Xi stresses on ‘zero-Covid’: What’s China’s strategy and why has it been criticised?

Two banners were unfurled across a bridge, one of which read, according to a report by the BBC, “No Covid test, we want to eat. No restrictions, we want freedom. No lies, we want dignity. No Cultural Revolution, we want reform. No leaders, we want votes. By not being slaves, we can be citizens”; and the second called on citizens to “go on strike at school and work, remove dictator and national traitor Xi Jinping”.

What is China’s ‘zero-Covid’ strategy?

It is a strategy that aims to drive down and ultimately eliminate the number of Covid-19 cases by imposing extremely strict lockdowns and crippling travel bans.

Initially, when the pandemic started in 2020, Western countries adopted a mitigation approach that involved trying to flatten the curve while strengthening healthcare capacity to deal with possible flare-ups.

But soon another strategy — the elimination approach — started to find acceptance. This strategy eventually evolved into a Covid-elimination or zero-Covid plan. As part of the plan, governments tried to stamp out outbreaks down to the last case, at any cost.

Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong and several other Asia Pacific countries applied the approach, involving highly restrictive measures, for different lengths of time, with varying degrees of severity in their Covid curbs. India too, imposed a tough lockdown in March.

Why did countries move away from zero-Covid?

By the middle of 2021, as the cost of shutting down economies and locking up entire populations for extended periods became too high to bear, a range of experts including healthcare authorities as well as ordinary people, started questioning the zero-Covid approach to fight the disease.

Vaccines had started to be rolled out worldwide from the beginning of 2021, and as mass vaccination programmes gathered pace, some countries also simultaneously began to gradually move towards fewer lockdowns and more freedoms for citizens. The UK lifted restrictions putting its faith in the vaccination drive, France started issuing health passes to the vaccinated to enter public spaces, and India began a process of phased and graded “unlock”.

Even Australia, after battling the record Delta wave surge, started talking about “living with the virus”, with focus shifting from number of cases to total hospitalisations. However, New Zealand and China were among the countries that stuck to the elimination response.

In October 2021, New Zealand too ultimately transitioned away from a hard elimination approach, and its government subsequently acknowledged that zero-Covid was not the best solution. But China stayed firm, refusing to pivot.

Why has China’s approach been criticised?

Quite apart from the hardships Chinese people have had to face — which in any open society would most certainly have resulted in massive protests that would have forced the government to change its policy — the response has been criticised from a public health response perspective as well. As the virus mutated into the hard-to-lock-out Omicron variant and its sub variants, it found reservoirs of vulnerable populations with poor immune response — the consequence of harsh lockdowns and inadequate vaccination coverage.

This resulted in summer surges in various cities of the country, and Shanghai was locked down for months and Beijing closed schools and colleges for several weeks, even as the rest of the world was moving towards normality. A Reuters report earlier this week said China’s daily count of cases has doubled since the second half of September when new cases trended around 900 a day.

However, China has remained wedded to the zero-Covid policy, ignoring evidence at hand and the WHO’s advice that its Covid response was “unsustainable”.