The 20th National Congress last month cemented President Xi Jinping's policies in place. Photo / AP
People sprint out of their workplaces. Armed guards in white environmental suits march down roads. Disneyland slams its gates shut, with tourists locked inside. Welcome to Chairman Xi Jinping’s “zero-Covid” world.
Barely a week after cementing himself with powers not seen since the times of China’s emperors, Xi’s carefully crafted personality cult is under threat.
He’s a reliable bastion in a turbulent world. He’s the font of all wisdom. His only concern is the “common prosperity” of his people.
Or so his Chinese Communist Party (CCP) insists.
But he needs a crisis to prove it.
Xi wants to whip up nationalistic fervour to trigger an invasion of Taiwan. But the Covid-19 pandemic has other ideas.
Workers have broken out of #Apple’s largest assembly site, escaping the Zero #Covid lockdown at Foxconn in #Zhengzhou. After sneaking out, they’re walking to home towns more than 100 kilometres away to beat the Covid app measures designed to control people and stop this. #China pic.twitter.com/NHjOjclAyU
— Stephen McDonell (@StephenMcDonell) October 30, 2022
In Shanghai, some 10,000 visitors suddenly found themselves quarantined within the walls of Disneyland. It took three negative antibody tests over three days before they were allowed out.
In Zhengzhou, hundreds of workers at Apple’s largest iPhone assembly plant scaled walls, scrambled through windows and walked through fields to escape a sudden forced lockdown.
“Not long ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping was riding high,” says Cai Xia, a former CCP professor of politics .
November 01, 2022 Update: Shanghai Disneyland - Visitors unable to leave without negative Covid test as park shuts. #ShanghaiDisneyland #Shanghai #Lockdown #PR pic.twitter.com/7YA1DGFXW0
— Amir Alhaj | ASM | International PR Consultant ℠ (@AmirAlhaj_ph) November 3, 2022
“But behind the scenes, his power is being questioned as never before.”
He’s upset the party elite with his power grabs. He’s discarded party ideals by cultivating a personality cult. He’s bungled public policy.
“Xi’s reversal of economic reforms and his inept response to the Covid-19 pandemic have shattered his image as a hero of everyday people. In the shadows, resentment among CCP elites is rising,” she says.
The 20th National Congress last month cemented Xi’s policies in place. There was no criticism. There was no cross-examination. No corrections were needed.
Key among these was Xi’s view that the only way to halt the Covid pandemic was to strangle millions of Chinese with severe, large-scale lockdowns.
“In responding to the sudden outbreak of Covid-19, we put the people and their lives above all else, worked to prevent both imported cases and domestic resurgences, and tenaciously pursued a dynamic zero-Covid policy,” Xi told a stony-faced audience last month.
“In launching an all-out people’s war to stop the spread of the virus, we have protected the people’s health and safety to the greatest extent possible and made tremendously encouraging achievements in both epidemic response and economic and social development.”
None of the 2296 delegates disagreed.
Nor did they raise the plight faced by millions of their constituents.
Loss of liberty. Lack of food. Extended close confinement. Unemployment. Death.
“A leader more open to influence or subject to greater checks would not likely have implemented such a draconian policy, or at least would have corrected course once its costs and unpopularity became evident,” Professor Cai says. “But for Xi, backtracking would have been an unthinkable admission of error.”
The professor has personal experience with China’s authoritarian shift. She dared to criticise Xi.
“I was expelled from the party, stripped of my retirement benefits, and warned that my safety was in danger,” she says. “I now live in exile.”
Over the past two years, Beijing has pointed to the death tolls in Europe and the United States as evidence its own zero-Covid strategy saved lives.
But it’s been less than forthcoming about its effectiveness in preventing the pandemic’s spread.
Protracted lockdowns in cities such as Xinjiang’s Urumqi and Qinghai’s Xining serve as a warning to other Chinese provinces.
“Many mainlanders [Chinese] also question the accuracy of official case numbers as they notice more people around them with infections,” writes Josephine Ma in the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. “It is impossible for the central government [in Beijing] to verify all data given the size of the country. Local governments also have a strong incentive to under-report figures since many officials were punished for not controlling outbreaks effectively.”
It’s a case of competence competing with loyalty.
“Nowhere has Xi’s desire for control been more disastrous than in his reaction to Covid-19,” Professor Cai says. “When the disease first spread in the city of Wuhan in December 2019, Xi withheld information about it from the public in an attempt to preserve the image of a flourishing China.”
Local government officials found their hands tied. But they were also being held responsible.
“When eight brave health professionals blew the whistle about it, the government detained and silenced them,” she says. “One of the eight later revealed that he had been forced to sign a false confession.”
Three years later, Xi hasn’t changed tack.
A panel of 60 pandemic experts recommended against total lockdown during a February outbreak in Shanghai. The city’s Communist Party administrators agreed.
“When Xi heard about it, he became furious,” Professor Cai says. “Refusing to listen to the experts, he insisted on enforcing his zero-Covid policy.”
Tens of millions of people were locked inside their high-rise apartments. Even grocery shopping and healthcare consultations were forbidden.
“Some died at the gates of hospitals; others leapt to their deaths from their apartment buildings. Just like that, a modern, prosperous city was turned into the site of a humanitarian disaster.”
Nine months later, this scenario is unfolding across China once again.
“As Xi’s rule becomes more extreme, the infighting and resentment he has already triggered will only grow stronger,” predicts Professor Cai. “The competition between various factions within the Party will get more intense, complicated, and brutal than ever before.”
But it’s not just about politics any more.
“They’re very worried about street protests. They always have been. They have nightmares about colour revolutions, as they call them, the Arab Spring scenarios,” Foreign Policy’s China brief editor James Palmer says.
That’s why censorship, propaganda and surveillance are so prevalent in Chinese daily life.
And Xi’s promise of “security” exploits every crisis to enforce them.
“It’s very hard to imagine a scenario where this becomes like full-blown zero-Covid protests on any kind of national level because also any local-level incident would be crushed so thoroughly that it would send a message to any other potential protesters,” Palmer says.
But the price of Xi sticking to his word is rising.
Economic growth expectations have collapsed from 9 per cent to about 2 per cent.
And that undermines Xi’s mantle of economic legitimacy.
“You’ve lost that idea entirely, particularly among the Beijing big-city upper classes,” Palmer says.
Then there’s Xi’s personality cult.
“They’ve really tried hard to restore ideological legitimacy. We’ve seen the attempt to restore Maoist figures too – to make movies and TV free of foreign influences. All this has failed,” Palmer says.
All Xi has now is the traditional tactic of last resort among authoritarian “strongmen”.
“All that leaves is nationalism, and the ultimate nationalist safeguard is invading Taiwan now. But the problem is, if you invade and fail, you’ve cost the party massive legitimacy,” Palmer says.
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