The Yomiuri Shimbun via AP Images
A medical worker wearing a protective suit sets up a barricade at a closed housing complex in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19, November 29, 2022, in Beijing.
On November 25, protests in China against the government and its zero-COVID policy broke out in the Xinjiang region of Western China. The immediate spark was a fire in an apartment building in the region’s capital city, Urumqi, which took over three hours to be extinguished and killed ten people. Protesters pointed to the restrictive zero-COVID policy as a hindrance that prevented emergency services from putting out the flames and saving lives sooner. Videos, quickly censored by the Chinese government, show fire trucks blocked by metal gates and barriers meant to keep people at home. As a result, the fire truck’s water appears to fall just short of the flames.
Nearly three years into the pandemic, most countries across the globe have pulled back from the most restrictive COVID-19 containment measures thanks to how mass vaccination and (alas) mass infection have boosted population immunity, as well as treatments like Paxlovid. But China has doubled and tripled down on containment. COVID testing is undertaken en masse within the population, and anyone with a positive test can be forced to remain home at gunpoint. With enough cases, whole neighborhoods or even major cities are put under lockdown until the number of new cases drops.
China claims this approach saves lives. Early in the pandemic, when zero-COVID was managed relatively easily (while the United States blundered into mass infection and death), this was certainly true. But today, with the rise of the ultra-contagious omicron variants, zero-COVID has become more and more difficult. Small brushfire outbreaks are now common, and today China is suffering its second major outbreak after a serious one in April, with official statistics reporting more than 35,000 cases multiple days in the past week despite strict lockdowns. The consequences could be deadly and politically explosive.
There are three reasons. First, China’s domestically produced vaccine is not very good. According to a study from Hong Kong, the Sinovac vaccine has an effectiveness of just 60 percent. Furthermore, its recipients “were three times more vulnerable to die compared to those inoculated with the German Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.” The Chinese company Fosun Pharma signed a joint venture with BioNTech to produce an mRNA vaccine but has been waiting for approval for over a year. Ian Johnson, the Stephen A. Schwarzman Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, believes China’s refusal to approve the vaccine is because they “want to have their own domestic champion” to develop the vaccine. “The contract from the Chinese government to make 1.4 billion vaccines and another 1.4 billion boosters, that is a lot of money.” he told the Prospect.
Second, while Western countries prioritized vaccinating the elderly, China has not. While about 90 percent of the whole population has gotten a primary sequence of shots, just 66 percent of those over 80 years old have—and just 40 percent have gotten a booster shot. And as Liyan Qi and Raffaele Huang report at The Wall Street Journal, China has also not taken advantage of the time bought by zero-COVID to build out its rickety medical system.
Zero-COVID backlash appears to be fueling broader unrest.
This combination of a bad vaccine, poor vaccination coverage of the elderly, few prior infections, and insufficient hospitals has left China vulnerable to a truly murderous outbreak. That’s exactly what happened earlier this year in Hong Kong, which is much richer than mainland China.
Zero-COVID is the only thing standing in the way, but it is creating severe side effects of its own.
One is political unrest. For Xinjiang, lockdowns were nothing new. The region had already been under lockdown for over 100 days (the lockdown began on August 12). There had been complaints of food scarcity, charging the Chinese government with not providing people with enough food to eat during their forced confinement. In September, more than 600 people were arrested for protesting against the lack of food in Ghulja, a town in Xinjiang. Later, Radio Free Asia confirmed the deaths of 22 people in a single day due to starvation. The Chinese government censored information about the protest and other complaints about the lack of food. When a political system can’t feed its people, one can typically expect bread riots sooner or later.
Zero-COVID backlash also appears to be fueling broader unrest. After the fire on Friday, people in Umqiri protested the zero-COVID policy, marching and chanting to end the lockdowns. In less than a week, protests had spread to 17 cities throughout China—but with more radical demands. While many people protested for the end of lockdowns, others went further, calling for Xi Jinping to step down, for democracy and the rule of law, and even for the end of the Communist Party in China. Pieces of white paper appeared at these gatherings, a symbol of discontent held aloft by protesters. “They know what they want to express, and authorities know too, so people don’t need to say anything. If you hold a blank sheet, then everyone knows what you mean,” Xiao Qiang told The New York Times.
Economically, China’s lockdowns have had brutal effects in a country that prides itself on its economic strength. Analysts estimate GDP growth will be just 3 percent in 2022—the worst figure since 1990, aside from the pit of the pandemic in 2020. The CSI 300 Index is down 22 percent since the beginning of the year, and in October, 207.7 million people, responsible for one-fifth of China’s 2021 GDP, were under some form of lockdown policy. The economic hardships of COVID lockdowns are particularly affecting the younger generation, with youth unemployment at 18.7 percent in August. There is “a sense of let’s get back to the times when China’s economy was growing faster and tomorrow was a better day,” says Johnson. The economic slowdown and high unemployment “are all underlying issues that actually make the government’s challenge greater than first appears.”
President Xi has backed himself into a corner. Either he can loosen lockdown restrictions as protesters have requested, and risk carnage, or quadruple down on zero-COVID, risking further discontent. It appears Xi will go with the first option, as sources claim China will ease quarantine restrictions and mass testing. “The problem is, when they do that, they are going to have to accept that a lot of people are going to die. No matter how good the vaccine rate is or how good the vaccine is, the fact is there are people who are going to die from COVID,” says Johnson.
As for the protests, Johnson believes they are a significant moment but not a turning point in China. The protests “may be a harbinger of the future challenges the party faces in keeping a lid on things as it enters a period of slow economic growth.” China has made efforts to prevent protests from continuing—sending police to the protest locations, placing barriers along the routes, and shutting down a small protest and arresting protesters in Hangzhou. The Biden administration has supported the right of the Chinese to protest, with Republican leaders criticizing his response as lackluster. But for President Xi, foreign criticisms are the least of his problems.
