China’s ‘Zero Covid’ Has Become Xi’s Nemesis
Beijing oversold its surveillance-based system of disease control and underestimated the shape-shifting virus. The result is an economic mess — though probably not a political crisis.
Locked down in Shanghai.
Photographer: Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images
W. Somerset Maugham’s 1925 novel “The Painted Veil” features a harrowing description of a cholera outbreak in a provincial Chinese city. “The great city lay in terror; and death, sudden and ruthless, hurried through its tortuous streets … The people were dying at the rate of a hundred a day, and hardly any of those who were attacked by the disease recovered from it; the gods had been brought out from the abandoned temples and placed in the streets; offerings were laid before them and sacrifices made, but they did not stay the plague.”
That was the backward China supposedly swept away by Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution. In reality, man-made disasters outdid natural ones to kill tens of millions of people under Mao’s tyranny, the most disastrous being the famine of 1959-61. According to Frank Dikotter’s definitive account, 45 million people “died unnecessarily” as a result of the collapse of agricultural production caused by Mao’s disastrous “Great Leap Forward” — just under 7% of the Chinese population.