What's Happening With China's COVID Policy?

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic early in 2020, China has maintained some of the harshest lockdown, testing, and quarantine procedures in the world, with the goal of keeping COVID infections as close to zero as possible, according to NPR. Those policies have been collectively known as China’s zero-COVID policy, and include severely limiting the number of people coming in and out of the country, mass testing citizens periodically, extensive quarantining, and locking down buildings and cities with outbreaks.

According to Reuters, the Chinese government has gone so far as storing each Chinese citizen’s COVID test results and travel history, tracked by mobile phone signals, in a government database used for contact tracing. When infections are detected, contact tracing is immediately performed, and infected persons are alerted and forced to home quarantine or moved to facilities to quarantine. To enforce isolation, electronic seals are sometimes attached to doors, and infected persons are barred from public transit and venues. People that have been in contact with, or suspected to be in contact with, infected persons can be subject to the same measures. Entire buildings can be locked down for a single detection of COVID. Even major cities, including Shanghai, Xian, Chengdu, Tianjin, and Shenzhen, and entire regions and provinces such as Xinjiang, Tibet, and Jilin, have been shut down.

Lisa Wang, a sophomore at State College Area High School, has family in China and felt the emotional stress which came with hearing about zero-COVID lockdowns.

“[My mother’s side of the family] were locked down in their apartment complex […] It hurt because I know my family likes to see each other and celebrate things with each other,” Wang explains. “I remember one year they were worried about not being able to visit each other for the spring festival, which is a very important holiday in China, one of the biggest they have. I remember those complaints of having to celebrate it alone.”

Travel restrictions due to the policy have also had repercussions for her family.

“We haven't been able to visit family,” she says. “I mean we could've, but it would be way more expensive because you have the flight tickets, which are through the roof, then you have the quarantine period, which is pretty expensive, a two week period, and then you can go free.”

After two years, zero-COVID has not lessened, and social pressure against the severe restrictions on daily life rose and culminated into China’s first major citizen protests since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. According to TIME, the demonstrations began with a fire in a building in the city of Urumqi which resulted in the deaths of 10 people, rumored to be unable to escape the building due to COVID procedures. Though the Chinese government denied these rumors, protests started breaking out across the country. In every protest, citizens held up blank, white sheets of printer paper to symbolize what they could not voice for fear of the repercussions of dissent: opposition to the zero-COVID policy. What began as demonstrations against COVID policies quickly escalated into broader messages against censorship and authoritarianism under Xi Jinping’s rule, with students at Tsinghua University—where Xi attended—protesting by holding up blank paper with Friedmann equations written on them, “Friedmann” being a homonym for “free man” in Chinese, according to BBC.

White paper was not chosen randomly as a symbol for the protests--it has a history as a symbol of dissent, according to The New York Times. A Soviet-era joke goes like this: a policeman stops a dissident handing out flyers in a public area. The dissident shows the policeman the flyers, revealing that they are blank and explaining that there is no need for words because “everyone knows.” Similarly, the white paper in the Chinese protests is a message of everything the protestors wish they could say, but cannot due to censorship. White paper was used also in protests in Hong Kong against a new National Security Law which gave Beijing more power over the city, and just earlier this year, Russian demonstrators were arrested for holding up white paper symbolizing opposition to the war in Ukraine, which triggered a protest in the U.K. against a new draft law partially repressing the right to protest in which blank paper was also used. Many online have called the protests the “A4 Revolution” referring to the standard size of the white printer paper used in the demonstrations.

The social pressure from the demonstrations led to an abrupt abandonment of the zero-COVID policy on December 7th, in what is known as its COVID pivot. The sudden shift from harsh to lax lockdown, testing, and quarantine procedure has left many Chinese citizens confused. Despite months of exaggerating the dangers of the Omicron virus strain to maintain its zero-COVID policy, the Chinese government informed its populace that there was little to worry about, generating a storm of misinformation. Dr. Liang Wannian, a major contributor to the engineering of the zero-COVID policy, told a state media outlet that 78% of Omicron-infected individuals would not be reinfected for a long time, despite studies showing that protection against reinfection declines rapidly within 1-2 years, according to NPR.

The country’s failure to approve COVID vaccines from the Western world has also exacerbated problems with its public healthcare system, already underfunded and overwhelmed by patients.

“I think it’s time to start trusting each other and believing that other countries and other companies from other nations are creating public things for the good of the people, like vaccines,” Wang says.

City-wide COVID outbreaks across the country due to the sudden abandonment of lockdown and quarantine procedures, resulted in a spike in demand for fever and cold medication, in turn resulting in medicine shortages, according to The New York Times. China reported an average of 30,000 COVID cases in the first week of December, which is likely an undercount due to decreased testing.

The speed of the policy change and the accompanying COVID outbreaks has meant that little has changed for those with family in China.

“I know the policy changed in like December. Not even a week after that we heard news of the first family members contracting covid, and it was shocking [...] I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly,” she continues, “We wanted the policies to change because we haven't seen family in a long time, but also I didn’t expect it to be so open with little to no policies and regulations. So probably won’t be visiting anytime soon even though borders are open.”

William Zhang, also a sophomore at State College Area High School, explains, “When it opened some of [my family] still stayed inside because they heard about the huge amount of cases, but in the end it didn’t matter because they still got it anyways.”

Despite the disastrous effects of the sudden COVID pivot, the Chinese government has maintained its standpoint that it has thus far made the right decisions concerning zero-COVID and the pivot, censoring posts online that call to move back to zero-COVID or that encourage a complete abandonment of COVID procedure, according to The New York Times.

Zhang disagrees.

“[The Chinese government] could have prepared more ERs or medicine in general. They opened up in a week, which is really fast for a country with 1.4 billion people, could have spent a lot more time opening up, or slowly opening up, not all at once,” he says. “[The zero-COVID policy] might’ve been necessary in the beginning when not much was known about it [...] as time went on it was just damaging to everyone.”

Cover image: Washington Post | "China's rare protests spark demonstrations in London, Taipei, Hong Kong."