For the past two years, the Western media has taken that pernicious little term, “Zero Covid”, at face value. While the rest of the world saw rocketing caseloads and death rates, during a key 18-month period China reported two (yes, two) deaths. In a country of 1.4 billion people, and with a disease that scientists find uncannily adapted to infect humans, this was not just obviously false; it was absurd.
Nevertheless, Western media has repeatedly validated the claim, often celebrating it. The result is that in the minds of billions of people, China was uniquely successful at containing the virus. What few, if any, have realised is that among the many false narratives constructed and deployed by the Chinese government, Zero Covid has been the most successful — a fact evidenced by the widespread adoption and use of that patently self-contradictory term itself.
Like any global, historically significant false narrative worth its salt, Zero Covid has not been monolithic in its claims. Rather, it has been modulated by the Chinese propaganda apparatus, with, of course, the witting or unwitting collaboration of Western media that has been essential to its success. The most recent manifestation of the Zero Covid false narrative is one that speaks to its daring and sophistication — the idea that, in response to criticism and pressure, the Chinese government came to terms with the fact that it could not cope with the swell of Omicron cases and so needed to ease restrictions.
The new “China is easing restrictions” phase of the CCP’s Zero Covid campaign began to emerge in March when a high-ranking Chinese health official began arguing in the Chinese business news outlet, Caixin, that China should fight the disease “more sustainably”. “We should carve a very clear path and not spend all our time debating whether we should continue zero Covid or coexist (with the virus),” wrote Zhang Wenhong, a senior infectious disease specialist known as the “Chinese Fauci”. Zhang followed up with another opinion piece a week later: “China’s Pandemic Fight Can and Should Allow for Normal Life.”
This development seemingly exposed the flaws in China’s Covid strategy, which is exactly what was messaged by the US media. The Associated Press article that reported Zhang’s comments added that despite the new policy advice, “the government is sticking with the tried-and-true policy of lockdowns, repeated mass testing of millions of people and a two-week or more quarantine for overseas arrivals…Opening up carries risks, because the country’s success in protecting people from Covid-19 means many don’t have antibodies to fight the virus from previous infection.”
The reality that the AP report papered over — and what virtually all Western media has missed as it swallowed CCP’s Covid narrative whole — is that China’s true Covid strategy wasn’t aimed at containing the virus; it was aimed at containing the narrative. “The Chinese CDC was told how it’s going to go,” a private intelligence analyst with knowledge of the data said. The source explains that the CCP’s methodology of choice is not to flatly deny data or take down reporting wholesale but simply “round the edges” off the story by obfuscating just enough to blunt any alternative narrative from forming.
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