China’s zero Covid crack-up

‘We’re being driven mad. Nobody is listening to us. They’ve politicised this disease.’ This week, the candid remarks of Zhu Weiping, a senior official at Shanghai’s Centre for Disease Control (CDC), have gone viral in China. Her phone call with a frustrated local was recorded, and her despair resonated with people in the city and the rest of the country who are at their wit’s end with the zero-Covid policy. Shanghai is buckling: the Covid chaos there is the worst China has seen since Wuhan in 2020.

In the last two years, China’s zero-Covid policy has demonstrated the determination and effectiveness of the one-party state. Millions of people can be tested en masse. Positive cases are dragged into state quarantine. New arrivals undergo a marathon isolation period (my mother is on Day 19, having returned to Shanghai last month). But cases and deaths have been kept low. Brutal and strict it might be; the one thing zero Covid hasn’t been is chaotic.