🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
China's successful exit from its yearslong zero-COVID policy would benefit a world economy marred by disruptions and slowdowns, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday, as major Chinese cities continued to lift sweeping controls on the population.
Beijing is reportedly preparing a new central directive to further loosen restrictive pandemic measures under President Xi Jinping's signature public health strategy, which has sought to avert widespread infection with snap lockdowns and mass testing since 2020.
But the highly transmissible Omicron variant is testing the sustainability of his policy at a time when hundreds of millions have had their livelihoods upended by the national campaign, especially as health officials continue to report an above 95 percent asymptomatic rate among positive cases.
The public's frustration boiled over and triggered rare political protests against the government late last month. Almost immediately, megacities across China lifted lockdowns and dropped testing requirements in the first meaningful shift in years.
Blinken told an event organized by The Wall Street Journal that it was difficult to assess the direction of Chinese policy. It was "a little bit too soon to tell," he said, noting: "It appears that China has relaxed some of its COVID protocols."
"But the other thing I'll say is this about China: We want China to get COVID right. It's profoundly in our interest that that happen," said Blinken. "It's in the interests of the Chinese people first and foremost, but it's also in the interests of people around the world. So we want them to succeed."
"We've seen the dramatic impact that the slowing of China's economy, as a result in part of the shutdown for COVID, is having not just in China, but around the world. That's in no one's interest. So our hope is that they find a way to move forward and move forward in a way that addresses the challenge," he said.
When it comes to reopening China from zero-COVID, Xi is in a bind. The policy is tied to his political legitimacy, meaning the Communist Party is likely to eschew any suggestion that it was a misstep. China's state media, meanwhile, also will be reluctant to openly credit any changes to the recent unrest.
Along with scrapping one-size-fits-all lockdowns and negative PCR test requirements, Beijing is also tweaking its messaging about the virus, which until recently was still being described as an existential threat that had already caused considerable havoc in the West, particularly in the United States.
A change in tone is a start, but it may not be enough to prepare the Chinese public for the surge in cases that could follow even a managed reopening, which one study by Chinese and American scientists, published in Nature Medicine in May, predicted could lead to 1.55 million deaths.
The recent anti-government protests may or may not have moved the needle in Beijing, but experts consulted by Newsweek in recent months have argued China still needs to urgently increase ICU capacity, stockpile therapeutics and establish triage protocols to avoid overwhelming its health care system—financial and manpower resources that were largely poured into sustaining zero COVID.
Crucially for Beijing, its above 90 percent vaccination rate has yet to be truly tested by a nationwide outbreak because of the long curbs on movement. For the time being, as its daily infections remain near all-time highs, severe cases and deaths continue to be rare.
China's National Health Commission has prioritized immunizing the elderly against COVID. Only 40 percent of the 36 million people aged 80 and above have been boosted, according to NHC statistics, while 8 million over-80s—some 22 percent—haven't been vaccinated at all.
As an apparent point of national pride, Beijing has so far declined to approve the use of Western mRNA vaccines developed by Moderna, Pfizer and BioNTech, which a recent Lancet study by scientists in Singapore found to be more effective at preventing symptomatic infection, hospitalization and severe disease when comparing data of over-60s who had received three or four doses of the inactivated virus vaccine produced by China's Sinovac.
Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, told the Reagan National Defense Forum on Saturday that China's president had been "unwilling to take a better vaccine from the West, and is instead relying on a vaccine in China that's just not nearly as effective against Omicron."
"Seeing protests and the response to it is countering the narrative that he likes to put forward, which is that China is so much more effective at government," Haines said. Beijing's response to the public's demands would affect "Xi's standing," she said.
On the margins of the G20 summit in Bali last month, Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, made similar observations: "I believe that we have offered China American mRNA vaccines, and I believe that they have not been interested in taking us up on that."
"To the extent that it might be helpful to them, certainly we want to see them be able to deal effectively with the pandemic, both for their own sake and the sake of the entire world. So we certainly stand ready to be of assistance," Yellen said.
China hadn't asked the U.S. for mRNA vaccines, the White House said last week.
"It seems fairly far-fetched that China would green-light Western vaccines at this point. It's a matter of national pride, and they'd have to swallow quite a bit of it if they went this route," an official told Reuters.
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About the writer
John Feng is Newsweek's contributing editor for Asia based in Taichung, Taiwan. His focus is on East Asian politics. He ... Read more