The restrictions that the Chinese government has placed on communities seeing an outbreak of COVID-19 have been harsh from the outset. From the first days of the outbreak around Wuhan, China used a program of taking the infected away from their families, placing them in isolation, and completely closing down commerce in areas where the outbreak appeared to be increasing.
And it worked. Even though the outbreak began in China, with multiple scientific papers now tracing the beginning of the pandemic to two separate incidents at the “wet market” in Wuhan, China’s hardline policies were effective in bringing the initial epidemic in that nation under control little more than a month after the initial outbreak. For over two years, between February of 2020 and March of 2022, there were only 30,000 new cases of COVID-19 officially recorded in all of China.
Even now, the world’s most populous country is number 103 on the list when it comes to cases of COVID-19. Until last week, there had been more cases of COVID-19 in Luxembourg (pop. 642,371) than in China (pop. 1,448,471,400).
But starting back in March, as the delta variant was becoming dominant in countries around the world, cases began to rise again in China. The authoritarian government responded with the same harsh tactics as it had the first time: shutting down cities, separating families, erecting special facilities to house the infected. Only this time the number of cases kept rising. As the delta wave waned in May, it seemed for a moment that China had once again obtained a kind of stasis, but then omicron hit and China went right back to closing down cities, and building more of those massive structures. Since early November, cases of COVID-19 have been rising extremely rapidly, in spite of the government’s actions.
The government has been engaged in policies even harsher it used in 2020 since last spring. Lockdowns in some areas have extended for months. But cases are still going up.
Why isn’t it working this time? The answer is simple enough to see from this chart first published back in April.
China’s actions were sufficient to constrain variants up to delta, where the rate of infection was more comparable to smallpox or polio. Those measures were strained when delta pushed the R0 rate higher, and have become ineffective in fighting a disease that is now at least as infectious as any other virus we know.
There’s an argument to be made that if everyone had been as tough in their response to the first wave of disease as China, these more infectious variants might never have emerged. Maybe. But then, if China had ever cracked down on wet markets where non-domesticated animals are not just butchered but held in cages for weeks, there likely would not have been a pandemic to start with. Has China closed down wet markets where people are peddling wild-caught bats and endangered pangolins? No.
There are still steps that any reasonable government should be taking to minimize the spread of COVID-19 and to limit the threat it poses to citizens. Those steps include encouraging (or mandating) the use of masks in public spaces and on public transportation, limiting the size of gatherings, and making sure that everyone gets vaccinated—especially with the new bivalent vaccines that have proven to be both more effective in preventing infection and in reducing the chance of long COVID.
China has mandated vaccination with its own version of the COVID-19 vaccine, but as Nature noted back in October 2021, China’s vaccine is less effective than those being used in the U.S. and most of the world. As new variants have emerged, China’s CoronaVac and Sinopharm have become less and less effective in even reducing serious cases.
Instead, China is doing this:
Events like this are happening not once, but thousands of times across China. They’ve been happening since the spring, when that increase of new cases caused by the delta variant caused China to shut down a number of cities in different regions. Since then, total lockdowns—in which all businesses are closed, people are forced into quarantine, and the roving bands of white-suited “health officials” take people away by force have been rolling across the country. (WARNING: “Brutal” is a good description of what’s happening in this video.)
And they are still trying to build their way out of the problem by ramping up the instant quarantine camps that were erected around Wuhan in the initial weeks of the not-yet-pandemic.
The authoritarian regime is showing no flexibility in its response. It was equally brutal toward those who began to protest back in the summer. However, as China has carried on with the process of trying to lock down entire regions, people have simply had enough. They are not submitting quietly any more. They’re not submitting at all.
COVID-19 remains a serious disease. We still don’t understand all the ways in which it causes harm to people both short-term and long-term. New variants are continuing to appear. In no sense is the pandemic over. The use of masks, vaccines, and efforts to limit the spread and reduce the effect are as vital now as ever. Maybe more so.
But China’s efforts to bludgeon its populace into accepting a response that is not only horrific, but ineffective against the current variants, is resulting in a bloody confrontation that is rapidly spiraling into something that goes beyond a fight over COVID-19 policy.
At this point, China’s COVID-19 tactics are just a symbol of the way the dictatorial government treats its citizens. As with the protests in Iran, what started with a relatively small protest around a single issue is growing into growing into something much larger. The protests have expanded well beyond just issues of quarantine and lockdown, into broader expressions of freedom vs. authoritarian rule.
Both the size of the protests and the scale of the government response are increasing, and China seems to be days away from events that are going to redefine that nation. As Asia Times reports, the protests could go “anywhere” from here, but at the moment, the scale of protests isn’t as large as those that preceded Tiananmen Square in 1989. Even so, the numbers in the street are large, still growing, and the government response is harsh and getting more so.
Whether these events will end with the ruthlessness of Tiananmen Square, or with the fall of dictator Xi Jinping and the current government … that’s not clear. The protests could fade. The government might even see how things are going and change its policy. But the way protests are moving now, it’s unlikely that the answer will be long in coming.
