China shows that a zero-Covid policy fails. It is now the biggest threat to the world economy

Hard though it might be to remember now, little over a year ago there were people in Britain who were still advocating a zero-Covid strategy — not one of getting infections down to manageable levels but seeking to eliminate each and every last case through constant mass testing and regular incarceration of the population. It should have been obvious at the time where that would lead, but for those who prefer to wait for solid, real world evidence, they can see what is now happening in China.

Virtually alone among countries, China has never abandoned its dream of eliminating Covid, with the result this week that more lockdowns were announced. Six million people in the city of Guangzhou — Canton in old speak, just 100 miles from Hong Kong — have been ordered to stay at home. Unless the country rapidly changes course, there will be a lot more of this to come. Recorded covid cases in China, at around 30,000 a day, are higher than they have been at any point in the pandemic.   

Zero-Covid might briefly have seemed clever, such as at New Year 2021 when many western countries were trying and failing to control Covid with belated lockdowns but the Chinese were allowed to celebrate the festival in near-normal fashion. But that faded quickly once the West became vaccinated and the inevitable outbreaks continued to occur in China.   It didn’t help that China’s vaccines were significantly inferior to those developed in the West.

In his obsessive attempt to show superiority over western countries in handling a pandemic, Xi Jinping has doomed his country to re-live 2020 for all eternity. If this policy continues, China will never return to normality. The World achieved a huge success in eliminating the smallpox virus, but eliminating an endemic coronavirus like SARS-CoV-2 is pointless —  just ask the staff who laboured for years at Britain’s defunct Common Cold Research Laboratory. 

Never mind Ukraine, never mind gas shortages, Xi’s pig-headedness is becoming the biggest threat to the global economy. For years, global economic growth has been driven by China, but not any more. Guangzhou is a major producer of silicon chips, a shortage of which has already brought the car industry nearly to its knees. After weaning ourselves off Russian gas we will next have to start thinking of how we can live without Chinese electronics and other goods, if our importers are not to find their supply chains regularly snapped by repeated lockdowns.

But could zero-Covid bring about the end of Xi Jinping himself? It takes a lot to persuade the Chinese to riot — there is too much too lose, too little support. Yet Guangzhou this week has seen crowds take to the streets, overturning cars, throwing objects at the police and chanting ‘no more testing’.     

At the peak of Covid in Britain, Professor Neil Fergusson and a few other scientists announced themselves to be impressed at how the British public had accepted serious restrictions on their freedoms —  far more easily than they could have imagined. Briefly, it seemed as if the whole world was going Chinese — that authoritarianism was winning over freedom, and over freedom of speech in particular.  But with China’s population sapped by a zero-Covid policy which is well into its third year, the tables have turned. Authoritarian public health policies have not merely proved ineffective, the Chinese people are responding with rare seen mass defiance.