Will CCP’s 20th Congress Mark the End of China’s Zero-COVID? (Part 1 of 2)
No, unfortunately, for both pragmatic reasons and political constraints.
This article is the first half of a two-part series on China’s zero-COVID. In the first half, I talk about the pragmatic limitations preventing Chinese leaders to ditch its zero-COVID policy. In the second half, I will reveal how this reveals the source code of Chinese politics (Link here).
Back in 2021, China emerged as a champion in its fight against COVID. The world was struggling, but for a long period of time, China successfully contained the virus, with its export sectors booming fulfilling the world’s demand for goods.
But in 2022, the country’s Zero-COVID policy backfired. The highly contagious Omicron variant forced the country into massive lockdowns, occasionally lasting months, which drew criticism for their disruption of economy and life and incidence of citizen rights violations. Yet as the world gradual returns to its pre-COVID self, the Chinese government has been stubborn to let go of its zero-COVID policy despite mounting pressures from home and abroad.
Some people hope that CCP’s upcoming 20th Congress on October 16th – a twice-a-decade big conference that formally work out the country’s top leadership for the next five years – might finally mark the onset of the country’s opening-up post-COVID. They reason that the confirmation of Xi’s third term will ease his power anxiety, so that China can finally open up a little.
Unfortunately, this is not true.
Lockdowns have been annoying to citizens and detrimental to the economy. Most importantly, poor execution during lockdowns created many tragedies that could have been avoided.
In today’s article, I will explain why China will not open up soon. In my projection, China is likely to start to open up next April.
Reluctance to open up because it hurts Xi’s legacy?
China pundits frequently quote political motives behind this reluctance, presuming opening up signals Xi’s deviation from his own policies, therefore potentially hurting Xi Jinping’s authority. Even if there are traces of truth in this argument, this factor is likely overplayed.
It is true that China’s prior successful campaigns against COVID had become a political trophy for President Xi. But because the COVID-19 virus is extremely mutable, the Omicron variant becoming China’s latest headache is arguably an entirely different virus from the older ones: it is much more contagious and way less deadly. For a much different virus, Xi and his team should have ample reasons to justify a potential change in policies.
But what’s holding CCP back?
The reality is, the central government is bound by significant, pragmatic constraints that are often overlooked.
The primary constraint: medical resources.
When talking about China, I oftentimes need to remind my audience that China is still a relatively underdeveloped country.
China’s medical resources are insufficient relative to developed countries. According to data compiled by Forbes, Americans have ten times more intensive care beds on a per capita basis than Chinese (34.7 beds for every 100,000 Americans, vs 3.6 for Chinese). In severe COVID cases, an ICU bed determines a patient lives or dies.
Not only that, the distribution of China’s medical resources is vastly uneven. If opens up, only a handful of the largest cities can possibly withstand the COVID-induced bank run on medical resources. Once open up, the virus will quickly overwhelm the small towns and rural areas’ healthcare systems.
Another major limitation: the population’s low immunity level.
Unlike other parts of the world, only a negligible portion of the Chinese population contracted this virus and consequentially acquired natural immunity. The country’s vaccines, based on an older version of technology, were functional but not as potent as the Western versions based on mRNA.
Worse yet, the immunocompromised groups’ vaccination rate is especially low, the most vulnerable being the seniors. As of July 2022, the last available data, only 61% of seniors over 80-year-old received two doses of COVID vaccines; just over 38% completed the entire three-dose regime.
There is no going back from opening up.
Once opened up, it’s impossible to go back because of the prohibitive cost, both socially and economically. Since the virus spreads exponentially, the effort needed to curtail the virus also grows exponentially.
Although CCP is sometimes viewed as a radical party due to its Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution days, the Party’s success in the last several decades is mostly because it has returned to its conservative nature. That is, the Party has a natural inclination to small refinement over big changes, and usually prefers experiments first before scaling out.
Combining these two factors, it is easy to understand CCP’s reluctance to open up now from zero-COVID.
The pattern of mutation implies the world has not fully de-risked from COVID
For a government governing more than 1.4 billion people, it makes sense to be conservative, given how highly mutable the virus is. A common fallacy of the virus is that it becomes less deadly as it becomes more transmissible.
This view is simply wrong.
In reality, a virus can simultaneously evolve along two dimensions: it can become more transmissible or less, and at any time it can become more deadly or less. To help illustrate all the four possibilities, I display them by four quadrants in the chart below.
The less transmissible variants (two on the bottom) are unlikely to win out against their more infectious siblings because the latter will outpace and supersede them.
For the more transmissible variants (two on the top), however, their paths of mutation are trickier to think through.
In not-so-exact words, the more deadly and more transmissible mutations (top right quadrant) often died out sooner than less deadly ones with comparable transmissibility, because the former tended to be starved to death—either by themselves as they kill out their host before jumping on to other victims; or by humans, who will quarantine the infected and cut off the transmission path. In other words, higher transmissibility does not naturally cause lower fatality. Past examples where viral mutations beacme both more contagious and less deadly is the result of both natural selection and human intervention.
COVID may escape this pair of quenching factors, however. Omicron is likely the fastest-spreading disease ever. The virus is so contagious that it makes containment almost infeasible. And its death rate is just low enough, which makes human intervention too costly to implement. With no This gives the virus a longer mutation runway to mutate, which suggests that it is still too early to rule out that Omicron (or any of its cousins) might evolve into a more deadly variant. So no matter what Biden or Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of WHO, tells you, it’s not entirely true.
This likelihood gives a strong reason for the CCP to hold out longer, especially as winter is looming in much of the world.
Infectious respiratory diseases thrive in cold weather. When the temperature drops, people spend more time indoors, making pathogens easier to transmit. With probably winter COVID surges coming, it is unwise to let guards down in the fall. After getting through this winter, the CCP might have a higher conviction to open up after seeing more data from other parts of the world.
(This is the end of the first half of this series; the second half is now available by clicking here!)
This is the end of the first half on China’s bizarre stuborness around zero-COVID. In the second half (spicier than the first half, guaranteed), I will answer the key question: China is not the only country facing these constraints, but all other countries are opening up! Why cannot China? Hint: it is rooted in China’s distinctive but misunderstood political arrangement.