Democracy is the vaccine that China needs most

The ‘zero Covid’ protests prove China – and President Xi – can't control the people the way they think they can

Why China? Why the protests across the country? Why the calls for President Xi to stand down, or even for the Chinese Communist Party to end its rule? Why now?

Ostensibly, it’s because of the zero-Covid policy, and the draconian measures taken by the authorities to achieve what is now an entirely unrealistic policy aim, whatever its theoretical attractions may once have been. It is an extremist policy, and should not be necessary to keep Covid cases suppressed at low, manageable levels – particularly at a phase in this post-pandemic environment when less lethal variants are circulating, and when the vaccines are continuing to protect people against the most serious effects of illness.

The West – and much of the rest of the world – has found a way to “live with Covid”; without being complacent about it. Testing, isolating, taking modest precautions when needs be –and keeping up with booster jabs. The virus hasn’t gone away, and it’s still a potential killer. But we no longer (at least for the time being) need to impose harsh restrictions on social interaction.

Not so, in China. Understandably, many Chinese people are fed up with the continual lockdowns, the removal of freedom to travel and the suppression of debate and dissent online and in officially-approved media. They are rightly feeling oppressed.

No public health approach can succeed without the consent of the people – and in the past, Chinese citizens joined in the fight against coronavirus with admirable determination and unity. If you notice, many are still habitually wearing face masks as they protest – even out in the open air. They understood and agreed with social rest options. But now they can see no end and no point to it. There’s a backlash – and a dangerous one.

The one treatment the Chinese people are deprived of in all this isn’t some wonder drug or a better vaccine (though the Chinese versions may not be as effective in combating the different variants as they emerge, compared with the latest Western bivalent vaccines). It’s democracy. It’s the political vaccine that protects people’s human rights; and also protects governments against violent overthrow. We’ve seen its worth in real time throughout the pandemic. President Xi should take note.

In the West, when the lockdowns were imposed, there were open debates in the media. People and politicians argued freely about the costs to business, the mental health implications, the impact on children and the lonely. Governments had to win votes in parliament to assume emergency powers. There was dissent. There were endless debates in the media and on social media – and still are. Public health officials had to explain the balance of risks, and how and when restrictions would be lifted.

Conspiracy theories started to circulate, with their harmful misinformation and dangerous myths being transmitted at high speed through the internet – another potentially deadly virus to contend with. The president of the United States suggested that bleach might be the answer.

Such is freedom and the sometimes wild ways of democracy. Societies fortunate enough to have such freedoms of speech and protest have the strength to endure lockdowns and other privations, because there are channels for dissent and protest.

The authorities are accountable to parliaments and the media. Governments have to carry people with them. There are natural, in-built shock absorbers, metaphorical guard rails and buffers to prevent a virus destroying all of a people’s freedoms.

One of the most delicious ironies is the number of people on social media perpetuating myths that an unnamed “they” want to suppress their voices, without ever getting suppressed themselves. On fringe media, foam-flecked pundits push conspiracy theories about the truths that “they” won’t let you see... except that there they are, on your telly, freely babbling on about their latest pet theory. They even use people’s grief to discredit the vaccines.

Apparently, in 2020 and 2021, “they” wanted to control everyone forever; but in 2022, not so. The “new world order” and “the great reset” never happened, and we can all go down the pub as we wish (even if some folk are still banging on about them on Twitter, and how Covid was a hoax).

The West came out of lockdowns and into a world where vaccines have become our primary defence – and we’ve grown to understand how the balance between public health, prosperity and liberty can evolve, depending on the balance of risk. Again: not so, in China. There, the Chinese Communist Party is committed to “zero-Covid” as an article of faith, and public health has turned into an ideological issue.

There is no good reason why China, with the best vaccines they are well able to deliver, cannot lead as relatively relaxed and free a life as, say, the UK. Indeed, with their greater sense of social cohesion and habit of donning face coverings, their rates of serious Covid harm should be as low as practically possible.

Yet the Chinese leadership’s impulse to extremism is evidently counterproductive and disproportionate. The zero-Covid aim has a Maoist quality to it – like the Great Leap Forward, an economic disaster that had to be tested to destruction before being quietly dropped.

The modernisation of the economy in recent decades is another sacred target being pursued with a fanatical determination, regardless of human or environmental damage. In a dictatorship, it’s what happens – and they get away with it.

Yet China is different now, and we see it. In 1989, at the dawn of China’s industrialisation, the Tiananmen Square protests were the inevitable result of a more questioning people. Workers (as well as students) were involved in Beijing – but the demonstrations, large as they were, did not spread across the country.

If they had, they might not have been so easily crushed. But crushed they were. This time? The people have a better sense of what is going on, even under the censorship that restricts internet access and blurs out images of maskless fans at the World Cup.

They have political and cultural aspirations as well as material ones. They are better educated, and demand more personal autonomy. When they rejoined the world economy in the 1980s, after the death of Mao, they also inevitably became exposed to new ideas, too.

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Right now, they can see America and Europe back to normal – and managing Covid better – and they don’t understand why they have to remain in lockdown indefinitely. Meanwhile, their leaders feel no need to justify the zero-Covid policy (if they ever did).

Rather than the CCP becoming more open and democratic to reflect the changing nature of the people it purports to lead, under Xi it has actually receded into its Stalinist shell. Xi now seems to me a “dictator for life”, violating a convention set down by Deng some decades ago, to prevent the CCP Politburo becoming ossified by a self-regarding, self-perpetuating clique. Xi and his cronies appear to have grown more and remote from the population – and it is causing a real crisis.

If he has any sense, and particularly a sense of self-preservation, he will seek an artfully spun “different path” to zero-Covid through a renewed campaign to maximise vaccination, with a strong system of sewage monitoring, voluntary testing and self-isolation to foresee and limit local outbreaks.

It’s not clear the kind of bloody brutality that happened in Tiananmen Square would be tolerated again, even within his own party. Surely Xi can see that?