China’s Covid problem shows how dangerous dictatorships can be

Editorial: The problem is that the Chinese government failed to use the time bought by lockdowns to get its citizens vaccinated

The overall rate of vaccination, around 60 per cent, is weak (AFP/Getty)

As an object lesson in how not to manage the latter stages of a pandemic, China provides a fine case study. After sticking for too long to a phantasmagoric “zero-Covid” objective, the Chinese Politburo, spooked by a near-revolutionary mood among the populace, panicked and ended all the previous draconian restrictions almost immediately.

The result was predictable: a huge spike in Covid cases that threatens to overcome the nation’s economy and, more to the point, its underdeveloped health system. In a nation of 1.4 billion, that equates to a lot of casualties, even if the strain of the virus now circulating causes relatively mild Covid-19. There are predictions that half the population of Shanghai, for example, some 25 million, will soon be infected – and the same could happen across the nation.

The problem is that the Chinese government, labouring under the misapprehension that Covid could indeed be eliminated with sufficient testing and quarantining, failed to use the time bought by lockdowns to get its citizens vaccinated. The overall rate of vaccination, around 60 per cent, is weak, and in some groups, such as the elderly, the number who have had the vital booster jab administered to them is dangerously low.

When they fall seriously ill, the chances are that they won’t get a bed in intensive care. Lockdowns have been ended so rapidly, and compulsory testing abandoned so quickly, that no one – including the Chinese authorities and the World Health Organisation – knows what is going on.

The other consequence of this spike is that China, in common with every other nation, will face a continuing economic and social strain through the effects of long Covid. That, again, will depress China’s future ability to grow and provide jobs and food for its population.

Investment and the country’s export sector have already been affected adversely by a wave of Western hostility to President Xi’s domestic oppression and foreign expansion. The renewed disruption from this round of Covid will help persuade more Western-based transnationals to “re-shore” production previously contracted-out to China, and relocate supplies to the likes of India, Vietnam and Indonesia.

None of that is good news for China, but given that China is the second-largest economy in the world, neither is it going to help the rest of the world make it through the recession. Exports of everything – from German machine tools to Italian luxury fashion items – will be affected if the Chinese market also stalls. America remains dangerously reliant on China being strong enough to buy its US Treasury bonds. In what is still a globalised economy, if China catches a cold – or, in this case, Covid – the rest of the world sneezes, and some catch pneumonia.

Three years on from when the first cases of a mysterious new feverish disease were detected in Wuhan, China has been forced from a policy of zero Covid to “living with Covid”. It’s possible that new and more dangerous variants and sub-variants may evolve during this huge and sudden upsurge in infections, with hundreds of millions of human beings about to incubate existing iterations of the coronavirus.

As we discovered in 2020, it is simply impossible to prevent the virus from crossing international borders; and the world awaits with trepidation what may yet emerge from China.

Not that it’s of much use to the world as it watches millions die and Chinese industry grind to a halt again, but it’s worth pointing out that China’s opaque and repressive system of governance has been an important factor in its ultimate devastating capitulation to Covid.

In the West, even the most dangerous Covid cranks are relatively free to spread their misinformation online. More sensibly, scientists, public health authorities, pharmaceutical company executives and governments are held to account by the media and elected representatives.

Policy decisions are minutely scrutinised, and errors exposed and corrected. Obviously, few such processes exist in China, where the ability of the state to impose its will on its people is thought of, at least by the Chinese Communist Party, as a source of strength in its rivalry with the decadent, undisciplined democratic West.

Covid has shown just how much damage not only coronavirus but also dictatorship can do to a nation.