Xi Jinping Must Choose A New Covid Strategy

Chinese People Have Little Covid Immunity and Low Vaccination Rates of Elderly Could Lead to Massive Deaths and Infection

I am writing this edition of Harold’s Newsletter based on my reading of the following sources: South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), Peoples Daily, Global Times (Government international propaganda outlet), Xinua News Service, New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, The Guardian and Twitter Posts.

China imposed harsh quarantine measures in Wuhan when Covid-19 was first identified there. Controls were imposed on the people that could only be done in an authoritarian dictatorship, which China has unfortunately become under Xi Jinping. I had expected more from Xi Jinping based on his early travels around the world including living as a young man with a family in Iowa. But as they say, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

XI Jinping’s problem in now dealing with Covid is the same problem experienced by Lyndon Johnson about Vietnam, Putin with his misguided war in Ukraine, Charles DeGaulle with his French isolation and wish for international dominance, and more recently in Britain, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss and the Mullahs in Iran. The problem is a leader cutting off open debate and truthful information from advisors, not listening to a wide range of advisors, journalists and the people of each country.

Here are some basic facts why Xi Jinping now faces a potentially calamitous Covid decision.

China adopted a Zero tolerance Covid strategy as we all know, but its actual implementation was not consistent with the label. A priority was set on inoculating younger people with the Chinese Covid vaccines, CoronaVac and Sinopharm which have been shown to be less effective than the mRNA vaccines manufactured by Pfizer-Bio-N-Tech and Moderna which have an effective rate, depending on date of inoculation, from 90% to 70%. But the Chinese vaccines have only a 61% effective rate, according to recent studies.

Then China decided to inoculate younger people-workers in order to boost their economy while neglecting the elderly. Also the elderly in China have suffered some of the same vaccine fear and misinformation as we have seen in the U.S. and Europe. So a large proportion of the elderly Chinese population are not vaccinated or if they have received the initial doses they have not taken boosters. It is estimated that only 40% of the Chinese elderly have taken boosters.

So combining the lack of herd immunity to Covid among the Chinese population in general due to the initial effectiveness of the Zero tolerance policy and the fact that not many Chinese have endured Covid infections together with the reduced effectiveness of the Chinese vaccines compared to the mRNA vaccines, and the contours of the problem facing Xi Jinping becomes clearer.

The unusual protests in China to the lockdown policies, which in some areas like Shanghai have resulted in people being kept in their homes for three months and combined with the fire in Urumqi in Xinjiang, which it is suspected resulted in 10 people being killed in a house fire because they were locked in and fire personnel could not get to them, have been responded to by Xi Jinping by allowing some reconsideration and adjustment of lock down policies. Though China continues to pursue a Zero tolerance policy that is being slowly changed in response to the protests and demonstrations. But of course, Xi Jinping does not want to admit that his emphasis on a Zero tolerance policy was wrong, but the facts and the demonstrations are having effect. China’s top Covid Zero tolerance enforcer has been Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, who has been one of the few women to rise in the ranks of the Chinese political hierarchy, and one professor of Chinese relations at the University of San Diego said that if Sun were a man her political skills would have put her into a major leadership position or the presidency. So this week she announced a framework for revising China’s Covid policies but without much detail.

Xi and Sun are apparently adopting an old Mao Tse Tung policy of setting broad policy frameworks and then letting a Thousand Flowers Bloom, meaning they would expect local leaders to set new policy goals and programs consistent with the overall new framework.

As a result the authorities in Shanghai are moderating some of their lockdown policies to limit containment and lock down to areas of serious infection. Even in Urumqi, the local officials are moderating their very recent claims that severe lock down strategies have prevented the spread of Covid and are now responding to the horrific fires that resulted in locked down apartment buildings killing people trapped inside. Guangzhou in southeastern China, not far from Hong Kong, has announced some liberalization of the extreme lock down policies.

But here is the rub for Xi Jinping and Sun Chunlan as they respond to demonstrations and the fire deaths and general hostility of the Chinese people to the extensive and overbearing lockdowns. With the lack of herd immunity in the Chinese people in general due to the lack of previous Covid infections, the lower effectiveness of the Chinese vaccines, the refusal of Xi Jinping to allow importation of the Western mRNA vaccines and particularly the low vaccination rates among the elderly, a quick reopening and elimination of the lock downs may lead to rampaging by the highly transmissible Omicron virus which is now accounting for the bulk of the Covid virus and the new subvariants such as BA.2, BA.4 and BA.5 which are also now becoming predominant in the West and China.

China’s current daily new Covid infection rate is 40,000. For a country of 1.4 billion people that seems like a very low number compared to daily infection rates much higher in the U.S. of Omicron infections in January, 2022. (I got my Omicron infection in January while hospitalized in Governor Ron DeSantis’ Florida. And as Colin Powell said about Iran, and equally applies to Florida, if you break it, it is yours). But with recent daily rates of only 30,000 cases in China, 40,000 daily cases seems like a big number to them.

Then there is the impact on economic development of a general opening and elimination of lock downs in China. The Zero tolerance policy until now has kept some larger Chinese businesses operating, but the recent strike and riots at the Foxconn plant in China due to Covid lockdowns, where IPhones are assembled, has resulted in a significant inventory drop for Apple IPhones. Small businesses which are everywhere in China have been harshly hurt by the lock down policies where some Chinese people have not received a pay check for three months. Coupling the lack of income to ordinary Chinese people with the difficulty of keeping one’s sanity in extended lockdowns, are reasons why the recent Chinese protests and demonstrations erupted and quickly became wide spread across China despite the severe censorship and promotion of police control.

As part of Xi’s authoritarian policies, Twitter, Facebook, and news websites have been banned in China leading some Chinese to obtain VPN systems to bypass the Great Chinese Firewall. But for every action there is a reaction, and police are now stopping people and checking their phones to see if they have VPN systems on them. Chinese innovation by the people leads to countermeasures in XI Jinping’s China.

So, what does Xi Jinping do in this multifaceted Covid problem some of which is of his own making? If he opens too soon and eliminates lockdowns, Covid infections will spread rapidly among the Chinese people and even more rapidly among the very vulnerable and often unvaccinated elderly Chinese population. One study estimated that very quickly China’s relatively low rate of ICU facilities will be overwhelmed with 15.6 times the available ICU and hospital beds and medical staff to treat them. This could lead to 1.5 million deaths from Covid particularly among the elderly. China could rapidly exceed the Covid daily death rate in the U.S., and total Covid deaths could exceed the U.S. 1.09 million Covid deaths that have occurred.

One would think Xi should immediately agree to purchase the Moderna and Pfizer mRNA vaccines, but that is probably down the path as he wants to continue promoting Chinese self-sufficiency.

XI Jinping has a Covid time bomb which has lead to unusual massive demonstrations in China (and with their suppression), and the Chinese people have already learned, that contrary to what they have been taught, the protests and demonstrations can change Chinese Covid policy. Can those demonstrations also change the Chinese political system? More doubtful. Some protestors at a Chinese demonstration, I think in Shanghai, said, “We are not political. We are good citizens.”