Rama
V. Baru,Professor,
Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, JNU and Honorary Fellow, ICS,
Delhi and Madhurima Nundy, Fellow,
Centre for Social and Economic Progress
Source: Hebei North University
The COVID-19
pandemic has disrupted both school and higher education across the world with
indefinite closure of institutions and online learning. For those who were enrolled or planning to
enroll in professional courses like medicine especially in middle income
countries like China and Russia, have faced the maximum disruption. According
to the data put out by the MEA, the pandemic resulted in a 55 per cent dip in 2020
with only 2.6 lakhs students having gone abroad compared to 5.9 lakhs in the
previous year. A small proportion of students travelling abroad is for medical
education and nearly 30,000 of them are in China. The pandemic and diplomatic tensions between India and China has
jeopardized the continuation of students studying medicine. The return of
Indian students due to the first outbreak of COVID-19 in January 2020 has
affected their study and career plans.
The rising anxiety due to this uncertainty is palpable. As Susan Ann Varghese of
Thiruvananthapuram and a
final year medical student at China, said that she “cannot go back as the
Chinese government is not allowing the Indian students to return and the
universities which had taken initiative to send us back home are not
responding”.
Meanwhile, students are
being instructed online by their respective Chinese medical colleges. But
online teaching is not recognised by the National Medical Commission (NMC) in
India and hence it creates concerns for students transacting classes in this
mode. The students recognise that online
instruction will be inadequate to complete their training since practical
exposure is critical for medical education.
They are also facing issues in accessing online classes since Chinese
apps are banned in India and students have to purchase VPN to access the online
classes.
As a result, the students feel that they have been left in a lurch by both the
governments. A union of students studying medicine in China have expressed
their anguish to the Indian government: “We are
25,000 Indian students studying in Chinese universities who have been forced to
participate in online classes for the past 17 months because of travel and visa
restrictions. Our medical study requires a lot of practical and group work, but
our entry to China and our respective universities have been banned for the
past year-and-a-half and we are suffering every day.” With little hopes of
returning to their campuses anytime soon, Indian medical students enrolled in
China are now looking at mid-course transfers to institutes in India and
other countries. However, this requires the NMC which is the apex administering
body for medical education in India to allow the mid-course transfer. The NMC
is silent on this matter for the moment.
The plight of students who
have returned from China and other countries is also filled with anxiety and
uncertainty since their employability is dependent on their clearing the Foreign Medical Graduate Examination. The pass percentage over the last few years
has been low and is demoralizing for the students travelling abroad for medical
education. The Covid pandemic could have utilized the services of the large
number of foreign medical graduates to supplement the shortage of medical
personnel but this was not done.
Clearly, the lack of policy engagement and direction
from the NMC and the Indian government
to address the concerns of continuing students and those who have completed
their course in China and other countries is unfair. There needs to be a review
of the FMGE process and some kind of parity with those who completed their
medical education from public and private medical colleges in India. It is
worth considering an exit exam for all medical graduates irrespective where
they were trained, as a pre requisite for employability. This is a reform that
has been suggested at various points in time but has received little attention
from the professional bodies. On the one hand there is a move to increase the
number of seats for the training of medical graduates and on the other there is
little effort to find ways to engage with the large number of foreign medical
graduates who are looking for employment. Clearly, this impasse cannot go on
for much longer since it affects a large number of young professionals who at
the moment are frustrated by the indecisive attitude of the NMC and the Indian
government.
Hemant Adlakha, Vice Chairperson, ICS and Associate Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Image: Xi Jinping riding a tiger Source: twitter.com
A
Chinese idiom says: If you ride a tiger, it’s hard to get off! Since being
handed over China’s reign by the CPC a decade ago, Xi Jinping hasn’t
experienced “the year of the tiger.” He will be riding into the tiger year this
Chinese zodiac year – a crucial year for him. Speculations are high in the
People’s Republic as everyone is asking: does Xi know how to get off a tiger?
It
is well-known that the tiger occupies a unique position in traditional Chinese
mythology. Of the twelve Chinese zodiac animals, tigers are known to have
potent personalities. They are considered to be strong, brash, impetuous and,
above all, self-assured. However, while they are potent personalities, at the
same time they are fundamentally dangerous. Xi Jinping emerged as the top
communist party leader in China in November 2012 – two years after the last
year of the tiger in 2010. Remember, in 2010 China edged out Japan and became
the world’s second largest economy after the US. This year will be the first
time Xi Jinping will be leading China into the year of the tiger. In fact, as
observers tell us, Xi will usher China “riding a tiger” as the leader of the
world’s largest economy.
But
does he know how to get off a tiger? For, in recent years, Chinese politics has
increasingly become too “hot” at the top and is not for someone with a weak
heart – especially when compared with the days of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao,
respectively. Of course, no one can disagree, Xi Jinping has been under
mounting pressure since the last CPC Party Congress in 2017, when he forced his
“Thoughts” into the party constitution and got rid of the 2-term
limit to his leadership of the party and
of the PRC. Hence, it is the mounting political pressure he has put himself
under to succeed for the “unprecedented” third term at the top that explains
Xi’s uncharacteristic and yet distinct shift towards populism during the entire
past one year.
Image: Chinese Zodiac: Year of the Tiger Source: studycli.org
Some
say it is the widening social inequality – and Xi did not do anything for the
first eight years – the biggest driving force behind Xi’s emphasis last year on
“common prosperity.” Last August, Xi’s call for “prosperity of all” at the
Central Committee for Financial and Economic Affairs stands
out as the most populist of his series of
“populism” measures announced last year. Other populist announcements include
massive national propaganda that China has abolished “absolute poverty”; steps
to rein-in China’s monopoly capitalists such as big and large “fin-tech”
entrepreneurs Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Tencent’s Pony Ma, among others; shutting
down of highly profitable private online coaching shops that dominate the
education industry; and last but not least is the state cracking down on Didi
online cab service and on the real estate businesses.
Furthermore,
just like Xi did not, or could not, do anything substantive to bridge yawning
inequality during his two terms as the top leader, he also failed to carry it
through to the end the campaign against corruption. Remember the great
enthusiasm with which the new leader had launched the “anti-corruption”
movement on coming to office in 2012. However, soon the common people in China
could see through the hollow slogan
Xi had coined at the time: we must uphold the fighting of “tigers” and “flies”
at the same time. Though anti-corruption rhetoric has been maintained at a high
pitch, yet it remained a mere propaganda and failed to “destabilize the rotten
bureaucratic apparatus on which the CPC relies to rule.” At the end of Xi’s ten
years of rule, likewise, calls for “common prosperity” – the so-called philanthropy
from the super-rich and the need to reduce social inequality, are seen as mere
“populism” aimed at deflecting rising discontent and resentment mostly among
rural migrant workers and vast majority of marginalized rural youth.
Image: The Year of the Tiger 2010: Before Xi became the CPC top leader Source: wgm8.com
Ever
since the CPC general secretary Xi declared, or some say claimed, the party has
apparently extended its full support and endorsed Xi as the “core” leader and
abandoned the principle of collective leadership. The global media as well as
scholars abroad have been critical
of the PRC president for “leading China away from the hybrid path taken by Deng
Xiaoping and returning to a system of absolute rule by one individual without
term limits, as under Mao Zedong.” Xi is also accused of returning China on
“the road to disaster” by turning the CPC leadership back from authoritarianism
towards one-person dictatorship. Moreover, serious doubts have been expressed
over whether “unstoppable” Xi can end the world’s largest economy’s (in size)
“Gilded Age” and lead China into “its own era of progressive reform.”
It
is in this above backdrop, president Xi’s sudden, high-pitched “populism” in
the past one year must be analysed, for political as well as for economic
reasons. On the one hand, Xi’s populism actually relies upon “socialist
nihilism” to quell ideological challenges from the Chinese left. On the other
hand, Xi is using the state-led propaganda of “abolishing of absolute poverty”
and “prosperity for all” as a political instrument to dupe the working people
of China. As Joschka Fischer has explained
in a Project Syndicate column recently, perhaps Xi may be right in thinking
that for the CPC, a change in direction is clearly needed. “For Xi, the Chinese
hybrid model that has developed since Deng now needs a fundamental readjustment
and social reorientation to account for the escalating political confrontation
with the US and the decline of the economy’s growth rate,” Fischer noted.
However,
within China, in a nutshell, disregarding all the populist moves in the course
of the year just gone by in which Xi has tried to drum up for consolidating his
quest for the third term, his only claim to enjoying wider popularity within
China is perhaps the manner in which Xi and his team managed to keep low the
pandemic death toll. As according
to Eric Li, a Shanghai-based venture capitalist and political scientist, once
President Xi took charge of leading China’s counter fight against the epidemic
– following Xi’s virtual meeting with the head of the WHO on January 28, 2020 –
he has shown that “opportunism and shirking responsibility” are not in his
leadership character. Li does not disagree that the Wuhan authorities had erred
in the early stages of the virus outbreak about which very little was known.
And the unexplained delay resulted in justified public anger – best manifested
in Wuhan Diary written by the city-based well-known writer, Fang Fang –
especially at the initial silencing of the whistleblowing Dr. Li. But Xi’s
decision to lockdown Wuhan city and Hubei province turned out to be “the
decision that saved the nation from a devastating catastrophe,” noted Eric Li.
Source: idlehearts.com
Finally,
if Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping both could be credited to possess the required
political skill to be able to both ride and get off a tiger – Mao for his
extraordinary ability to lead China on the disastrous path to Great Leap
Forward, Cultural Revolution and yet he continues to enjoy god-like status
today, while Deng having had emerged from “three lows and three downs” into
“chief architect” of a strong, modern China. In comparison, Xi’s only claim to
be endowed with the unique Chinese skill “to ride and get off a tiger” lies is
his ability to act with unprecedented high degree of firmness and character to
lead China’s “people’s war” against a once-in-a-generation pandemic crisis. The
world is still fighting the war to contain the corona pandemic, with both the
number of infected cases and death toll rising. So is China. But with a
difference – China has a communist party and Xi Jinping. If Eric Li, advocate
for communist China and for Xi Jinping, is to be believed, Xi seems to have
successfully managed to both “ride and get off” the Chinese tiger.
This blog was earlier
published by thinkchina.sg on 20 January, 2022 under the title “Can Xi Jinping ride the tiger year with success?”.
Image: A city notice board in Rongcheng displaying model citizens with high social credit scores Source: South China Morning Post
Just as the “Ides
of March” served as a warning and ultimately, signified a perceptible pivot for
the Roman Republic, China’s social credit system in the wake of the Covid-19
pandemic has marked a new era for the “Ides” of control and surveillance. The
social credit system in China has proved adept at acclimating to the new
realities brought to the fore by the Covid-19 pandemic. The government in China
has introduced specific stipulations to modify the requirements in the system
including alterations for repayment provisions devoid of drawbacks and inducements
for some companies to help control the pandemic. Obligations have also been
presented, which entail businesses to desisting from price gouging on health
merchandise. In 2020, the social credit system covered 1.1 billion
individuals through an integrated China social credit system officially
declared in 2014. Notably, the earliest forms of the social credit system have
been tested since 2009 on a
regional level. However, the genesis of the philosophy responsible for the
social credit system has been propounded by scholars for centuries in the making. It
has traced back to China’s “Warring States” Era.
At the end of the
Warring States era, the Qin leaders encouraged the rule of law to nourish a well-ordered
societal structure. However, the current Chinese leaders are focused on a code
of conduct that emphasizes values which encompass inclusiveness,
harmony, civility and morality to retain order as well as
concord while harnessing compliance. Experts attest to the fact that the social
credit system is an ecosystem of
initiatives that share some fundamental
commonalities. Subsequently, 40 trials have been
conducted to establish the current social credit system nationwide with their
own objectives, distinctions, recompense and castigations to establish the
current social credit system nationwide.
One of the most
profound influences for the social credit system appears to draw insight from
the doctrine of Legalism, which rose from the ashes of
the Warring States era (475-221 BCE). The Chinese terminology fa-jia for legalism
encompasses more than just law. It includes approaches, norms, and impersonal
guidelines. The Legalists promoted in practice and works the usage of
law as the primary tool of government wherein the focus was on punishment and
reward. Their distinguishing attribute was the importance placed by them on the
usage of law to expand the power of the sovereign besides the authority of the
State. The Legalist thought, particularly regarding the law, may well be
understood in the Austinian interpretation of law wherein any orders by the
ruler are backed with a threat of force. The
commentators have projected that the chief objective of the Legalists was to
formulate policies that would better the martial and financial position of the
state. This policy construction was also motivated by the political and
societal circumstances during the Warring States era. The implementation,
however, required the employment of a centralized authority directing the accumulation
of power for the sovereign. The sovereign exerts this power via a system of
bureaucracy with strict accountability and governance accomplished through laws
that all citizens understand. Therefore, legalism controlled not only the
citizenry but the bureaucracy as well.
This control is
exercised through the mechanism of penalties and rewards in the current social
credit system. The disadvantages are significant and are enforced by a range of
current methods used by the government to ensure power encompassing the “hukou” system, detention, and incarceration for dissenting
deeds or even the articulation of nonconforming sentiments. The
social credit system was envisioned in 1999 under Zhu Rongji, who wanted to
alleviate the complexity of external firms in obtaining data on their Chinese associates.
The system was considered in official papers exclusively in market reforms. However, the
real breakthrough came during the 2014 Five Year Plan (FYP), which encompassed
the online revelation of the identity of citizens who have been chastised and
those who have been compensated. Furthermore, there has been an enhanced
congruence under President Xi Jinping of the legalist philosophy, who uses numerous
quotations from legalist scholars in his speeches. Xi is the focal point of
China both administratively and spiritually, and the power
structure is etched to bring about his interpretation of law and policy.
The administrative
control is additionally exercised by other developments, including the
publication of “black list,” which heralded the penalties, and “red list”,
which touts access to improved
privilege for the citizens according to their actions which have been
intensely documented through the vast surveillance network in China.
There is also a list for companies called the irregularity list, which acts as
a warning to improve scores. This further underscores discussions on privacy in
China which are pretty different from the Western notion. Researchers have
proposed that traditional
Confucian philosophy praises morality rather than deference to individual rights
as the basis for social interactions. Furthermore, privacy has conventionally
entailed familial familiarity or dishonorable/scandalous secrets. On the other
hand, the law in China is concerned with privacy as a right to protect one’s
reputation against insult and libel. Notably, the governmental
authorities have also maintained a dang’an, a dossier
composed of detailed information about citizens residing in urban areas, which
appears to have had a desensitized impact on privacy concerns.
Strategic analysts
have also reflected upon the novel surveillance culture intending to
essentially eradicate the apprehension and the prospect of observation of
historical, Confucian-inspired
conceptions of virtue. The emerging surveillance culture is prompted to
imbibe the attributes and evaluate the citizenry through the social credit
system on their perceived capacity to assist or impair the state. Thereby, a
noticeable change in the surveillance change is witnessed wherein there is a
purging of traditional Confucian conceptions such as the face, both of its
inner moral dimension and its external,
socially constituted dimension. Scholars have also noted
that the credit score’s rationality is founded on social discipline, which is
then reinforced by official public-private partnership rather than the
Confucianism’s “face.” Furthermore, this step expands across an array of
exchanges by citizens. For instance, big data is being
employed to construct more effective policymaking
and enforcement. Nevertheless, the Covid-19 pandemic has spotlighted on the
limitations of surveillance systems. However, a pattern can be observed wherein
novel technologies are utilized for the attainment of better social control
and social management. Thereby, tackling social dilemmas and sequestering social
instabilities.
Consequently, in its current reincarnation, the social credit system is expected to track every act and transaction by every Chinese citizen in real-time and respond to the aggregate of a citizen’s financial, societal, and ethical conduct with incentives and punishments. This dream is aided by ubiquitous algorithms designed to generate fiscally valuable, socially harmonized and politically obedient citizens who self-censor and restrict. Consequently, the corporate social credit can be utilized as a trade war weapon in an informal capacity by regional officials or an implicitly authorized order by the government. Furthermore, this system has a higher export value which is likely to interest other authoritarian and totalitarian systems worldwide.
The author is thankful to her mentor, Dr. Bhim Subba, Assistant Professor, University of Hyderabad. The views expressed here are those of the author(s), and not necessarily of the mentor or the Institute of Chinese Studies.
Hemant Adlakha, Vice Chairperson, ICS and Associate Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
This article was published two months ago in Modern Diplomacy under the same title. However, following the revival and fast spreading of local variants of Covid-19, including Omicron, first in Xi’an and then in Yuzhou city in Henan province, and now in the northern port city of Tianjin near Beijing, questions have been raised in China on the rationality behind persisting with “zero tolerance” policy. I hope to come up with the second part of the article with focus on resurging Covid-19 cases in China and the Beijing Winter Olympics.
Image: Where is the exit from China’s zero tolerance on Covid-19? Source: scmp.com
The world is again
at war with China. This time, the war is not about China’s aggressive “wolf
warrior” diplomacy; nor is it about China threatening to use force to reunify
with Taiwan. Instead, if one goes by what the global media says, this new round
of “war” is an ego clash between what China calls Covid-19 “dynamic zeroing”
and what the West is practicing – “living with virus strategy.”
Last year, Dr. Li
Wenliang, who raised an alarm about the coronavirus in the early days of the
outbreak, was forced by the police in Wuhan to write “self-confession” and was told
to immediately stop spreading false rumours. Within a few days, Dr. Li caught
the infection and was hospitalized, where he succumbed to the virus and died
three weeks later. Of course, Li was not infectious disease expert, he was an
ophthalmologist at the Wuhan Central Hospital. A little over a year later, when
Zhang Wenhong, a doctor in Shanghai who has been compared with the top US
health official Dr. Anthony Fauci, wrote on his Weibo blog indicating China
might have to live with the Covid-19 pandemic, he had to face vicious attacks
by the official media and the Chinese health authorities. For, Dr. Wenhong had
come in the cross hairs with China’s official “dynamic zeroing” strategy aimed
at eliminating the coronavirus.
It is important to recall, since early last year China has been strictly
adhering to a “zero tolerance” (Qingling in Chinese) policy for
Covid-19, under which authorities have imposed strict border controls, travel
restrictions, lockdowns and at times carried out mass testing as and when new
Covid-19 cases emerged. Furthermore, the success of “zero tolerance” policy which
resulted in long stretches of zero new cases was drummed up by the communist
leadership of the country as the secret for successful coronavirus pandemic
containment strategy. “China’s government attributed the effective virus
containment to the phenomenal leadership of the communist Party and its institutionalsuperiority over Western liberal democratic systems,” commentedThe Diplomat two months ago. (Emphasis added).
Image: China’s zero-Covid strategy risks leaving it isolated for years Source: Bloomberg.com
Rise in regional
flare-ups
However, more recently, China experienced regional flare-ups of the globally
prevalent delta variant, including in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. As a
result, Beijing authorities were forced to postpone the capital city’s annual
marathon scheduled to be held on 31 October. A week earlier, on 24 October,
Beijing’s Universal Studios theme park also took preventive measures and
started testing all its employees after it was found out that a suspected case
had visited the Studios. At the same time, Shanghai Disneyland and Disney town
were temporarily shut down as part of the pandemic prevention drive. According to China’s English language newspaper,
CaixinDaily, the decision to suddenly close Disneyland followed
the emergence of a new Covid-19 case in neighbouring Zhejiang province, it was
someone who had visited the Shanghai attraction.
In fact, the recent flare-ups spread across over twenty provinces and
areas in China have been attributed to a cluster of Covid-19 cases in Ejin
Banner in the remote Inner Mongolia that is in the Gobi region. According to
reports, nearly 9,000 tourists who were visiting the Gobi Desert during China’s
National Day “golden week” holidays were trapped there, mostly in quarantine.
The Chinese tourists had gone there to spend time in the famous poplar forests
where trees turn golden yellow during this time of the year. An official
Chinese media outlet reported “the recent local Covid-19 outbreaks
that began in mid-October have spread to two-thirds of China’s 31
provincial-level regions, with more than 1,000 locally transmitted infections.”
Attributing delta variants as the cause for the country’s second wave of the
pandemic, one of China’s top epidemiologists, Dr. Zeng Guang, a former head of
Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC), opined China
must continue with emergency measures, including maintaining long quarantines
and vigorous contact tracing, until a “barrier of immunity” has been established.
Living with the
virus” is more costly
While acknowledging that the global challenges in containing the delta
variant will mean that society must learn how to coexist with Covid-19, Zeng
emphasized that “China will need to continue its ‘zero tolerance’ strategy
against Covid-19 with nationwide emergency responses.” Reacting sharply to the
last of few remaining countries which too have finally shifted from eliminating
strategy to trying to live with the virus – for example, New Zealand, Singapore
and Australia – China’s most celebrated infectious disease expert and “national
hero” Dr. Zhong Nanshan has strongly defended “zero tolerance” strategy on the
grounds that measures to deal with sporadic Covid-19 outbreaks are less costly
than treating patients after they have been infected. “The cost is truly high,
but compared with not managing it, relaxing (the zero tolerance policy), then
that cost is even higher,” Dr. Zhong Nanshan said in a recent TV interview.
Image: How long can China chase COVID zero? Source: japantimes.co.jp
Remember, China has reported about 4,600 deaths due to COVID pandemic. In
comparison, the US with just a quarter of China’s population and a far more
expensive and superior health care system has lost over 755,000 lives. No
wonder China’s foreign ministry spokesperson has recently disdainfully
dismissed the US as an “inferior system” and a “total failure.” Defending the
Chinese government policy, Dr. Zhong Nanshan questioned all those countries
(mostly the developed countries in the West) that had relaxed their policies
amid a drop in Covid-19 cases only to go on to later suffer a large number of
infections. “The global mortality rate for people infected with Covid-19, which
spreads fast and continues to mutate, is currently around two per cent. We
[China] cannot tolerate such a high mortality rate,” the top Chinese
epidemiologist said.
The logic of China’s “zero tolerance” policy
Refuting the logic offered by Dr. Zhong Nanshan in defense of China’s
“zero tolerance” policy, i.e. it is more effective and less costly to contain
Covid-19 than treating patients after they have been infected, an overseas
Chinese scholar Zhuoran Li attributed China’s so-called success in fighting the
pandemic to the Maoist doctrine of massline and the CPC’s
Leninist identity, respectively. “The key to implementing this ‘zero tolerance’
is the CPC’s mass mobilization capability. The CPC has viewed mobilization as a
‘secret weapon’ throughout its history. After Mao’s Mass Line became a key to
the CPC’s victory in 1949, the Party continued to rely heavily on mass
mobilization to achieve its goal – social transformation between 1949 and 1956;
steel and food production between 1958 and 1961; or combating natural disasters
in 1998 and 2008,” Zhuoran Li argues.
At another level,
adding a different dimension to Zhuoran Li’s argument, another overseas Chinese
scholar, Yanzhong Huang, a senior research fellow with the Council for Foreign
Relations (CFR) has observed: “It’s becoming part of the official
narrative that promotes the approach and links to the superiority of the
Chinese political system.” Maybe true, however, from China’s point of view,
what is most disturbing is there is a lack of consensus within the official
narrative. Take Ruili for example, a southwestern city surrounded by Myanmar on
three sides and currently the center of the highest flare-up. According to
Ruili residents, they have been the worst victims of China’s zero-transmission
strategy as they have been subjected to multiple rounds of quarantine,
lockdowns and excessive Covid19 testing. The local city authorities have put
the blame for the plight of the 270,000 residents on the successive flare-ups
on “traders and refugees who frequently cross the border into China.” On the
other hand, the angry residents in the city have been complaining of the
escalating financial as well as social costs for having been left alone to cope
with the epidemic.
Image: China is keeping its borders closed, and turning it inwards Source: economist.com
Furthermore, foreign
experts and the global media have maintained that China either doesn’t want to
admit or the authorities in Beijing are yet to realize – as most or nearly all
countries have – that not only the virus is now permanent but also that there
is no chance in the long run that a zero-Covid strategy could work in terms of
achieving complete elimination. This confusion is the official narrative in China
has been best manifested in a public spat between the mayor
and the deputy mayor of Ruili. Last month, Dai Rongli, the deputy mayor posted
an essay on his personal social media blog highlighting the difficulties city
residents have been facing due to the pandemic prevention policies. “The
pandemic has mercilessly robbed this city time and again, squeezing dry the
city’s last sign of life,” the deputy mayor wrote. Within days, an infuriated
city mayor Shang Labian criticized his deputy in an interview with a Chinese
digital news platform saying: “Ruili does not need outside support and
sympathy.”
To sum up, it is
indeed true that most people in China support the country’s strict pandemic
prevention policies. Yet undeterred by what most other countries are claiming,
that is, “the illness will circulate in perpetuity and can only be encountered
with high immunization rates,” the Chinese leadership is standing firm on its
resolve that the zero-transmission strategy is less costly. Liang Wannian, the
head of China’s “leading small group” under the Ministry of Health to combat
Covid19, has refuted as baseless claims that China is persisting with its
zero-transmission strategy for political reasons such as holding of the Beijing
Winter Olympics in February 2022 and the 20th CPC National Congress
in October next year.
Image: The Delta Variant and China’s Need to Change its COVID-19 Policy? Source: nytimes.com
“Dynamiczeroing is not zero transmission, nor is it China’s permanent strategy. Whether to change the current pandemic prevention strategy depends on the trend of the global epidemic, the mutation of the virus, the change in the severity of the disease and the level of vaccination coverage in China and other factors,” Liang said. In other words, Liang Wannian almost confirmed what experts outside China have been claiming: “They [China] are not confident about the effectiveness of [their own] vaccines – the ability to prevent infections.” Therefore, China has been caught in its own trap of “zero transmission” or “dynamic zeroing.”
