China’s ‘zero Covid’ has become Xi’s nemesis

W Somerset Maugham’s 1925 novel “The Painted Veil” features a harrowing description of a cholera outbreak in a provincial Chinese city. “The great city lay in terror; and death, sudden and ruthless, hurried through its tortuous streets … The people were dying at the rate of a hundred a day, and hardly any of those who were attacked by the disease recovered from it; the gods had been brought out from the abandoned temples and placed in the streets; offerings were laid before them and sacrifices made, but they did not stay the plague.”
That was the backward China supposedly swept away by Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution. In reality, man-made disasters outdid natural ones to kill tens of millions of people under Mao’s tyranny, the most disastrous being the famine of 1959-61. According to Frank Dikotter’s definitive account, 45 million people “died unnecessarily” as a result of the collapse of agricultural production caused by Mao’s disastrous “Great Leap Forward” — just under 7% of the Chinese population.
That China too no longer exists — the China of permanent revolution — or so we are told. Over the past two years, the government of President Xi Jinping has boasted time and again about the superiority of the Chinese response to the Covid-19 pandemic. While decadent Americans failed to contain the spread of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, in China there were virtually no cases, and a grand total of 4,638 deaths through March. The US mortality rate was a thousand times higher than the Chinese. In any case, the virus originated in the US and was brought to Wuhan by Americans. If you like this sort of thing, just follow the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s “wolf-warrior” spokesman Lijian Zhao on social media. You can also learn how the war in Ukraine was our fault, too.
Several things about this story always struck me as off. First, the People’s Republic that Mao created remains a one-party state with more than vestiges of Marxist-Leninist ideology and a personality cult that now revolves around Xi. Second, the pandemic originated in Wuhan under circumstances that remain mysterious. The lab-leak hypothesis has not been confirmed or definitively ruled out. But the attempt — not only by the Chinese government but also by its Western apologists and social media censors — to shut down investigation of that possibility has been exposed.
Third, whether the virus originated in a lab or a “wet” food market, there can be no doubt that the Chinese Communist Party’s prolonged denial that it was transmissible between humans allowed the virus to spread from Wuhan to the rest of the world in a way that might have been avoided under a more transparent and truthful system of government.

—Bloomberg