MAINTENANCE – While Shanghai has been confined since March 30 and China persists in its « zero covid » strategy, sinologist Jean-Philippe Béja analyzes the consequences of Beijing’s hardline policy.
Research director at the CNRS, Jean-Philippe Béja is a researcher at the CERI and a specialist in China.
LE FIGARO. – Since March 30, the city of Shanghai has been under strict confinement. Does the city pledge loyalty to Beijing’s « zero Covid » line? If yes, why ?
Jean-Philippe BEJA. – I would rather say that it is the opposite. The decision to confine Shanghai is bizarre, firstly because the number of cases was negligible, but above all because it was sudden: the center had first decided to confine the Pudong district, then a few days later the Puxi district, and all of a sudden the city was completely locked down. We had the impression of a decision taken in an emergency (when there was none) and the authorities were ill-prepared, particularly in terms of supplies.
The relatively large protests seem to indicate that the local party wanted to show its displeasure with Beijing’s « zero Covid » policy. If they had really wanted to, they could have prevented the protests from developing: neighborhood committees are omnipresent and can intervene at any time in apartment buildings.
For Xi Jinping, this policy shows the superiority of the socialist system and its thinking. So there is no question of abandoning it.
Jean-Philippe Beja
But let us remember that the leaders of Shanghai were very close to former Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin, whose supporters have been the target of the purges launched by Xi Jinping since 2012. If you have a bad mind, you can say to yourself that these protests are encouraged behind the scenes to show the population’s dissatisfaction with Beijing.
How do you view the Chinese strategy? Does the Chinese authorities’ hard-line approach hide a political reality?
The strict containment policy allowed China to drastically limit the scale of the epidemic at a time when Western countries were overwhelmed by the wave and health systems showed weakness. For Xi Jinping, this policy shows the superiority of the socialist system and its thinking. There is therefore no question of abandoning it, even if the circumstances have completely changed and the omicron variant is much less lethal than the first coronavirus. It is no longer a question of public health, but a question of the correctness of the political line. Let’s not forget that Xi Jinping is obsessed with the 20th Communist Party Congress, which should give him a third term. Under these conditions, there is no question of abandoning the zero covid policy that he decreed. He repeated it recently. Reality must bend to his thought, and not the other way around.
Can the Chinese president emerge weakened from this episode?
All kinds of rumors are circulating on social networks. But we see that he is mentioned less on the front page of the People’s Daily, and the last communiqué of the meeting of the Political Bureau mentioned his name much less. It is obvious that intense struggles agitate the leadership of the Party in preparation for the 20th Congress. The protests in Shanghai, the discontent that is emerging in Beijing can naturally be pretexts for questioning its infallibility. His rivals (whose names are not known) will no doubt try to recall the two-term limit rule that Xi is trying to break.
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