What you need to know about China’s covid protests

Over the weekend, however, thousands of citizens took to the streets in more than a dozen cities across the country. They called primarily for pandemic restrictions to end. Yet many, on university campuses as well as in the middle of busy shopping and business districts, also voiced a more general anger over political repression. Some protesters demanded that Xi himself resign, a sentiment deemed so sensitive in China that it is seldom uttered publicly.

As dramatic as they are, the demonstrations are unlikely to threaten Xi’s grip over the Chinese Communist Party, which he consolidated and extended at a meeting of the top leadership in October.

The volatile situation, caused by one of his signature policies, is at minimum an embarrassing setback for Xi. He has consistently defended “zero covid” as “putting people first” and being the best option for China to avoid a health crisis. But the strategy, instead of garnering public support, is fast becoming a serious liability to his ambitious policy agenda. And right now it’s failing to contain the country’s worst outbreak since the pandemic began.

Here’s what you need to know about the situation — and where it might be heading.

What triggered the protests that started Friday?

That evening in Urumqi, capital of northwestern Xinjiang, 10 people died after firefighters were slow to put out an apartment complex blaze. Residents blamed “zero covid” restrictions for the tragedy, despite the city government denying any such delays. People took to the streets to call for an end to all lockdowns in Xinjiang, which has faced among the harshest controls since 2020.

The show of defiance in one of China’s most surveilled regions touched a nerve across the country. College students held vigils on campuses. Residents gathered in major cities from eastern Shanghai to southwestern Sichuan. As well as commemorating those who had died and venting about lockdowns, their rallies became a vehicle for deeper frustrations about political oppression and social malaise. Some even called for the Chinese Communist Party and Xi to be ousted. Videos of these stunning moments were circulated widely online.

How has China’s “zero covid” policy played out during the pandemic?

In late January 2020, China shocked the world when it announced it was sealing off Wuhan and confining more than 11 million residents to their homes to curb the spread of a novel coronavirus. Similar tactics soon went global as governments tried to “flatten the curve” and give medicine time to catch up with a new disease. Still, China’s strategy had a different goal from the start. Not content to merely slow the virus, Beijing wanted to eliminate it.

For months, “zero covid” worked. Cases were nearly nonexistent. Occasional outbreaks were quickly brought under control with mass testing, contact tracing and quarantine. Frustration with the approach simmered in a few places. But it was overwhelmed by a nationalist pride about China seemingly beating the virus while infection and death spiked in Europe and North America.

The emergence of highly transmissible variants made China’s strategy increasingly unsustainable. Public support for the hard-line approach waned as the rest of the world learned to live with the virus. In March, Shanghai enforced its strictest lockdown of the pandemic. Outraged residents complained about having little access to food and health care. After two months, the outbreak in China’s most populous city was brought under control — with the policy taking a beating in the process.

There was some expectation that the October party congress would announce a change of course. Instead, officials declared their “unswerving” adherence. An “optimized” set of containment measures announced in early November did reduce quarantine and testing requirements. Yet lockdowns continued, along with widespread disillusionment after officials denied that the new tack was a prelude to opening up.

Why does the government’s covid policy seem ineffective right now?

More transmissible variants mean it is becoming difficult for the government to prevent the virus from circulating in the general population. China is now reporting more infections per day than it has at any other point of the pandemic, with more than 40,000 coronavirus cases logged on Monday.

Mass testing, centralized quarantines and lockdowns are not just unpopular; they are also expensive and damaging for the economy. But Chinese officials maintain that switching gears now would lead to a wave of deaths and severe illness that would overwhelm the health-care system. They may well be right.

China’s population has low natural immunity because so few people have been exposed to the virus. And vaccination rates among the elderly are low compared with many developed nations, with only 40 percent of people older than 80 having received a booster shot. In addition, the vaccines the population has received — all developed within China — have proved less effective against the coronavirus variants now circulating.

What alternatives do China’s leaders have to stem the spread?

One option to boost immunity would be to import foreign anti-viral medicines and Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s bivalent booster vaccines, which are more effective against the omicron variants.

Beijing has so far stuck with domestically developed treatments. Xi often speaks of the need for China to be self-sufficient in advanced technologies. Chinese biomedical firms are racing to produce their own mRNA vaccines. But none of the 10 products under development have concluded the Phase 3 trials needed to show effectiveness in a general population.

Some experts on Chinese health policy argue that additional treatment options cannot address the fundamental problem that the government’s commitment to its policy is rooted in politics as well as virology. Early on, Chinese state media linked the success of epidemic control to the superiority of China’s political system under Xi.

Will the government crack down on the protests if they continue and grow larger?

The Chinese regime has a well-honed playbook for dealing with what it terms “mass incidents.” First, protests are dispersed with a mixture of threats and promises of redress. Then comes the crackdown.

On Monday, police and metal barricades guarded the downtown intersections of Shanghai where demonstrations had taken place over the weekend. At the Communication University of China, Nanjing, the principal told students to leave the vigil or otherwise “you will pay for everything you did today,” according to videos of the scene verified by people who witnessed it.

Censors rapidly cleared Chinese social media of articles about the protests. The word “white paper” was censored after students held up blank sheets to protest restrictions on speech. Chinese officials have yet to comment — or even acknowledge the demonstrations. But pro-government commentators have accused the protesters of working with “hostile foreign forces” and claimed that “evildoers” had instigated the demonstrations, echoing a standard line Beijing deploys to explain away challenges to its rule.