The End Game of China’s Zero-Covid Policy Nightmare
On December 22, 2021, the entire western Chinese city of Xi’an was put into lockdown. “It was all of a sudden,” says Fan, a Xi’An native and university student in his early twenties who didn’t give his full name, due to privacy concerns. “The university wouldn’t let us go outside of the dorms. Our freedom was restricted, and they stopped all our classes. I couldn’t leave and I couldn’t go home. We were stuck.” Xi’an, a city of 13 million people, spent the end of December 2021 and much of January 2022 in one of China’s most severe lockdowns. The trigger? A handful of cases of Covid-19.
Since the start of the pandemic, China has clung to a zero-Covid strategy consisting of strict containment measures that have served the nation remarkably well. China’s official death toll has remained under 5,000, and its total reported caseload of 124,900 is significantly lower than the 78 million cases in the United States or the 18.4 million in the United Kingdom. Aside from travel disruptions, life has been largely normal—and China’s success at containing the virus has become a source of national pride.
Yet the emergence of more infectious variants, like Omicron, is changing the calculus. While other countries are responding to Covid’s evolution by moving toward a strategy of living with the virus, China continues to rely on some of its harshest restrictions since the outbreak began. Surrounding the Lunar New Year and Winter Olympics, small but regular outbreaks of the Omicron and Delta variants have left Chinese authorities scrambling. After Beijing failed to trace its first local Omicron infection in January, its Center for Disease Control and Prevention pointed the finger at a mail delivery from Canada, prompting various cities to frantically disinfect international mail and test package recipients.
