Image: Kayla Kozlowski
Covid is tearing through China, and the Chinese government decided it is time to open its doors to allow citizens to travel abroad.
Chinese citizens are flooding foreign cities in droves following China’s sudden abolition of its draconian zero-Covid policy. Half the passengers on two flights from China to Milan on Christmas week were found to be infected with the virus.
Just as the rest of the world is beginning to move beyond the shadow of Covid-19 that originated from Wuhan in 2020, Beijing’s about-turn is once more upending the new normal. Millions are contracting infections in China each day, and a proportion of them are travelling abroad, while their government is increasingly evasive in the retreat from the “dynamic zero-Covid” strategy. Forget about sharing data as that would directly weigh on the credibility of President Xi Jinping’s “all-out people’s war” on the coronavirus.
Given the circumstances, it is inevitable for countries to protect their own people and avoid another global spread of infections. A growing list of them are requiring negative test results or reinstating testings on China arrivals. Beijing via its state media has predictably, railed against these foreign governments, calling the measures “discriminatory”.
As recent as November, the Chinese leadership was reiterating resoluteness to uphold Xi’s hallmark policy, the basis in which it had used to claim superiority of its authoritarian model over Western democracy as evidenced by the pandemic chaos in the West particularly in the early days of containment in 2020. By the end of the month, however, China was roiled by mass public protests against the controls, triggered by a deadly fire in the western Xinjiang region where the victims were trapped in the building because of lockdown measures. Many defied repercussions for political activity in the modern autocracy, backed by surveillance technologies that give protesters no place to hide, to join the most widespread demonstrations since the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. In their wake, Beijing shifted course almost overnight, following the approach of “living with the virus” like the Western economies that it previously scorned at for their incompetence in containing Covid.
For now, there is no time for the ideological argument, not when the Chinese economy’s well-being hangs in the balance. Being able to ensure that the quality of life continues to improve for citizens is the unwritten pact and yardstick by which the public measures the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy to rule, more so as they tolerate rising authoritarianism.
China’s economy is sputtering. The pandemic battered domestic consumption, the pillar to which Beijing shifted towards to reduce the economy’s reliance on exports for growth as well as exposure to external factors it can’t control. In the five years to 2019, prior to the pandemic, the share of exports in its GDP shrank from 23.5 percent to 18.4 percent. The trend has reversed since then as home-bound consumers around the world snapped up Chinese goods when Covid hit. Then, Beijing’s strict lockdowns in 2022 disrupting supply chains took a toll on export growth.
Exports dropped 8.7 percent in November from a year earlier for a second straight month, the steepest fall since February 2020 when the viral outbreak occurred. Weakening global demand due to high inflation and aggressive interest rate hikes by major economies like the US, Japan and South Korea didn’t help.
The World Bank has slashed its 2022 growth forecast for the Chinese economy to 2.7 percent from 4.3 percent. In his New Year address though, Xi said the country’s GDP exceeded US$17.4 trillion in 2022. That would have been a 4.4 percent rise from 2021.
Officially, China has registered just more than 5,200 deaths from Covid, a tiny fraction of US’s 1.1 million, the world’s highest death toll. There is a yawning gap between the picture Beijing painted and the reality reflected in social media posts from Chinese citizens across the country. Hospital emergency wards are overflowing with patients and medical supplies are running low or out. Even shelves of pharmacies in Hong Kong are cleaned out either by relatives snapping up basic drugs to send to families in mainland China or Chinese visitors to the city.
China’s border reopening on January 8 puts Hong Kong in the first line of fire. While the Hong Kong government is eager to reopen its border with the mainland, Hongkongers are apprehensive, fearing another wave of infections among other concerns. It doesn’t need a sixth wave after the last one in 2022 claimed over 11,000 lives.
During the Lunar New Year in 2020, the Chinese government allowed millions to travel abroad when it knew there was a new coronavirus infecting its people. It suppressed information and covered up until the virus was rapidly spread to the rest of the world.
Several mutations of the coronavirus have been identified since December 2020. China’s current outbreak is causing concern of producing a new variant, which will raise questions such as: will the vaccines still work and are people more at risk for getting sick.
There is a sense of déjà vu, but this time, the rest of the world will not be taken by surprise.
