Zero-Covid No More: Is China’s Loosening of Restrictions Really a ‘Major and Decisive Victory’?

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Last Wednesday, China reopened its borders to foreign visitors for the first time in three years, beginning to review and approve new visas once more. This means that tourists and businessmen will be able to visit the country once more. Prior to this, China had been one of the last countries in the world still adopting a zero-Covid policy.

Since early December last year, the Chinese government has been shifting away from the draconian measures adopted during the pandemic, which included mass lockdowns following a single positive case, mandatory 21-day quarantine periods for returning citizens, and requiring citizens to present negative PCR tests to take public transport. Borders between Hong Kong and China reopened in early February. 

This loosening of restrictions commenced after a series of protests broke out across the country, as public anger towards the government’s handling of the pandemic reached a boiling point. Since then, the Chinese government has declared a ‘major and decisive’ victory in eradicating the virus—but the country’s rough transition towards normality proves otherwise.

How has the country fared so far?

On December 7th 2022, the Chinese government abruptly announced that it would be partially lifting Covid restrictions. This included reducing the number of Covid tests and lockdowns, as well as allowing isolation at home.

What followed was a public health crisis that saw 80% of the Chinese population becoming infected with Covid. The surge in cases crippled the nation’s healthcare system and was especially devastating for those over 80, around only two-thirds of whom were double-vaccinated. China reported 12,658 deaths in early February, but most experts suspect that figures have characteristically been underreported—the actual death toll is likely to be close to over a million. 

It’s still too soon to determine whether or not China’s economy will ever sufficiently recover from the past three years, but the signs so far are unpromising. China’s economic performance in 2022 was the worst since 1976, and the working population has declined by 40 million. Travel seems to have increased, with the country logging around 40 million entries and exits over the past two months. However,compared with the 2019 figure of around 56 million trips per month, this seems a rather sparse number. China’s crackdown on human rights in both Hong Kong and the Xinjiang autonomous region, coupled with its souring relations with the USA and its complicity in Russia’s attack on Ukraine, has also made the country a rather unattractive region to be in, for tourists and businessmen alike.

Political implications

It should be noted that there are also geopolitical implications to China’s decision to open their borders. Group tours from Japan and South Korea are still banned—the very two countries that adopted strict travel restrictions against Chinese travellers in early 2023 due to China’s surge in cases. The same goes for Australia and the USA, whose diplomatic ties with China have become all the more strenuous in recent years.

Flows of people between China and Hong Kong, however, have increased, and the city is seeing an influx of mainland Chinese tourists. Already there are signs of friction, with several tourists claiming to have felt a chill in the air when interacting with the locals. Given that Hongkongers are living in the wake of China’s crackdown on Hong Kong in the 2019 protests, it hardly comes as a surprise that many remain resentful—and this resentment is likely to grow as interactions between the two parties increase.

Covering up tracks

Above all, we should remember that looming over China’s sudden loosening of restrictions are years of policies that claimed to focus on health but showed little regard for wellbeing or basic human life. This included separating Covid-positive children from their parents. The Shanghai lockdown from April to May 2022 resulted in massive food shortages—especially for medical volunteers brought into the city, who had apparently been neglected in terms of food and resources—and killed elderly patients who were forbidden access to medication at clinics and hospitals. The final straw was the fire in November, a disaster that killed ten residents in a building in Urumqi because lockdown restrictions had hampered rescue efforts. It was this fire that sparked protests across the country, unprecedented since the 1986 Tiananmen Square Incident. 

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese government is now seeking to erase this. Authorities have published articles claiming that their abandonment of zero-Covid policies was not the rushed decision that it seems to be, but rather a carefully pre-mediated strategy formulated during a meeting on 10th November 2022—a convenient two weeks before the fire in Urumqi. 

Was it all worth it?

China deems its policies a ‘major and decisive’ victory. Yet a brief glance at the country’s economy and public health situation would suggest that its transition into zero-Covid has not been a steady and decisive trajectory, but rather a violent lurch in the vague direction of normality. At any rate, any relief that comes at the cost of innumerable lives—whether they be lost to fires, lockdown, starvation, or protests—should not be celebrated, but rather taken as something that has come far too late.