In its first official reaction, the Government denies that the demonstrations criticize the sanitary measures and attributes the crisis to the execution of local administrations
The Communist Party has listened to the complaints of Chinese society, but it does not have much to say about it. The authorities took the floor this Tuesday during a regular press conference of the National Health Commission, their first intervention after the historic protests that have brought hundreds of citizens exasperated with the covid-policy to the streets of the main cities of the country. zero.
During the event, the organization offered its reading of the popular demands. “The problems recently denounced by the public are not directed against the prevention and control of the pandemic itself, but are focused on the simplification of measures against general actions of arbitrary application,” defended the spokesman Cheng Youquan, blaming implicitly to the execution by the lower levels of the Administration.
“We will continue to make an effort to further refine the policy [de covid-cero] to reduce its impact on society and the economy. The also representative Mi Feng dispatched with this ambiguous response the question of whether the demonstrations will lead the Government to “reconsider” its strict protocol.
The absence of an expected change of course in his speech did not satisfy the demands of the population, raised in civic disobedience against a health strategy that for more than two and a half years has suffocated daily life in the country; nor those of the worst outbreak since the beginning of the pandemic, which continues to advance irremediably.
possible reopening
However, not all government responses occur in choreographed press conferences. The state media also fulfill their mission. ‘Beijing News’ published an extensive interview on Tuesday in which several people recovered after being infected with covid – still a rare bird in China – shared their experience; all of them very positive, how could it be otherwise.
The propaganda thus tries to appease the same fear that it fueled by publicizing the chaos in Western countries during the harshest months of the pandemic, at the beginning of 2020, as proof of the superiority of its authoritarian model over liberal democracies. Political discourse has abandoned this argument for a long time, however, given the unfavorable course of events.
More and more rumors suggest that China is finalizing a liberalization, as substantial as it is hasty, of its health campaign. On the one hand, the current outbreak has already acquired unprecedented dimensions, as demonstrated by the fact that the daily count has chained five consecutive maximums. In the last twenty-four hours, it has remained stable at levels of around 40,000 infections, but its intensity and geographical extension make the aspiration to return to zero unfeasible.
On the other hand, society has expressed loud and clear that it is not willing to accept the current restrictions, much less a resurgence of them. This leaves China without many alternatives to a more or less directed, but forced reopening. He plays in his favor that this wave shows an overwhelming majority of asymptomatic, which responds both to the inoculation -considerable although insufficient- of vaccines and to the fact that the new subvariants are more contagious but less deadly.
This would allow the government to present the narrative that its covid-zero policy has been a victory. Such a scenario, however, would overwhelm its meager medical resources: China has fewer than five intensive care beds per 100,000 population, one of the lowest rates in Asia. As a result, deaths could number in the millions, as academic studies have been warning.
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