China's reversal on Zero-COVID underscores the fickleness of strongman rule—from suffocating control to callous inaction
Public health experts also struggle with the logic of opening up some six months after most Chinese have had their last jab, given the rapidly decreasing efficacy of vaccines over time. Not to mention there’s just weeks before China’s Spring Festival—humanity’s largest annual migration, when some 200 million Chinese cram into buses and trains for long journeys to ancestral villages where medical facilities are rudimental at best.
Many Chinese will no doubt buy the propaganda. But a large number have had their eyes opened by the bungling of zero-COVID, the lives lost to suicides and treatable ailments that worsened in an ultimately futile attempt to stamp out the virus. The protests only serve to show that the party is, in fact, fallible and responsive to public anger, that the people have more power than anyone thought.
“I don’t know how anybody can have confidence in China anymore,” says one Shanghai resident, speaking to TIME on condition of anonymity for fear of official reprisals. “Disruption and unexpected things is one thing, but a government pulling the rug under your feet is quite another.”
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