China’s COVID crisis and the dilemma facing its leaders
Published: 10 May 2022
Commentary
What can China do to resolve a crisis that threatens not just the health and security of its people, but of the world’s largest economy?
More than two years after a deadly strain of coronavirus was first identified in the central city of Wuhan, China remains locked in a COVID crisis. Around 400 million people are currently thought to be living under some form of lockdown across the country. One of China’s largest cities, Shanghai, has been paralysed for the past month, with many of its residents hemmed in by hastily erected metal fences. The capital, Beijing, is now striving to avoid a similar fate.
The extraordinary story of China’s ongoing, and increasingly desperate, struggle against COVID-19 combines hubris at its own early public health successes with a failure to sufficiently vaccinate its elderly people, and is fuelled by rising anti-Western sentiment over the last five years. The result is that China now faces a dilemma: either the high numbers of deaths and overwhelmed health services that would result from a rampant virus, or the rapidly mounting social and economic costs of prolonged lockdowns and stay-at-home orders nationwide.
But resolving China’s COVID dilemma and finding a route out of the pandemic is complicated by the difficulties of challenging a "zero-COVID" strategy so closely associated with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping. Xi is due to be re-appointed for a controversial third term as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party at its five-yearly Congress in the autumn. He will not want a rampant virus and high death rates to tarnish his reputation and undermine his, and the Party’s, claims that they have handled the pandemic better than other countries.
How did China get to this point? And what can it do to resolve a crisis that threatens not just the health and security of its people, but of the world’s largest economy – and those of the many countries that rely on its vast supply chains.
At the University of Glasgow’s Scottish Centre for China Research, we have been tracking the rollercoaster evolution of the Chinese government’s COVID strategy, and the impacts of its containment measures, since news of the virus first reached us in early 2020. Combining on-the-ground reports from researchers with reviews of policy documents and social media outpourings, this is our analysis of China's COVID crisis – present, past and future.
See the full article on The Conversation website
First published: 10 May 2022