The Spike at the End of “Zero COVID”
Mary Harris: And I think about China’s zero COVID policy. The rules that kept millions of people in lockdown, sometimes for months at a time. I think about emptied out streets in Shanghai. I think of the PCR tests government officials required of every resident week after week. But Dake Kang from the Associated Press, he thinks about something else.
Dake: I mean, just to give you an idea of how crazy things were getting before zero COVID ended, I had quite a few friends and acquaintances were having for all parties and going to Thailand because they were just like, This is too much.
Mary Harris: I’m out for Dake zero. COVID was surprisingly effective until it wasn’t. And then it became this opportunity for everyday people in China to rebel, coming up with workarounds to avoid the apps that the government used to track them.
Dake: You know, at a certain point, by the end, I think people were just straight up resorting to using fake health codes or recording the sound of, you know, the health code scan so that they could get into places without actually having to scan the codes because so many people were fed up with this policy.
Mary Harris: Wow. That’s I hadn’t even thought about that. But that’s like an ingenious thing. Just record that little like, bling and like, play that.
Dake: And then that’s exactly what happened. I mean, it was an open dissent, but, you know, it was basically people being like, I’m done with this.
Mary Harris: Well, don’t go. Then these individual dissents became communal. They got people started protesting in the streets, which is when the Chinese government decided to reverse course. That good? Dake says the cause and effect was not as neat as all that. By the time protesters started openly speaking out, the government had been looking to ease away from zero COVID for a while.
Dake: So it was this really confusing period for for like a month when people weren’t really sure what exactly the central government wanted was a zero COVID or was it not COVID? Was it something else?
Mary Harris: It turns out that what happened next wasn’t very neat either. You chronicled the way zero COVID led to all kinds of discontent. Now that restrictions have been lifted, is that discontent lifting, too?
Dake: I think that’s a complicated question because quite a few people are happy, Quite a few people are unhappy. I think everyone, however, is a bit puzzled at just how quickly the government moved to lift restrictions, because it’s pretty clear that the government could have done more to prepare for the exit from zero COVID.
Mary Harris: The virus is overwhelming hospitals across the country. The sick struggled to get help.
Dake: The cases have just gotten out of control and it’s.
Mary Harris: Like the opposite of zero. This video CNN has obtained was filmed by a man who said his father’s body was lying in this overflowing Beijing hospital morgue for days. He said his father waited hours for hospital bed space. By the time a bed opened up, it was too late.
Dake: It is the opposite of zero. I mean, you know, you have probably hundreds of billions of cases at this point, even if you don’t necessarily have the statistics to reflect that.
Mary Harris: Today on the show, why China went from COVID zero to COVID everywhere. I’m Mary Harris. You’re listening to What next? Stick around.
Mary Harris: The Chinese Communist Party officially dropped its zero COVID restrictions on December 7th. Party machinations can be mysterious from the outside, but Dake Kang says, as far as we can tell, there were a couple of factors that swayed the party leader, Xi Jinping, to change course. First, there were those protests that broke out all around the country in November. They fuelled unrest. They undermined party control. But just as important, maybe more so was Covid’s impact on China’s bottom line. Data released this week shows that in 2022, China’s economy had its worst performance in decades.
Dake: I mean, this was basically a pressure cooker situation because there was pressure coming from all sides. Local governments were also being told that they had to spend huge sums of money setting up a massive PCR testing infrastructure and to test basically everyone in the province every few days. That’s extremely expensive. So local governments were also running out of money and you’d hear rumors of, you know, government officials flying to Beijing to try and get loans from banks because they had a big hole in their budget. You know, The Wall Street Journal reported that the head of Foxconn, one of Apple’s biggest suppliers, had sent a letter to the Chinese leadership begging them to, you know, reconsider zero COVID because it was crippling their production and having a big effect on their factories. So you can see that it was really damaging the economy.
Dake: And, you know, just from my personal perspective, I mean, there’s a street down from where I live, which is famous for its restaurants. And like by the time zero COVID were lifted, like half or more of those restaurants had shut down and gone out of business. I mean, you could feel it on a visceral level. You would go traveling in China, you’d go to these famous tourist spots, places that used to be thronged with tourists so packed that you could barely move. You know, before the pandemic. And I would wander around there and you’d be empty. It was just surreal. So it was really, really hurting the economy. And that was definitely a factor.
Mary Harris: Still, up to the last minute, the party waffled. The South China Morning Post reported that the original plan was not to reopen the country till March.
Dake: That is what would make sense, right? The you know, during the winter, COVID is more likely to spread too quickly because people tend to stay indoors. There is dry air. Also, there’s the flu. So, you know, the flu circulating at the same time as you have COVID. But it seems like the government’s hand was forced to a certain degree. I mean, the change was so sudden. And, you know, before December 7th, the government was still saying in newspaper editorials that they wanted to absolutely uphold zero COVID.
Mary Harris: So what happened on December 7th? How did the government do this U-turn?
Dake: Yeah, So the government basically said on December 17th, they published a list of ten measures to adjust their their COVID measures. They never actually formally declared the end of zero COVID. Which is interesting. Not surprising. I mean, you know, it’s kind of awkward to be saying in all your state newspapers, you know, Resolute, Lee, uphold zero COVID. And then a couple days later suddenly be like, oh, yeah, we’re you know, we’re ending it. They tend to say, oh, we’re ending it because it’s like, you know what? And like, you were just saying that you were maintaining it just a few days ago.
Dake: But those measures were really significant because they basically announced effectively the end of scanning health codes most of the time, which, you know, was the way the government had restricted the movement of a lot of people. It was also saying things like, you know, officials should not lock people down in their neighborhoods. You should just lock down individual houses or individual apartment units. And that was a major shift as well.
Mary Harris: So no more using an app on your phone to get a green, yellow or red rating that decides where you can go and where you can’t.
Dake: Yeah, exactly. And also, you know, no more checking PCR tests. Most of the time, that was a big one.
Mary Harris: Yeah. I mean, in November and December, COVID numbers were already creeping up in China. So how did the zero COVID policy ending impacts numbers of infections? And what happened then?
Dake: You know, there was this period for a couple of weeks where things seemed kind of normal and it was like, oh, like, you know, maybe everything is fine. And, you know, there was a bit you know, people were going to restaurants and so excited that they could go without necessarily having to go through all these restrictions. You know, you could travel around. And then things fell very silent in Beijing because everyone was getting sick. I mean, basically, there was a weekend when it’s felt like half of my office had had fallen sick with COVID and a bunch of my friends fell sick with COVID. And to give you an idea of how weird that was. I mean, before they started lifting these restrictions, I didn’t know of a single person who caught COVID in China for the past three years.
Mary Harris: Wow.
Dake: Because zero COVID, you know, had been that strict and that effective. Nobody I knew was getting COVID. And then suddenly, overnight, it seemed like everyone I knew was getting COVID.
Mary Harris: Was that shift reflected in China’s official COVID counts?
Dake: No, absolutely not. It wasn’t reflected in the COVID count at all. And, you know, at first, while people were trying to figure out what was going on, it wasn’t really clear. But then as the days passed by and as everyone started to getting infected, it became increasingly clear that the official count was not reflecting reality. You know, it was saying things like, Oh, there’s thousands of cases or tens of thousands of cases, and you’re like, half the city is probably infected. What are you talking about? You know, like Beijing is a city of 20 million people, have half the people in the city are getting infected. There’s no way it’s a couple of thousand cases or tens of thousands of cases at a certain point. To the government’s credit, they basically threw up their hands and they said, you know, yeah, I mean, we’re not counting this anymore. We’re not publishing the statistic anymore because there’s no way we can keep track of what’s going on here.
Mary Harris: But there have been these reports that even if your relative dies with COVID, they’re probably not being counted as a COVID death because China has decided to be very strict in terms of how it interprets COVID deaths in a very different way than the US or Britain or even Hong Kong tend to, you know, count up how COVID has impacted their mortality rates.
Dake: That’s correct. Actually, that’s been China’s practice from the beginning. They’ve always only counted deaths from COVID if the death was caused directly by COVID. And there’s also been some of the issues, same issues we’ve seen elsewhere in the world, where there’s inconsistent standards as to how to count a COVID death. You know, is it a death caused by a pneumonia? Can you count tests that are caused for other reasons? At the same time, though, even considering China’s stricter definition, it seems pretty clear at this point that there’s, you know, far more than the 40 or so people that they’ve said have died from COVID since the beginning of the lifting of restrictions.
Mary Harris: Is that literally what the number is, 40 now?
Dake: It’s something in that neighborhood. And that’s just I mean, it’s just absurd, right? I don’t think anyone believes that number.
Mary Harris: In the last couple of days. Chinese officials finally admitted with the Chinese public had figured out already, they disclosed that between December 8th and January 12th, 60,000 Chinese people died with COVID. Many doubt that this is a full accounting and many think these numbers are about to get much worse.
Dake: And so the biggest worry right now is the upcoming Spring Festival in China, which is the biggest holiday. It’s also the biggest annual human migration on the planet. And so a ton of people are going to be going home to the countryside to see their parents or their relatives. And they’re worried that, you know, this is going to bring COVID to a lot of the most distant corners of China.
Mary Harris: Well. So it sounds like you’re saying this the waves are going to kind of just keep coming for a while. That’s the fear.
Dake: I mean, it’s going to take a while for a virus, no matter how infectious to burn its way through, you know, a country of over a billion people. Right. And it’s just a huge country. It’s a huge, diverse country. And in fact, the biggest concern is not, you know, the COVID wave in the big cities, Shanghai or Beijing, which are the most developed cities in the country and have a pretty good medical infrastructure. The concern is what happens when COVID burns through the countryside. You know, the medical infrastructure there is much poorer, and it’s to the point where many counties don’t have a single ICU bed. And so people who get sick and are critically ill in places like that have to go to the bigger cities in order to get medical care.
Mary Harris: And will they find a bed there when they get there?
Dake: I mean, that’s another question, right? I mean, I when I went into the countryside to answer exactly this question, I found that a lot of hospitals were just totally overwhelmed. You would go into the hours and it was just it was dependent on me. I mean, you would see nurses and doctors running back and forth wheeling ventilators. You would see relatives crowding around counters, asking for medication. There were people sprawled out on the hallway, on the floors or on metal benches waiting for care because there was just too many people there and not enough staff, not enough resources.
Dake: I met someone who was actually driving from hospital to hospital looking for a bed for her mother in law, and she was just not getting any success. She was getting turned away from every hospital she was going to because she was told that it was full and she was so frustrated that, you know, she was cheering up and she was speaking to us. I mean, it was really a dire situation.
Mary Harris: We’ll be right back after a break.
Mary Harris: Part of what was so striking to me about your reporting from China was this bifurcation. And it was happening in a bunch of different ways. There was a bifurcation of, you know, the fact that maybe things looked normal in the cities or normal ish, but then if you went to the hospitals, they were overwhelmed. And it reminded me of the United States. But the difference was that when this happened in the U.S., like in 2020, where some states were opening up, some states weren’t. You’d see sort of the hospitals overwhelmed, maybe the cities normal. There weren’t that many ways to prevent COVID, like there wasn’t a widely available vaccine, but there are now. So are we seeing in China a ramp up of these preventative measures, things that could maybe prevent people from getting sick, prevent people from dying?
Dake: Yes, I think the authorities are fully aware of what they need to be doing, but they just haven’t had very much time to prepare. So they are doing things like having a vaccination campaign, trying to get that elderly vaccination rate up, trying to expand the medical infrastructure, trying to get more ICU beds in place. But unfortunately, these are not things that you can do overnight. I mean, just to give you an example, the vaccination campaign, I went to two vaccination sites when zero COVID was lifted and it was empty. There was nobody getting a vaccine. I was like, what’s going on here?
Mary Harris: Is that because there wasn’t interest in it or there hadn’t been promoted or what was it?
Dake: There was plenty of promotion. Part of the reason why I went was because I could see posters saying, you know, go get vaccinated. But I think what was going on was not that there was an interest, but that a lot of the most vulnerable people to COVID who should be getting these shots were scared of going out and scared of getting vaccinated because they were worried that while getting vaccinated, they could catch COVID. So it would have made sense to have this vaccination campaign while zero COVID was still in place when people could go and get vaccinated without fear of getting infected. But for some reason, that didn’t really happen.
Dake: Another example is, you know, ICU capacity. ICU capacity. You can have beds. You can even have the, you know, equipment per say. But you can’t just train ICU staff overnight. Right. I mean, they need training. They need, you know, kind of specialized training in order to be able to handle these kinds of situations. And they’re stretched thin as they are. So you can’t be doing this overnight. It’s going to take, you know, weeks, months to put this all in place. So they’re trying to, you know, be running ahead of a tsunami, basically. Yeah.
Mary Harris: I also read that there’s been this bifurcation of public opinion where there are active debates playing out online between people who welcome the end of zero COVID and people who are looking at what’s happening in terms of people getting sick, people dying and saying, this is why we shouldn’t have done this essentially. Even Xi Jinping in his near New Year address kind of nodded to this and said, you know, it’s only natural for different people to have different concerns or hold different views on the same issue. But that seems so anathema to the kind of Chinese mindset that we’ve seen over the last couple of years of everyone in lockstep in agreement about how to move forward when it comes to COVID. Does that strike you, too?
Dake: Yeah, and that was very apparent already by the beginning of 2022, I would say. It was becoming increasingly clear that zero COVID was becoming this polarizing topic in a way it hadn’t been before, because, again, you know, in 2020 and 2021, zero, COVID was very successful. And it seemed like China was getting the best of both worlds because people would look at other countries where not only was everyone falling sick, everyone was also staying home and life was not going as normal. And in China, there was no COVID and life that’s going on like normal. So people were like, Wow, this is wonderful. China’s doing better than the rest of the world. That changed in 2022 because the restrictions became so onerous that it really became disruptive towards people’s lives and started strangling the economy.
Dake: But, you know, people are still scared of the virus. A lot of people were still scared of the virus. So the you know, there was a group of people who were like, I’m so ready for this to be over. There was a group of people who were like, we need to maintain this. And I think you see that playing out right now, where some people are still like, oh, like, you know, this is so I’m so done with the three. And no matter what the cost, this is inevitable. Of course, people are going to die, which is true. I mean, of course people, you know, when you open up, inevitably there is going to be a wave of infections, hospitalizations and deaths, just like in the rest of the world. It’s just basic science, right? But then you also have these people who are like, you know, this is the fault of those people who pushed for zero COVID too fast. You. We’ve done this too quickly and look at the consequences. And the thing is, they’re not entirely wrong about that.
Mary Harris: Yeah, but if like lifting zero COVID was supposed to kind of quell this debate or feeling of unrest, it doesn’t seem like that is what happened.
Dake: I mean, I think that just like with everything else in recent history, once this wave passes through, people will kind of settle back into their normal lives. We’ve seen this kind of thing before, right? I mean, you know, go back three years when the whistleblower Doctor Li Wenliang, passed away from COVID, you know, he was punished for speaking about or, you know, basically trying to spread information about the spread of this mysterious new disease. And then he was punished for it. I think there was a big wave of of anger when he passed away because it kind of manifested how the government had been opaque, not transparent about this virus. But that wave passed away. I mean, it just it just receded into the background. And as China got the virus under control, people became very happy with the government. Actually, people became proud of China’s zero COVID policy. And that wave of discontent kind of melted into the past.
Mary Harris: Until they came back.
Dake: Until it came back. And so this is what I mean when I talk about discontent in China, right? I think in the short term, people are going to be happy or people are going to be unhappy about what the government is doing. There’s going to be ups and downs, pretty dramatic ones, right, because the government is taking a lot of responsibility for everything that is going on. But the bigger picture is that it is increasingly difficult to talk about even normal topics that shouldn’t necessarily be politically sensitive, but have become politically sensitive like the real COVID or like what’s going on to you personally with quarantines or with the economy. And I think that does cause a certain amount of pressure to start building in society because people will start having these problems. They’re going to be unhappy about certain things and they’re not going to be able to express it if they’re not able to express it. Those problems can fester for a long time.
Mary Harris: So do you expect more protests like what you saw around COVID in November? And it may not even be about COVID, but because of these bigger issues that don’t seem to be going away.
Dake: I think predicting discontent or protests in China or China’s future in general is a bit of a fool’s errand. But I will say that I don’t think the underlying discontent that led to some of what we saw is going to go away, because, you know, you can get rid of zero COVID, and that is indeed one of the major, major issues that is driving the protests. But it’s not getting down to the very root of the problem, which is that people are feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the way the country is being run.
Mary Harris: Well, and while zero COVID was a manifestation of how the country is being run, the end of zero COVID was also a manifestation of how the government’s being run. That’s the issue.
Dake: Yeah, I mean, you look at you look at all of that, and it’s basically because, you know, Xi Jinping is one man. He’s got 24 hours in a day just like the rest of us. And so the challenge now is this man is deciding everything in order to get anything done. You have to get his attention. Right. And that can just be a challenge because until then, everything is kind of stuck in a holding pattern. You’re waiting for a clear signal from the top, an order from the man himself in order to get anything done. And that’s just leading to a lot of problems. I think people look at this and they’re like, oh, wow, Like, what’s going on? The policy making is so logical. Has everyone in China become brainwashed? That is not what’s going on, right? People in China are not stupid. They look at the situation and they know exactly what’s going on. And many people, even in the government, are uncomfortable with what’s going on or with the zero COVID policy or whatever. But they just can’t say anything about it because they’re waiting for a clear signal from the top because things have become so top down.
Mary Harris: Dake. I’m super grateful for your time. Thanks for coming on the show.
Dake: Thank you.
Mary Harris: Dake Kang is a journalist in the Associated Press Beijing bureau. And that’s our show. What next is produced by Elena Schwartz, Carmel Delshad and Madeline Ducharme. We are getting a ton of support right now from Anna Phillips, Jared Downing, Victoria Dominguez and Laura Spencer. We are led by Alicia montgomery with an assist from Susan MATTHEWS. Thanks to Ben Richmond, he makes sure I read all the ads. And I’m Mary Harris. You can go track me down on Twitter, say hello. I’m at Mary’s desk. Thanks for listening. I’ll get you back here tomorrow.
