Covid has been very important in recent Chinese history. In the first phase of the pandemic, and after a few days of confusion, Beijing was quick to contain the spread of the virus. That was in 2020. The contrast of the orderly Chinese policy with the chaos experienced in the United States, with a denialist president, was decisive in consolidating China's image as a responsible great power. For Xi Jinping, it was proof that China was doing things better than the West and that reaffirmed his will to distance himself from outside influence and shut down the reform policy of his predecessors.
Almost three years later, Western countries are dealing with covid relatively normally, while China is setting contagion records and is unable to stop the virus with its zero containment policy, which combines rigorous isolation with continuous testing.
The explanation for this paradox is in the vaccines. Western pharmaceutical companies were quick to launch highly effective vaccines and developed a technology that China lacks, based on messenger RNA. In contrast, the effectiveness of Chinese vaccines is still below 50%. And they have been shown to be ineffective against a variant as contagious as omicron.
The celebration of the XX Congress of the Communist Party of China aroused expectations among the population that the Government was going to soften the confinements and the excess of controls. Xi Jinping's trip to the G20 summit in Bali without a mask corroborated that hope: the bad times were behind him. But at the moment of truth, the health authorities advised against this softening. They warned that if it materialized, it could cause thousands of deaths and collapse the health system. China was a great power, but its health system is still weak.
From that mirage is born the current fatigue. The trigger was the death on Thursday of ten people in a fire in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, where strict containment measures prevented firefighters from arriving on time. The unrest spread through social networks and has led thousands of people to demonstrate this weekend in the country's large cities and the first cries of "Xi, resign" have been heard.
Like other autocratic governments, be it in Tehran or Moscow, Beijing tries to attribute events to "hidden interests". Try to erase what happened with arrests and censorship on social networks. But his room for maneuver is minimal. The covid chains contagion records daily and the confinements will continue. Those who have taken to the streets are a minority (a few hundred in the big cities, the most active) but they are also a transversal force. There are workers, like the employees of Foxconn, the maker of the iPhone. There are students, like those from Tsinghua University. And there are middle classes, like those in Shanghai, fed up with not being able to travel.
The covid has become the first economic problem in China, ahead of the stagnation in the real estate sector. The clashes in the Zhangzhou factory this past week, with 200,000 workers, are an example of the speed with which the containment policy collapses supply chains. In this case of a product as demanded as the iPhone. The confinements in the large manufacturing areas of the country will cost the government several points of GDP in 2022.
The political consequences of the protests are more difficult to determine. In the last ten years, Xi Jinping has erased any trace of opposition. He has banned NGOs, jailed dissidents and sanctioned human rights lawyers. The protests are spontaneous. And as in the Arab springs, social networks have been the vector of its extension. There is not the slightest suspicion that a sector of the regime is dissatisfied with Xi's policy and that prevents anything from moving in the intricacies of power. But the party is obliged to respond. The spark that he ignited in Urumqi may ignite more easily in the coming weeks. The covid will continue to chain records.
In any case, the protests are a blow to Xi's authority. A warning against the arrogance that has guided his last steps. For the planet as a whole, what is happening in China is not good news. In the 2008 financial crisis, Chinese demand was crucial in making the Great Recession less severe. These days, when the world seems to be headed for a synchronized recession due to the high rises in interest rates, China will not be able to act as a counterweight. And that's not good.
