 Chinese cities, with almost 400 million inhabitants total, were in some form of lockdown.
In the face of adverse data, you might expect China’s leaders to soften the zero COVID policy for the sake of economic growth. That’s what has happened, at least tacitly, in the U.S., where the Biden administration has relaxed its COVID-19 recommendations in view of the diminished threat of fatalities.
Not in China.
“Prevention and control work cannot be relaxed,” President Xi Jinping said. “Persistence is victory.”
The problem is political: Zero COVID has been one of Xi’s signature policies, and he doesn’t appear interested in diluting it — especially as he approaches a Communist Party Congress this fall that is expected to award him a third five-year term. In a democratic country, a leader would worry about bad economic news in the middle of a reelection campaign. Xi doesn’t have that problem; there’s no sign of a challenge.
But Xi still faces a long-term economic challenge. His larger goal is to move China into the ranks of advanced high-income countries.
Since Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in the 1970s, China has grown prosperous thanks to low-wage export manufacturing and an inexhaustible supply of workers. But one of Xi’s core promises is that a modernizing economy will deliver higher wages. Meanwhile, China’s population are projected to shrink, a product of its old “one-child” policy.
Meanwhile, Xi is employing another time-honored device to bolster domestic support for his regime, even in the face of an economic downturn: unbridled nationalism.
“The regime has deliberately ratcheted up the sense of antagonism between China and the West,” Aaron L. Friedberg, a China scholar at Princeton University, said. “And it’s actually been quite successful at that.”
When China accuses the U.S. of being at fault for Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine, he said, Americans and the Biden administration aren’t its main audience.
“I don’t think it’s aimed at us,” he said. “It’s aimed at the domestic audience and at the developing world — showing that China is emerging as the leader of the global south, willing to stand up to the West.”
Russia’s war in Ukraine will end someday. When that happens, China — with its economic challenges and its ambitions of international leadership — will reassume its status as the most important global rival to the United States.
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