Has China admitted failure for zero Covid?

Why did China end its zero Covid policy so abruptly? This question has confounded China-watchers and even the Chinese people over the last month.

For the last three years, the Chinese government dictated its people’s lives to an extent unseen since the Cultural Revolution. Zero Covid had become part of Xi Jinping’s political legacy. It was touted as proof of socialism’s concern for human life, compared to capitalist indifference. And yet, almost inexplicably, zero Covid ended pretty much overnight at the beginning of December.

For the first time ever, the Chinese government appears to have admitted the real reason – zero Covid was failing to control the Omicron variant. In October, ‘new domestic cases kept appearing, signs of rapid transmission became ever more prominent, involving 31 provinces, regions and cities, with some regions seeing new infections for around three months, and the social cost of pandemic control climbed’, wrote the Xinhua News Agency on Sunday.