Dog killers and baby snatchers: welcome to Covid zero, Xi-style
Beijing’s blatantly political suppression strategy has never looked as cruel. And it could go on for years.
It’s as though Xi Jinping’s Communist Party has been running a competition for members to show their worst face to the world.
A corgi beaten to death by a healthcare worker on an empty Shanghai street after its owner was sent to a quarantine centre.
Crying babies taken from terrified parents and put into a crowded hospital to monitor their asymptomatic Covid.
A drone hovering in a dark sky above a group of Shanghai’s 26 million residents, who had been singing on their balconies.
“Control your soul’s desire for freedom,” says the drone through a loudspeaker. “Do not open the window or sing.”
This has been a nightmarish week in China.
Shanghai has replaced Wuhan as the Chinese city with the highest number of new daily cases of Covid. On Wednesday, more than 17,000 cases were found in the city, according to the official statistics (on whose veracity, more later).
President Xi’s “Covid zero” policy has never looked so incompetent. And rarely has it looked as cruel.
However, due to the political logic of the Chinese Communist Party, it also seems to be more immovable than ever.
Xi and his closest advisers are totally absorbed with ensuring the coronation of his third five-year-term at the Communist Party’s congress at the end of the year. Which means now is not the time to change the general secretary’s signature “Covid zero” policy, one he claims has made his country a “world leader”.
“Judging from how this pandemic is being handled by different leaderships and (political) systems … (we can) clearly see who has done better,” Xi boasted to his comrades last year.
Last month, Xi underlined again how China’s Covid policy had outshone the “chaos in the West”.
But for many outside of China, the ongoing outbreaks in Hong Kong and now Shanghai show the impossibility of eliminating the new, terrifically infectious strands of Covid.
The outbreak in Hong Kong led to the city recording the highest death rate in the world as Covid spread among its unvaccinated elderly. More than 8000 people lost their lives.
It looked like the ultimate cautionary tale about the need to vaccinate the most vulnerable members of a population. But things looked different from the leadership compound in Beijing.
“They draw a different kind of lesson,” says Yanzhong Huang, a New York-based expert on China’s health policy.
For Xi’s leadership team, the Hong Kong disaster was further proof of the correctness of their “Covid zero” strategy. Comrades were instructed to implement it more “resolutely” than ever.
This week, Shanghai, the most cosmopolitan city in China, has learned just how scary that whatever-ever-it-takes approach to stamping out the virus can be.
Children sent away
Until now, Shanghai has played a role similar to Sydney earlier in the pandemic in Australia.
Shanghai’s health officials championed a more relaxed interpretation of Xi’s “Covid zero” policy. Until last weekend, the city had never been in a citywide lockdown, aside from a fortnight in early 2020, right after the Wuhan catastrophe.
That more flexible approach ended with the arrival last weekend of Xi’s most senior Covid enforcer, Sun Chunlan. With the full authority of Xi behind her, she is now issuing instructions to Shanghai’s medical army and the 38,000 white hazmat suit-wearing reinforcements flown in from around the country. The message is clear: Beijing is now in charge.
Comrades in Shanghai have pledged to “show their swords and struggle against all kinds of behaviours that interfere with and undermine the overall situation of the epidemic”. In other words, corgis beware.
Everyone in the city who tests positive for Covid is being taken for an indefinite stint in enormous quarantine stations with no showers, overrun squat portable toilets and as many as 4000 fellow occupants. Children as young as seven can be sent to them without being accompanies by a parent.
Shanghai’s quarantine network is beyond overstretched. New asymptomatic and mild cases in the city are being transferred to the neighbouring provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu.
Those additional 60,000 beds will fill up soon based on the current daily case numbers.
“It is a complete clown world,” says Elizabeth Liu, 39, an American and longtime resident in Shanghai. “I told my husband, if they try to take our kids away, I’m going to barricade the door with the sofa.”
Their family of six is now preparing to leave Shanghai, their home of almost two decades. The opinions of Shanghai’s dwindling community of expats is not going to change the central government’s approach.
Nor are the arguments of Shanghai’s health officials, including one who complained that the hardline measures were more “political” than medical. She is said to now be under investigation.
Until now, Shanghai has been the base of a group of health policy experts who were trying to move China’s policy to a more scientific, less campaign-style approach.
Their best-known advocate has been Dr Zhang Wenhong, an infectious diseases specialist who has advised Shanghai’s Covid response. Just over a fortnight ago, Zhang was telling his 4.2 million fans on the Chinese social media site Weibo that the new Omicron strand of Covid was “not so scary”. After more than two years of terrifying propaganda about the virus, it was part of an effort to try to present a path for China to, very slowly, open up to the world.
“The question is whether we can outrun Omicron without a regional lockdown and mass nucleic acid testing,” he wrote in a piece composed after a late night inspection of one of Shanghai’s new quarantine facilities.
That essay on March 24 has not aged well for the man dubbed “China’s Dr Fauci” – at least not by the standards enforced by the nationalist warriors who dominate China’s internet. All 26 million people in Shanghai are now in a total lockdown of a severity that would shock even Dan Andrews. Waves of citywide Covid tests began a week ago.
After more than two years, the policy response is stunningly similar to the original brutal lockdown in Wuhan. Zhang’s essay had been an attempt to learn from the deadly outbreak in Hong Kong. Vaccination of the elderly was the key, he argued.
Shanghai health officials had suggested that, perhaps, people in China could be allowed to use the world’s most effective vaccines, the American-made Moderna and European-invented BioNTech jabs. But China’s less-effective vaccines remain the only ones approved by Beijing.
Zhang had also supported the use of the antiviral drug Paxlovid, a Covid treatment pill developed by the American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. That approach has led to h im being derided as a “traitor” by influential nationalist commentators.
“You are disloyal to the party and irresponsible to the people,” posted one.
“My hatred for Zhang Wenhong has gradually turned into anger after a month of the Shanghai epidemic,” said another.
Zhang has not said a word in China’s party-state media for more than two weeks. His social media account is silent. Rumours abound that he has been stood down from his advisory role.
Why Beijing is worried
Nobody has died in Shanghai’s outbreak, according to China’s National Health Commission.
You would need to be a very loyal comrade to believe that.
A report in China’s most respected masthead Caixin last weekend revealed ghoulish scenes at Shanghai’s biggest elderly-care facility.
Covid had struck the Donghai Elderly Care Hospital. A nurse at the hospital told Caixin she had moved an 87-year-old deceased man out of his ward early in the morning of March 31. She found almost a dozen other bodies in the morgue.
Within an hour, that report was removed from China’s internet. The same thing happened to Caixin’s reporting in Wuhan at the start of the outbreak.
Xi has trumpeted China’s “people first” approach as the guiding philosophy for its Covid strategy. That has tremendously raised the political stakes for acknowledging deaths from Covid.
Chinese officials have responded as you might expect. According to the official tally, there have been only two Covid deaths in the past 14 months in China (population of 1.4 billion), despite outbreaks in some of the country’s most populous cities, including Shenzhen, Nanjing and Shanghai.
“It’s hard to believe,” says Yanzhong Huang, the Chinese health policy expert, of the almost non-existent fatality rate.
The most charitable explanation is that China uses a much stricter definition for what is classed as a Covid death.
It is not a subject Beijing wants to talk about. A spokesperson at the National Health Commission declined to share China’s definition of a Covid death with The Weekend Australian. After a two-week delay – and after getting the approval of the commission’s leadership team – they gave a slogan-filled non-answer.
Among a recitation of Xi’s Covid maxims, the commission said “traditional Chinese medicine” had helped to keep the death rate near zero.
Beijing’s terror about a wider outbreak is not without basis. Vaccination rates are lowest among China’s most vulnerable. More than 18 million people over 80 haven’t had a jab.
Research outside of China shows the case fatality for Omicron is more than 20 per cent for unvaccinated people over 80. The outbreak in Hong Kong was an awful vision of what that might look like on the mainland.
Many say they are worried about the risks of side effects, not surprising considering the reams of vaccine misinformation on China’s curated internet.
That the Communist Party hasn’t made taking them mandatory has raised further doubt. It suggests they too are worried.
Incredible as it might seem to people outside of China, the Shanghai outbreak may even delay any adjustment of Beijing’s vaccine strategy.
“When you’re talking about prioritising vaccinating the elderly, focusing on severe cases, reducing deaths, you are essentially moving away from ‘zero Covid’,” says Huang, who is a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Beijing is a long way from doing that.
The beating to death of pet dogs has become one of the most grotesque features of China’s Covid exceptionalism. There is no scientific rationale for why a health worker in a full white hazmat suit bludgeoned a corgi on Wednesday after its owner was taken to a quarantine facility for testing positive for Covid.
The clubbing to death a month ago of Snowball, a fluffy three-year-old Samoyed purebred, by another zealous hazmat wearer in Guangdong was similarly pointless. Snowball’s crime was to have an owner taken to quarantine. Their deaths were filmed and shared by horrified pet owners.
No wonder some residents in Shanghai refused to come out of their apartments this week for their compulsory Covid tests.
China’s hazmat suit-wearing “Covid zero” enforcers complain of the extraordinary pressure they are under as they try to implement their leader’s policy.
“We nurses got up at 2am to work,” says one nurse, almost in tears, in one of the grim videos being shared on Chinese social media. “Why can’t you give us some understanding?”
