China’s stringent crackdown on zero-Covid dissent

China’s premier Xi Jinping and his authoritarian leadership are struggling to keep control of the country with protests raging in many regions over its strict zero-Covid policy.

From the streets of Shanghai and Beijing to many university campuses, “protesters made a show of civil disobedience unprecedented since leader Xi Jinping assumed power a decade ago”, said Reuters.

The protests were sparked by an apartment fire last week in the western city of Urumqi that killed ten people. “Many speculated that the zero-Covid policy in the city, parts of which had been under lockdown for 100 days, had hindered rescue and escape, which city officials denied”, added Reuters.

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What’s happened during the protests?

Most notably, protesters in Shanghai chanted “Xi Jinping, step down”, a remarkable development considering “how it breaks the usual norms that Chinese protesters abide by to remain safe: focusing on single issues, criticising local rather than central leaders”, said the Financial Times’ Yuan Yang.

Equally worrying for China’s leaders is that “the protests have brought together a broad coalition of interests: factory workers, shopkeepers, students and urban elites, all of whom have suffered under zero-Covid in different ways”, Yang added.

In Shanghai, the BBC said police assaulted and detained one of its journalists covering the events before releasing him after several hours. And “unrest is spreading elsewhere”, said The New York Times (NYT).

Last week, workers at the Foxconn iPhone factory in Zhengzhou clashed with riot police in videos that have gone viral on Chinese social media. Protesting workers can be heard “complaining about their pay and sanitary conditions”, said CNN. It comes just a month after a Covid outbreak in the same factory forced the site into lockdown, forcing some workers to “reportedly flee”, said the broadcaster.

In the city of Guangzhou, migrant workers reportedly “broke out of locked-down buildings to confront health workers and ransack food provisions”, said the NYT.

Dominic Waghorn, Sky News’ international affairs editor, said that “unrest is actually commonplace in China but demonstrations are usually small, localised and easily quashed”. What will worry China’s leadership about these protests is “their size, their spread across the country, and their persistence”, he said.

Does the zero-Covid policy actually work?

Almost three years after China began pursuing its strict zero-Covid policy, cases of the virus have surged to an all-time high in the country.

Three deaths were reported in the Chinese capital of Beijing last week, with the fatalities plunging “parts of the city home to more than 21 million back into lockdown”, said the BBC.

Millions more have been placed under lockdowns across the country as Chinese authorities struggle to get soaring case numbers under control. Almost 25,000 new cases were recorded last weekend, “nearing the country’s daily infection peak in April”, said the broadcaster, and which prompted an almost two-month lockdown in the city of Shanghai.

And cases are continuing to rise. “Authorities on Sunday reported the highest number of daily infections on record for the fourth consecutive day, with the tally close to 40,000,” said the Financial Times.

Can President Xi find a ‘middle ground’?

These “rare displays of defiance” are the “most visible signs of frustration and desperation with the lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing that have upended everyday life” in China over the last three years, said the NYT.

A pledge from officials earlier this month to adjust Covid restrictions in order to limit the impact they are having on the economy is now being called “into question” as case numbers rise, “with many officials falling back on familiar heavy-handed measures to try to stop the spread of the virus”, said the paper.

But whether President Xi can find a “middle ground” in his country’s approach to tackling the spread of the virus “will reflect on China’s status as the world’s factory floor and a major driver of global economic growth”, the paper continued.

One analyst in Beijing, Wu Qiang, told the paper that the scenes at the Foxconn factory displayed the limitations of “the China model”, and represented “the collapse of China’s image as a production powerhouse, as well as China’s relationship to globalization”.

“Markets have speculated for weeks about the timing of China’s departure from its stringent zero-Covid policy,” said Beijing correspondent Evelyn Cheng for CNBC. The strict controls have “weighed on the economy which barely eked out growth while Shanghai was locked down”, as growth estimates fell for a fourth quarter and the year below 3%. And “in GDP terms, nearly 20% of China’s economy was negatively affected by Covid controls as of Monday”, added the news site.

And with so many cases now circulating, “China might have already passed the point of no return as it’s unlikely to achieve zero-Covid again without another Shanghai-style hard lockdown”, said Larry Hu, chief economist of the Macquarie investment group, suggesting policymakers in China would be better off attempting to “flatten the curve” by tightening Covid controls “for the time being”.

The latest breakout of Covid-19 was “inevitable” in a “large continental nation” and “given the increasing transmissibility of the virus as it mutates”, said The Wall Street Journal. And China now has a “particular problem” as its zero-Covid policy “has left its people less protected with either vaccine or natural immunity”.

But perhaps the “larger lesson of China’s Covid reckoning” is that zealously stringent lockdowns and restrictions “don’t work”, added the paper, “and authoritarian regimes aren’t models of public health or anything else” despite often imagining themselves to be.