Easing Covid restrictions but grip on protests tightened

CHINA offered the clearest sign so far that it might end its three-year pursuit of “zero Covid”, with major cities loosening some control measures even as cases continued to climb.

But authorities also imposed tighter censorship controls and issued stark warnings of a crackdown before potential protests.

Vice-premier Sun Chunlan, who heads the Covid response efforts, said China faced a “new reality” because the Omicron coronavirus variant was less deadly and there had been an expansion in vaccine coverage and health-care preparedness, state media reported this week.

Many Chinese associate Sun, with the harshest aspects of the zero-Covid policy, including sudden lockdowns, mass testing and mandatory centralised quarantine for close contacts.

It was a rare instance of a senior Chinese official publicly acknowledging that the virus now poses less severe risks. The megalopolises of Beijing, Chongqing and Guangzhou said on Wednesday that they would allow some close contacts of infected people to quarantine at home. Mandatory centralised quarantine in spartan facilities has been one of the most controversial aspects of zero Covid.

Mass-testing requirements would also be relaxed, even as cases in those cities continued climbing. Beijing said on Thursday that it had logged a record 5 000-plus infections the previous day.

Chinese health officials have also said they would prioritise getting booster doses to seniors, which global experts say is key to any reopening. Vaccine hesitancy remains high among China’s elderly, though the independent financial publication Caixin reported on Thursday that China was aiming to ensure that 90% of those over 80 were up to date on their vaccinations by late January.

Sun and other high-level health commission officials did not use the phrase “dynamic zero Covid”, which is associated with the aggressive measures that Beijing has pursued since the coronavirus was first detected in Wuhan in late 2019. The policy is linked with loyalty to President Xi Jinping, who has tried to assert near-absolute control as he claims an unprecedented third term.

But the policy and Xi, as well as the ruling Communist Party, have been the target of growing public grievances that culminated in the rare nationwide protests that began last week.

Analysts say Beijing is adopting a two-track approach. On the one hand, it will loosen virus restrictions to appease public anger. On the other, it will use censorship, propaganda and force to prevent the protests from escalating into a movement that could pose an existential threat to the regime.

While the demonstrations appear to have fizzled out in the face of icy temperatures and the start of the work week, local governments pledged to crack down on protesters, with an iron-fist approach, and made the unsupported claim that demonstrators were separatists and seditionists, state media said on Wednesday.

From Beijing to Shanghai, police officers visited suspected protesters at home in the middle of the night, while stopping people for random checks in city streets and searching their phones for banned communication apps. Half a dozen people interviewed by The Washington Post said they and their family and friends had been questioned and detained.

Activists were also concerned about Tibet and Xinjiang, two regions with significant ethnic minority populations that had been the subject of harsh rule even before the pandemic. Hopes had been raised after new leaders were appointed for the regions over the past year, that Beijing would be willing to ease some social restrictions to support economic development.

But the recent protests, which were triggered after a fire in Xinjiang last week that killed 10, have raised fears of a return to heavy-handed measures.

Ma Xingrui, the Communist Party boss in Xinjiang, convened securityrelated meetings for three-consecutive days, state media reported. On Monday, he told officials to monitor public opinion closely, step up censorship and push back against “wrong ideology”. Harsh penalties would be meted out if people disrupted “the order of Covid prevention”, he said.

Tibetan authorities warned of separatist and national security crimes, which carry penalties such as long prison sentences, though they offered no evidence that separatists were involved in the demonstrations. Officials in Lhasa, the regional capital, also pledged a crackdown on violations.

Lhasa had teased a reopening in October after months of lockdown. Dorje Gyaltshen, a 26-year-old Tibetan restaurant worker, said he had been stuck in his small, rented room in Lhasa for almost three months.

Transport services connecting the region to much of the rest of the country were restored in November. Restaurants and supermarkets in Urumqi, the regional capital of Xinjiang, were allowed to reopen on Monday, days after residents protested against the distancing measures that many believe delayed rescue efforts during the blaze.

The warnings by Tibetan and Xinjiang authorities were published by state media on Wednesday, as Sun hinted that the country might turn a page on zero-Covid.

One question is how long it will take for China to transition out of zero Covid, if Beijing decides to do so. On Wednesday, the National Bureau of Statistics reported further contraction in the manufacturing sector. Caixin said the unemployment rate was at its highest since March 2020.

In the Chinese economic hub of Guangzhou, multiple districts cancelled mass testing and allowed for the resumption of indoor dining and public transport. Haizhu, the centre of Guangzhou’s latest Covid outbreak and the site of a violent clash between police and residents on Tuesday night, allowed businesses to reopen and relaxed strict controls that had left residents stranded at home for weeks.

Capital Economics, a consultancy, forecast that the Chinese economy would contract in the fourth quarter and would probably remain weak in the immediate future.

Some human rights activists claimed a victory after the most significant non-state-sanctioned protests in China since the 1989 Tiananmen demonstration.

“No matter how the ‘blank paper revolution’ ends, the younger generations in China have expressed their opinions… and left a heavy mark on history,” tweeted Han Lianchao, a former Chinese diplomat and activist, referring to protesters holding up blank sheets of paper to symbolise Beijing’s censorship.

He added that their biggest achievement was poking a hole in Xi’s claim to represent the whole country.