In China The city has closed its inhabitants, supply lines have been destroyed and officials are fighting. to ensure the functioning of important factors - when the most recorded explosion of The Covid-19 threatens to enter a national crisis caused by the government itself.
At least 44 Chinese cities are under full or partial exclusion as authorities continue to work to curb the spread of a more viable Omicron variant, according to a report by Nomura investment bank and CNN's own report on Thursday.
In Shanghai, the center of the country's latest epidemic, unimaginable scenes of state-of-the-art financial capital have become part of the daily struggle for 25 million people. There, residents are forbidden to leave the closets of their apartments or prefabricated houses for weeks in despair after food and freedom - some are seen on social media clips screaming from their homes. window frustration or fight with workers wearing hazmat. Even after Monday's closure of the preliminary plan for partial easing of measures, the end seems to be in sight.
The current situation could be the most important challenge for the country - and perhaps for Chinese leader Xi Jinping - since the first Covid-19 explosion in Wuhan died more than two years ago. And for Si Jinping, it will come at a more sensitive time, months before his expected move into an almost invisible third term in power in the party's second decade this fall.
Commitment is high for China's most powerful leader in decades - because it has firmly established its personal seal on the goals of the "dynamic zero covid" that drives these Allied control measures, and continues to push the country on this path.
"We need to overcome paralysis in the face of danger, war fatigue, leave things to chance and be able to relax," state media said Xi Jinping on Wednesday, urging the country to "strictly enforce normal preventive and control measures."
In China, local officials who implement Covid-19 measures, as in Shanghai, are often accused of mismanagement when problems arise - a more acceptable goal than the central government and its policies in a tightly controlled political environment.
And the Covid crisis is not expected to hurt Xi's likely third term. But as the epidemic enters a critical phase - some cities are closed for several weeks and a top state health official on Tuesday warned that the epidemic in Shanghai "is ineffective." - The ruling Communist Party of China and its leader must fight the economic collapse and the growing possibility that, like the virus, it could spread anger against the government in Shanghai.
+ The earth is in confusion
Xi ordered local officials to do everything in their power to stop the virus while minimizing the "impact on economic and social growth" - an order which, contrary to intuition, is expected to force local officials to in some cases they resorted to violent measures to prevent. or even preventively after the Shanghai crisis.
"Shanghai officials are trying to thread this needle, which they were asked to thread, that is, 'let's keep zero covid without disturbing anyone's life.'" "They focus a little on 'not disturbing people's lives' (aside). And they fail," said Trey McArver, partner and co-founder of China's political research group Trivium.
"The lesson everyone will know is that you really need to focus on the part with zero covid," he said. Many municipalities have some form of locking, although most of the total number of cases since the beginning of last month have been found in Shanghai and the northeastern province of Jilin. Getting supplies across the country became a serious problem, some highways were closed and truck drivers were caught in quarantine or at thousands of highway checks. Some cities are discouraging their residents from leaving, such as the main southern port of Guangzhou, which requires 18 million people to pass a negative test at Covid if they want to get out.
"It can be said that the whole country is now like many remote islands," said Yanzhong Huang, a leading global health fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The situation has prompted several Beijing ministries to take action, with a National Development and Reform Commission official on Tuesday promising to "actively coordinate with local governments" and "use a lot of data" to ensure compliance. Meanwhile, public health and media officials have reinforced public messages about why China should adhere to the policy, citing large-scale 1.4 billion explosions in the country, especially for a large and unvaccinated elderly population.
According to Huang, the health concerns were accompanied by a "secret" political calculation of the cost of the big explosion.
"(Beijing) sees the perceived impact of political and socio-economic stability, sees the impact of the leadership change before the party congress and sees the legitimacy of the regime - many people are in danger," Huang said.
However, the risks to the Communist Party in pursuing this policy, which has caused growing frustration and anger and threatened further unrest in Shanghai, are also clear - especially since the country is more than 88% indigenous and, in most cases, authorities said, remains soft.
"The economic slowdown is a major problem," said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. "The central government has always used so-called economic performance to improve its legitimacy. So how does it (explain) slow economic performance? I don't know. But one thing is for sure, people will be -antos."
+ Guilt game
In the name of Xi, he was very closely associated with politics, the leader associated him with its success.
"If you very clearly centralize power in someone's hands, then I think you can put all the problems at that person's feet - so it obviously doesn't show him well," McArver said. But on the question of whether it would harm the leader's third term, "the answer is no," he said, pointing out what observers in China's opaque political elite believe there was no real competition for supreme duty.
In the meantime, it is possible that even from the depths of the current challenge - if it can find a way to control the epidemic - the central government can achieve a political victory, as was the case in Wuhan in 2020, analysts say. ingnon.
Then there was great anger against the government, for example after the death of flute doctor Li Wenliang, but the Chinese Communist Party emerged from the crisis to paint a strict control strategy as an example of its superior management. .
These days, there is clear frustration with the government, which is streaming social media this week as users adopt pro-China policies, generally tending hashtags to make veils or sarcastic remarks against the government - before they become censorship.
But there are also willing goats across the country in the form of local government officials, who are under strong pressure and can be accused of not pursuing a "zero-covid" policy. in the central government itself, experts say. Many cadres were fired or degraded by the entire pandemic, including most recently in Shanghai, with details often reported in the state media.
"China's central government is very, very careful and also very wise in venting the wrath of local governments instead of its own," Wu said.
And in a political environment where all opposition has been eliminated, Si's party account will dominate.
However, some argue that China is turning into a corner where it must now follow its strict policy, after celebrating two years of "zero cover" success, fearing the virus and creating widespread support for the policy.
Huang puts it this way: "We must never underestimate the government's ability to change its account in order to maintain public support. And we must never underestimate people's tolerance, even in politics that harms some interests.