What COVID Revealed About China
By LEO ZHANG ‘25
This past winter break, I flew on an airplane for the first time since 2021. At John F. Kennedy International Airport, things looked drastically different from what I remembered. Barely anyone wore masks in the security lines. TSA officers patted down passengers instead of having them walk through scanners. Bustling restaurants and stores lined the terminal, serving customers face-to-face. On the plane, I couldn’t see any empty seats. Everything felt normal again.
As COVID approaches its third anniversary, many countries like Denmark and the United States have relaxed their restrictions. Surprisingly, China has joined the bandwagon by rolling back more than two years of its “zero COVID” strategy. However, the country has seen a huge spike in cases. According to the New York Times, more than 60,000 people have died from COVID-related complications since Dec. 8, 2022.
On paper, “zero COVID” worked. It kept a nation of more than 1.4 billion people to only around two million cases and 5,200 deaths. Compare that to the 100 million cases and 1.1 million deaths out of the 330 million people in the United States, and one would assume that China did a good job.
Time, however, has revealed its significant consequences. Besides 2020, the economy “had one of its worst performances since 1976, the year
Mao Zedong died, when it declined 1.6 percent” (The New York Times). Quarantines stopping people from going to their jobs, the constant opening and closing of factories and ports, and government spending on medical equipment crippled the economy.
Intense quarantine mandates, such as the Shanghai lockdowns that kept citizens indoors for more than two months, also wreaked havoc on individuals’ well-being. Many teenagers and young adults, who should be socializing, were confined to their rooms and subjected to strict schedules to eat and shower. Lu Lin, the president of Beijing University’s Sixth Hospital, suggests that the “toll on people’s mental health could last over two decades” (US News).
These failures exposed underlying instability. When the first case emerged, the Chines Communist Party set out on a mission to tighten its control over Chinese citizens through CCTV cameras or enforcing month-long lockdowns. It flaunted the country’s few cases and deaths, but that control began to weaken. Already faced with growing economic and mental health problems, officials couldn’t handle a new wave of protests, causing them to roll back on the strict policies.
The pandemic did not end up being an opportunity for China to flex its muscles. Rather, it became an opportunity for the Chinese people to find their inner drive to push for democracy and expression.