A strongly-worded statement released by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo’s supreme seven-member Standing Committee warned top leaders from questioning Xi Jinping’s Covid Zero strategy.
The lockdowns caused due to the Omicron-driven Covid surge has dented economic growth – a source of the CCP’s towering strength and power. The economic downturn is now leading to criticism of the Chinese president and his leadership.
The criticism also came from those who are Xi’s greatest cheerleaders. Former Global Times Editor-in-Chief Hu Xijin, according to a Bloomberg report, published and then soon deleted a WeChat post earlier Thursday where he commented on the zero-Covid policy Beijing is sticking to.
Xijin said that the economic costs of containing the virus shouldn’t exceed the public-health benefits. Hu even went on to say that the CCP should tell the truth to the people or ‘make low-cost containment work’ if Beijing faces a surge in cases.
Some view that Xi’s rugged insistence on Covid Zero stems from his thought that China’s Covid strategy is better than that being devised in the western nations. He also feels that China’s Covid Zero is an example of how China’s model of governance is superior to those in the western nations.
Deng Yuwen, a former editor of a Communist Party newspaper, told Bloomberg that despite the criticism Xi could be facing top leaders will still have to listen to him as Covid is evolving into ‘a fight that Xi cannot afford to lose’.
However, the onslaught of Covid on China Securities Index 300 (CSI 300) continues as it fell to a two-year low last week and slumped 21% this year. Many containers remain stuck in Shanghai further crippling global trade and hurting emerging markets.
Despite these developments, Xi insists on sticking to Covid Zero.
For Shanghai a proposal has been forwarded to industries where workers will work in a ‘closed loop’. This has helped ‘restart production at more than 70% of its industrial manufacturing facilities, while 90% of 660 “key” industrial companies have resumed output’, a Bloomberg report said.
Censorship is commonplace in China and such is its insistence on uprooting dissent that the CCP banned China strategist Hong Hao’s Weibo and WeChat accounts following his ‘bearish’ reports on the economy and the stock index.
The CCP statement remained bullish. As mentioned earlier, it was strongly-worded and warned against dissent.
“(The Politburo pledges) to fight against any speech that distorts, questions or rejects our country’s Covid-control policy. Our pandemic prevention-and-control strategy is determined by the party’s nature and principles. Our policy can stand the test of history, and our measures are scientific and effective,” it said.
What it failed to mention is that the actual ‘policy’ is to ensure that Xi can begin his precedent-breaking third term as he prepares for a twice-a-decade leadership reshuffle towards the end of this year.
(with inputs from Bloomberg)
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