China’s zero-COVID-19 policy pits it against the rest of the world. Thanks to effective vaccines and herd immunity outside China, the virus is becoming endemic in the rest of the world.
Since COVID-19 will always exist abroad and be able to spread to China, China can never relax its zero-COVID policy of rolling lockdowns and quarantining at border entry. That means business and leisure travel to and from China will be restrained forever. It also means reduced Spring Festival mass migration, forbidden for employees of government and state-owned enterprises, discouraged among migrant workers, and risky for everybody else who could get locked down somewhere remote.
How long will the Chinese population put up with no more foreign travel and limited/risky mass domestic travel?
Prior to the pandemic, China had become the world’s top source of international tourism. Yet public pressure to loosen the control on movement would rub up against the Communist Party’s wall of intolerance, not only of viruses but more basically of deviation from its dogmas and of doubt over its infallibility.
The Communist Party can’t tolerate even the possibility of deviation from a specific, planned, predicted outcome and having to prepare for multiple contingencies. It seeks to force nature into being as simple and direct as possible, including by controlling thought. Put another way, Xi Jinping and his inner circle can’t bear to coexist with the doubts that sensible COVID-19 management necessarily entails. In their absolutist mindset, the virus must simply be eliminated in China. The only way to do that is to control every individual’s physical movement. This arrangement needs to be permanent as long as the rest of the world values freedom and readily tolerates a degree of COVID-19 risk.
China’s only escape from perpetual self-isolation would be the unprecedentedly massive import of those foreign mRNA vaccines proven most effective against COVID-19, together with herd immunity born of letting unvaccinated people catch COVID. But that would signal the regime’s fallibility over its own less effective vaccines.
Xi, then, has stuck his regime in a quagmire of its own making.
Robert Blohm, an economist who spent the decade until 2016 in China, has been a frequent contributor to the Nelson Report for East Asia policy. He has contributed to the Wall Street Journal editorial page for three decades. Blohm can be reached at [email protected].
