After Xi is anointed, most of China will have one wish

In 2019, Li Long, a manager of an international travel agency in China had 50 tour guides in Beijing, 10 in Qingdao and 20 in Shanghai. Now he has only three staff in Beijing and moonlights as a car share driver.

“Most of those who were laid off have not been able to find a decent job, many are working as Didi drivers or deliverymen,” he said.

Billboards of Chinese President Xi Jinping and former leader Mao Zedong in eastern Beijing’s Tongzhou District on Wednesday. Credit: Sanghee Liu

Li, like many Chinese business owners, is struggling to stay afloat as China’s leaders show no sign of easing their COVID-zero policy. On Wednesday, Shanghai released plans to build a 3250-bed COVID-19 quarantine facility on Fuxing Island in the middle of a river that splits the metropolis.

The same day, video emerged of a 16-year-old girl dying in a quarantine centre in Henan, central China, as her family pleaded for help – triggering an outpouring of grief across Chinese social media. In September, 27 people were killed while they were being taken to a quarantine centre on a bus in south-western China.

“Evil is prevalent because we obey unconditionally,” frustrated Chinese social media users posted in response to the accident.

COVID fatigue, distress and anger have set in across China, but its citizens are powerless to end a policy that has crippled large sections of its economy. This week’s National Party Congress, at which more than 2000 Chinese government leaders gathered in Beijing to anoint President Xi Jinping for a third term, was seen as the catalyst for a shift in policy.

One of China’s quarantine centres, in Shijiazhuang, which has more than 4000 rooms to isolate close contacts of COVID-19 cases.Credit: AP

Instead, millions were left frustrated when Xi’s two-hour-long speech gave no sign that their COVID isolation would be coming to an end.

As deadlines come and go, residents and businesses pin their hopes for COVID relief on one significant political milestone after another. It is part optimism, part self-preservation.

“After the 20th Party Congress, there will be Chinese New Year in January next year, then Two Sessions in March,” said Li, referring to the next major political meeting of the Chinese Communist Party in 2023.

“Everyone hopes the dynamic zero-COVID policy could be lifted by then.”

Xi defended his response to the pandemic on Sunday. “We have protected people’s health and safety to the greatest extent possible,” he said, but the economic impact of rolling COVID restrictions has become highly sensitive as the party attempts to maintain its domestic and international image.

On Tuesday, China’s National Bureau of Statistics delayed the release of key economic data indefinitely, including figures on economic growth, retail sales, property prices and fixed asset investment.

“Chinese growth slowed down in the first quarter of this year because Shanghai locked down. If you have a handful of cities like that, it will have a direct impact on national-level growth,” said Victor Shih, a professor of political economy at the University of California, San Diego.

“Unfortunately, we’re seeing some of these big cities getting hit yet again.”

Susan Shirk, a professor in Chinese politics at the University of California said over-concentration of power had led to bad outcomes for Chinese workers.

“For the first time that any of us can remember, we have a Chinese economy that’s on the ropes in large part because of the bad decisions that have been made by the Chinese leadership,” she said.

Shirk told Zhengfawei, a Chinese politics event, on Thursday that Xi’s COVID-zero policy looked “disturbingly like a great leap” – a reference to Mao Zedong’s disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign that ended with the deaths of 30 million people through famine after Mao and sycophantic officials tried to force China to switch from an agrarian to an industrial economy.

“What we have today is personalistic leadership and highly concentrated authority. What we saw in the Mao era is over-concentration of authority leads to arbitrary decisions. And what do we have today? We have exactly that,” Shirk said.

“Local officials are under such intense pressure to carry out the policies. They do it to an extreme extent, and they don’t provide accurate information to the top.”

That power is likely to be concentrated further on Sunday when Xi secures his third term, eliminates the last of the liberal economists in his seven-man standing committee and promotes ideological loyalists.

Xi’s rise, geopolitical tension and COVID-19 restrictions have tied China’s economic future to increasing self-reliance and fuelled growing nationalism at home.

Yao, a retired carpenter in Beijing reads newspapers in the street on Wednesday. Credit: Sanghee Liu

“I take the greatest pleasure from reading news about something bad that took place in the United States,” said Yao, a retired carpenter who asked to be referred to only by his last name. “The harder US sanctions are, the more self-reliant will China become.”

“China is strengthening its own power in preparation for a long-term struggle against the United States,” Yao said as he read newspapers on the side of the road in Beijing with his magnifying glass on Wednesday.

The 70-year-old does not share many of his younger compatriots’ concerns about the impact of COVID-zero.

“China in the past 10 years under President Xi Jinping’s leadership has proved to be a great success,” he said. “It will become better and better.”

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