The world has largely moved on from Covid – except for China, where towns and cities are still locked down overnight.
And that’s unlikely to change soon, according to President Xi Jinping’s opening speech at the Communist Party Congress on Sunday. China – and even the world – was hoping for a sign of relaxation. But Mr Eleven, who is poised to hand over a historic third term to lead the party, said the government would not “waver” in its commitment to register zero cases.
Driven by Mr Xi’s approval, China’s lockdowns have by most accounts been relentless, unpredictable and hellish. They have led to food shortages, crippled access to health care, severely damaged the economy and even sparked rare signs of protest.
But Beijing is clinging to Zero Covid, which has come to appreciate Mr. XI’s rule and authoritarian bureaucracy like no other policy at his disposal.
Confuse or Persuade?
Since March, China has partially or completely locked down 152 prefecture-level cities, affecting a population of more than 280 million. But 114 of them have been locked down since August, as the party congress approached.
Beijing is the only major city to have avoided a complete lockdown so far. Residents half-jokingly watch as the capital manages to lock down the rest of the country when necessary. However, some housing estates and shopping centers in Beijing were closed after a sharp increase in cases on Thursday.
JEE News collected the data starting in March because that’s when the fourth phase of China’s Covid-control measures began – it’s difficult to compare lockdowns across phases because of changes in official language, definitions and the like. Data related to
And China’s bureaucrats have certainly found innovative new ways to describe the lockdown. These measures had become so controversial and terrifying that a way to make them more palatable was officially obscure.
So they used phrases like “stasis management”, “quietness in the house” or to be clean, “quietness in the whole area” or “stop all unnecessary movement”.
This was followed by “temporary social control”, which officials said was not a “lockdown” but reduced movement that did not in any way affect “production and the normal order of life”. will do And yet “people were told not to go out unless absolutely necessary”.
“Closed management” was another new phrase coined in the southern province of Guangdong. It means that a village, district or residential compound is surrounded, with checkpoints at the entrances and exits. People and vehicles are allowed to enter and leave with the pass. People who do not live or work in the enclosed area are not allowed to enter. But, residents were told, this is not a lockdown.
When track-and-trace methods began to grind, hobbyists came up with an alternative: “temporal and spatial overlap”. The phrase sci-fi victim refers to a person whose location, tracked by their phone, overlaps in time and space with someone else who is Covid-positive.
Instead of telling people not to visit their hometowns during this year’s Spring Festival, the governor of Dancheng County in central Henan province warned them that “those who come home with malice should be quarantined first.” will be held, then detained”.
China is now in what Beijing calls a “scientific and precise dynamic zero” phase, the meaning of which no one is sure. This is meant to be a step up from the earlier “dynamic zero” policy.
Dynamic because the idea is that it’s not just about shutting down entire cities and towns, but about having a more dynamic response as the situation calls for. But on the ground, it just looks and feels like a series of endless lockdowns.
The year began with the tourist hub of Xi’an, which has a population of 13 million, closed for a month. Then in March, a lockdown was announced in Shanghai. It was intended to last less than a week, but its 25 million inhabitants stayed at home for two months. In September, stranded residents in Chengdu found themselves trapped in their apartments during the earthquake. Elsewhere, aid workers were required to undergo a Covid test before they could rescue someone.
