While Shanghai eased anti-Covid-19 restrictions in certain neighborhoods on Monday following growing discontent among residents, François Godement, Asia adviser at the Institut Montaigne, estimated on Tuesday April 12 on franceinfo that if China is also strict with these quarantine measures, it is because the authorities have “fear that all this will go wrong towards the small towns” Chinese.
franceinfo: Why this reversal of the Chinese authorities which partly eases the anti-Covid restrictions in Shanghai?
Francois Godement: We have not seen confinements of this magnitude since the beginning of 2020. Shanghai is 30 million inhabitants. So even for the Chinese army, it’s impossible to have a supply chain, an alternative food chain for 30 million people. This was done in Wuhan, but not always perfectly. Secondly, this variant is no longer the virus we knew in 2020. As we know, it is much more contagious, so containment is necessarily less effective. Third, Chinese vaccines are, unless you really have had the three shots, much less effective against Covid. The great fear of the authorities is that all of this will drift towards the smallest towns, towards the countryside where vaccination rates are even lower, where there is often an old population, where the number of hospital beds is absolutely insufficient, especially beds with respirators. And so official China is stuck with its own politics.
Does this show the limits of the Chinese zero Covid strategy?
It’s a strategy that worked at first. We must not conceal ourselves and China had a few reasons to be pleased with this in relation to our results. But the contagiousness of the virus jeopardizes this policy. I personally do not understand why China did not launch the manufacture of the Pfizer vaccine, when it had acquired the license. It is outdated because the elderly population in particular is dragging its feet to get vaccinated, especially in secondary regions. So I would say that Shanghai is almost punished because if it spreads in Shanghai it will spread everywhere. And that’s the big official scare. You have to understand it too. But obviously, the authorities were not ready to assume the consequences of such rigorous confinement on 30 million inhabitants.
And maybe imposing such a strict lockdown in Shanghai might be more difficult than in other Chinese cities?
Let’s say that the people of Shanghai are more internationalized, more capable of making themselves heard. But it is not clear what may have happened elsewhere also in some cases. The people of Shanghai are perhaps more capable of making themselves heard. But I don’t believe that the city of Shanghai is more rebellious or more than any other.