Zero-COVID & "The Narrative"
When selling a story overrides all else
When will China abandon the widely-criticized “zero-COVID” strategy and emulate its regional peers in learning to live with the virus without resorting to draconian lockdowns and stringent health control measures? This is the overarching question that has dominated discussion regarding the country’s future for months now. The answer: not anytime soon by the look of it.
From the FT earlier this month:
China is building hundreds of thousands of permanent coronavirus testing facilities and expanding quarantine centres across many of its biggest cities as part of its zero-Covid policy, despite the economic and human toll on the world’s most populous country.
Residents of Shanghai woke up on Thursday to an announcement that lockdown measures and mass testing would be conducted in the Minhang district, home to more than 2mn people, for at least two days. The directive was issued just a week after President Xi Jinping’s administration declared victory in defending the city from the pandemic after a punishing two-month lockdown.
Tough restrictions in scores of cities have driven the country to the edge of recession for just the second time in three decades. But even though measures have been eased in many areas, experts believe the government’s virus infrastructure programme is designed to sustain the mass-testing and quarantine policies through 2023.
The costs of zero-COVID are well known: sharply reduced growth prospects, rising recession risk, bottled-up supply chains upending the operations of countless multinationals, accelerated decoupling as western businesses who stuck it out during the 2018 Sino-American trade and tariff war now scale down and/or exit the country, and rising social unrest as citizens across the People’s Republic chafe under prolonged lockdown while struggling to secure basic goods. Last month, WHO boss Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus labeled China’s strategy “unsustainable.”
Against this dystopian-sounding backdrop, it’s been illuminating to read recent, well-sourced reporting of elite-level dissatisfaction with both China’s COVID strategy and President Xi’s controlling approach to governance more broadly. The key development underpinning much of this focus has been the public re-emergence of oft-marginalized Premier Li Keqiang.
In one bit of high-profile reporting, the WSJ flagged divergent messaging between Mssrs. Xi and Li; the premier acknowledged the negative impact of the lockdowns while notably refraining from defending Xi’s signature policy during a meeting of senior business leaders with operations in China.
Signs of infighting and “simmering tensions” beneath the surface of China’s opaque political system always hold out the tantalizing prospect of wholesale policy change (if not a broader realignment of power within the uppermost rungs of the regime). However, I am confident zero-COVID will persist as the government line well into the foreseeable future; as the mass-level rollout of permanent testing stations and quarantine facilities makes clear.
In light of the enormous socio-economic costs, mounting public anger, and attendant political risks, the key question is why?
A couple of points here. We know, for example, that China’s vaccination rate amongst the elderly registers well below peer competitors like Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the USA. We also know the efficacy rate of Chinese-made vaccines is demonstrably lower than brands like Pfizer, Moderna, and AZ. So far, Chinese authorities have refused to deploy foreign-brand vaccines. “Jingoistic state media have criticised effective foreign-made jabs, which have not been authorised in China for seemingly political reasons,” writes the Economist.
Left unmanaged, the highly-virulent omicron strain risks overwhelming China’s healthcare system and maxing out finite hospital capacity. For a regime whose legitimacy rests, first and foremost, on citizen belief in its unique ability to ensure public health and social order while delivering tangible improvements in quality of life, it’s easy to see why there’s pronounced resistance toward changing tact. The specter of elderly citizens dying en masse understandably frightens leaders from Beijing to Brasilia.
Any national-level COVID strategy—whether in China, Japan, the USA, Sweden, etc.—entails brutally unpopular trade-offs between personal liberty and public well-being. Virtually no one alive today possesses firsthand experience living through a global pandemic and the highly disruptive, whole-of-society responses required have understandably invoked public outrage, undermined government legitimacy, and furthered social polarization. Few citizens across North America and Western Europe are anywhere close to happy with how COVID has been handled to date.
With that in mind, I would caution against assuming that within China zero-COVID is widely seen as counterproductive at best and an outrageously unpopular policy failure at worst. In fact, based on China’s experience from early 2020-late 2021, it’s easy to see why strong buy-in remains at both the elite and public levels—as the Washington Post recently pointed out:
In its calculus, the benefits outweigh the costs. The government estimates the strategy has avoided 1 million deaths and 50 million illnesses. Fewer than 5,000 people have died from Covid on the mainland, mostly during the virus’ initial spread. That compares to more than 900,000 deaths in the U.S., which has a population less than a quarter the size of China’s. Beijing has used those figures to portray its system of governance as superior. Covid Zero also allowed the Chinese economy, the world’s second biggest, to grow while other major economies contracted in 2020.
Cary Wu, a sociology professor at York University in Canada who compiled survey data drawn from 20,000 citizens, found that following the outbreak in 2020, the “numbers suggest that Chinese citizens have become more trusting in all levels of government.”
While 2022 has illuminated zero-COVID’s wrenching trade-offs, exposed the anguish of China’s governing deficiencies, and severely damaged the “social compact” between state and citizenry, I think a change in approach remains unlikely. Trampling civil liberties and eating the costs of extended lockdown, grotesque as it may seem to many outside observers, is simply the price Beijing is willing to pay in order to contain the pandemic and preserve the narrative of the system’s superiority vis-a-vis its democratic rivals. Ben Thompson astutely explains this divergent perspective in his Stratechy newsletter:
One of the common responses to China’s draconian efforts to control COVID’s spread (which, notably, do not include forced vaccination, or the use of Western vaccines), is that it doesn’t work: SARS-CoV-2, particularly the Omicron variant, is simply too viral. It’s worth pointing out that this response is incorrect: China not only eventually controlled the Wuhan outbreak, and not only kept SARS-CoV-2 out for most of 2021, but also ultimately controlled the Shanghai outbreak as well.
What I think people saying this mean is something different: either they believe the trade-offs entailed in this effort are not worth it, or they simply can’t imagine a government locking people in their homes for months, hauling citizens off to centralized quarantine, separating parents and children, entering and spraying their homes, and killing their pets. I suspect the latter is more common, at least amongst most Westerners: people are so used to a baseline of individual freedom and autonomy that the very possibility of the reality of COVID in China simply does not compute.
Thompson contrasts China’s experience with democratic Taiwan, which recently abandoned its civil liberties-curtailing zero-COVID aspirations only to see its daily caseload skyrocket to the highest level in the world.
Controlling the narrative
Regardless of the underlying efficacy of China’s approach to date—and I would argue there’s a strong case to be made for changing tact in the face of the omicron variant—the key point here is less about balancing tradeoffs and more about preserving narrative.
Modern autocracy looks markedly different than the 20th-century vintage. Revolutionary ideology and the glorification of state-sanctioned violence—synonymous with the Pol Pots, Stalins, Maos, and Kims of the world—are mostly a thing of the past.
In their place, according to Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, authors of the excellent Spin Dictators, exists a constellation of illiberal regimes who maintain their grip on power through a combination of lower-intensity “background” coercion, performance legitimacy derived from delivering growth, development, and social stability, and, perhaps most importantly, an intense, overarching fixation on managing public opinion.
The art of 21st-century dictatorship, therefore, “is not to be feared but to become popular through the control and manipulation of information.”
While China hews much more closely to the coercive, “fear-driven” model of dictatorship than places like Thailand, Hungary, Turkey, or Venezuela, it’s apparent Xi and co. internalized key lessons from the spin dictators. Whether celebrating the virtues of Chinese-style “democracy,” advocating win-win economic cooperation in the form of accelerated trade and investment flows between developing nations, or depicting the state’s crackdown on ethnic Uighurs as a benevolent humanitarian exercise geared towards promoting tourism and economic development in the restive Xinjiang Province (while aggressively restricting on-the-ground reporting regarding the human rights situation), China’s leadership emphatically presses an image of competence, popular legitimacy, and responsible, non-disruptive stakeholdership in the international arena.
It’s also the case that China’s political elite see themselves locked in an existential struggle with a hostile, US-led coalition of (mostly) Western democracies hellbent on containing its rise to great power status by undermining Communist Party rule at home. Against this backdrop, a perpetually insecure leadership must actively sell its citizenry on the superiority of one-party rule.
COVID presents a unique opportunity to do just that. With humanity facing the common challenge of managing a global pandemic—the single greatest threat to public safety in generations—I think it’s fair to say China’s performance through the first two years has been objectively better than many of the countries it sees itself embroiled in ideological competition with, most of all the United States.
Unsurprisingly, President Xi—who has methodically exerted personal control over his party, state, and society in a manner unseen since the Mao period—intimately links his strongman approach with China’s superior pandemic management.
Public criticism, much less open advocacy for an American-style “live and let live” recalibration, insinuates that when dealing with the single most salient political issue of the day, Xi and co. are getting it wrong while ideological rivals are getting it right. From Beijing’s vantage point, going after zero-COVID is less a criticism of specific policy and more a full-frontal attack on the legitimacy of the system itself.
That simply cannot stand. Chinese state media remains utterly saturated in pro-regime propaganda; contrasting an America ravaged by death and despair on account of its lax pandemic handling and democratic deficiencies with a People’s Republic heroically banding together to “defeat” the virus under the aegis of Community Party leadership. Rather than letting angry citizens vent on social media following months of lockdown, state censors have kicked into overdrive in a bid to suppress threatening counternarratives. Per Freedom House:
Censors appear to have doubled down after a May 5 meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee, during which President Xi Jinping affirmed the “zero COVID-19” policy and made clear that he would tolerate no calls for reconsideration or adjustment. The readout notes from the meeting state that the party must “resolutely struggle against all distortions, doubts, and denials of our epidemic prevention policy.”
We’ve seen this story before. Preserving cherished narratives is a central reason why Chinese authorities are unwilling to repudiate Mao’s legacy, provide an honest accounting of the party’s role in WWII, or cave into international pressure for a more forthright accounting of COVID’s origins. Relitigating history risks undermining the stories the government tells itself and its citizens and puncturing its reputation for competent governance.
This is all a long-winded way of saying information control is essential to state control, and, therefore, something to be defended at all costs—whether those costs are human, economic, or geostrategic. Beijing is simply too invested in selling a story—that zero-COVID is both distinctive and uniquely successful—to chart a new course.
Perhaps that will change in the future. Improved vaccination rates, mounting economic hardship, or successful execution of the Communist Party’s 20th National Congress in November, where Xi is widely expected to secure a third term as General Secretary, could prompt a different approach. For the time being, I remain skeptical. Safeguarding public health and managing public perception will likely win out over competing concerns.