“But what do they want in the end? To make us all crack?” In his apartment in northern Beijing, this university professor a few months from retirement is on the verge of a nervous breakdown: “We had planned to visit our daughter who lives in the United States, but for three years, with each new epidemic outbreak, we are locked up a little more”, he annoys. A few trips to the provinces have earned this sexagenarian to find himself locked up at home three times, in quarantine, since the beginning of the year. “When I returned to Beijing, and despite several screening tests that were still negative, my health QR code on my mobile phone changed to orange, which means: no going out. Members of the neighborhood committee arrived and put an alarm on my door to prevent me from leaving my apartment. Each time, it lasts a week…” The professor shows an application on his smartphone, representing a map of the capital. “Each red dot indicates that a patient has been there, and each time it’s the same scenario: they cordon off the buildings, he gets angry. It’s the most total arbitrariness, our country is gone completely mad.”
Since the end of October, the capital, like the whole of China, has recorded the highest number of new cases since the start of the pandemic (nearly 30,000 per day). At the end of November, a third of the Chinese population was subject to more or less severe travel restrictions. After being singled out for being the cause of the epidemic, China then proclaimed, in March, its “victory” against the coronavirus, touting the supposed superiority of the communist model, when Western democracies deplored a carnage. But, after three years of epidemic, the most populous country in the world seems completely stuck in a zero Covid policy which is paralyzing the economy and despairing the population. While some expected an easing after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China last October, which saw Xi Jinping triumphantly reappointed for a third term, nothing of the sort seems to be taking shape.
Zealous “white giants”
The Chinese live with the fear of da bai, the “white giants”, nickname given to these health police officers in full suits, cosmonaut style. They can disembark at any time to take the sick and contact cases to isolation centers with more than Spartan comfort. Sometimes violent scenes are multiplying where we see these members of health security hitting those who are reluctant to PCR tests, handcuffing and pinning a young woman to the ground who refuses to wear a mask or cordoning off entire residences with the help of plates of sheet metal and barbed wire. “This hardening highlights the growing pressure on local officials to contain cases, says Alfred Wu, professor of public policy at the National University of Singapore. This explains the excessive zeal with which they are dealing with current challenges”.
A symptom of growing tensions, in Zhengzhou, central China, home to the world’s largest iPhone factory, protests erupted on November 23. The da bai tried to stop them, without success. Riot police were called in to lock down the site, nicknamed “iPhone City”, which normally employs more than 200,000 workers. Due to the pandemic, workers work, eat and sleep on site in a “closed circuit” bubble (as in almost all Chinese factories). Living conditions that have continued to deteriorate, especially as Foxconn, which manages the site, is stepping up the pace as the end of the year festivities approach. The management had promised bonuses, but assures that a computer error prevented the payment of wages. Hence the anger of the demonstrators, who are demanding their due and asking to go home. At the end of October, thousands of workers made the wall, fearing the Covid-19, which would have contaminated some of the staff. To fill the production lines, surrounding villages were instructed to send at least two residents to iPhone City, and Communist Party cadres were required to sign one- to six-month contracts to set an example.
“The only solution is the vaccine, but…”
Riot scenes also took place in Guangzhou, where thousands of residents clashed with police to oppose containment measures. “The anger comes from ordinary people and local officials, exasperated to see their resources and time almost solely devoted to zero Covid, underlines Alfred Wu, associate professor at the Lee-Kuan-Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, quoted by the AFP. The Japanese bank Nomura calculates that around 20% of the Chinese economy is negatively affected by this hardline policy.
“The most difficult thing is that there is no prospect, explains a trader from Beijing who had to lower the curtain for the third time this year. We are told to close overnight, but we have no no help to pay rent, employees, or just to eat. I’m going to have to close permanently and return to live in my home province, it’s hopeless…”
In Beijing, the streets are deserted. Schools, restaurants, cinemas, parks and sports halls, everything is closed, and screenings are compulsory, organized every twenty-four or forty-eight hours in the middle of the street. The authorities consider that if China relaxes the restrictive measures, it could face a viral wave accompanied by mass mortality, which would quickly overwhelm its fragile health system. Especially since only two-thirds of those over 80 have received their two doses of vaccine. “The only solution, like everywhere in the world, is the vaccine, insists a Beijing doctor. We all know it, but we cannot say it. The authorities put too much energy into controlling people, and not enough to look for lasting solutions to live with the virus.”
Problem, the only two Chinese vaccines available are ineffective and have not evolved to adapt to new variants. China has still not authorized messenger RNA vaccines, deemed to be more effective. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit to Beijing in early November certainly resulted in an agreement to distribute the Pfizer vaccine in China, but its use is limited to foreigners residing in the country. Nationalism seems to have taken precedence over all rationality…
Images of a maskless Xi Jinping at the G20 summit had also raised hopes of a return to a more normal life. But this new wave with more contagious variants has come to shower all hopes. Nothing seems to indicate an imminent abandonment of the zero Covid policy, especially as the Chinese regime finds itself trapped in its own communication strategy. “Most Chinese still believe Covid has high death tolls and serious consequences,” Nomura Bank wrote in a recent report. ‘they are seeing a rapid increase in cases and social disruption.” After years of insisting that the method of Western countries was catastrophic, a reversal would also risk appearing as a disavowal of Xi Jinping’s policy.
“Why do we need to control a variant that is not lethal?” asks a user in a post widely circulated this week on Chinese social networks that was quickly censored. The FIFA World Cup in Qatar only increases skepticism. Also confined to Beijing in his apartment, Gary Wang, a 42-year-old entrepreneur, is perplexed by the matches he follows on television. “It’s still incredible to see these stadiums full, people without masks, it’s like living in a parallel world, he says. Are we more fragile? Is the variant Omicron is more dangerous in China than elsewhere? He slips ironically. Certainly not, all this government wants is to keep us locked up”.