How will China pivot from boasts about low covid death

CHINA / CHAGUAN
The politics of death in China
How will the party pivot from boasts about low covid death tolls?
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FOR NEARLY three years, China’s rulers have built harsh pandemic controls around a stark offer to their people: at the cost of individual liberties, privacy and dignity, we will keep you alive. Communist Party leaders called their “zero-covid” campaign an “all-out people’s war”. Their favourite battle cries emphasised China’s low pandemic body count, especially in contrast with far higher death rates in America and other liberal democracies.

Even in recent days, as it became clear that the party is losing its unwinnable war with covid-19, senior officials dug in more deeply. Like generals facing defeat in a bunker, they redoubled their promises of victory, declaring the saving of lives to be the ultimate test of a political system. On November 29th, just one week before the central government all but abandoned its zero-covid campaign, the foreign ministry’s chief spokesperson, Hua Chunying, tweeted out a reckoning of what she termed “the price of ‘freedom’ in the US”. She listed American casualties with cold precision: 1m fatalities from covid, 40,000 annual gun deaths and 107,622 fentanyl deaths in 2021 alone. “The American people deserve something far better than that. What we want is to protect our people’s lives and ensure them a better life,” wrote Ms Hua.

Diplomats in Beijing were appalled by Ms Hua’s scornful accountancy of death, and in particular her reference to Americans killed by the synthetic opioid fentanyl. That is a scourge fuelled by a trade in smuggled Chinese precursor chemicals that authorities in China seem unwilling or unable to stem, despite years of pressure at the highest level. The American ambassador, Nicholas Burns, lodged a protest with senior foreign-ministry officials.

Ms Hua is feted by nationalists for her caustic tone with the West. But all arms of China’s propaganda machine have spent the pandemic depicting democracies as too decadent to protect a basic human right, life. On the same day as Ms Hua’s tweet, the main evening TV news programme, “Xinwen Lianbo”, broadcast images of American misery that it has shown many times before during this pandemic: ambulances arriving at hospitals and sick Americans on respirators. An anchor recited America’s latest covid toll and explained that hospitals in that country also face surging influenza cases. Propaganda works. Take the grey-haired Beijinger who was out for an evening stroll in late November when he came across a rare protest in the capital. He berated youngsters for lighting candles for victims of pandemic lockdowns, from families reportedly trapped in a burning apartment block behind sealed fire exits, to children denied life-saving hospital care. Noticing foreign reporters at the scene, the old man rounded angrily on Chaguan, asking what China has to mourn. How many died of covid in America, he demanded to know? And how many in China?

Those two numbers—over 1m pandemic deaths in America, versus an official toll of 5,235 in China—are political totems, cited by many Chinese without prompting. Now, as they abandon zerocovid without proper preparations, officials need a new message. Suddenly they have begun talking up the mildness of new Omicron variants, as if China is about to enjoy a hard-won victory lap. That ignores the dangers that Omicron poses to the vulnerable, notably to undervaccinated old people, who abound in China.

To predict how the party may navigate this perilous moment, it is worth remembering that deaths can be recorded in different ways. Death can be a statistic, and also the saddest and hardest-borne of human events. Statistics hold little fear for China’s leaders. To burnish its ideological legacy, the party has erased tens of millions of dead from history. It under-counts Chinese casualties in the Korean war, and denies the suffering of many killed by purges, man-made famines and mobs during the Mao era. Other deaths are too inconvenient to mention. For all the party’s boasts of putting lives first, leaders say remarkably little about the million Chinese killed each year by tobacco, perhaps because cigarettes are a huge source of taxes. Some deaths are a state secret. China does not report execution statistics (nor is it transparent about the sources of organs used for transplants, though it claims to have stopped harvesting body parts from executed prisoners).

Many outsiders disbelieve China’s covid statistics. There are two responses to that. One, the virus really was relatively rare in China for much of the pandemic. Indeed, officials had incentives to be transparent about infections they found, because contact-tracing required it. Two, the death numbers do look odd. China recorded over 500 covid deaths in 2022 but just two in 2021. Between May 26th and November 19th this year China reported hundreds of thousands of covid infections, but not a single fatality.

As zero-covid ends, secrecy will increase
China generally under-counts deaths from all manner of infectious diseases. In part, weak hospitals simply fail to test sick people for some diseases. In part, infectious diseases that threaten social stability are viewed in China as a question of national security, says Mai He, a pathologist at Washington University in St Louis. Methodological quirks play a role. Patients often die of several things at once and Chinese doctors typically put chronic conditions, such as heart disease, on death certificates. China routinely reports just a few dozen fatal cases of seasonal influenza each year. Reputable studies put China’s annual flu toll at perhaps 100,000.

If dry statistics can be manipulated, hiding the human toll of a deadly exit wave from zero-covid would be harder. Should hospitals be overwhelmed or panic grip communities, smartphone videos will go viral, despite the censors’ efforts. After failing to prepare for an opening, expect the party to claim credit for restoring long-constrained freedoms. Some Chinese will accept that abrupt shift in messaging. Others may remember being told for two-and-a-half years that the avoidance of preventable deaths is the mark of true leadership. The party claimed victory prematurely in a war that could not be won. China’s people will pay the price. ■