China

A few days ago, an email arrived from someone I know in China: my book The Great Sea had been spotted on the bookshelves of president Xi when he delivered his beginning of the year address to China and the world. China watchers were expending plenty of energy identifying the other books on his shelves, and came up with 62 titles. The great majority were by Chinese authors, including famous classics: the history of ancient China by Sima Qian and the Full Collection of Tang Poems, not to mention works by Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Admittedly there is a scattering of translations, including Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy

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

Beijing’s roads are busy once more. Though zero Covid had ended in December, cities across China emptied out again over the past month as the virus swept through the population. Many stayed home to avoid getting infected or, more likely, to recover from infection. One government model estimated that a fifth of the Chinese population (250 million people) were infected in the first twenty days of December. But now, those who have got better are going back on to the streets and back into their workplaces. Cities which fell first, like Beijing, are hoping that they are over the worst of this wave. The return to normality has come at

One University of Hong Kong model has forecast that there could be up to a million Covid deaths in China over the coming months. That would be a political problem for the Chinese Communist Party, which prides itself (or tries to) on its competence. But it turns out the CCP has a rather elegant solution: stop counting cases, and you won’t see the scale of the deaths either. Nobody knows for sure how high case numbers in the country are right now. At the beginning of December, the National Health Commission announced that it would no longer count asymptomatic cases. But even if you’re symptomatic, you’re unlikely to be counted in the

For more than 20 years the West ignored China’s militarisation of the South China Sea. Until, that is, it was too late. Now, after being artificially expanded and built out with sand, the islands of this crucial maritime space are dotted with Chinese missile systems and runways. The region’s smaller nations, who also lay claim to sections of this sea, can only protest in vain.  Will the Free World learn from the mistakes of history? Beijing is now trying to redraw the map across the Himalayas, most recently in Arunachal Pradesh, a territory in North-eastern India that China claims as ‘South Tibet’.  Last week, Chinese and Indian troops clashed in the

Zero Covid seems to be ending in China. After three years of pushing this policy, the message from the state has now changed: each person’s health is now their own responsibility. State media is emphasising ‘new evidence’ showing that Omicron has a lighter viral load than previous strains. Meanwhile, testing sites across the country are being dismantled and new vaccination targets have been set to protect the most vulnerable. Some Chinese are bemused, asking themselves: ‘do protests work?’ The timing certainly suggests so – in the same week as student leaders were being rounded up, state media started talking about how Covid has no long term complications and quietly dropped

Tony Blair recently described the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s zero-Covid policy as ‘completely irrational’. He is completely wrong. Within the context of the CCP’s interests, it makes sense. ‘Completely political’ would have been nearer the mark, but not a bull’s eye. When Covid first appeared, the CCP got it right. Lockdowns and restrictions meant the China largely escaped deaths and serious illness. Later the mistakes – or rather the inevitabilities of the system – kicked in. China’s home-produced vaccines were insufficiently effective, but the CCP refused to use foreign vaccines, even though they had been licensed for use within China. Partly, this was misplaced nationalistic pride. But ever wary of

I’ve always loved the Chinese national anthem. I used to think I was the loudest Communist Youth League pioneer as my class belted it out, dressed in our little red neckerchiefs, during our school’s weekly flag-raising ceremony. ‘The March of the Volunteers’ was composed in the 1930s during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria; it starts with ‘Stand up, those who refuse to be slaves’ and only gets more rousing. I could see, even at a young age in the early 2000s, that China wouldn’t be facing those days again – it was getting wealthier and more powerful. Standing in a Nanjing schoolyard, I was proud of China’s return to greatness.

It is easy to imagine that a dam might be bursting in China. There have been spontaneous street protests across the country against the country’s zero Covid policy, unconfirmed videos in Shanghai show crowds calling for president Xi Jinping to resign, and political content is slipping though China’s draconian social media censorship.  Earlier in the pandemic, Chinese residents in Covid-stricken cities were trapped in their apartment buildings while, in one memorable dystopian moment, a horde of drones deployed by the local communist party told them to ‘control your soul’s desire for freedom’. Now, after a fire in a residential block in Urumqi killed ten people, it seems as though people have suddenly had enough.  

The Chinese people seem to have run out of patience with their country’s draconian Covid policies. After almost three years of brutal lockdowns, mass testing and sweeping quarantine, all facilitated by claustrophobic surveillance, they appear to have snapped. The protests that swept China at the weekend are the biggest challenge to Xi Jinping since he took power in 2012, and try as he might he cannot shift the blame. Zero Covid is his policy. Dissenting voices pointing to the economic and social cost have been silenced, and ‘defeating’ the virus and demonstrating the superiority of the Chinese Communist party over the floundering West is part of the cult of Xi. 

The Covid situation in China is not looking good right now. The authorities have trapped themselves into a situation from which there’s no obvious escape strategy. Whatever they choose – or will be forced – to do next will be very costly. The country is extremely poorly prepared for a major surge of the virus So far China has only managed to suppress Covid with brutal restrictions. Those are becoming increasingly untenable and the population is suffering. Unrest is spilling out into the streets in cities across the country. A major surge seems largely inevitable in the short term unless the authorities choose to enforce even more ruthless measures. A