China’s largest protests since 1989 have forced a rare course correction by the ruling Communist Party: Its much-loathed “zero-COVID” policy has been silently shelved as the country pivots shakily to living with the mercurial coronavirus.
But can China win its “people’s war” against the coronavirus, now that it has abandoned its once-sacrosanct quest to eliminate the pathogen?
It is ironic that the pandemic, which began in the central Chinese city of Wuhan three years ago, has ebbed in the rest of the world but still rages in China. China was the first country to face the coronavirus, the first to corral it — with a draconian lockdown of Wuhan that morphed into the infamous zero-COVID policy — and the last to remain at its mercy.