China’s pandemic strategy is unlikely to change any time soon

Author: Editorial Board, ANU

As missiles fall on Kyiv, you might be forgiven for forgetting that the last global crisis — the pandemic that continues to infect nearly two million people a day worldwide and is responsible for one death every eight seconds — is still not over. In much of the West, policymakers are deciding to act as if the pandemic has passed. Barriers to people movement and restrictions on daily activities are being unwound.

The movement away from restrictions has been most pronounced in North America and Europe. In Japan, the rules have mostly been targeted at foreigners, with increasingly dubious rationale, though there are some signs that ‘fortress Japan’ is slowly being dismantled. Thailand is removing restrictions on foreign travel, while Malaysia will probably wait until the second quarter of the year to remove its travel bans.

In China, where the virus was first detected, authorities have no intention of easing a regime of strict containment. The political imperative for President Xi Jinping is to maintain the aura of good governance in the run-up to the 20th National Party Congress later this year, where he seeks a third term at the helm of the world’s largest economy.

The prudent strategy is a cautious one, whether in dealing with COVID-19 or navigating the Ukraine conflict, on which Beijing has remained firmly on the fence. The initial effectiveness of Chinese strategy on COVID-19 has burnished Xi’s image as a competent leader, while China’s vaccine diplomacy has strengthened the country’s position in key Asian countries even as China’s increasingly aggressive foreign posture has heightened tensions in the region.

In the first of our two lead essays this week, Bingqin Li argues that the success of China’s containment measures owes much to the ‘campaign style of governance’ that has long been part of the CCP’s model of exercising power at local levels. Contrast this with the United States, where a Madisonian constitution designed to prevent tyrants from exercising unlimited power has gone to seed, preventing Washington from coordinating any kind of substantive response to the pandemic and leading to a loss of life that seems unfathomable: the United States is not far from passing the grim milestone of one million deaths.

Xi is in some respects now the hostage of his own success. As Neil Thomas argues in the second of this week’s lead articles, China’s ability to prosecute a zero-COVID policy has led to an expectation among Chinese citizens that the virus not be allowed to run rampant, as it has in the United States. As other jurisdictions that ran successful zero-COVID strategies for much of the pandemic like New Zealand have discovered, the choice to attempt to keep the virus outside national borders entirely is not one that can be easily cast aside. Recent experience of respiratory viruses like SARS helped China, along with other countries around the region, craft an effective if at times draconian public health response to COVID-19. This has translated into strong popular support for the Chinese government. The idea of letting the virus circulate freely as it does, more or less, in much of the West, seems anathema to the Chinese public.

But China’s hardline approach comes with an obvious cost in terms of economic activity in the locales where restrictions have been imposed and the possible forward impact through lost economic growth. It’s entirely plausible, though, that a general opening-up of the economy and an attendant untrammelled wave of Omicron throughout the country would result in a still sharper downturn — one that would damage Xi politically in the lead up to the Party Congress.

As Thomas argues: ‘There’s a credible argument that the benefit to China’s economy of a zero-COVID strategy outweighs the drawbacks, at least for now. Surging cases, faltering health infrastructure and a wave of self-isolation in China could produce more acute labour shortages and supply chain disruptions than zero-COVID. In any case, there’s little chance that Xi will end his zero-COVID approach before the 20th Party Congress and any relaxation is likely to be cautious and gradual’.

The impact on the world economy of a slowdown in China could be major, with the past year’s supply chain disruptions serving as a warning of what might happen if the world’s factory were hit with a massive wave of the virus again. For that reason, many leaders in Asia and elsewhere may well be hoping that China continues its zero-COVID policies for some time.

There are other costs of a ‘fortress China’ strategy both for China and the rest of the world. Already China’s international relationships are plagued by misunderstandings and growing mistrust. Without more in-person interactions at all levels, China will seem more distant and outside the international community.

President Xi is playing a delicate balancing act. It is unlikely that China’s citizens will continue to accept draconian lockdowns indefinitely, but as long as there is popular support for a zero-COVID policy, the economic risks of backing down from it will be considered too high to countenance.

The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.

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