Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s "COVID-zero" policy has been pushing the country’s citizens to their breaking point for months, with large-scale lockdowns, mass testing and forced quarantine of positive cases the norm even as the rest of the world learns to live with the capricious coronavirus.
Xi has doubled down on the policy in the wake of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 20th Party Congress, emboldened by his success in securing a precedent-breaking third term and stacking the Politburo with loyalists. “Facts have fully proved that each version of the prevention and control plan has withstood the test of practice,” the party mouthpiece The People’s Daily said this week.
The Chinese leader's unwillingness thus far to adjust the policy meaningfully has consequences. Fed up with COVID zero and irate about the deaths of 10 people in Xinjiang Province who reportedly perished because they were locked down in a burning apartment building, thousands of Chinese took to the streets last weekend in some of the country’s largest cities. The protests are significant in that participants are united in their anger about COVID zero-induced malaise and challenging a core central government policy on which Xi has staked his prestige.