How long can China’s strict Covid laws last?

China is calling on its people to have “confidence and patience” with its zero-Covid policy as local cases soared to their highest since August and the 20th Communist Party Congress is about to get under way.

Beijing has “repeatedly quashed” any speculation of a “let-up in its tough counter-epidemic policies”, said Channel News Asia. These preventive measures can range from locking down a local community to sealing off an entire city.

According to official figures, China has so far suffered just 996,000 infections. However, some are speculating that the economic toll of the zero-Covid approach could lead to a relaxation of policies after the congress.

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‘Doubling down’

“Governments across Asia have been winding down some of the world’s strictest control measures,” wrote Yanzhong Huang for Foreign Affairs. Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong have moved to a “lighter, more flexible approach” but China has “doubled down on its all-encompassing ‘zero COVID’ strategy”, he added.

Health chiefs fear that relaxing the approach could lead to a health crisis because after two and a half years of zero-Covid policies, a very high percentage of China’s population has never been exposed to the virus.

Chinese officials “have reason to fear” that lifting restrictions could be followed by a surge in cases that would “quickly overwhelm the country’s health-care system,” wrote Huang and “lead to large numbers of deaths and consequent societal instability”.

For China’s leader, there is a personal, as well as political, dimension. The “victory” of zero-Covid was “claimed not just as the party’s but as Xi Jinping’s in particular”, said The Atlantic.

Therefore, if Beijing “loosened up and allowed Covid to run amok”, Xi would seem like “another failing politician, a mere mortal, not the virus-fighting superhero he was painted as”.

‘Livelihoods smashed’

However, without a change of course, the economic toll of zero-Covid will grow. “To an extent, this superpower is getting by,” wrote the BBC’s Stephen McDonell from Beijing. “Nearly a fifth of the earth’s population are, in one way or another, going about their daily lives inside a giant bubble,” but “they are doing this while people’s livelihoods are being smashed”.

Beijing’s stubborn approach has indeed come at a cost. Protracted lockdowns have hit China’s economy and provoked rising social discontent. Official youth unemployment stands at 18.7% and earlier this year it was as high as 20%.

Exports are dropping and the IMF and World Bank believe that severe Covid restrictions will shave a full point off China’s 2022 growth target.

The “mounting economic toll” of the zero-Covid policy is “raising investor hopes that Beijing may finally begin laying the groundwork for the tricky epidemiological and political task of shifting course following this month’s Communist Party congress”, said Reuters.

“Once the congress has taken place and political optics are no longer directly in play,” agrees Huang, Beijing could “begin to change its narrative about Covid-19 and choose science over politics”.

“Covid is here to stay and Beijing’s policy needs to reflect that,” wrote Professor Nick Obolensky, from the European Centre for Executive Development, in a letter to the Financial Times. “Time will tell how much further the policy in China evolves, but it will necessarily change.”