Covid-19 has become a political problem in China. Fear of the devastating effect that variants of the virus may have on the country has enlisted in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in a zero tolerance, which is becoming more difficult and expensive every day. The isolation imposed has unleashed a dangerous nationalism and it threatens the aspirations of the People’s Republic to rise as the voice of the global South and the alternative to the liberal order advocated by the United States.
Xi Jinping, the most traveling president in the history of the Central Empire, with an annual average of 14 trips abroad, is now serving a biennium without venturing outside the national borders. Your rival in global governance, Joe Biden, has been in charge of publicly criticizing his absence from the G20 summit and the COP26, which he has called a “great mistake”.
The words of the US president have not softened the stubbornness with the policy of ‘zero covid’. China faces a critical 15 months to its future and does not want the virus to tarnish them. First, the Winter Olympic Games (February), in which it intends – as in 2008 – to show the world its capabilities. Second, the celebration next fall of the XX CCP Congress, in which Xi is at stake to continue as the maximum leader of a party with 93 million members. And third, the plenary session of the National People’s Assembly, in March 2023, which will decide on the leadership of the State and the directives of the Government. According to experts, it is quite possible that Beijing will maintain foreign restrictions, at least in the capital, until it ensures the movements of the CCP’s staff.
The Government has staked its political legitimacy on control the virus better than the West, which he considers weighed down by a visceral individualism. China has reported less than 5,000 deaths since the pandemic began and for many Chinese this is a source of national pride. In fact, when the covid-19 began to prevail in Europe, in March 2020, China declared victory over the disease, after surprising the world with the confinement of hundreds of millions of people for two months.
Since then, a steel wall separates China from the world, with massive cancellations of visas, restrictions on the family reunification of foreigners and unaffordable quarantines for the majority of businessmen and merchants, almost the only ones with the possibility of entering, who are frequently forced to a double confinement of two weeks each: the first in one of the few cities in which it is possible to land from abroad and the second, in the city to which they are going. No foreign dignitary has set foot in Beijing. Xi Jinping communicates with his counterparts by videoconference and phone calls. The few face-to-face meetings between senior foreign and Chinese officials, such as Foreign Minister Wang Yi, are held in Tianjin, about 130 kilometers south of Beijing, where international flights land at the airport.
According to Western Chambers of Commerce, foreign residents in China have been reduced by more than 30% since the start of the pandemic. Many Chinese see the outside world as chaos and the national media has encouraged a dystopian view of Westerners as selfish and scornful of science. There are Chinese who, when they see a foreigner, they go away for fear of catching it.
Tight government control has so far allowed the economy to grow, driven by increased exports and investment, both foreign and domestic, but restrictions are slowing ports and their supply chains. The signs of exhaustion grow and even within the country the voices are multiplying that affirm that “the ‘zero Covid’ approach is unsustainable & rdquor ;.
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“Zero tolerance will not be successful because the coronavirus has fully adapted to people and cannot be eliminated,” Guan Yi, director of the Emerging Infectious Diseases State Laboratory at southern Shantou University, told Hong Kong channel ‘Phoenix TV. ‘.
80% of the adult population is vaccinated and in November they began to inject a third dose to the elderly and the first to children. Booster vaccination is a good way to return to normality. China urgently needs to open its doors and curb the nationalist rise generated by isolationism.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com