China’s COVID Crossroad

Turning on the news these days is daunting. Waking up to see social media and news headlines sharing yet another tragedy or natural disaster. Videos of people losing their homes and loved ones seem to fill timelines weekly. From severe wildfires and heat waves to sudden flash floods, the climate crisis has begun making its presence known more and more in the past few years. This apocalyptic weather may seem independent of current weather and climate patterns, but it is not going away anytime soon. 

The initial rounds of cheers for China’s effective COVID containment strategy have long quieted down. With the steadily decreasing death rate of new variants and the ever-increasing toughness of lockdown policies, the unanimous front of support for government decisions has fractured into two opposing camps: “elimination” and “coexistence.” Whenever there is a new headline on regional outbreaks, debate ensues on Weibo, a Chinese online platform like Twitter, and in daily conversations. Autonomous as the Chinese government is, it has to consider people’s reactions and the underlying reality. Which side will prevail? Should China continue its path of prioritizing the fight against COVID-19? To answer those questions, the current discourse provides three perspectives — economy, national health, and citizen rights in times of crisis.

Over the past six months, cities from metropolises like Shanghai to towns like Dandong have experienced weeks or months of “silence periods.” With restaurants closed, people locked, and delivery routes blocked, resources are secluded in their respective realms, and cannot be combined for production. 

GDP, as the most direct indicator of immediate economic impact, only grew 0.4% during the second quarter of 2022. While narrowly avoiding a contraction, it is much slower than the modest performance of the previous two quarters (4.8% for Q1 2022 and 4% for Q4 2021), making the official annual growth target of 5.5% difficult to achieve. As a result of lower economic growth, the Chinese unemployment rate for the first half of 2022 spiked to 5.7%, 2% higher than the United States. 

But aside from those descriptive data, the more essential concerns for ordinary people are changes happening to their daily life. Unable to undertake the burden of rents without business, stores closed one after another in shopping malls. Scared by the stunning youth unemployment rate, young people crammed civil service exams, choosing the safe bureaucratic path rather than the more ambitious route of entrepreneurship. “Virus can’t kill us, but hunger does,” thus became a trending comment online to amplify the hardship of many that cannot be reflected by pure figures. 

Short-term economic shocks are real, but they fade whenever restrictions are removed. Stores will reopen and traveling will resume. Long-term impacts, however, will stay, and their seriousness intensifies with the prolonging of today’s pain. 

Even before the pandemic, foreign factories in China were considering relocating to Southeast Asian countries due to increasing Chinese labor costs. Current uncertainty over policies pausing delivery and assembly lines accelerates this process. A series of announcements came out this summer from prominent manufacturers like Apple and Mazda about their decision to move part of their production investment to Vietnam or India. As their determination hardens along with the lockdown, worries come that the current agenda is demolishing decades of achievement after reform and opening up. 

While it is hard to grab onto one piece of billion-dollar investment, it is harder to control a billion individual minds. Brain drain of middle to upper-class families has occurred as a serious reality, symbolizing the end to years of increasing nationalistic identification. Phrases like “emigration to Canada” became the most popular keywords on Baidu during the lockdown in Shanghai earlier this year. The pessimistic clouds on studying abroad wither away in the education market, and the rush back to the domestic system in previous years has changed to the opposite direction. When the word “run (to foreign lands)” becomes an Internet slang, the pressure of the capital and labor outflow on the once-majestic dam can no longer be neglected. 

As a rebuttal to growing anxiety over economic prospects, the meeting on stabilizing the economy organized by the State Council in May pointed out that temporary difficulties could be solved with the aid of government adjustments. Fiscal spending on infrastructure was reintroduced alongside renewed incentives for real estate purchases and lower interest rates for small-sized enterprises. But in a time of lockdowns when neither consumers nor entrepreneurs are brave enough to spend, none of those policies can perform to their fullest potential. How to boost people’s confidence? The answer is not to be found in the narrative of “not only containing COVID-19 but also boosting the economy.”

The necessity of protecting the health of all citizens has been the core argument for maintaining a “zero COVID” environment. Despite the low death rate of coronavirus, its high infectivity combined with China’s large population would still lead to many deaths when restrictions were to be lifted, according to Hu Xijin, former chief editor of state media outlet Global Times. Then, the large number of severe cases would overload the healthcare system, depriving the less privileged of treatment. Hence, the current policy guidelines embody the socialist spirit of caring for the vulnerable, the genuine practice of securing human rights. 

Nonetheless, car accidents also kill many; why are cars not canceled, but the economy is? As the public image of coronavirus has degraded from ventilators and ICUs to asymptomatic patients dancing and playing cards, the demand for the government to reconsider the balance has grown. The first balance, as aforementioned, is between COVID and the economy. The second balance is between COVID and other diseases. 

With massive government spending on testing and mobile cabin hospitals, depletion of funds from healthcare insurance come to be an impending possibility. Many provinces in 2022 increased the minimum payment years for public health insurance. Guangdong now requires the standard to be lifted to 30 years for male employees by 2030, double the current requirement. If this drastic change reflects the burden undertaken during the past three years, then how will the government respond to lockdowns for years to come? The concern that the price of surgery and medication for serious illnesses will go up with decreased government funds in the near future thus becomes reasonable, though not yet provable. 

Despite repeated announcements of the State Council requiring local governments not to restrict people from going to the hospital under lockdown, the fear of losing their positions pushes officials at provincial, municipal, and district levels to each add on new constraints. For instance, in Daqing, residents in areas of risk must have three consecutive negative test results in 24-hour intervals before they can visit the hospital. At the height of the outbreak in Shanghai, ambulances were deployed to deliver COVID patients, meanwhile people with other medical emergencies waited for days to be transported. Under Weibo’s COVID-related hashtags, webpages were filled with tragic stories about those grounded patients — hanging, jumping to death, miscarriage. Some of those stories are true, others were declared by officials to be rumors, but the general message is clear: the harm brought by restrictions on national health has exceeded its benefits. In other words, “should COVID be the only disease?”

When the pandemic first started, Chinese people willingly agreed to compromise on some of their citizen rights. From the health code collecting people’s everyday locations to the requirement to stay in the neighborhood, the policies were considered to be legitimate uses of government power to protect the general welfare in a time of crisis. Nevertheless, if such an extension of power is not regulated, it can soon break the boundary of laws and seek self-interests. 

“Silence periods” are times when the people’s appeals are the most urgent. But just as the name suggests, they are also times when government repression is the easiest. With the justification of “disrupting public order” during lockdowns, a person in Changchun was arrested after organizing a movement of striking bowls to demand basic supplies from the government, and one in Jining was detained because of their call in a group chat for everyone to plead in CCTV’s online newsroom. Almost in every case, the legal basis for police action is weak even without taking the constitutional guarantee for free speech into account. A wave of doubts has risen, arguing for the rule of law. Executive agencies rarely respond. They hope for the dilution of memory over time. But public suspicion deepens with the repetition of similar events.  

A red health code means the holders are infected with or exposed to COVID-19, and holders of red codes will be grounded and transported to isolation centers. Hence, it opens the door for the government to cover all kinds of evil with the pretext of virus containment. When four village banks in Henan Province closed their checking service, and 40 billion RMB could not be withdrawn, officials in the municipal COVID Prevention Department changed the health codes of savers to red to prevent them from protesting or appealing. Though the widespread outcry over this incident forced the local government to conduct investigations and announce punishment for related officials, the terror that it arouse was hard to be pacified. Many realize that health codes are now “certifications of obedient citizens,” and the overreach of government power is difficult to be halted once the invitation was sent. 

The 20th National Congress of the CCP is going to be held this coming October. Speculation has spread that an end will be put to the current COVID policy. Nevertheless, a good decision can only be made based on accurate and comprehensive information. While the economic data cannot be hidden, members of the Politburo may be blinded from the other problems and public sentiments associated with the contemporary agenda, seeking to achieve an unrealistic goal like that of the Great Leap Forward. This article thus hopes to link popular opinions, well-known incidents, and official stances to provide an overview of Chinese society in 2022, and more importantly, to call for a return to normal life with regard to the three perspectives.

Michael Qian ‘26 studies in the College of Arts & Science. He can be reached at mankang@wustl.edu.
Photo courtesy of the London School of Economics under the Creative Commons.