Xi Jinping's Fatal Error

Xi Jinping struck a surprisingly conciliatory tone in his New Year's Eve address to China's citizens over the weekend, when he called for unity and acknowledged diverging opinions in the country currently living through the largest coronavirus outbreak in the world.

The nation's leader staked his personal political legitimacy on his response to the pandemic. His zero-COVID policy, which he insisted had balanced the economy against public health "to the greatest extent possible," was touted among his central achievements when he extended his rule over the Communist Party last October.

"Ours is a big country. It is only natural for different people to have different concerns or hold different views on the same issue," Xi said in Saturday's prerecorded speech. It's possibly the closest thing to an admission of fault China's public will ever hear.

In the weeks after Xi secured his norm-breaking third term as party chief, China's restive youths crossed the Rubicon by staging the country's most widespread demonstrations in three decades. They rallied against the government's excessive anti-virus controls and its even more unyielding network of censorship, both online and offline.

It was clear then that China's president was caught in a bind: persist with sweeping COVID measures and risk the social stability he seeks, or loosen pandemic strictures and let the virus rip through an unsuspecting health care system. He chose the latter, but no one expected his signature policy to fall away quite so quickly, with so little warning.

The failure to adequately prepare for China's reopening is evident in harrowing scenes emerging in so-called first- and second-tier cities, where vulnerable patients are crowding overworked hospitals and at-capacity funeral homes are cremating corpses around the clock. Beijing's decision to loosen controls in the middle of winter, shortly before the peak travel season of the Lunar New Year, also belies its insistence that "China's COVID situation is predictable and under control."

As early as last spring, when officials imposed Xi's heavy-handed zero-COVID playbook in Shanghai to lock down 25 million people, Beijing batted away WHO warnings that said the policy was unsustainable in light of the still dominant and highly transmissible Omicron variant. The shuttering of entire industries and sky-high youth unemployment in the intervening months only added to China's economic woes.

Throughout last year, hundreds of billions of dollars continued to be poured into the country's zero-tolerance system, including for near-daily mass testing and the building of centralized quarantine facilities. Instead, public health experts said, the funds should have been diverted toward a renewed vaccine drive, boosting ICU surge capacity and stockpiling therapeutics—all conductive to exiting COVID controls.

China's National Health Commission stopped publishing daily case numbers last month, and the task of disclosing fatalities fell to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. On January 8, Beijing will further consign the public, local governments and medical institutions to chance by downgrading COVID from a Class A to a Class B infectious disease, removing the final piece of its pandemic strategy in the span of a month.

For all its love of control, the Chinese leadership appears to have condemned its public to relive the uncertainty of early 2020, when Western capitals couldn't grasp the spread of COVID. For those hoping to track the country's first nationwide outbreak, it's nothing short of a guessing game, and Beijing doesn't know either, Tong Zhaohui, vice president of Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, told state broadcaster CCTV in a recent interview.

The Cost of Miscalculation

Xi's fatal error has hit China's elderly particularly hard, anecdotal accounts online and in the state-run press suggest. Before it rolled back its zero-COVID policy, the government also narrowed its definition of fatalities by excluding those who die with underlying illnesses, in a move that may be contributing to significant undercounting.

Beijing's redefinition of COVID deaths means official statistics are unlikely to reflect private sector projections. Airfinity, a British health analytics company, estimates China is seeing 14,700 deaths a day from the virus as of January 4, for 176,500 cumulative fatalities since December 1. Its model predicts 1.7 million deaths across the country by the end of April.

The China CDC, meanwhile, reported five new COVID deaths for January 3, raising the country's three-year pandemic death toll to just 5,258. The figures have come under intense scrutiny from the public, and any credibility China's propaganda organs still enjoyed is likely bankrupt, too.

"Policy-wise, Beijing is struggling to present a coherent narrative at this point, about why China persisted with zero COVID for so long, and why it is suddenly ending it," said Wen-ti Sung, a political scientist at the Australian National University in Canberra. "After a decade in power, it is not always easy to distinguish whether the main responsibility lies with local leaders' failure to follow the center's orders, or the center's inability to get local leaders to listen."

After successfully mobilizing the population under an anti-COVID banner, China faces a health and political fallout with unpredictable consequences. The shattering of any illusion of "authoritarian competence" could be kryptonite for the long-ruling Communist Party, whose regime security trumps all else. But while public trust in Beijing's ability to govern may have declined, Xi's authority in the party won't have waned, subject-matter experts said.

"Politically, Xi has established himself as the unquestionable core leader," Sung told Newsweek. At a recent gathering of the party's decision-making Politburo, each member was made to publicly acknowledge their shortcomings from the past year. "That is a sign that Xi's authority remains unchallengeable even after his government's ongoing struggles with managing zero COVID," said Sung.

To some, Xi's mistake wasn't implementing zero COVID itself, or ending it when it could no longer contain the virus, but rather his failure to properly exit the policy that had afforded the country with some semblance of normality. However, Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London, argues they are "two sides of the same coin."

"Zero COVID and the relaxation are two stages of the same policy. People in China were told that Xi and the CCP would protect them, and they believed in them. Zero COVID was meant to deliver that, and for nearly two years it kind of did," he told Newsweek.

"They would expect that when this policy is being changed, Xi and the party would have a better alternative and would protect them still. In their eyes, Xi and the party failed to deliver and caused death and suffering to them, and prevented them from even articulating their true feelings," he said.

A Policy Scramble

As the world enters its fourth year of the pandemic, Beijing's lack of real-time data is causing panic in other capitals, too. Mao Ning, China's foreign ministry spokesperson, hit out at governments like the United States this week for imposing WHO-backed soft limits on travel from China. Requiring negative PCR tests from passengers is "disproportionate and simply unacceptable," she said, before threatening "corresponding measures."

European and American officials have offered free mRNA shots to help ease China's COVID burden. Beijing has insisted on homemade vaccines based on inactivated virus technology, which are effective at preventing severe disease and hospitalization, but only at higher doses, according to recent studies. Mao rejected the Western assistance, saying Chinese vaccines are "in adequate supply."

Although more than 90 percent of China's 1.4 billion people have been vaccinated with at least one course of an effective vaccine, an estimated 37 million over-60s remain unboosted and 28 million in the age group have yet to receive a single dose, according to government statistics from late November.

The scale of the current viral surge, which Airfinity believes is responsible for 2.27 million infections a day, has hampered the government's efforts to get shots in arms. Orders to boost the numbers came down from on high on December 1, but the campaign to address China's "immunity deficit" was halted after just two weeks, industry consultancy Health Insights, based in Shanghai, said in its report on Wednesday.

"In some places, vaccination workers have fallen ill themselves or have been transferred to provide medical assistance elsewhere, shutting down vaccination sites. In other places, logistics are struggling and vaccine deliveries are delayed. Then there are places where the focus on vaccination work has already shifted to treating infected patients," it said.

"Worst of all, amid mass infections, the elderly population has also rapidly become infected. With no requirement to receive a COVID shot within six months of infection, the elderly have lost confidence in vaccines," the report said.

For the vast majority in China, the end of public health restrictions changes little about the government's existing social controls. Xi has spent a decade refining a system of widespread censorship and surveillance to stifle free speech and any hint of opposition inside the highly securitized one-party state. But he hasn't redeclared victory over COVID just yet.

"Xi Jinping has entered into what may prove to be the highest-risk phase of his tenure as supreme leader," said Mark Watson, director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's office in Washington, D.C. "Since the time of the emperors, all of China's rulers and the people they govern have feared one thing above all else: chaos."

China's president might choose to sacrifice select senior officials to give the appearance of accountability, Watson told Newsweek. "But the cult of personality that Xi has so assiduously created means that he is seen literally as the personification of the state and the party—and so any failings necessarily fall at his feet."

Tsang said: "Yes, many people in China are angry and upset. They don't trust the party and Xi's promises any longer at the moment. But what can they do? Zero chance of holding either accountable, let alone punish them."

"The credibility and legitimacy of both Xi and the party have been damaged. But, no, it will not result in the fall of either of them," he said. "Xi and the party will do whatever it takes to stay in power and most people know that in China, and they don't really have the scope to change that, at least not in the foreseeable future."

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