In China, the impact of Xi’s zero-Covid strategy is becoming clearer. New Covid outbreaks and ongoing lockdowns result in rising unemployment and a slump in the economy.
The images from Shanghai are still fresh in our minds: locked apartment blocks, sealed doors, people in white suits going door to door conducting tests. Now the next wave of corona threatens to paralyze parts of the People’s Republic and torpedo the laborious recovery of the economy.
In the eastern province of Anhui, in Si County, a thousand cases were registered over the weekend. Si County is about five hours west of Shanghai by car. If you want to drive from the port metropolis to Anhui, you will come through the province of Jiangsu. There, too, the number of cases is increasing slowly but clearly.
The authorities are alarmed, on Saturday they ordered a lockdown for the 760,000 residents of Si County. In Yiwu, south of Shanghai, the largest Christmas tree exporter in the People’s Republic, flights to Beijing were canceled as a precaution after new Covid cases became known.
Alexander Görlach is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York. The PhD linguist and theologian teaches democratic theory in Germany, Austria and Spain as an honorary professor at Leuphana University. In the 2017-18 academic year, he was at National Taiwan University and City University Hong Kong to conduct research on China’s rise. He is currently researching new technologies at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute and how they are used in democracies and abused in dictatorships.
The names Anhui, Jiangsu and Yiwu mean little to Europeans. However, these cities are vital for world trade: More than 35 percent of the solar panels used worldwide are produced in Jiangsu. Important chip components and solar cells are also manufactured there.
Overall, this region, the Yangtze River Delta, is something like the heart of the Chinese economy, which is only slowly recovering from the hardships of Corona. This is what people are being asked to do above all by Xi Jinping’s zero Covid strategy. The Chinese leader had only recently confirmed that he wanted to stick to his policy, which was also not uncontroversial in the Communist Party.
According to this, apartment blocks, streets and districts in the People’s Republic are closed depending on the number of new corona cases, residents have to be tested daily, infected people are separated from their families.
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Xi Jinping is sticking to these measures because there is currently no effective vaccine against corona in China. The communist leadership refuses to buy effective vaccines from abroad because they themselves started the rumor that the Americans brought the pandemic to China.
Having to buy American vaccines now would mean a major loss of face for Xi. Officially, the Biontech/Pfizer vaccine is still in the testing process. The magazine nature published an article on June 27, according to which an mRNA vaccine could possibly be on the verge of a breakthrough in the People’s Republic.
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That would give the country emaciated by the zero-Covid strategy some breathing room, should it deliver on what it now seems to be promising. It’s about time, also for another reason: in Shanghai alone, due to the daily testing of hundreds of thousands of people in June, according to SPIEGEL magazine, 68,500 tons of medical waste were produced.
All of this is not good news for ruler Xi. At 18.4 percent, youth unemployment is at an all-time high, and the World Bank has revised China’s own growth forecast down to 4.4 percent due to the pandemic. In autumn the XX. Party congress, at which Xi would like to be proclaimed absolute ruler.
Since the devastation Mao wreaked in China, presidents have only been allowed to remain in office for two terms, a maximum of ten years. Xi wants to change that in order to run China in a totalitarian manner, possibly until his death. Above all, he will refer to the need to continue to face the pandemic.
In any case, the “zero Covid” strategy, as the recent lockdowns show again, is not sustainable for the country, and the associated economic and social shocks are wearing people down. Still, no one expects a palace revolution during the party congress, not even given the growing dissatisfaction in the country, which critics on the internet are calling “West Korea” because of Xi’s political style and conformity.
But it could happen that the other offices, such as that of prime minister, will be appointed to a person who is not necessarily close to Xi. In this way, the population and the world could be signaled that not everyone in China is dancing to Xi’s tune.
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