ភាពច្របូកច្របល់សូន្យរបស់ចិន
Chinese leaders’ refusal to adopt a clear stance on zero-COVID is pure politics: nobody wants to be blamed for whatever surge in infections, hospitalizations, and deaths follows a reopening. But the longer the authorities attempt to avoid responsibility and muddle through, the greater the risk to public health.
CLAREMONT, CALIFORNIA – China has lately experienced its largest and most politically charged protests since the pro-democracy movement in 1989 ended in a massacre by government forces on Tiananmen Square. The recent social eruption should not be surprising; frustrations over the Chinese government’s rigid zero-COVID policy have been brewing for a long time. Yet the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) apparently did not see the protests coming, despite operating an all-pervasive and deeply intrusive surveillance apparatus. Now, the central government has announced that it will accelerate the shift away from zero-COVID with a broad easing of restrictions. After publishing a set of 20 guidelines for officials to follow last month, it has now cut the list down to ten.
Faced with the protests, President Xi Jinping’s government eschewed brutal Tiananmen-style suppression of the demonstrations. While large numbers of police have been deployed to protest sites, they have avoided bloody “crowd-control” tactics and mass arrests, preferring instead to identify and intimidate protesters using cell-phone tracking technology. But CPC leaders also warned that a “resolute crackdown” was coming. According to Chen Wenqing, the CPC’s newly installed domestic security chief, the authorities will target “infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces” and “illegal and criminal acts that disrupt social order.”
While China’s government has sent a relatively clear message about the fate of the protests, its stance on zero-COVID has been hazy and inconsistent, with restrictions being relaxed only in some cities, such as Guangzhou, Hangzhou, and Shanghai. In recent days, the phrase “dynamic zero-COVID” (dongtai qingling) seemed to disappear from state-run media.
Still, uncertainty reigned, because no senior Chinese official had publicly stated that the zero-tolerance approach is being fully abandoned. Instead, Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, who is overseeing the pandemic response, has acknowledged the “weakening severity of the Omicron variant” and said that the fight against COVID-19 was entering a “new phase.”
With little direction from above, local governments have been adopting widely different policies. For example, though Shanghai’s municipal government announced an easing of some rules – as of December 5, a negative COVID test was no longer be required to take public transportation or visit parks – it has again shut down the recently reopened Disneyland.
Chinese leaders’ refusal to take a clear stance on zero-COVID is pure politics. The central government has been reluctant to take responsibility for the decision, because policymakers do not want to be blamed for whatever surge in infections, hospitalizations, and deaths follows a reopening. The new guidelines may be looser than what came before, but they do not necessarily represent an end to zero-COVID.
Moreover, local officials have been playing politics, too. If they have been relaxing pandemic restrictions, it is because they believe that doing so will serve their interests well enough to merit the risk to public health. If they have stuck with harsher restrictions, it reflects their calculation that the immediate hit to their popularity would be dwarfed by the impact of becoming a scapegoat for any wave of cases.
But perhaps the clearest and most worrying evidence of the politicization of public-health decisions is the Chinese authorities’ refusal to approve the more effective mRNA vaccines produced by Western companies. Though these vaccines would help to make the departure from zero-COVID safer, especially for the currently under-vaccinated elderly, China’s leaders apparently view the use of Western vaccines as a blow to national pride and an admission of past mistakes.
Looking ahead, China’s leaders can probably count on the security forces to snuff out new protests, thereby allowing the CPC to reassert control and downplay people’s frustrations. But the reluctance to devise a comprehensive and systematic exit strategy – and to take responsibility for its outcomes – could result in China experiencing the worst of both worlds.
If there is still confusion over Xi’s commitment to zero-COVID and the central government’s reopening plans, that will produce a chaotic response at the local level, and the continued enforcement of ever-changing pandemic restrictions will strain state attention and resources, while stoking popular frustration. At the same time, a loosening of restrictions that is not accompanied by effective public-health measures – such as a rapid mass immunization campaign using Western vaccines – will send infection rates soaring, overwhelming China’s health-care system.
Xi needs to act fast to avert this outcome, not least by ordering the immediate approval and import of mRNA vaccines. Such a move would demonstrate not only political courage but also political savvy, because it would go a long way toward repairing the damage done to Xi’s image by the anti-lockdown protests that rocked his government at the end of November.
With protests erupting across China, the government is under pressure to exit from its costly zero-COVID strategy. But the rollback of restrictions is likely to be carried out in a gradual, controlled manner, much like China’s reform and opening up of four decades ago.
HONG KONG – Following a deadly fire in a residential building in China’s Xinjiang region – which many blame on COVID-19 lockdowns – Chinese protesters have taken to the streets to demand an end to stringent pandemic restrictions. Even before the protests erupted, there were signs that President Xi Jinping’s administration was preparing to roll back the costly zero-COVID policy, though the exact timeline remains uncertain. But this process will be more complicated than many seem to realize.
China’s exit from zero-COVID clearly carries public-health risks that must be managed, especially given low vaccination rates among the elderly. Less noticed, however, are the operational challenges this process raises.
As China has learned from Hong Kong’s painful experience, a wave of infections in a densely populated area can create a sudden surge in demand for medical resources, paralyzing the public-health system. If the government fails to find a way to meet that demand quickly, the death toll – especially among the elderly – could soar.
The need to prevent such a demand shock explains why countries have largely taken a gradual approach to lifting pandemic-control measures. But for a country with strong centralized control, China has the advantage of staging its gradual re-opening not only in a temporal sense, but geographically as well.
China’s economic reform and opening up over the past four decades offers useful lessons. Rather than opening the entire economy to the outside world in one fell swoop, China began by designating four mainland cities as special economic zones. Soon after, it opened up 14 other coastal cities. It then gradually replicated the now-proven model in the rest of the country.
From an operational standpoint, this gradual approach offered several obvious advantages. The central government was able to contain – and thus manage – the risks associated with market reform. Moreover, it was able to experiment, accumulate experience, and collect data, which built up people’s confidence and guided the expansion of reforms. And it was able to mobilize talent from across the country to support relevant initiatives.
In exiting from zero-COVID, China can take a similar approach, carving out “special health zones” in high-risk and well-resourced cities, such as Guangzhou, which recently experienced a surge in cases. Such zones will enjoy looser pandemic restrictions, but face limits on movement to other cities and regions.
China’s government can gather data about the impact of easing pandemic restrictions within these contained zones before loosening restrictions more broadly. If a health-care crisis were to emerge in one of these zones, it would be contained, making the surge in demand for critical medical supplies and personnel much easier to meet, not least by ensuring that resources from areas still adhering to the zero-COVID policy could be reallocated.
China has experience with such resource pooling: during Shanghai’s lockdown earlier this year, more than 38,000 medical personnel from 15 Chinese provinces traveled to the city to help tackle the case surge. But, amid an exit from zero-COVID, resource pooling would need to be organized on a much larger scale, with more careful advance planning.
Intuitively, resources should be pooled at a subnational level, with unmet demand in one region met by excess supply from neighboring regions. In this way, resources would need to be carried over relatively shorter distances, making transport faster and cheaper.
But this approach also has a notable limitation: given that neighboring regions tend to have strong economic ties, it makes sense for those near the special health zones to be next in line to have their pandemic restrictions loosened. Once that happens, a rise in COVID-19 cases – and demand for medical resources in the neighboring regions– can be expected. If their medical resources have already been sent to the special zones, they will quickly confront a shortage of medical supplies and personnel.
Given this, regional resource pooling should be complemented by a national-level system. That way, resources can be transferred across distant regions, which are more likely to be at different stages of re-opening.
This larger-scale effort would require advance preparation and coordination between the central government and subnational governments at all levels. Local governments must identify “disposable” medical resources that, if contributed to the resource “pool,” would not cause a significant decline in the quality of local services. The central government, for its part, must devise standard operating procedures to ensure that the different regions’ resource pools cooperate seamlessly.
In the meantime, the central government could create one or multiple centralized distribution hubs to hold medical resources for shipment to regional centers. It could also assemble a team of specialized medical workers to be dispatched to special health zones on demand. Fortunately, China’s highly centralized political system is well-suited for such large-scale and complex endeavors.
Despite the surge in popular unrest, China’s exit from zero-COVID will not happen overnight. Instead, it is likely to be carried out in a gradual and controlled manner, much like China’s economic reform and opening up. That said, China’s leaders must move much faster than they did four decades ago. With a carefully devised operational strategy, there is a good chance that they can pull it off.
កង្វះខាតសកម្មជនចិន
China’s Activist Shortage
It is difficult to achieve political transformation in a country with a median age over 40 and young people aged 15-29 accounting for less than 20% of the population. That is why, even as protests roil cities across China, no one should expect a sustained push for democratization.
MADISON – Protesters have taken to the streets of China’s cities in a rare show of political dissent. While the demonstrations are focused largely on the authorities’ zero-COVID policy, they have sparked speculation that a pro-democracy movement – and even a Taiwan-style political transition – could come next. But this is unlikely, not least because decades of strict family-planning policies have left China with too few young people to join the fight.
A country can be said to be having a “youth boom” when the proportion of people aged 15-29 exceeds 28%. As the most economically dynamic, politically passionate, and physically active members of society, people in this age cohort are particularly likely to challenge norms, participate in protests, and demand reform. So, when a country is experiencing a youth boom, it may also find itself on the path to political change – including, potentially, democratization.
That was the case in Taiwan and South Korea. As the share of young people increased – from 25% in each country in 1966 to a peak of 31% in the early 1980s – so did economic growth and pro-democratic fervor. Both economies became democracies in 1987, when their populations’ median age was 26. A youth boom also contributed to the eruption of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2010, when the median age across the Arab world was just 20.
A similar trend once seemed to be unfolding in China. The share of young people in China’s population rose from 24% in 1966 to 28% in 1979, when the median age was 22. Growing political – though not democratic – fervor helped to fuel the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. Political engagement among young people also helped to drive the reform and opening up that Deng Xiaoping launched in 1978, and sparked some social unrest.
The government responded to that unrest by launching a three-year “strike hard against crime” campaign in 1983-86. But this did not temper the Chinese people’s increasingly pro-democratic zeal. In April 1989 – when the proportion of youth was at its peak of 31%, and the median age was 25 – student-led demonstrators occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing, with tens of thousands of Chinese hoisting a new symbol, the Goddess of Democracy, modeled after the Statue of Liberty, and calling for freedom of speech and an end to censorship. It took a bloody crackdown that June to crush the movement.
In Xinjiang province, the unrest came later. While the region was not experiencing a youth boom in 1989, the proportion of Uyghur youth exceeded 28% in 1996, and peaked at 32% in 2008. The next year, Xinjiang was roiled by the so-called Ürümqi Riots, which began as a peaceful student-led protest over the killing of two Uyghur factory workers but quickly descended into violence. The 2008 Lhasa riots in Tibet are also correlated with a youth boom.
Today, young people are again at the forefront of protests in China. But there are not so many of them anymore. The proportion of youth aged 15-29 in China stood at just 17% last year, when the median age was 42. And the share will only continue to shrink, likely dropping to 13% in 2040, when the median age is expected to reach 52.
It is difficult to achieve political transformation in a country with a median age over 40 and youth accounting for less than 20% of the population. The protest movement that emerged in Hong Kong in 2019 to defend the city’s democracy ended in failure, partly because, with a median age higher than 44, the territory has entered political “menopause.” Only 16% of its population is aged 15-29.
Of course, repression also plays an important role in crushing such movements, and China’s rulers have not hesitated to suppress, censor, and subdue. But it is the declining youth population that is ultimately depleting society of the will to fight for democracy. What the Chinese authorities need to worry about is not the threat to regime security, but social rigidity, because there will not be enough young people to support benign reforms like the one in 1978.
The members of the one-child generation are overwhelmingly “little pinks,” preferring to support the government, rather than pursue sociopolitical change. Their parents are not exactly primed to lead a revolution, either, and not only because older generations tend to prefer the status quo. With only one child to support them in retirement, they know that they will have to rely on the government for social security, health care, and the rest of their retirement safety net.
The one-child policy has led to a decline in China’s average household size from 4.4 people in 1982 to 3.4 in 2000 and 2.6 in 2020, leading to a reduction in families’ needs and, in turn, an increasingly powerful government. In 1983, China’s household disposable income accounted for 62% of GDP, but declined to 44% in 2021. (The global average is 63%.) Despite four decades of rapid economic growth, China does not have a large enough middle class. A fragmented, economically strained society may mount protests, but none that would be sustainable or large enough to challenge a powerful regime, let alone bring about a democratic transition. Because aging leads to economic slowdowns, China may never escape the middle-income trap or achieve a political transition.
To be sure, if household disposable income rises to 60-70% of GDP, China may have to pursue paradigm-shifting economic, political, and social reforms, as well as change its foreign and defense policies. This would produce a more Western-style political system and lead to improved relations with the United States.
But, despite its weaknesses, China’s political system is not in immediate danger, though maintaining its governance model is a formula for eventual demographic and economic collapse. Tibet’s political system survived for more than a thousand years after its population began to decline in the eighth century. Chinese authorities should feel politically secure enough to return to a more benign Confucian system, with the government working to restore population sustainability and socioeconomic vitality, though it is hardly clear that they will.
When China joined the World Trade Organization two decades ago, many anticipated that the country’s economic opening would inevitably lead to greater democratization. Instead, China increased censorship and repression, while becoming a producer of everything its people – and the rest of the world – could want. What China has not produced is enough Chinese people to secure its future and sustain progress toward democratic reform.
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