Exit from zero-Covid is no easy path for China
Arriving in Beijing from Hong Kong in late October, my family and I witnessed Xi Jinping’s now defunct zero-Covid regime at its awful peak.
As we filed into the deserted airport, one of the policy’s foot soldiers — the Dabai or “Big Whites” in full PPE uniforms — shouted at us. We were sent for 10 days of quarantine in a hotel so drenched with disinfectant that it stung the nostrils. Yet few of us that day could have imagined that within weeks, China’s zero-Covid experiment would collapse, resulting in a tidal wave of cases.
For President Xi and his new leadership team, appointed in October during the Communist party’s quinquennial congress, their handling of the country’s chaotic exit from zero-Covid will determine not only how they are viewed domestically but also by international business, which is already reassessing the country’s role in global supply chains. “Xi’s failures to prepare for reopening will tarnish his authority and the party,” predicted TS Lombard analysts Lawrence Brainard and Jon Harrison.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Joe Leahy
