In its first official response, the government denies that the demonstrations are critical of the sanitary measures and attributes the crisis to the execution of local governments.
The Communist Party has listened to the complaints of Chinese society, but has not had much to say about it. Authorities took the floor this Tuesday at a regular National Health Commission press conference, their first intervention after the historic protests that have sent hundreds of citizens, irked by the covid policies, taking to the streets of the country’s main cities.
During the event, the organization offered its reading of the popular demands. “The issues recently denounced by the public are not aimed at the prevention and management of the pandemic itself, but are aimed at simplifying measures against general actions of arbitrary application,” the spokesman Cheng Youquan defended, implicitly blaming to implementation by the lower levels of the administration.
“We will continue our efforts to further tighten the policy [de covid-cero] to reduce the impact on society and the economy. The also representative Mi Feng sent with this ambiguous answer the question whether the demonstrations will lead the government to “rethink” its strict protocol.
The lack of an expected change of direction in his speech fell short of the demands of the population, raised in civil disobedience against a health strategy that has stifled daily life in the country for more than two and a half years; nor that of the worst outbreak since the beginning of the pandemic, which continues beyond recovery.
However, not all government responses take place in choreographed press conferences. The state media are also fulfilling their mission. ‘Beijing News’ published an extensive interview on Tuesday in which several people recovering after being infected with covid – still a rare bird in China – shared their experience; all very positive, how could it be otherwise.
The propaganda thus seeks to allay the same fear it fueled by publicizing the chaos in Western countries during the worst months of the pandemic in early 2020 as proof of the superiority of its authoritarian model over liberal democracies. However, the political discourse has long abandoned this argument given the unfavorable turn of events.
Increasing rumors suggest that China is finalizing a sweeping and hasty liberalization of its health campaign. On the one hand, the current outbreak has already acquired unprecedented dimensions, witnessed by the fact that the day count has chained together five consecutive maxima. Over the past twenty-four hours, it has held steady at a level of around 40,000 infections, but its intensity and geographic expansion make the aim to return to zero unfeasible.
On the other hand, society has made it clear that it is not ready to accept the current restrictions, let alone a resurgence of them. As a result, China has few alternatives for a more or less targeted, but forced, reopening. It works to their advantage that this wave shows an overwhelming majority of asymptomatic, responding both to the inoculation – significant though insufficient – of vaccines and to the fact that the new subvariants are more contagious but less lethal.
This would allow the government to present the narrative that its covid-zero policy has been a win. However, such a scenario would overwhelm meager medical resources: China has fewer than five intensive care beds per 100,000 inhabitants, one of the lowest rates in Asia. Millions could die as a result, as academic studies have warned.
Source: La Verdad
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