Today, Explained - China’s pursuit of ‘Zero Covid’

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

China’s 1.4 billion people are averaging fewer than 100 cases of Covid-19 a day. All it takes is the willingness to shut down anything at any time. NPR’s Emily Feng explains from Beijing. Today’s show was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's Stay Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm, and we have not talked about COVID-19 on the show in a minute. I mean, we've talked about how the pandemic's affected the supply of consumer goods. We've talked about how parents are really mad about pandemic policies in schools. But it's been several weeks since we've made an honest-to-goodness episode about COVID. And I

think that's a pretty good reflection of where we're at in America right now. We've reached the point where we're just living with this thing for better or worse. Cases go up, cases go down. Some people are vaccinated, others aren't. That guy's got a mask on.

This guy doesn't seem to care very much about the mandate here at this Safeway supermarket. Life goes on. Contrast that approach with China's. China's pursuing a policy known as zero COVID. It means keeping COVID as close to zero cases as possible from day to day. Emily Feng is NPR's China correspondent based in Beijing. She says China usually has less than 100 new cases of COVID per day.

And that's mind-boggling because China has 1.3 billion people. It's still allowing in some international travelers, and that's usually where most of the new COVID cases come from. But domestically speaking, in terms of like actual new infections coming from people living in China who have not left China for the last two years, those infection numbers are usually close to zero. And China will take extreme measures to keep it that way. Let's take travel, for instance.

I rode Amtrak yesterday, a little work trip. I bought my ticket. I showed up, wore a mask, except when I was eating or drinking. That was about it in terms of COVID precautions. Emily travels for work, too. Her experience is a little different. To leave Beijing, my home base, and go to another city, I first have to get a COVID test, and that test usually has to be valid for the last 48 hours. Then I have to have a digital

health certificate, and that uses a variety of inputs. My latest GPS coordinates, anyone I've been in close contact with with where my home address is my passport number which is linked to recent travel which is also linked to my recent vaccination record all of that information then is computed by the state health code app and it gives me a green red or yellow green means that i'm clean you know i can travel wherever i haven't been in close contact with anyone. And that will usually give you access to most public places. So you now need this health code or health certificate I mentioned to not just travel, but to basically get into any large shopping mall or restaurant or grocery store if they're being really strict.

On top of that, we have another thing called a traveler's code. So the idea is it gives you a recent travel history and it will show any places you've traveled that could be a high risk area in China. And high risk is defined as anywhere with at least one COVID case. So the barrier is quite low. A failure to have any one of these three things and traveling could land you in quarantine someplace for 14 days, not just technology, but people who work on super, super grassroots levels. I have what's called a community center or a xiuqu near where I live. Every apartment complex is governed by one of these, and they're tasked with making sure travelers coming in or leaving the city are honest about their travel history and they're the ones that also do mass testing. Now this is just like the status quo. If something really does happen, there is a diagnosed case in someone's neighborhood, the entire neighborhood gets sealed

off. It goes into lockdown. It becomes what's called the mid or high risk area. And then people do mass testing, every resident has to be tested at least once. People are not allowed to leave that area. And anyone who has traveled from that area to another location should also quarantine in place. And there's a vast apparatus of people who will call you constantly to make sure that you're quarantining, basically, you know, like contact tracing on steroids. And China's international borders have also remained closed since last March. So there are very, very few people who are allowed to come into mainland China. And those that do get permission have

to quarantine for two to three weeks. Incredible. So that's your experience as a journalist who travels more than the average local. What does this look like for people in China who maybe don't get around so much? Yeah, so for the most part, the things I've described are not too onerous. But for people who really get unlucky and just get hit by successive COVID cases, they really suffer the brunt of the cost of zero COVID. And Raleigh, this Chinese border town that's in some places literally meters away from Burma, from Myanmar, I think has just gotten really unlucky. So over the last 10 months of this year so far, they've been under lockdown for about five months of that. And when I say lockdown, it's pretty strict lockdown. People are asked to stay inside.

They have to get permission to leave their houses and go grocery shopping. Just recently, stores were allowed to reopen in the city, but people are still afraid to go out and run errands because, as I mentioned, they have to show their health codes wherever they go. So you actually have to scan the health codes as you enter into public spaces, and they're worried that if they scan a place and someone who is later diagnosed with COVID occupied the same space the same day that anyone who went into that store could also get quarantined and there's so little transparency in a small place like Rayleigh that no one is willing to risk it so everyone's going out at night secretly to buy food no one's been able to work and people are sometimes quarantined in place

very, very suddenly without any notice that the district that they're in is going under lockdown. Did you talk to anyone there? I reached out to a number of people and because they are so desperate, there were many people who are willing to share their story. What's unusual about Raleigh is that because it's a border town, many people who live there are not local residents. Most people who live in Raleigh traveled there or moved there because they're in the jade business or they're involved in some kind of cross-border trade with Myanmar. So I managed to reach one jade trader who wanted to use only his last name, Mr. Wong, and he had this crazy story of how his wife had been quarantined in place for 45 days

because she'd gone to a market to run some errands. All of a sudden, authorities said, we found a handful of COVID cases in this particular city district. We're locking it down. They did not care that she didn't live in that district and didn't know where to go. She simply had to find a place to shelter and was stuck there for 45 days, being tested every day with no news about when she could leave or what it would take to leave.

And finally, her husband, Mr. Wong, was able to get her out because he basically pulled some strings and got her transferred to a hospital after which she did another two-week hotel quarantine, but at least that was in a hotel and she had ready access to food. And there were a lot of stories like this. It's not just the arbitrary quarantine policies that

were really upsetting people, because for the most part, people support these zero COVID policies. What they were complaining against was the inability to work. We support the government and its policies, but that does not mean we should also have to go hungry, says Raleigh resident Lidia. Because no one is allowed to work, she cannot afford to stay in Raleigh, but to leave would cost her weeks of self-financed quarantines. As I mentioned, many people travel to Raleigh because they are buying and selling precious stones and other commodities with Myanmar, and they have not been allowed to do any of that. They even have been banned from selling their goods online because authorities are afraid that by doing live streams and filming commercials, say, online, that that could also create some

kind of COVID transmission. So there were many people I talked to who said they literally could not afford their next meal because they hadn't been allowed to work for the better part of the last year and a half. It's surprising to hear you say people on the whole support these policies, policies that in the United States at least would be considered draconian, unthinkable, infringements on personal liberty. Why do you think people are still putting up with this after so much time? People support these policies because for the most part, zero COVID has allowed China's economy to open up much sooner than any other economy. It is having a huge financial cost. Imagine paying for all this testing and monitoring, of course. But people can live relatively worry

free. They are not worried about getting COVID, even if they travel or don't wear masks in the country. And because the extreme costs are borne by such a small group of people, particularly in a town like Rui Li, which is very far away from the big cities of China, their suffering is usually out of sight, out of mind. Occasionally, of course, there are flare-ups, but even at its highest, the number of new cases a day was around 100. And that's considered extremely high for China. The country goes into crisis mode.

China's COVID numbers were obviously second-guessed early on in the pandemic. Their numbers seem to be a little bit on the light side. And I'm being nice when I say that. Can we trust these astonishingly low numbers from the most populous country in the world? I have pretty high confidence in China's COVID statistics. The reason why I have confidence in China's statistics is because of just how closely people are monitored here. Everywhere you go, you've got to check in with your health certificate. Mass testing can happen over an entire city in the blink of an eye over just one single COVID case. Do we have any idea if China is going to eventually loosen up these restrictions, considering that they seem to be working pretty well?

There is no immediate indication that China wants to lift these restrictions this year. There are multiple reasons, the first being the Winter Olympics are coming up. They start next February. And China is going to be welcoming foreign athletes, coaches, and journalists to come participate and cover the events. And they're really, really anxious that, of course, these people are going to be bringing the virus with them. And so China's already starting to take extra measures to make sure that it has everything under control before all of these visitors come to China. And so it is unwilling to relax its zero COVID policies before then.

After the Olympics, there is going to be a major Communist Party political meeting in October 2022 called the Party Congress. This happens every five years, and the one happening next October is going to be particularly important because many political analysts expect this is going to be the meeting where Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who has enjoyed huge amounts of popularity in part because of his zero COVID policies, he is expected to stay on for at least another term as leader of the country. And he will announce that at the party Congress. So everything has to be perfect during that meeting as well. For those two reasons, most people expect any kind of relaxation to COVID policies to happen at the end of 2022, end of next year, or perhaps in 2023. More with Emily in a pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions

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to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Emily, I think the story of Rayleigh is sort of astonishing, but how comparable is that to what's going on in the rest of mainland China? It is not representative, but it does represent the worst case scenario that everyone faces in China, which is if you become sick or you're considered a close contact, your life basically

ends for the next few months. I mean, you are put under excruciating surveillance. You're tested over and over again. You and your family and any of your close contacts removed by two degrees is put under quarantine. And this is a risk that people are willing to take. Huh. How has this pressure sort of affected cultural or economic life in the country? Let's start with the economy. The zero COVID policies have allowed China's economy to rebound quickly from the costs of complete lockdowns from last year. But they are starting to take a toll now, particularly as Delta, which is much more contagious, is starting to make itself felt in China. More than 1,000 infections have been reported since late October.

The resurgence has spread to 21 provinces so far and has been accompanied by unseasonably cold weather in the country's north, conditions which have helped the virus to thrive. Travel is still down. Cons. Travel is still down. Consumption is still down. China's economy is slowing, not just because of the coronavirus, but certainly exacerbated by it. In this most recent quarter, the third quarter, China's GDP growth was only 4.9%. Now, to put that into perspective, the second quarter was 7.9% growth.

And if you're not following economics, let me just say that this is massive. And all of these public health measures like mass testing cost a lot of money. But again, China is willing to stomach this cost, in part because it believes that if it lifted zero COVID policies, but there was a sudden flare up, and there was public outcry, and they had to reimpose these lockdowns, that that would cost much more in terms of public morale and financially than if they just keep the zero COVID policies on until 2023. In terms of cultural production,

it certainly isolated China because people are not traveling abroad anymore. Students are finding it much harder to take the tests they need to study abroad and buy plane tickets and even get new passports from the Chinese government, which has stopped issuing passports unless you can prove you have a pressing need to travel abroad. Government leaders are not going abroad for state visits. Xi Jinping, China's leader, hasn't traveled for more than two years. And so he's missed a number of big international functions where he normally would get FaceTime with, say, President Biden at COP26 this week. COVID's the reason Xi Jinping wasn't in Glasgow. President Biden didn't seem to buy that. The fact that China is trying to assert, understandably, a new role in the world as a world leader,

not showing up, come on. Beijing is extremely careful about exposing Xi Jinping to the coronavirus. And that was, coronavirus was their publicly given reason. He also may have decided, for example, COP26 was not particularly important and he was most likely is going to have a video conference with Biden in the next week or two anyways. Come on. But COVID has been the reason that Xi Jinping has not traveled abroad. How is that affecting China's relationships with the rest of the world that it's sort of self-isolating right now?

You know, it's hard to measure the impact of its isolation. I would say that it's not helping China's increasingly abrasive and more hostile foreign policy style. What had once blunted, I think, anxiety about China's rise was that so many people still travel to China. There are businessmen who came here to work, to start up new companies, students who wanted to study here or Chinese students going abroad, scholars and government officials who would come here on informal and formal delegations. And none of that's happening anymore. And so we are only getting either the public propaganda that

China's putting forth, limited numbers of reports from journalists like myself who have been able to remain in China, and basically nothing in between. And so I think that leads to easy mischaracterizations or misunderstandings between China and other countries because of that lack of in-person access. You know, we talked about Xi on the show back in September, specifically about his rectification campaign. That is targeting ride-hailing services, tech companies, insurance companies, education, and even the amount of time that kids can play video games.

And what we're seeing in this great rectification is really the redrawing of the boundaries of business and society in China today. Does China's zero COVID policy fit into Xi's sort of broader reshaping of the country? It coincides with the timing of these other policies, and it certainly reinforces their effects, though they're not related. I mean, even President Xi Jinping, I'm guessing,

would not have known two years ago that COVID was going to happen. But the isolation that it's afforded China and the amount of support the Chinese Communist Party now has because of the widespread perception here that the party has successfully controlled COVID when other countries have not, has given Xi Jinping and other party leaders more confidence to pursue

these policies that you're talking about. Obviously, it's not lost on anyone who's listening to this that COVID-19 originated in China. And, you know, in some segments of the United States population, it's, you know, wildly popular to point that out. Do you think Xi is motivated in part by sort of wanting to rewrite the story of China and COVID? Definitely. And you see that happening already for the last year. One is in terms of China's quite aggressive COVID diplomacy. It's been donating medical equipment and its own vaccines to other countries as a way to boost relations with those countries and also to recast its own role in this pandemic, not so much as the country where the virus originated, but as the country that really

stepped up globally to combat the coronavirus. And again, it's been able to use its zero COVID policies and its domestic success story as a way to bolster that narrative. And the second way it's refashioning its own reputation is there has been rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories in Chinese language sources that have started to steer the conversation away from Wuhan, the Chinese city where the first human cases of the virus originated, to suggesting that perhaps the virus started outside of China. And it was brought in either on imported food or international luggage and then started infecting animals and people within China. So within China, you'll find a lot of people who genuinely think that the coronavirus began in the U.S. Wow.

And they're now calling for investigations into how the coronavirus began, perhaps in the U.S. or Italy, and was brought into China. Which leads me to wonder how much China is cooperating with the WHO's investigators who are still trying to figure out how this all got started. Right. So the WHO did send a delegation of scientists to come and visit wet markets and talk to scientists and hospitals in China last year, and they were basically given no free access. The WHO is now asking for a second in-person investigation, but China has blocked those efforts. The WHO either has gotten no response or they haven't really settled on a date or conditions under which they can send a second team. And in response, China is asking

for a parallel investigation to happen in the US where they have this conspiracy theory that the coronavirus began at an American military lab and the WHO should look into that conspiracy theory. There's no evidence, I should say, that this theory is actually true, but it is being peddled at very senior government levels in China. The Chinese foreign ministry has suggested that this is perhaps how the virus began, and so it's been picked up by mainstream outlets in China. It seems like, from what you're saying, Emily, that two things kind of are true at the same

time here. China is taking this pandemic extremely seriously and to great success, but also not really helping the world better understand the origins of this pandemic. Is that fair? Yeah, it's most concerned about its own citizens. And that makes sense. And so they're not interested in helping understand how the virus began, or at least we don't have access to that research anymore. And they have pursued a very successful policy in terms of numbers of infections. The question is, how long will that success last? And how long would that be considered a success? If other countries can begin opening up, pursuing next generation vaccines and high levels of immunization,

and basically going back to life as normal with very, very low infection rates and death rates from COVID because people are living with COVID, so to speak, what will China's continuing lockdowns and isolation look like? Will people start to finally get lockdown fatigue when they see how the rest of the world is opening up? How China transitions from its extreme zero COVID stance now to what inevitably has to be an acceptance of the novel coronavirus is going

to be very interesting. I wonder how quickly they're going to take on that process or if it's going to be a long, drawn-out transition that takes place over years. Emily Feng, she's a reporter with National Public Radio based in Beijing. Our episode today was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matthew Collette, engineered by Afim Shapiro, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. The rest of the team includes Victoria Chamberlain, Halima Shah, Harima Wagdi, and Will Reed. Our supervising producer is Amina Alsadi. Our veep of audio is Liz Kelly Nelson.

And Jillian Weinberger is the deputy. We use music from Breakmaster, Cylinder, and sometimes Noam Hassenfeld. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. You can find us on Twitter at today underscore explained. I'm over at Rammus for him. Thank you. Come on.