Within hours, tributes began to circulate. On Reddit, strangers tried to figure out what had happened, with some assuming it was related to his bout with “long Covid”, while others believed, reasonably under the circumstances, it was suicide (YB didn’t reply to my requests for comment). On YouTube, podcasters eulogized Lee. And across X, the platform where he spent so much of his last five years, the reactions carried a stunned grief. 

I expected to feel ambivalent. I had known Lee only through a couple of antagonistic exchanges online this year. In our final exchange in August, I blocked him after I refused to debate him about Covid on his show, Struggle Session. But I could only muster sadness and pity for him. The “Zero Covid” or “Covid cautious” community he helped sustain had hardened into something like an emotional pandemic, long after the biological one had faded into the background of American life.

To understand that movement, we have to return to 2020.

The institutional failures of the early pandemic are well documented: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s infamous mask flip-flop; the agency’s fixation on surface transmission; missteps on testing; mixed messages about risk; and a possible coverup of the origins of the novel coronavirus. For many Americans, the CDC’s credibility cracked. For people already predisposed to distrust institutions — especially on the far Left and Right — it shattered.

Into that breach stepped the so-called People’s CDC, a self-appointed, grassroots alternative. It was a coalition of activist scientists, public-health researchers, and highly online progressives, united by the belief that only a bottom-up, morally pure movement could save the marginalized. They were united by a shared belief that the official CDC no longer “followed the science” and had been corrupted by MAGA and capitalist institutions, which demanded everyone go back to work to shore up the corporate bottom line. The People’s CDC began issuing biweekly “risk maps” that almost always seemed to point toward continued caution, regardless of the data. 

More from this author

Jack Schlossberg’s ChatGPT candidacy

By Ryan Zickgraf

Even after vaccines arrived, even as hospitalizations fell, even as scientists updated their understanding of risk, the People’s CDC preserved the emotional realities of early 2021: masks were always necessary, indoor gatherings were inherently suspect, and any attempt to resume normal everyday social life was problematic. The group wanted the United States to be on full lockdown like China, even as the Middle Kingdom abandoned its hard-line Zero Covid policies. For many, this alternative CDC filled an emotional void or offered clarity during a bewildering moment. For others, it became something more — an identity.

The Zero Covid movement’s nerve center is a 32,000-member-strong subreddit called ZeroCovidCommunity. The members are convinced that the pandemic never truly ended, that the emergency has become a permanent condition. The radical edge of this community codified itself into what some observers half-jokingly called COVIDTELPRO, a quasi-ironic name evoking the FBI’s secret surveillance program of the 1960s. This group primarily targets Left-wing organizers, journalists, union members, and anyone else who dares to propose a future that includes socializing, bars, or maskless joy. The result is a constant churn of denunciations, loyalty tests, and ritualistic online shaming of those who don’t wear N95 masks in public.  

I encountered them firsthand. In February, I wrote a brief essay urging young adults — Gen Z, in particular — to revisit offline social life, to resist the isolation that had become endemic. I intended to push against the extreme safety-ism that had metastasized among the Left and young people since 2020. Humans are inherently social animals, as Aristotle taught, and meeting others face-to-face is a fundamental aspect of physical, mental, and even political health. But in the eyes of Zero Covid activists, I had committed an inexcusable offense — telling people to get a life. 

One of the most persistent of the Covid-cautious commentators was Leslie Lee. He had a career long before his activism swallowed him. He taught high-school English, wrote for the Huffington Post and other progressive outlets, and co-hosted a number of Lefty podcasts. 

In the late 2010s, Lee was sharp, blunt, funny, and often pugnacious — an online personality who knew how to provoke. Then Covid struck; for him, the “long” variety. On his GoFundMe page, he described brain fog, excruciating migraines, constant fatigue — all of which made his once-fluid creative process painfully slow: “one show every month or two,” he admitted. What he did have energy for, at least publicly, was venting endlessly about “Covid deniers” like me. Once Lee put me in his crosshairs as the enemy on X, I received hundreds of angry tweets from those in the movement — including from Seventies actress Morgan Fairchild and the forever-masked influencer-journalist Taylor Lorenz, arguably Zero Covid’s biggest icon. 

What surprised me most during the weeks-long harassment wasn’t the volume; it was the emotional intensity. My opponents posted as if they lived in a perpetual emergency, and I was part of the problem. Many of these people were polite in private over direct messages or phone calls, including Lorenz. But in public, they wanted a pound of flesh from me, a groveling apology, even as they threatened real-life harm. The rhetoric kept escalating. Disagreement meant harm. Harm became violence. Violence turned to genocide. I was an “ableist” and eventually accused of being — yes — Hitler for the immunocompromised. One wrote: “People like you make it impossible for me to exist in public spaces.” 

I was far from the only one on the receiving end. Activists told me they were tired of every event photo being ammunition for the Covid-cautious to scream bloody murder at the sight of unmasked faces. A national newspaper columnist contacted me privately to say she had endured 18 straight months of being called “a murderer” and worse for her positions on lockdowns and school closures. “I just want you to know you aren’t alone,” she wrote.

As political journalist David Weigel has observed, these online crusades have been disastrous for the Left. Progressive spaces — activist meetings, book talks, union gatherings — became some of the last places in America still requiring masks, vaccine cards, or elaborate safety rituals years after the broader public abandoned them. Many simply stopped showing up, and a movement already known for its internal fragmentation became more physically and emotionally atomized. A rally in 2024 or 2025 featuring a sea of N95s doesn’t project seriousness; instead, it signals an inward-facing subculture that pillories dissent. 

Yet the Zero Covid crowd viewed this online invective as necessary and themselves as noble martyrs burdened to save the world from a crisis that everyone else had forgotten. Another prominent community member, Alice Wong, embodied such thinking. Wong, who coincidentally also tragically died this month, was a MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, best known as the founder of the Disability Visibility Project. She reportedly died of an infection in a California hospital at the age of 51, not long after her Teen Vogue disability column got canceled. 

Just as segments of too-online progressive spaces once espoused that black women were inherently magical (Remember #BlackGirlMagic?), or that autism imbues people with superhuman powers, Wong called herself an “oracle” due to her experience with muscular dystrophy. She co-founded the Society of Disabled Oracles, which framed disabled people as holy priests possessing what she called prophetic perception: an ability to sense power dynamics others can’t see, and to perceive hidden knowledge from the past or the future. “Disability is a generative force. It’s magic,” reads a banner on the group’s site.

Suggested reading

Beware the lockdown generation

By Mary Harrington

This might all sound like a harmless New Age-y fantasy, but the reality is that these delusions do not appear to be making anyone happy. On ZeroCovidCommunity, where Wong was revered as a visionary, you can see the emotional consequences of this cosmology laid bare. A recent thread titled “Does anyone else struggle with life feeling…” reads like a collective diary of people trapped in a state of self-victimization.

The responses are chilling. Posters describe losing friends, losing hobbies, losing whole years. A few confess they no longer feel connected to their own bodies — that masking and hypervigilance have rewired how they relate to themselves and to others. One admits that the mask has become a psychological crutch — not for safety, but because it provides “a barrier between me and other people”, a permission structure for avoidance. Some say the pandemic ruined their 20s or 30s; and now the Zero Covid community has become the only place that recognizes their pain. But recognition is not the same as healing. 

The pattern becomes clear: the Covid-cautious online community didn’t merely attract people with existing vulnerabilities. It amplified their fear, rewarded their withdrawal, endowed their anxiety with moral weight, and continues to tell them they are righteous for feeling this way, that they are saving countless lives. It is a feedback loop between individual fragility and a worldview that says fragility is wisdom. 

Lee and Wong deserve our sympathy, as do many of the Zero Covid die-hards. But it is difficult to read their words without feeling the weight of what the movement has done — perhaps not maliciously, but inevitably. A political identity built around a permanent emergency can’t shepherd people out of an emergency. It can’t guide them back to the world. It can only freeze them in the moment when everything first went wrong, and prevent them from re-entering a world they no longer trust — with devastating consequences for well being. 

It has been gruelling stint, taking in not only the pandemic, but also the biggest terrorist attack in her nation’s history and a volcanic eruption that claimed 22 lives. Having faced  sustained vitriol from some of her opponents, and with a young daughter born while she was in office, it’s perhaps understandable, if disappointing, that the inspiration for working mothers the world over might now want to leave politics to spend more time with her family.

Ardern insists that she is standing down for personal reasons, and not “because it was hard”. But her political woes must have made that decision easier. Ardern’s popularity has been sinking for over a year, the country faces a crippling cost of living crisis, and her Labour government faces a daunting election this year against a resurgent centre-Right National Party. It is a far cry from 2020, when she was re-elected to become the first NZ Prime Minister to win an outright majority under an electoral system designed specifically to preclude such an outcome.

This is the leader who inspired “Jacindamania” and became an international progressive superstar. How did she fall from grace so spectacularly?

Covid-19 did play a part, but not in the way generally understood. Ardern’s Zero Covid strategy was driven by the cold reality of a health system that wouldn’t stand up to even a mild outbreak after decades of austerity. And contrary to critiques from abroad about “Covid dictatorship” and “never-ending nightmares”, the policy was actually successful. Within three months, New Zealand eliminated Covid, lifted all restrictions except closed borders, and life in the country returned to normal while the rest of the world descended into chaos. No wonder her pandemic management strategy was wildly popular, supported by 75% of the population as late as July 2021.

The problem, though, was the government’s failure to prepare an exit strategy. Complacency meant that vaccination roll out was slow, and the country was unprepared for the next wave: the Delta variant’s arrival, in August 2021, sparked a three-month lockdown in the largest city, Auckland. Once it became clear that the country’s success relied on luck and ad-hoc measures rather than enlightened leadership, Ardern’s popularity tanked.

The plan for re-opening once high vaccination levels were reached was similarly poor. Despite having watched Australia’s failures, New Zealand repeated many of their mistakes, with shortages of testing leading to an explosion of cases at the end of 2021, as well as staff shortages in shops and hospitality, and supply chain disruptions, and a health system still on the verge of collapse.

More from this author

New Zealand's Zero Covid delusion

By Tom Chodor

More controversially, New Zealand relied on vaccine mandates; Ardern described vaccination as “the golden ticket to freedom”. When the mandates sparked a protest movement that occupied the lawns in front of Parliament, the government refused to engage. The weeks-long standoff ended in violence when police moved in to clear the protesters, and it has rent the country’s social fabric, with 64% of New Zealanders believing the country is now more divided than ever.

It is this division, more so than any pandemic mis-management, that ultimately toppled her — it’s a division she was elected to address.

Ardern’s initial victory, in 2017, was based on promises to fix the widespread socio-economic disadvantage plaguing the country following four decades of neoliberalism and post-2008 austerity that would make even George Osborne blush. At the time of her election, over one in five children lived in poverty and inequality was high, with the wealthiest 10% owning 59% of all of the country’s assets, while the poorest half owned 2%. Housing affordability was a perennial issue — the average house would cost seven times the median income — while the country had the worst homelessness rate in the OCED, with almost 1% of the population living on the streets or in shelters.

Yet, almost six years on, what’s changed? Child poverty rates remain unchanged, while inequality has increased. House prices have increased by 58% over the past five years, with the average house now costing 8.8 times the average income. New Zealand, according to one economist, is now a country of “the landed gentry”, which dominates wealth and housing opportunities. Meanwhile, homelessness has worsened considerably, with more than 26,000 people waiting for social housing, up from 5,000 five years ago, as targets to build social housing have been badly missed. Even sympathetic commentators are examining Ardern’s legacy and asking “what was the point of all that?”

Suggested reading

Australian Labor's hollow victory

By Shahar Hameiri

Undoubtedly, the pandemic thwarted some of her ambition and the government’s response exacerbated some of the problems. Record high inflation won’t have helped. But Labour was struggling to make progress with its agenda well before Covid struck. Indeed, this was the reason it was trailing in the polls in late 2019, which the pandemic masked for a while: a failure of imagination.

On housing, for example, Labour backtracked on closing tax loopholes that only benefit investors and drive up prices, while its grand plans to build 100,000 “affordable” homes in the decade came to nothing, as it struggled to incentivise the private sector to do so. Likewise, the solution to the homelessness crisis has been to put people in emergency housing, usually motels. With scant progress on building new social housing, the average stay in this “transitional” system has increased from 3 to 21 weeks over the past five years. On child poverty, it has relied on inadequate increases to welfare spending, rather than any structural changes that would address poverty and inequality.

More from this author

New Zealand's lockdown fairytale is over

By Tom Chodor

This, then, will be the legacy of Jacinda Ardern: a missed opportunity. Ardern recognised the need to address the socio-economic disadvantage brought by 40 years of neoliberalism, and made bold promises of state action to do so. Yet when it came down to it, neither she, nor her government were able to break free of the Blairite Third Way mentality.

Despite talking a big game where the “days of thinking that the state can be a passive bystander and the market will provide…are over”, her government relied on short-term fixes, deferred to the private sector, advanced the interests of the asset class, and tinkered around the edges of child poverty or homelessness. Ardern leaves her country facing a cost of living crisis, and her party with no clear successor with fresh ideas how to address it, or the other social ills crippling it. Despite being hailed as the harbinger of a new, progressive Left, Ardern simply turned out to be more of the same.

These social, political and economic shocks might have traumatised a lesser nation, but China has managed to maintain relative stability. Indeed, the Communist Party has ruled over the country for three-quarters of a century — a product not merely of its authoritarianism but also, as Kerry Brown has argued, its ability to provide ordinary Chinese with a unifying national narrative around “which the Communist Party relates to their daily lives”.

When Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 2012, this unifying story became known as “The Chinese Dream”, a slogan that was plastered over billboards and hoardings across the country. Through the Chinese Dream rhetoric, Xi confirmed that the country would become “moderately prosperous”, employment opportunities would improve, and individuals would thrive. Xi was laying the foundations, as he put it, for the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.

The Chinese Dream was symbolised by social engagement, as opposed to the American Dream, which reflected Western individualism. To demonstrate the seriousness with which he took this notion of communal solidarity, Xi directed the authorities to clamp down on corruption and personal aggrandisement within the ranks of the CCP. For him and the country, social improvement was to be a collective effort, and all would reap the benefits. These included the promise that GDP per person would double within Xi’s original term of office, that citizens would have access to massively improved welfare provisions, and that China would start to develop a military “capable of fighting and winning wars”.

It was all going so well — until Covid-19 hit. Even when China was initially building a consensus for lockdown, the restrictions were sold as a selfless, patriotic duty. While the Covid-related fatality statistics remained low — perhaps implausibly low — people bought the narrative of a paternalistic party protecting its people. But over the last few years, China’s lockdowns have done untold damage to people’s families, their businesses, and their health. As time dragged on and Chinese citizens gradually realised that the government had no Plan B, they slowly began to withdraw their loyalty.

Until recently, demonstrations of frustration with the state and its armed goons have been curiously middle-class affairs, like the tang ping (lying flat) movement of students who refused to get out of bed. That was a form of passive resistance, and therefore fundamentally unthreatening. The real attack on Chinese authority came when striking workers broke out of the Foxconn plant, and then unemployed youth united with ordinary people and began tearing down Covid barriers and demanding freedom.

During the course of the demonstrations in November, many shouted slogans insisting that Xi Jinping step down, called for an end to CCP rule, and demanded greater civil rights — a direct challenge to the Communist Party. China has responded by becoming the only country to have overturned Covid policy in response to popular anger, which is ironic given the caricature of Chinese people as passive subjects of their rulers.

More from this author

Zero Covid has radicalised Shanghai

By Austin Williams

The problem now facing the CCP is how to rebuild its popular legitimacy — and rewrite its national narrative — as nearly three years of Covid policy end in disastrous failure. What kind of narrative will Xi turn to in order to explain all this away?

For a hint, we can look at the “For a Life of Contentment” report, published last week by the state media’s think tank, New China Research. It sets out a strategy to recapture “harmonious” public order by outlining China’s place in the world. The document has been a long time in production, but its release has clearly been rushed out after the shock of the anti-Party disturbances. It tells a new narrative — one that is more strident, authoritative, and decisive than the Chinese Dream. And, in a bold move for China, it puts human rights centre stage.

China has long held pretensions of challenging America’s hegemonic role in world affairs. The party’s concept of Chinese rejuvenation — dubbed the “New Era” — was always premised on developing sufficiently to rival America. In 2017, for example, China was insisting that it was prepared to “take centre stage in the world”. Five years later, Beijing is sounding a more defensive, pessimistic note. It says: “the Cold War mentality as well as the hegemonic practices of putting one’s own country’s interests above the interests of others and even the international community at large, and pointing fingers at other countries are not welcome.”

This is not to say that China no longer has global pretensions — only that it is a little more circumspect. It seems that the street protests have rocked the confidence of the ruling party, and Xi needs a new narrative. Faced with widespread popular anger, for instance, the idea that the Chinese state “cares for its people” is clearly not going to work as it has over the last seven decades. Xi is going to have to earn some trust.

More from this author

President Xi is exploiting #MeToo

By Austin Williams

And so to “human rights”. China’s conception of human rights is a pragmatic (and self-serving) one. The CCP clearly believes that it can improve its image at home by advancing the lot of Chinese people; when in doubt, the party has long fallen back on giving people more money. It claims that happiness is the ultimate basis for human rights and thus, by providing material benefits to the population (better infrastructure, jobs, pay and conditions), the regime is also promoting human rights. Ironically, China appears to be tapping into the “happiness agenda” beloved of Western environmentalists by turning the “abstract concept of human rights into a set of tangible rights”.

Of course, the CCP is banking on the fact that the West still relies on it. If the party can reinvigorate the Chinese economy and hold onto the reins of power, it will be a lifeline for ailing Western economies. If China can say that their minorities are exploited but happy, that their peasants are over-worked but with cash in hand, that the Uyghurs are denied rights but have decent pay and conditions, will Western leaders really condemn it? Tapping into Western relativism, China says: “There is no fixed model of human rights protection in the world. Different countries have different national conditions, histories, cultures, social systems and economic and social development levels. A proper path of human rights development should be explored to suit national conditions and the needs of the people.”

More from this author

President Xi is exploiting #MeToo

By Austin Williams

China, then, appears to be regrouping, and a weakened West is giving it the time and space that it needs. Beijing says that it wants to bring “novel ideas, measures and practices in terms of how to respect and protect human rights (as) a refreshing addition to the global human rights cause and to the diversity of civilisations”, as well as offering “inspiration for the rest of the world, especially for developing countries”. In other words, Beijing might be in a weaker-than-normal position, but it is still trying to export its social and political model overseas. It knows it cannot afford to be completely defensive. Whether Xi can get away with this in the fragmented international community is one thing — but as the past month has shown, whether the Chinese Communist Party can convince people at home is quite another story altogether.

***

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here. 

This new festive tradition, where we tell our wizened elders to piss off and keep their grubby hands and lips to themselves, obviously has its roots in the all-consuming contemporary dialogue about consent. But this holiday season it hits differently. Rejoice, for gone are the grim days of socially distanced drive-by birthday parties and Thanksgiving over FaceTime; once again, Grandma can be treated like an avatar for child molesters the world over right to her face. The recirculation of articles like these coincides with another notable entry into the every-touch-is-a-bad-touch canon, triggered by a recent update on the MeTooing of author Junot Diaz. Diaz, a Pulitzer-winning fiction writer, was mostly (not fully) cancelled in 2018, after an accusation from writer Zinzi Clemmons that he had once “cornered” and “forcibly kissed” her. Accounts of verbal abuse and interpersonal cruelty from other women swiftly followed, along with rumours that dozens of additional allegations were coming down the pike — or would, if not for the victims’ fears of retaliation for speaking out. As summarised by Ben Smith of Semafor, a media firestorm ensued: “Publications from The Washington Post to New York Magazine ran with headlines about allegations of ‘sexual misconduct’.”

The bombshell, four years later, is a heretofore-unreported revelation in Smith’s article: that the kiss in question was not the open-mouthed, tongue-thrusting assault most readily conjured by the word “forcible”, but a peck on the cheek. Yet for every person who was thrown for a loop by this information, there was another just as willing to die on the hill of “A kiss on the cheek without explicit prior consent is assault, actually”. In the former category was the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, tweeting bewilderedly: “Imagine getting up and preparing to publicly accuse someone of assault and knowing full well that what you were actually referring to was a kiss on the cheek.” In the latter category was Diaz accuser Monica Byrne (who described a public but heated dinner party conversation with the author as “verbal sexual assault”), as well as recently-fired Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez, herself one of the #MeToo movement’s more controversial figures.

Needless to say, such assertions might (and did) invite a certain amount of snark (France, anyone?) — but there’s also a sober, and sobering, discussion to be had about what this all means in a diverse, high-trust society. The planet is presently home to more than eight billion people, and some fraction of these are bound to behave in ways that are grating to some fraction of the other eight billion; the cultural norms surrounding a kiss-kiss greeting notwithstanding, the world is also full of close talkers, arm-touchers, people who spit a little when they get excited. Annoying? Yes. Within tolerable limits of human diversity? Ah, well, they used to be.

More from this author

Demisexuals are scared of sex

By Kat Rosenfield

But that was before we became so accustomed to the total elimination of quotidian friction from our lives that even the most fleeting moment of irritation or discomfort began to feel like a tragedy. This is not the first time I’ve observed that the notion of a voicemail as a violation arose roughly in tandem with our ability to use an app to replace an ever-growing list of interactions, but it did. The lack of an online option has become so unusual that when I discovered a local pizza place that still takes orders exclusively by phone call, it felt like an aggressive albeit implicit declaration that those under the age of 35 should get their pepperoni-and-stinger pies elsewhere.

There’s a metaphor here about sensitivity, vulnerability, and how insulating oneself in a bubble can yield the opposite of the desired result, except that the metaphor is lately made real: the US, like many other countries, is currently weathering a wave of infections from all the diseases we didn’t get for two years while we were hiding out, trying not to get Covid. (In the UK, the surge in cases of Strep A among kids has been attributed to the fact that they weren’t allowed to mix in lockdown.)

Suggested reading

When did physical approach become scary?

By Mary Gaitskill

This was entirely predictable, and yet a remarkable number of people seem to believe that the solution is not to resume normal life and regain normal immune function, but to make our socially-distanced and sanitised bubbles a permanent state of affairs. Some of America’s top pandemic pundits are begging us to bring back masks and other distancing measures, while others appeared to praise China’s draconian Zero Covid strategy, even as the country was rocked by protests. In Los Angeles, home to a particularly relentless public health apparatus, a mandate remains in place that if a person has been infected with Covid, everyone in the household must wear masks at all times, including at home. It is a new vision of normal: Safer. Healthier. Cleaner. Lonelier.

Here the fear of Covid becomes difficult to disentangle from the creeping influence of consent as a framework to govern any interaction in which another person might hug you, touch you, or breathe on you. There’s a sense that if we just create enough rules, enough boundaries — confining every visit, every conversation, every human interaction sexual and non-sexual, within a set of strict limitations — the ordinary discomforts of coexisting with other people could be eradicated.

It does, however, have the peculiar side effect of making every instance of physical touch both existentially fraught and sexually tinged. This is not just about the inexpressible, ugly weirdness of kids being instructed that it’s okay to recoil from Grandma because her hugs are non-consensual (while Grandma is in turn instructed that if her feelings are hurt, she’s guilty of the same horny entitlement that leads men to commit sex crimes). It’s about the pathologising of normal human togetherness, and the normalising of an extremely online brand of misanthropy, all with the pretence that this is the only way to be a decent human being, the only way to show you care.

More from this author

The death of intimacy

By Kat Rosenfield

One of the most remarkable responses to the Junot Diaz cheek kiss was: “It’s okay not to want any intrusions into one’s space and that should be in fact, the standard.” It’s the “standard” that gets me, which if implemented would establish those of us who enjoy physical contact as deviations if not deviants, in need of stern correction. But this idea, so strange by ordinary measures, became truly ascendant during the pandemic: that the emergency-induced state of isolation is better, actually, both scientifically and morally. That we should, indeed, recalibrate society in accordance with the preferences of the most anti-social people in it, the ones who don’t especially like or trust other human beings, the ones who don’t want people in their space. You’d think the paradox of this would be cause for reflection. Reorganising society per the preferences of the anti-social seems, at the very least, a self-contradictory endeavour — on the same level as putting a vegan in charge of the menu for your Festival of Meats. And yet, the beat goes on.

Much has been made in recent weeks of a study showing that Americans now spend an increasing amount of time alone. This was a trend exacerbated by the pandemic but not original to it. I suspect it has been taking root for at least as long as the social web has existed, or perhaps longer, dating to that first moment at which the internet turned society’s shut-ins from solo hermits into a global community — a community with an outsized voice, owing to the propensity of its members to never not be online.

The writing of our impending isolation was surely on the wall amid the unofficial introvert awareness movement of the early 2000s, which led to a Tumblr-fuelled fetishisation of solitude that turned pathological reclusiveness into a point of pride, even an identity. (Sure, sex is great, but have you ever canceled your plans and stayed home on a Saturday night wearing fluffy socks?) Granted, the meme-ified introvert persona was in many cases indistinguishable from a person with clinical depression, but dressing up social withdrawal as an adorable and extremely online personality quirk made it all but impossible to criticise. Those who found it alarming just didn’t understand; they were probably (ew) extroverts.

Suggested reading

The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

It’s that frictionlessness again: here is a social milieu where everything from intellectual debates to sexually-charged banter can be shut down at the literal click of a button. Where there’s no threat of folks touching you, breathing on you, or noticing that you’re not wearing pants. Where other people are not only not in your space but cannot be, ever.

Is this better? We certainly tried to convince ourselves as much, in those long months when staying in went from choice to necessity. In addition to fear and stress and Tiger King on Netflix, the pandemic was characterised by an almost frantic forced enthusiasm for the concept of being alone together, the operative word being alone. Browsing the art museum’s collection online was all the culture, without the crowds. Streaming services introduced “group-watch” features to replace going to the movies; rowdy trivia nights at the local pub turned into sterile (but safe!) late-night Zoom affairs. Anything you could do in the real world, you could do better in virtual space: happy hours, birthday parties, conferences. School, work, therapy. Funerals. Especially funerals, given what a veritable minefield they are of both germs (all that sniffling and sobbing) as well as all kinds of nonconsensual hugging and hand-clasping.

In trying to persuade ourselves of the superiority of a socially distant life, we gave our most anti-social tendencies not just a pass but the imprimatur of moral authority. And while the threat of Covid has receded, this new paradigm has not. As recently as two months ago, the advice given in a national newspaper to a person whose continuing reluctance to socialise indoors had left her struggling under “waves of misery and loneliness” was to recast herself in her own mind as a heroic martyr to the cause: “It might help to see your decisions as marks of solidarity with people who do have underlying conditions,” wrote the Guardian‘s columnist. “If you can see these things as badges of consideration for the people most hurt by the pandemic, it might be something you feel happier to be conspicuous for.”

I wonder if it helped this woman even a little to be told that her aching loneliness was actually a badge of honour, that the best way to show her care for other people was to hide herself away from them. I wonder what kind of person would be comforted by this. And I wonder: until when? Having successfully flipped the script so that those who yearn for human contact became the avatar for destructive selfishness, while the recluses in their hermetically-sealed bubbles are the heroes holding society together, how are we meant to come together again?

An introvert and a misanthrope are two different things, but the discourse around how we should live now leaves little distinction between the two. The question of how the lines became so blurred is one thing. The question of how to rediscover the distinction, let alone rediscover the goodness of gathering, of holding each other close, and of refusing to abandon each other to the sanctified isolation of eternal quarantine, should perhaps be answered first.

***

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here. 

For three years, the Chinese government has maintained its policy of draconian city-wide lockdowns, endless daily mass testing, and digital Covid-passes. It has set up vast camps to house those dragged into quarantine for weeks at a time, and, more recently, “closed-loop” factories.

But many have finally had enough. Over the past several days, protests have erupted in at least two dozen cities and 79 universities across the country, with spontaneous demonstrations quickly drawing crowds of hundreds, even thousands, of people willing to fearlessly demand an end to the Zero-Covid nightmare. In Wuhan, where it all began, swarming crowds smashed down containment barriers and “liberated” locked-down neighbourhoods. In Lanzhou, they overturned Covid-testing booths; in Chengdu, they chanted “give me freedom or give me death!”

This is without doubt the largest wave of protest seen in the country since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. In some cases, protestors’ frustration with Zero-Covid tyranny has translated into something more: an outpouring of raw anger against the CCP and Xi Jinping.

What has really sparked these protests, however, is the Zero-Covid regime’s lack of basic respect for humanity. On 24 November, a fire at an apartment complex in Urumqi, Xinjiang, killed as many as 44 people, including children. Social media posts alleged they could not escape because the doors and windows of their building were wired shut (you know, for safety), and because responding firetrucks were not allowed past a checkpoint into the “quarantined” zone, preventing them from reaching the building (you know, for safety). While authorities have denied this — instead blaming residents for lacking “the knowledge or capability to rescue themselves” — China’s citizens are convinced otherwise.

They can see the residents were killed by the senseless, inhuman bureaucracy of China’s Zero-Covid machine. They know that they could easily be next. It is their anger and frustration with this system’s mindless stupidity that has prompted them to finally come out en masse.

Like every Kafkaesque technocratic nightmare, the Zero-Covid machine is seemingly constructed entirely out of arbitrary rules. This is a regime that deploys armies of flying robots to pointlessly spray vast quantities of (probably toxic) disinfectant into the air over entire cities; that installs machines in libraries to painstakingly sterilise every book, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that Covid doesn’t transmit through surface infection.

More from this author

Is China about to turn on Russia?

By Nathan Levine

Most visibly, this regime is embodied by the Dabai (the “Big Whites”), the omnipresent “public health” thugs who have flawlessly succeeded in dehumanising themselves into zombie-like agents of the machine by donning their iconic (and totally pointless) full-body white hazmat suits 100% of the time, no matter what their job is or what miseries they’re inflicting on the people while just following orders.

The most surreal and tragic part of all of this, is that there is absolutely no practical or scientific reason for it. As the protests rage, China’s state media asserted again and again that they will continue with Zero-Covid because it is “scientific and effective”. But of course it is neither. Lockdowns don’t work: a fact that was clear from very early in the pandemic. Even masks don’t appear to demonstrate any really any significant effect on transmission. By contrast, the “Swedish Model” for “living with Covid” has by now been fully vindicated.

The rest of the world has pretty much come — kicking and screaming — to accept this reality and allow people to move on with their lives. Which is why when Chinese citizens were exposed to insufficiently censored footage of the packed, maskless crowds of the World Cup, they were in for a shock that may have helped push the country over the edge.

I find it rather odd, then, that Western media outlets have insisted on upholding China’s Zero-Covid narrative. The BBC, the New York Times, Axios, and the Financial Times have all praised China’s “freedom fighters”, but they also echo the Official Line: sombrely asserting that China’s leaders are “in a bind” and can’t actually open up like the people naively want. If they do the hospitals will immediately be overwhelmed, untold millions will die, and the economy will suffer massively. Zero-Covid might be a bit excessive — what with people starving in their apartments and throwing themselves off buildings — and the government should probably loosen up somewhat, especially to get commerce flowing again. But ultimately top-down control will have to be maintained for the people’s own good. It’s an understandably difficult situation for Beijing.

I will go ahead and call total bullshit on this. To do otherwise would require pretending we don’t now have three years’ worth of collective experience from around the world, during which time every “expert” model predicting mass death in the dangerous event of freedom was consistently proved wrong. With only rare exceptions, health care systems in most countries ended up being able to handle the impact of the pandemic without any kind of collapse. Every big Covid wave quickly reversed itself and diminished. Why? Because herd immunity works.

Suggested reading

Will China's anti-lockdown protestors succeed?

By Bill Hayton

Ultimately SARS-CoV-2 is a virus with a greater than 99.9% overall pre-vaccine infection survival rate for those under the age of 69, and above 99.5% even if the most elderly are included. Vaccines have long been available for all those who want them. None of the humanity-crushing germophobic paranoia and tyranny is necessary or ethically justifiable in the slightest, and never has been.

No, there is only one real reason for China’s insistence on the Zero-Covid policy, and it’s one we also have some recent experience with in the West: pure ideological psychosis, rooted in the CCP’s pathologically fearful desperation to maintain total control of everything at all times, no matter how self-destructive the results.

The control-obsessed minds of the CCP’s leadership have been broken by the uncontrollability of the pandemic. The propaganda narrative they quickly built up around Covid — the web of lies intended to inculcate a “healthy” fear of the virus and thereby enhance social cohesion and control — took on a life of its own and became self-perpetuating. Now, in a closed information environment, the Narrative is setting the policies of government instead of the other way around. Much as during other massively self-destructive episodes of CCP history (the Great Leap Forward comes to mind), they are trapped not by a difficult reality but by a collective unreality — one from which at least some Chinese people have now woken up.

The pandemic has helped to shatter the image of modern China as a bastion of effective technocratic governance: a country run by sensible engineering PhDs, and possessing the enviable authoritarian “state capacity” to build marvellous mega-projects. Gone are the days when New York Times columnists and Canadian prime ministers daydreamed about what could be accomplished if their countries were but “China for a day”. The truth is of course that even technocratic central planners can be possessed by horrifyingly blind ideological madness just like everyone else.

Suggested reading

Can China let go of Zero Covid?

By Bill Hayton

It is pretty clear why the mainstream international media won’t talk plainly about China’s Zero-Covid mistake. To do so honestly would be to strike directly at the same animating myth that drove “emergency” Covid measures in their own countries. The lockdowns, vaccine passports, QR codes, mass censorship, and brutal treatment of so-called “far-Right” or “conspiracy theorist” dissenters that we saw gleefully implemented by governments all over the world — and which were based directly on the China model — were always worse than irrational and illiberal. To point out that such measures are a continuing crime against humanity in China would be to point out that they were a crime against humanity everywhere.

That would be pretty awkward for Western governments. Besides, it seems we’re not done yet with technocratic solutions to “public health” threats: new plans for sweeping, “technology-enabled ‘always-on’ global health infrastructure”, including a global digital health pass that will determine whether or not anyone anywhere “can move around,” was just agreed to by the leaders of the G20. The last thing our governments need is for their grand plans to be derailed by the kind of pro-human independent spirit on display in China.

Fortunately for everyone (except the people), police have successfully flooded the streets of China, and the protests seem to have died down. Stability will likely be restored; revolution doesn’t seem to be in the cards. Regimes and their journalists everywhere will breathe a sigh of relief. After all, what would the future be like if everyone was inspired to stop obeying disembodied robot-megaphones demanding that we show our health pass?

***

This essay originally appeared on The Upheaval on Substack.

Few of these protests have been quite so explicit in their demands — their defining slogan is a blank piece of paper. Borrowing from the experience of dissenters in Hong Kong and Singapore, they are defiantly saying nothing at all. The act itself is the protest; the challenge to the authorities is clear: find a pretext to stop me. So far, the prize for the most obscure placard goes to the students holding up sheets of paper bearing a mathematical formula describing “the expansion of space in homogeneous and isotropic models of the universe within the context of general relativity”. It’s a Friedmann Equation, get it? “Freed man”… These are not slogans that are going to connect with the masses.

These students have endured long lockdowns with no end to Zero Covid in sight. But for weeks their ennui has lacked a focus. We’ve seen absurdist performances, including groups crawling around on all fours and tens of thousands taking cardboard dogs for walks. Now, however, something has shifted. The deaths of at least 10 Uyghur people in a fire, apparently while locked in their apartment block in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province, and violent protests by workers at the vast Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou have triggered a sense of purpose. The final straw may have been the sight of huge crowds of unmasked football supporters at the World Cup in Qatar broadcast to every television and mobile device in China, a reminder that the rest of the world has moved on from Zero Covid.

It hardly needs stating that this is a delicate moment for the Communist Party. Giving the protestors what they appear to want — a relaxation of Covid controls — will almost certainly lead to a massive wave of death across the country. The impact of many Covid variants on a poorly vaccinated population of 1.4 billion, and the medical services that sustain them, will be catastrophic.

But not giving the protestors what they want will also cause the pressure on the system to increase. Prospects for many young people in China are bleak. Official youth unemployment stands at 18%, with hundreds of thousands of Chinese parents voting with their wallets and sending their precious offspring to study abroad. As growth continues to slow at home, even those studying at elite institutions feel pessimistic.

Yet what do these young people actually want? It is not even clear that they know the answer. The fact that some protestors were singing the Internationale doesn’t make them revolutionaries. The Leftist anthem, like the blank pieces of paper, is a plausible alibi; choosing to sing the Communist Party’s official tune is merely an attempt to create a bit of political shelter. They might as well yodel: “You don’t have any reason to arrest us.”

More from this author

Can China let go of Zero Covid?

By Bill Hayton

It is unlikely that this will cut much ice with the Communist Party, however. If the Party wants to snuff out collective action, it doesn’t need to worry about legal niceties. The catch-all charge of “Picking quarrels and provoking trouble” is usually enough to quash any unauthorised activity. Arresting the few students who were shouting “down with Xi Jinping” will probably be enough to discourage the others. There is, after all, no organised protest movement — just tens of millions of pissed-off people.

Nonetheless, the Party is in a quandary. Its bureaucracy is struggling to reconcile the leadership’s contradictory instructions. Earlier this month, the Standing Committee of the Politburo ordered a new approach to controlling the virus, ostensibly allowing local authorities to have greater flexibility in imposing lockdowns. It appeared to be a “having-its-cake-and-eating-it” strategy: a “smarter” approach to Zero Covid that simultaneously kept a lid on infections while reducing control measures in lower risk localities.

The reality appears to be the reverse. The disease is spreading, more than a quarter of the total Chinese population appears to be living under some kind of lockdown and discontent is rising. At the sharp end of local administration, where the Party’s neighbourhood warden system (shequ) faces the residents they monitor and manage, confusion abounds.

Danson Cheong, China Correspondent of the Singapore-based Straits Times, yesterday described the buck-passing between the shequ in his neighbourhood, the company that manages his apartment block and the central government’s Centre for Disease Control (CDC). A positive Covid case was discovered and the shequ ordered a lockdown, but the property company refused to impose it without an order from the CDC. The CDC was backlogged with other cases and couldn’t issue the necessary paperwork, so no lockdown was imposed and the residents of the block were left free to spread the virus.

This would not have happened at the start of the pandemic, when the political pressure to impose a lockdown would have overridden any jobsworth who attempted to stand in the way. But now at least a few jobsworths feel empowered to drag their heels and avoid a conflict with the people they must face every day. A breakdown of order is becoming crystallised, but inside the bureaucracy rather than on the streets. And this will terrify the leadership.

Suggested reading

Why is America provoking China?

By Thomas Fazi

Hidden from view, this insecurity will be driving divisions within the system, between critics of both Zero Covid and Xi Jinping himself. There will be those with axes to grind and others with wider agendas. Yet Xi hasn’t risen to the top without learning how to deal with challenges along the way. He has been ruthless in dealing with apparent plots against him, while October’s Party Congress saw him place his allies in all the key positions.

Meanwhile, outside the corridors of power, the Party has mastered the dark arts of public opinion management and social control. Its officials may have decided to allow a little release of the pressure on campuses and a few city streets in order to stabilise the overall system. By Saturday, for instance, the state media had started to challenge the narratives that fed the initial dissent over the fire in Urumqi and the protests in Zhengzhou, reporting that lockdown restrictions could soon be eased. At the same time, directives are presumably being issued to party units to step up their vigilance and “seriously” implement their instructions.

Anyone who doubts the Communist Party’s determination to remain the country’s sole political force clearly hasn’t been following events in Hong Kong, Xinjiang or anywhere else in China for the past decade. Whenever there has been a choice between control and disorder, the Party has chosen control, even at the expense of reduced economic growth and popular dissatisfaction. That is why, for all the bravery of the weekend’s anti-lockdown demonstrators, they will not succeed. Yes, the Party faces another systemic problem — but it will take more than a few photogenic protests to make them change course.

The country is about to mark the third anniversary of the discovery of a strange form of pneumonia in Wuhan, but the recipe for dealing with new outbreaks remains largely unchanged. At present, the southern economic powerhouse of Guangzhou is one of several cities currently locking down millions of people to try to stop the spread of the virus, while production at crucial companies such as iPhone-maker Foxconn and electric vehicle-maker Nio has slumped, with workers either quarantined or fleeing quarantine.

Criticism about overzealous lockdowns prompted the country’s National Health Commission on Friday to criticise “one size fits all” policies and encourage local authorities to be more flexible in their interpretation of central rules. This came a day after the freshly-appointed Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China doubled down on its Zero-Covid policy. Its two instructions were for “more decisive” measures to “minimise the impact of the epidemic on economic and social development” and to “restore normal production and living order as soon as possible”. The connection of the two objectives is a sign that the top leadership recognises the growing unpopularity of Zero Covid.

These first signs of relaxation are more likely to benefit foreigners and people returning to China from trips abroad. There will be a further easing of quarantine restrictions for people entering the country. There is also an instruction to change the gradations of Covid control measures, allowing local authorities more flexibility in how they impose lockdowns. Step-by-step reopening will require different regimes in different places and restrictions on movements between them.

How likely is China to move away from Zero Covid? Despite moves to make the policy more flexible, there are two main reasons why Zero Covid won’t be abandoned, at least in the short term. Firstly, because China is woefully unprepared for the spread of the virus; and secondly, because the Communist Party loves Zero Covid.

While the headline figures on vaccination look impressive — with more than 90% of adults having received two doses — a more detailed examination shows major gaps, particularly among the elderly. Figures from May showed that only 62% of Shanghai’s over-60s had been vaccinated, and only 38% had received a booster. The problem is likely to be worse in less developed areas of the country, and is compounded by a nationalistic refusal to use imported vaccines and doubts about the efficacy of Chinese-made vaccines. Combine this with the huge size of China’s population, and any decision to allow Covid to “let rip” is going to result in millions of hospitalisations and many tens of thousands of deaths.

Suggested reading

How America can save Taiwan

By Bill Hayton

The consequence of such mass death on public opinion, after three years of huge national sacrifice in the name of Zero Covid, must terrify the Politburo. And this is far from the only domestic challenge facing the Communist Party. Youth unemployment stands at almost 19%, growth is slowing to European levels, and the giant game of “pass the government debt burden down the line” is approaching its $1.6 trillion denouement. It’s not hard to imagine a perfect storm of popular dissatisfaction in the not-too-distant future.

All of which means that Zero Covid will be a very useful policy in the coming years. When, for example, irate customers attempted to demonstrate outside the offices of a collapsed bank in Henan province, many of them found their health status on their smartphone apps suddenly turned red, preventing them from travelling. Such micro-targeting will enable the authorities to keep a lid on unrest.

More fundamentally, Zero Covid is an opportunity for the Communist Party to do what it loves doing most. As John Culver, former US National Intelligence Officer for East Asia, has noted, this is a chance for the Party to return to its old ways. The economic reforms of the Nineties that drove the country’s rapid economic growth also brought about the end of the Party’s “work unit” system, which had been the foundation of its control over the population throughout the post-revolutionary period.

During his decade as Party general-secretary, Xi Jinping has prioritised one thing above all: control. We can argue about whether Xi is a Marxist or not, but there can be no doubt that he’s a Leninist. For him, the Communist Party is the machine that keeps the country together and drives it forward. All the ills of the 2000s — the corruption, loose morals and the weakening of the sinews of state — can be blamed on the loss of Party discipline.

Suggested reading

China's broken promise of prosperity

By George Magnus

For the past decade, Xi has been revivifying Party control of society and the economy. In 2017, for instance, the Party’s charter was revised to include the line: “Party, government, army, society and education, east, west, south and north, the party leads on everything.” State-owned enterprises have been rebuilt, private firms and foreign companies have been obliged to set up Party cells.

Zero Covid, then, is a means to exert the same level of control over apartment blocks, residential compounds and private lives. Even after the tide of Covid eventually retreats, China will be left with the reinforced surveillance and the digital and physical barricades that have been constructed over the past three years. Yet if, as expected, the economy heads further south in the coming months, the Party is going to need something else to keep the people mobilised.

The most obvious contender is nationalism. So brace yourself for some intensive patriotic messaging in the coming years, whether it be over Taiwan, foreign insults, or assorted enemies within. The Party will be walking along the tricky line between nurturing the “hurt feelings of the Chinese people” and keeping a lid on popular resentment. That’s where the local Party cadres and neighbourhood wardens will earn their pay, spotting the sparks of discontent and ensuring they are swiftly snuffed out.

This seems to be the prognosis for China; a careful opening in some places but also a tightening of control wherever the leadership deems it necessary. The question worrying the Politburo is whether the online participants in Singles’ Day, awaiting their deliveries of freshly purchased consumer goods, will march in step with the Party’s mobilisation and messaging, or turn off and tune out.

At the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th Congress this week, Xi Jinping will be nominated for a precedent-defying third term of office. But his grasp on power has not gone unchallenged. Days before the Congress began, a rare protest took place on Sitong bridge in Beijing, calling for the removal of “dictator and traitor Xi Jinping”. “We want to be citizens, not slaves,” read one banner.

The second issue is Common Prosperity. Resurrected in 2021, Common Prosperity is a political slogan and a theme that Xi has described as an essential part of socialism. It is designed to capture the government’s intention to improve the quality of life for China’s middle class and its aspirant members, including owners of small-businesses, migrant workers, and farmers. Its alleged goal is to lower those income and regional inequalities that have blighted China’s economic and social progress, and which might, if unaddressed, trigger social stress and unrest.

Suggested reading

China has given up on the West

By Bill Hayton

There is no question that China has a major problem with income inequality, which is not only high now, but has remained persistently high over time. Its Gini coefficient — a measure of income inequality where 0 equates to perfect equality and 1 to total inequality — was about 0.54-0.55 in 2019, according to the China Family Panel Studies survey. This was far higher than in most developed economies. The top 20% of income earners receive about 46% of income, virtually unchanged over the last decade or so, while the bottom 40% get slightly more than 13%. Until now, Chinese citizens have been willing to accept that the CCP would continue to enhance living standards and prosperity for future generations, but if citizens begin to doubt this, the government will have to watch out.

Suggested reading

Is China about to turn on Russia?

By Nathan Levine

One of the most pressing tasks is to increase educational attainment and employment opportunities for China’s citizens, especially those who live in rural areas. Whereas in the past, China needed workers who were simply numerate, literate, and disciplined, it now needs workers who are educated to much higher levels and who can compete in an increasingly technological and digital work environment. But the trend is going the wrong way: in 2020, around 60% of Chinese workers in urban areas were employed in the informal sector where low skills and poor pay prevail, up from 40% about 20 years ago.

More from this author

China can't afford to invade Taiwan

By George Magnus

In other words, Biden claimed prophetic insight on inflation because he was advised by experts who had access to vast data sets unavailable to the public. We know how this story ended. The data turned out to be ambivalent. The experts were confused. The presidential prophecy failed by a wide margin — a year later, Biden was telling anyone willing to listen that inflation, which in June reached 9.1%, was his “top economic priority”.

We seem to live in an age of failure. Consider the trajectory of the current crop of leaders in the Western democracies. Less than two years after his election, Biden is a political corpse, with approval rates as low as 31%. Two and a half years after winning a smashing electoral victory, Britain’s Boris Johnson has resigned in disgrace. In France, Emmanuel Macron, though re-elected, now faces a hostile parliament. In Italy, unelected super-technocrat Mario Draghi has been forced to resign by his unhappy coalition partners. In Germany, a cats-and-dogs government is struggling with past policy failures in energy supply and military preparedness.

What are we to make of this? Are elected leaders today exceptionally dim or — as in the plot of a Greek tragedy — have they been raised to power only to be crushed by its impossible demands? The two possibilities aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but those wishing to learn where to set expectations of government would do well to pick up Paul Ormerod’s subversive 2004 book, Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction, and Economics. If the central thesis of the book is correct, then the practice of democracy has for decades been stuck in a sterile space between fantasy and hubris.

Ormerod is a British economist blessed with an unusual combination of gifts. He can decode the obscure mathematical models that clutter present-day economics while writing in English that is easily understood and a pleasure to read.

More from this series

The West needs to grow up

By Paul Kingsnorth

He begins his tale with a paradox. Economic theory, he informs us, has long been fixated on artificial balance (between supply and demand), structural success (the theory of the firm), and rational behaviour. Yet the economy is a chaotic transactional swirl, the chief feature of which is failure. Of the top 100 American companies between 1912 and 1995, 29 had gone bankrupt by the end date, 48 had ceased to exist as corporate entities, and 52 had survived but dropped out of the top 100 list. Only 19 companies managed to cling to the top over the entire 83-year period. If we look at all US companies with an annual turnover of more than $25,000 a year, we find that 600,000 of them, or more than 10%, go extinct every year.

We tend to lionise winners — but for companies to fail is the rule, not the exception. The same holds true for government policies. Joe Biden may be exceptionally successful at failing, but he should be considered the patron saint for a whole class of political elites who offer “solutions” and deliver failure.

Can government “solve” unemployment? Every candidate for office promises to do so. On this question, however, Ormerod delivers a devastating historical analysis of the British economy, which, uniquely, has kept good records stretching far into the past. Between 1870 and 1938, unemployment in Britain averaged 4.9%. After the Second World War, the size of the government doubled in proportion to the economy as a whole. One rationale behind this expansion was that, unlike an untamed free market, the state could deliver full unemployment. Yet the unemployment rate between 1946 and 2004 was 4.5%, only marginally lower than the earlier period. Government can spend and hire, and in this way inflate employment — but because unemployment is never structurally “solved”, it will inevitably return.

Can government “solve” economic inequality? Massive state investment in education has failed to induce the mobility required in a meritocratic society, Ormerod observes. According to the evidence, developed democracies tend to have lower rates of inequality than poor or authoritarian nations — but at the moment, for unknown reasons, inequality is climbing, and governments have no clue how to reverse the trend.

More from this series

Can depression be cured?

By Ann Manov

Can governments “solve” segregated housing? Decades of anti-discrimination legislation and regulation have had little effect. Neighbourhoods across the West that have segregated along ethnic, racial, or religious lines have, if anything, multiplied. This may have nothing to do with systemic bias or racism — Ormerod can show through game theory how a very slight preference at the individual level for living near one’s group can deliver stark segregation at the level of the system.

This divergence between individual intent and systemic outcomes helps explain the astounding persistence of failure. Human societies aren’t mechanical contraptions that can be redesigned, in whole or in part, by the social engineers of the state. They are complex systems. Government policies seek linear outcomes, treating the citizenry as a passive mass. But we are human: we are causes as well as effects. Individuals will respond to government mandates by changing their behaviour in a range of unpredictable ways. That in turn will nullify the conditions on which the policy was planned. Government intent will get swallowed by complexity and result in failure.

Human systems are often arrayed in a power law distribution: a few power users at the top of the chart followed by a steeply declining long tail of less significant players. The power law describes many social and economic relationships, but Ormerod, in a brilliant tangent that illuminates the failure of Covid-19 preventive policies, applies it to viral infections. In networks determined by the power law, he writes, “if just one single component becomes a carrier of a virus… there is a risk that this will percolate across the entire population”. He continues:

“Policies which try to contain percolation across such networks are very hard to implement. Unless each one of the very small number of highly connected individuals is targeted effectively and immunised, the virus will persist. Immunisation at random of even a large proportion of the population will simply not succeed, unless purely by chance not just some but all of the highly connected are caught.”

Ormerod published these words in 2004. We can only wonder how much isolation and disruption would have been avoided over the last two years if the health authorities of the world, in their expert wisdom, had heeded them instead of chasing the shadow of Zero Covid.

“We do not want to adopt an almost nihilistic view that nothing can be done,” Ormerod warns — and of course he’s right. We can’t predict, but we can react swiftly to overcome our difficulties. Biden and his experts failed to see what was coming with inflation, but the Federal Reserve has slammed the brakes on the US economy and this will hopefully reduce inflationary pressures. We are not helpless cogs in a machine. The very quality that makes our actions so inscrutable in the aggregate — our agency — endows us with the motive power to tackle and fix our troubles.

Suggested article

Covid was liberalism's endgame

By Matthew B Crawford

One need not be a nihilist, either, to accept that, in the world according to Ormerod, the limits of human knowledge press much tighter to the skin than presidents and prime ministers have been willing to admit. The explanation for the collapse of trust in democratic institutions is a simple one: politicians promise what they can’t possibly deliver, and, in the digital age, their ignorance is constantly exposed. Biden, Johnson, and company are only the latest in a long line of elected leaders who claimed to bring the fire down from the heavens and “solve” the human condition. They mostly failed. The public, having bought into the Promethean rhetoric, can only interpret failure as the consequence of corruption rather than incompetence.

There’s a great deal of vanity involved in all of this. Our political elites, encouraged by a priestly caste of experts, love to pose as miracle-workers. To them, and to us who elect them to office, I would every day recite Ormerod’s final dictum: “We may intend to achieve a particular outcome, but the complexity of the world, even in apparently simple situations, appears to be so great that it is not within our power to ordain the future.” Only when this lesson is internalised will we begin to emerge from the age of failure.

The live fire military drills around Taiwan that China launched in response to Pelosi’s visit — which included the firing of ballistic missiles over the island — were scheduled to end on Sunday. But on Monday morning, this dress-rehearsal of coordinated manoeuvres for a potential future invasion had shown no sign of stopping. China also announced on Friday that it was cancelling high-level military consultative talks with the United States, and suspending cooperation talks on illegal immigrants, narcotics and climate change, among other things.

We can probably expect military matters to cool off in the coming weeks, ahead of the 20th Congress of the CCP in autumn. But for the moment we can be sure of only two things. First, China is bound to take further opportunities to put pressure on Taiwan using both commercial sanctions and military or diplomatic tactics. Second, for the time being, China is likely to avoid anything that might push its own faltering economy into a tailspin.

Any serious escalation of the tension could have grave implications for Beijing. Not only would it limit or cut off China’s access to semiconductors and Western technology, but it could see Chinese firms subject to further sanctions. It could also compromise trade with China’s biggest markets, namely the United States, the EU and developed Asia. China is dependent on the rest of the world for more than 80% of its semiconductor demand, three-fifths of which comes from the US, Japan and the EU. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company produces almost all of the most advanced varieties.

More from this author

Could we win a war in China?

By Aris Roussinos

The Chinese economy, meanwhile, is in bad shape. The target for economic growth this year cannot be met, and the property market, which accounts for over a quarter of GDP, is in disarray. Youth unemployment has shot up to 20%, and the labour market is far weaker than official statistics portray. Zero Covid policies, rigorously pursued both for public health and social control purposes, are stifling demand and turning foreign firms away from future investment in China. The nation’s development model is failing, but the government has no plausible strategies to re-energise it — or at least, none that is politically acceptable.

Beyond its borders, China faces the most extreme challenges since Mao, partly due to the imposition of commercial controls, restrictions and sanctions by foreign governments, and partly because of its own policies of disengagement and self-reliance. Its “no limit” friendship with Russia has only made things worse, and its behaviour towards Taiwan could also go awry. China may end up alienating not just the usual suspects — Japan, India and Australia — but also nations that prefer to stay above the fray, such as South Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam. They could be drawn further into security alliances championed by the United States — which is exactly what China’s Global Security Initiative is meant to stop.

Given these circumstances, there’s little chance China will stage any form of assault on — or wage all-out war with — Taiwan anytime soon. But that’s not to say it will end the so-called “grey-zone” warfare that began before Pelosi’s visit. China could pressure or occupy any of the 100 islands that belong to Taiwan, especially the populated ones in the Taiwan Strait such as Matsu, Kinmen and Penghu, the first two of which are just 10km off the Chinese coast. It could from time to time warn off air and sea traffic in the form of a quarantine, trying to regulate the inflows and outflows of people and goods. In extremis, it might even try to blockade Taiwan, restricting its access to imported energy (which meets about four-fifths of the island’s demand for energy), LNG (which provides most of Taiwan’s electricity), or even certain foodstuffs and raw materials.

Suggested reading

How Chinese is Taiwan?

By Bill Hayton

The aim would be to force the Taiwanese government to in some way cede autonomy to the CCP. The likelihood of this happening is about nil — and Beijing knows it. Local Taiwanese elections later this year, and national ones in 2024, may further strengthen the country’s backbone and remind Xi Jinping that bullying and coercion are leading China down a blind alley.

At every point, then, China runs the risk of incurring greater economic and political pushback by putting further pressure on Taiwan. As it is, global firms are starting to reconsider their supply chain structures and investments in China, and a deepening Taiwan crisis would create major strategy headaches for foreign firms. No company wants to be caught in the crosshairs of conflicts, sanctions, higher insurance costs and conflicted legal positions. Decoupling, and the rebuilding of global supply chains, are both likely to increase as a result.

For the same reason, China’s desire to de-Americanise its own supply chains, sanction-proof itself, and re-orientate markets towards domestic firms, will likely increase. But following this path would probably take China further away from its quest for higher productivity and undermine the nation’s lofty economic aspirations. Engagement with the global economy was the essential handmaiden of China’s economic eruption; disengagement is likely to reverse that process.

Besides, if China decided to introduce something as severe as a blockade, in an attempt to sap Taiwan’s political will and stifle its economy, it would almost certainly trigger not only sanctions but also resistance. Under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, the United States would consider boycotts and embargoes a threat to both global and domestic peace and security. This doesn’t guarantee American intervention to break the blockade, or tit-for-tat measures, but there is a strong chance that Washington would react — and that other Asian nations would fear for their security.

Suggested reading

Zero Covid has radicalised Shanghai

By Austin Williams

Short of outright invasion, therefore, it does not seem that China could really mount any campaign that would force Taiwan to capitulate. With every move to escalate tension, moreover, Beijing would confront political, commercial and perhaps even low-level military pushback — and significant economic consequences.

But what if circumstances changed? What if Xi went all in, and ordered an assault on the island? Even then, his chances of a successful occupation are slim. Whether China has the military capacity and logistics, now or in the future, is almost beside the point. The issue is whether it has the political will. As we know from Russia, the best laid plans can go awry, and in Taiwan an invading army would meet with spirited local resistance from 23 million people. Suppressing them would make China a pariah state for years, if not decades. The Chinese Dream would become a nightmare.

The CCP has placed huge importance on “reunifying” the renegade province of Taiwan with the mainland, but it would exhaust its political capital by mounting an invasion — successful or not. No one can dismiss the possibility that it might one day happen — especially if domestic pressures caused CCP rule to fray. But the party may well take a leaf out of the Western playbook by kicking this can down a long road, risking unknowable consequences at home.

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.

This new inflection in the Zero Covid narrative, which claimed that Omicron reveals the “limits” of China’s approach, merely served to reinforce the idea that China had successfully contained Covid had up that point. In an article on the limits of Zero Covid in the Omicron era, the BBC credulously noted, “If you adjust for population size, there’s been around three deaths per million people in mainland China, compared with about 3,000 in the US and 2,400 in the UK.”

Even entertaining China’s absurd Zero Covid claims requires suspending basic human logic. Consider the case of Singapore, a country much richer and more advanced than China that was able to drive compliance at least as well. (Though considering the entire country is an urban island, in distinction to China’s vast rural expanses, probably much better.)

According to analyst George Calhoun, official Chinese data put China’s mortality rate 50 times lower than Singapore’s. South Korea — which has a single, permanently closed border which effectively makes it an island — is another standout for Covid success. Yet by Chinese official reporting, South Korea’s Covid mortality would be 73 times higher Covid-19 than China’s.

More from this author

Did the New York Times stifle lab leak debate?

By Ashley Rindsberg

Late last year, The Economist published a machine learning study on global Covid-19 under-reporting rates, comparing reported Covid deaths to estimated excess deaths. The study found that it looked like the US under-reported Covid mortality by around 20%, though a number of Western European countries at times over-reported by around 2-3%. The highest rates of under-reported mortality top out at around 1,000% for countries including India, Afghanistan, Venezuela and a handful of others. That is, except for China, which the study estimates to have under-reported mortality by an eye-watering 19,000%.

Looking at China’s official death counts tells an equally surreal story. Like a fairytale princess, China’s total death count was frozen for well over a year from January 25, 2021 until March 21, 2022 at the magical number of 4,636. Prior to that, from April 20, 2020 to January 25, there were four deaths. Taking these numbers at face value, this would make the death rate of the United States, where superior vaccines were distributed with high compliance rates, 800 times higher than China’s.

In the US, we have an old saying about gullibility which goes that if you’re willing to believe some outlandish statement then we have a bridge to sell you (that being the Brooklyn Bridge). If we were to abstract this reality and describe this situation generically to a group of listeners, be they savvy statisticians or plain-thinking journalists, the chances that they would believe these numbers to be real would be next to zero.

And yet, not only have we all believed China’s claims about its Covid “success”, specifically Zero Covid, we’ve built an entire political theory around it. This theory states that while China’s authoritarian system of government certainly has its downsides (human rights and civil liberties and all that), the big upside is that it’s effective. With the pandemic, this reasoning goes, China was naturally somewhat draconian, but ultimately successful. Authoritarianism saves lives, you see.

“China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic,” a WHO report on China’s handling of the pandemic observed. Interestingly, one of the members of the WHO mission that produced the report, epidemiologist Tim Eckmanns, told Science magazine, “I thought there was no way those numbers could be real.” And yet, despite his own disbelief, he believed them to be real.

Suggested reading

What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

By Matt Ridley and Alina Chan

In a 2020 column titled “China Got Better. We Got Sicker. Thanks, Trump.” Thomas Friedman touted the wild success of the CCP. “[W]ho can blame the Chinese for gloating? A pandemic that began in Wuhan, and, for now, has been contained in China.” Friedman even allowed for a little number-fudging, writing, “Maybe China’s fibbing. OK — so quadruple its numbers — China still has been vastly better at protecting its people than the United States.”

Friedman never pondered the possibility that he might need to not quadruple China’s numbers but multiply them by 180 or 800 times. The patently ridiculous baseline mortality numbers set by China and validated endlessly by the Western media allowed commentators like Friedman to factor in CCP lying by a factor of four and still be off by an order of magnitude. (Who can blame China for gloating, indeed.)

What’s curious about the narrative that emerged in Western media is that it’s almost exactly the same one that Beijing was (and still is) advancing. While Western observers might think that the CCP’s wanting to “round the edges” of reporting on data would want to do the same regarding the rougher edges of its political approach, that’s incorrect. The CCP’s own messaging used the term “draconian” to describe the measures taken in response to Covid. For us “draconian measures” is harsh criticism; for the CCP it’s self-affirmation.

As egregious as it is, Zero Covid is only one facet of China’s propaganda campaign. Another equally important piece of this puzzle, one that ties Zero Covid to the question of the pandemic’s origin, is the date of the first outbreak. While most of the media has let the question settle comfortably on China’s official story, the reality is much more questionable.

According to China (and some Western experts), the first recorded cases were diagnosed sometime in mid-December 2019, which connects the outbreak of the pandemic to people who visited the now infamous seafood market. But evidence has emerged suggesting that the first outbreak might have emerged as early as November that year that would make the seafood market origin much more difficult (if not impossible) to support.

Suggested reading

Covid was liberalism's endgame

By Matthew Crawford

The same arsenal of tactics has been deployed, such as disqualifying early cases in China because they didn’t meet an almost impossible criteria — for example, being admitted to hospital and testing positive with a PCR test, which required being admitted to one of the very few hospitals that administered PCR tests in those early days. A key article in Caixin tracking these disqualified early cases was swiftly taken offline with a redirect put in place to the Office of Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission. It cites a statute that calls on Chinese citizens to “fulfil social responsibilities, adhere to correct public opinion orientation and value orientation, promote socialist core values, and publish high-quality information content that is upward and good,” as DRASTIC researcher Gilles Demaneuf documented.

In a way, the CCP can be forgiven its epistemic sins. It was, after all, just doing its job: consolidating power, weaving false narratives, tamping down dissent. What’s more concerning — what is in fact, a four-alarm fire raging deep in an institutional sub-basement — is that the CCP campaign could never have succeeded without Western complicity, and most of all, with the complicity of the American media, broadly construed.

If it weren’t for the fact that China’s false mortality data was presented in Google search results; or that Twitter-verified members of China’s State-Sponsored Media could post without being flagged; or, most glaringly and egregiously, that the legacy press actively spread the mistruths and openly celebrated them, the narrative could never have been built. And even if it had been, it would never have mattered.

“The world is turning its eyes to China, and China is ready,” Xi Jinping said in advance of the great authoritarian spectacle, the Beijing Olympics, which took place when Zero Covid was still the official party line. Xi was right that China was ready, but though the West had turned its eyes to China, it failed to scrutinise it whatsoever.

The seemingly irrational, self-defeating Zero Covid strategies in recent months have destabilised economic growth, at huge and cruel expense to the Chinese people. Shanghai’s economy has lost around £135 billion due to the latest lockdown, with huge numbers of job losses and business failures. Yet perhaps more importantly, Zero Covid has managed to germinate the seeds of dissent that the Chinese Communist Party has spent decades carefully suppressing.

President Xi Jinping is keen to avoid any association with the grim realities of the Mao era, particularly as he tries to consolidate his position as the Great Helmsman of China for a historic third term. Yet we can’t ignore the obvious parallels between Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and the current Zero Covid era.

It is 60 years since the end of the grotesque Great Leap Forward experiment (1958-1962), when Mao attempted to rapidly industrialise China’s economy at huge human cost. Every village set up mini furnaces to reach absurd steel manufacturing targets under the pretext of rivalling the West. Furniture was chopped up to feed the fires and cooking utensils smelted into worthless ingots. Meanwhile, forced land collectivisation — involving the seizure of private farms, the torture and execution of landowners, and nonsensical agricultural techniques — led to catastrophic grain shortages and widespread famine.

Ordinary people were dragooned into this mass lunacy that produced nothing but suffering. Over those terrible four years, up to 45 million Chinese people died of starvation, or were simply beaten and worked to death. It is a sordid period in Chinese history, seldom talked about openly still. Partly as a result of such wanton destruction of its own population, China became a pariah state across the world.

This national tragedy afflicted all corners of the country and, to greater or lesser extent, affected every single Chinese family. Chinese people have learned to live with the shame, horror and sometimes the guilt of what went before. “(Ni) chi le ma?” is an everyday greeting, meaning “have you eaten yet?”, with resonances of the terrible consequences of famine. The common phrase “mei banfa” means “there is no other choice” — a fateful resignation to hardship and an ultimate expression of futility among a citizenry with no meaningful democratic accountability.

More from this author

President Xi is exploiting #MeToo

By Austin Williams

But the state too has been shaped by historical experience. President Xi’s father Xi Zhongxun was purged in 1962 and demoted to a lowly position at Mao’s command. Xi himself was publicly denounced at the age of nine and sent to live in a cave in a remote region of Shaanxi Province, where he worked the land for many years. Of course, that’s not to excuse Xi’s authoritarian tendencies as the product of a dysfunctional parent or being mistreated as a child, but his instinct is to avoid inflaming memories of the bad old days. It’s odd then that, much like Mao, Xi appears to be sabotaging the Chinese economy in pursuit of ideological Zero Covid goals.

The Mao-era “Four Pests” campaign during the Great Leap Forward was targeted at the extermination of mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows. For a country striving to increase its agricultural productivity, these pests were blighting crops, eating the seeds, and destroying the stores. Peasants were compelled to stand in their villages banging pots and pans, blowing whistles, or shaking rattles in order to make so much noise that the sparrows could not rest. The birds had to stay on the wing until they died of exhaustion and fell to the ground. Over the course of the campaign, one billion sparrows were killed.

With hindsight ­— or perhaps a bit more forethought — the Chinese authorities might have realised that destroying the sparrows would leave fewer birds to eat other pests. The destruction of one immediate nuisance — the sparrow population — simply gave insects the opportunity to thrive. With nothing to keep the insect population in check, the number of locusts increased massively, and crop yields collapsed. Famine ensued. This farce was not a conscious act of self-destruction, but merely a set of idiotic targets set by apparatchiks ignorant of, or unconcerned by, the knock-on effects of their instructions.

Suggested reading

Inside China's fiction factories

By Megan Walsh

Today, China has been equally ruthless in its attempt to eradicate Covid. It is chasing an impossible dream of Zero Covid but cannot back down for fear of shattering public faith in the Party’s infallibility. However, politicians are oblivious to the unintended consequences of their actions. An assault on civil liberties has been the Party’s only consistent tactic for two years, confining what they believe to be a compliant population to barracks — literally in some cases. The noise of stranded families standing at their windows, banging pots and pans to express their anger and disquiet was an ironic flashback to a failed zero-sparrow policy of 60 years ago. As before, pests are not tolerated.

Locking innocent people up certainly looks like Chairman Mao-style totalitarianism. In Shanghai, with a population of 25 million, the authorities confined almost every single person in their apartment for three months. The state’s mouthpiece, China Daily, excused the draconian lockdown measures by pointing out that “China could face 1.55 million COVID-19 deaths if it abandons the current dynamic zero-COVID policy”. As far as the Party is concerned, the revival of the memory of millions of deaths during the Great Leap Forward could not be countenanced today. As a result, China’s Covid response has been driven by an absolute insistence that rising fatality statistics must be avoided at all costs.

Official statistics should be taken with a pinch of salt, but at the moment the authorities claim that there have been fewer than 5,000 deaths in China since January 2020. (India, with a comparable population has recorded 100 times as many, for instance.) Yet how many tragedies lie behind those locked doors of residential compounds? Like starlings, people in high-rise buildings haven’t been allowed to touch the ground for months and many have surely collapsed with exhaustion.

Suggested reading

Will China rebuild Ukraine?

By Rana Mitter

Watching thousands of residents of Beijing or Shanghai immediately leave the city after being released from lockdown says a lot about their fear that the government can shut down their lives again. Maybe, just maybe, the Party doesn’t work in their interests. Middle-class residents have been shocked by the destruction of livelihoods in some of the most modern cities of the world. A mood of unease has flowered, posing a rare challenge to the Party’s authority. For a country that relies on harmonious social stability, this is a growing problem for the president.

Admittedly, at present, things are positive as lockdowns wind down and people flock to the streets to drink and chat, but also to complain, to criticise and to conspire. The repopulation of the streets shows that life is being restored in Chinese cities as the people start to rebuild, but the sense of resentment and anger is not something that can be dispelled easily. Already we have seen student protests at a number of Beijing universities. Will Xi avoid the temptation to clamp down on dissenting voices, critical opinions, and seething anger in the hope that the population go back to their everyday lives and try to forget what has just happened?

Xi will do whatever it takes to maintain his authority. But rather than emulate Mao’s crackdown on dissent during the Great Leap Forward, it is likely he’ll simply ramp up the state machine of high-tech surveillance. It won’t look as brutal as the vicious state control of the past although it is destined to be even more insidious. Whether people accept it, after what they have been through, is an open question.

That was Wodehouse in 1941, from one of his Berlin broadcasts. But pretty much the same has applied 80 years later in Hong Kong, just with fewer Germans. If your goal has ever been to get locked in a room for weeks on end, then Hong Kong has become the place to be. The authorities would lock you up if you had Covid. They’d lock you up if you’d been close to someone who had Covid. At one point, they’d even lock you up if you’d been close to someone who’d been close to someone who had Covid.

You also got locked up just for getting into the country. You paid for the flight and the Hong Kong authorities would do the rest. Actually, that last bit wasn’t quite true: you had to book and pay for your room as well. But you get the point.

Brutal as it was — caring little for minor things like family separation or childcare — this system worked relatively well by its own standards until earlier this year. For extended periods there were no Covid cases at all and overall deaths remained low. But then Omicron broke through, as almost everyone knew it would: ironically, as the result of a cross-infection in a quarantine hotel, something the government had been warned about repeatedly.

There soon became too many cases to make asymptomatic people spend weeks in hospital and there were not enough isolation units to lock up close contacts. By the start of March, the death rate went through the roof, becoming the highest in the world at any point in the pandemic. They couldn’t process the dead quickly enough, with bodies stacked next to the living, in overrun, under-staffed, public hospitals. Hong Kong ran out of coffins as well as smugness. It became the premier place to be if you wanted to die from Covid.

The tragedy was how avoidable all this was. Having broadly succeeded in the initial stages of the pandemic, cutting down local case numbers down zero for months, Hong Kong had an opportunity — almost unique in the world — to transition, with as few deaths as possible, to a sustainable mitigation strategy.

More from this author

Hong Kong's Zero Covid deception

By Philip Cowley

Its failure not to take that opportunity has now been widely noted — as has its recent announcement that it would begin to relax some of its stricter restrictions. From outside, this has been presented as a pragmatic shift away from its policy of “dynamic zero Covid” to something akin to co-existence. The idea of “living with Covid” was previously verboten here, a sign of Western decadence and a failure to care about the value of human life, so any such shift would be profound.

Yet from within Hong Kong the shift seems less significant and reaction to the policy changes here have been more muted than some of the overseas coverage might suggest.

This is partly because the details are less dramatic than the headlines. Schools were told they could go back to face-to-face teaching, only for the government to then announce that they need to have achieved a 90% vaccination rate among staff and students before they could return to full days, something many will find next to impossible to achieve in what remains of the school year. Some of the more extreme rules remain: mask wearing is compulsory outside, even if exercising, even in remote country parks. There are still stories of the police lurking behind bushes to catch out knackered joggers who have pulled down their masks to catch their breath.

While the outright country flight bans that previously existed are to be dropped from April, and quarantine has been reduced to seven days (until recently it was 21), it’s still seven days more than most of the world insists on and it is also open only to vaccinated residents — no visitors at all. At any point, if an airline is found to have brought too many positive cases into Hong Kong, they are banned from that route for seven days. Travellers then have to rearrange everything, including the quarantine hotel, which is often simply not possible given the demand, and means not getting into Hong Kong for months. All of this remains a serious problem for Asia’s self-proclaimed “world city”.

But my suspicion is that the real reason people here are less impressed goes beyond the details of the changes; it is now a broader issue about lack of faith in the government, and the absence of any strategy.

For some, this is inextricably linked to the protests in 2019 and the government’s heavy-handed response — something for which a fair few people have been locked up, and for longer than three weeks. A significant proportion of Hongkongers wouldn’t trust the government whatever they did. But even if you are one of those who thinks that the Hong Kong government was right in its approach, it is difficult to say that it has recently demonstrated competence. It is not just the failures to prepare properly for the current outbreak — although that alone should have been enough to have ended multiple political careers. There have also been constant U-turns on policy.

Suggested reading

New Zealand's lockdown fairytale is over

By Tom Chodor

Perhaps the worst recently was the announcement that all the school term dates were to change, bringing forward the summer holiday to Easter — I am not making this up — to allow school buildings to be used for a city-wide testing programme. Then it was floated that this might also simultaneously involve a lockdown, which triggered panic-shopping; only for the government to then decide that maybe they didn’t want to do any of it after all.

Given the U-turns so far it would be a brave person who would bet against another massive reversal of policy months down the line. What happens when case numbers start to rise again? Or there are the inevitable outbreaks in schools?

One common response to this is to say something like: “Of course, they can’t say they are going to live with the virus. That would involve too much loss of face. But that’s obviously what they are doing”.

But there are two problems with this argument. The first is that there is plenty of evidence that this is not what they are doing: at the same time as there is talk of reopening the schools and the borders, the government has also been building multiple new isolation centres. Mass testing may have been put on hold, but compulsory testing of people who have been in places with Covid cases has restarted. As case numbers have fallen to more manageable levels, so people have begun to get put back into isolation. None of this looks like living with the virus.

Second, even if this were true, it is never a good sign for any government to say it is doing one thing while doing another. Even if the people at the top of government think they are following a plan, it makes it less likely for there to be a proper alignment of strategy and implementation. Chief Executive Carrie Lam has said that Hong Kong’s struggle with Covid is akin to a war, so it’s worth considering what Clausewitz said about military strategy. It was “to identify the decisive point and to concentrate everything on it, removing forces from secondary fronts and ignoring lesser objectives”. We shouldn’t necessarily have expected the Hong Kong authorities to have read Clausewitz — but at times they act as if they have read him only so they can work out how to do the exact opposite. There is no identification of the decisive point, no concentration of resources, and there’s always a host of lesser objectives.

Suggested reading

China's Communist Party owes it all to colonialism

By Bill Hayton

In the same way that the massive focus on locking people up and keeping out those from overseas distracted what should have been the main priority of vaccinating people in care homes, only last week Lam argued that Hong Kong needed both to reopen the mainland border and to open up to international travel. Yet these are in direct tension. As long as the policy on the mainland is for Zero Covid, the mainland border won’t open up while there are outbreaks in Hong Kong — but if you allow international travel without quarantine, you will get outbreaks. “To govern,” as Pierre Mendès-France put it, “is to choose.”  Hong Kong’s administration cannot choose, and thus it cannot govern.

One of the curiosities about Hong Kong — at least to a polling junkie like me — is the almost complete lack of decent opinion polling here. When asking awkward questions can get you threatened with the National Security Law, it is difficult to ask tricky questions or expect honest answers, and to know what people really think.

But for many the tipping point has been reached and people are voting with their feet. A full 1% of the population left last month. Some may be coming back, but lots are not. And sure, in time, when all this is a distant memory, others will come in to replace them, but the immediate consequences are significant. Talent drains, organisations relocate, businesses fold. The infrastructure won’t return, the diversity is lost. It is said that the recent promised policy shifts came in response to pleas from the city’s great and good, worried that irreversible damage was being done to Hong Kong’s status as a financial centre. These pleas were too quiet, and, for many, too late.

But as the pandemic inches towards its two-year anniversary, any warm feelings are but a distant memory. Today might be Australia Day, but the mood isn’t one of celebration. Australia is having a bad summer, and Australians are angry with their governments, especially the federal government led by Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

A few months ago, the Morrison government looked as though it would cruise back to power in the upcoming federal election, which must be held by May this year. This month, however, the Opposition Labor Party’s primary vote climbed past the Coalition’s for the first time ever. Morrison may still be leading Opposition leader Anthony Albanese as preferred Prime Minister by 7%, but he had a 23% lead in August. The trend is clear.

The immediate cause for the government’s political woes is the acute shortage of rapid antigen tests (RATs) across Australia. Although the federal and most state governments were right to shift to a ‘living with Covid’ approach late last year, they failed to anticipate the entirely predictable surge in demand for testing as society opened up and the highly transmissible Omicron variant took hold.

To manage mounting pressure on testing and supply chains, the National Cabinet, with the notable exception of Western Australia, agreed to redefine ‘close contact’ more narrowly, reduce the required period of isolation for positive cases, and permit the use of RATs instead of only relying on PCR tests. However, having failed to stock up on RATs, test kits rapidly ran out and could not be found for love or money. Actually, that’s not quite right. The small number of RATs that could be found cost a lot of money — in one case $500 for two tests.

What followed was immense public confusion and consternation, as well as crippling staff absences, since negative test results are necessary for ending mandatory isolation and international arrivals. The federal government responded by washing its hands of the problem, only providing free kits to six million low-income earners, and blaming state and territory governments since testing is their purview. In return, the states blame the federal government for failing to ensure a reliable supply of RATs to the country.

Yet behind these problems lies a more profound political failure: the Government’s inability to explain Australia’s almost overnight decision to drop its ‘Zero Covid’ approach. For almost two years, Australians were told that they should avoid Covid at all costs; today, they are accommodating very high daily case numbers with minimal restrictions.

More from this author

The cruelty of Australia's endless lockdown

By Shahar Hameri

Given Australia’s very high rates of vaccination and Omicron’s milder symptoms, this is arguably the right approach. Nonetheless, Australian leaders and public health officials, with few notable exceptions such as Queensland’s Chief Health Officer John Gerrard, have failed to make a sustained case for the new strategy publicly. And that has left many Australians concerned and confused, wondering if the Government is just winging it.

So rattled is the Prime Minister by his rapidly declining popularity that he attempted to distract from these problems by using the oldest trick in the Australian political playbook — looking tough on borders. Yet even the detention and subsequent deportation of Novak Djokovic has failed to revive his political fortunes, instead turning into a prolonged farce that made the federal government look even more useless.

So far, Australia’s anger has mainly been directed at Prime Minister Scott Morrison. And most of it is justified: Morrison’s incompetence, preference for soundbites over substance, and propensity to shirk responsibility have meant that Australia suffered from a leadership vacuum in the middle of one of the worst crises in its history.

But the dysfunction runs much deeper. Indeed, the problems exposed during Australia’s summer of discontent are symptomatic of the country’s entire pandemic response — but they can no longer be papered over by lockdowns. At the root of the problem are changes to the Australian state that began decades ago and whose negative impacts have finally come home to roost. Having set out to create a state that is less responsive to popular demands, Australia’s political elites have ended up creating a state that is incapable of addressing serious crises.

Suggested reading

Will Australia survive Covid?

By Freddie Sayers

Australia went through a deep political and economic crisis in the Seventies, which, at the time, political elites attributed to unrealistic popular expectations from an overburdened state. In response, from the Eighties, both centre-Left and Right-wing governments sought to dismantle the Keynesian compromise that underpinned a relatively equitable distribution of income. Although justified in terms of efficiency, rationalisation and competitiveness, the main purpose of Australia’s neoliberal transition over subsequent decades has been to reduce the state’s responsiveness to society.

Policymaking and implementation processes increasingly transformed the Weberian ‘command-and-control’ structures of the post-World War II state into a diffuse array of quasi-independent agencies, both public and private, loosely coordinated by the central government. State capacity was hollowed out, while fragmentation impeded central agencies’ capacity for direct action, and blurred lines of control and accountability. This was a design feature, not a bug of the emerging Australian regulatory state. Having shed direct control, political leaders could claim plausible deniability over policy decisions and their outcomes in many areas.

Federalism has only made these problems worse, routinely hampering Australia’s response to the pandemic and generating an endless blame game between the federal and state governments. Just like the federal government, state and territory governments’ capacity has also been hollowed out. They have also struggled with federally imposed budget austerity, weakening their capacity to deliver important public functions, such as health.

All of which made it impossible to coordinate a national response to the pandemic. States and territories have often acted as independent countries, paying little attention to the federal government and to each other. They have exercised unilateral discretion over state borders and even over the international border via their hotel quarantine systems. Even now, Western Australia alone remains committed to a Covid elimination strategy and is yet to reopen its borders to other states.

More from this author

What's the point of Australia?

By Shahar Hameri

In this context, Morrison’s incompetence is far from unusual — it is inherent to the kind of state Australia has. But even a leader keen to take control during the crisis would have struggled to get things done because of the very significant constraints on top-down direction in the Australian state.

And so Australia’s reckoning with its real pandemic record must extend beyond dissatisfaction with the performance of its current political leaders. Unless state structures change to become more responsive to elected leaders, and through them to the wider public, the same pathologies will continue to reappear. Australia has paid a high price for its dysfunctional state during this crisis, but it could be much higher in the next.

The mood is a far cry from the breathless commentary during the first 18 months of the pandemic, when New Zealand was held up as an extraordinary case of pandemic management, contrasted with the disasters in Europe, the UK and US. Indeed, the country’s tough border closures, skilful contact tracing, tough lockdown restrictions, commitment to Zero Covid and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s empathic and inclusive leadership were lauded as a model for the rest of the world.

And yet, contrary to ill-informed hot takes half a world away, New Zealand’s approach had its merits. Following an initial lockdown last year, the country recorded only 1,500 cases and 22 deaths from Covid-19, and succeeded in eliminating the virus in the community. Importantly, this was achieved without significant restrictions on individual liberties or substantial cost to the economy. While the rest of the world has spent the past two years in crisis, New Zealanders have lived remarkably normal lives. Undoubtedly, there was some luck involved, given New Zealand’s isolation from the rest of the world. But, as its neighbour Australia illustrated, isolation is no guarantee of success.

However, this New Zealand model came with two important caveats. First, the cost of normality enjoyed by citizens at home was paid for by its citizens abroad. The country’s harsh border regime, which allocated a limited number of places in a 14-day hotel quarantine system, meant that thousands were stranded abroad, unable to return home, often left facing destitution. Likewise, while the economy thrived, the cost was borne by the tourism industry — 18% of the economy — whose reliance on international visitors left it on the verge of collapse.

More from this author

Inside Melbourne's eternal lockdown

By Tom Chodor

Secondly, the New Zealand model could never be sustained long-term, once it became clear that global elimination of the virus was unlikely. As such, there was a need for an exit strategy, which seemed to centre on vaccinating the whole population before the virus got in. This was always a gamble and a race against time; one which Ardern lost this August, when a cautious re-opening of the border to Australia led to the arrival of the Delta variant, and sparked a new outbreak.

Despite the fact no country had managed to eliminate Delta, the Government reverted to its tried and tested approach, closing the limited openings at the border, announcing a snap lockdown, and re-committing to eliminating the virus. But this time, it didn’t work.

While the outbreak was contained to Auckland, the key pillars of New Zealand’s model — contact tracing and tough lockdown restrictions severely curtailing people’s movements — proved no match for the infectiousness of the Delta strain. Case numbers refused to budge, totalling more than 8,400 for the current outbreak, while deaths have nearly doubled to 43. Admitting defeat, the Government formally abandoned elimination as a strategy in October. Nevertheless, Auckland’s “snap lockdown” — meant to last for two weeks — has now dragged on for over 100 days, with predictable consequences for children’s schooling, mental health and the economy.

While the situation still compares very favourably to many parts of the world, New Zealand’s sheen has started to come off. Contrary to its claims of exceptionalism, throughout the current Delta outbreak, it has shown itself to be a normal country just like every other: faced with the same dilemmas, failures, trade-offs and divisions when it comes to dealing with the pandemic. What’s more, it hasn’t necessarily dealt with them any better.

Take vaccination. One consequence of the New Zealand model was complacency when it came to the roll-out, with many convinced that the country could take its time while the pandemic raged elsewhere. As a result, less than 20% of the population was fully vaccinated when Delta arrived in August, leaving it unprepared for the outbreak. In response, the government tied the lifting of lockdowns to the vaccination rate, setting a very high target of 90% before restrictions would be eased.

More from this author

New Zealand's Zero Covid delusion

By Tom Chodor

Still, while this was eventually abandoned, 86% of New Zealanders are now double-jabbed, making it one of the most vaccinated countries in the world. As we also saw in Australia, nothing concentrates the mind when it comes to vaccinations like a prolonged lockdown.

This is not to say that the issue hasn’t been divisive. Behind the high overall rates, there remain significant pockets of unvaccinated people in New Zealand, especially in the regions, and among the indigenous Maori population. Higher rates of poverty and disadvantage, and low levels of trust in the Government mean that only 68% of Maori are fully vaccinated, despite repeated efforts to roll out culturally specific and targeted programmes.

Meanwhile, the high rates of poor health outcomes have left the Maori more vulnerable to the virus, leading to demands that any re-opening be delayed until vaccination rates exceed the rest of the country. The Maori Party has been warning of a “modern genocide” if lockdowns are lifted while the virus remains in the community, with some local iwi (tribes) threatening to set up roadblocks to keep Aucklanders from visiting their regions once freedom of travel is restored.

More broadly, despite the high vaccination rates, the Government has not shied from introducing controversial vaccine mandates. With the country slowly opening up, Ardern has described vaccination as “the golden ticket to freedom“, requiring vaccine passes to enter most workplaces, hospitality, retail and entertainment venues. At the moment, unvaccinated people can do little more than shop for essentials, creating a two-tier society and sparking bitter conflicts. The Government has doubled down, stressing the mandate will continue into next year, and showing little sympathy for the unvaccinated minority.

This, in turn, has sparked protests for the first time in the pandemic. When the current outbreak started, commentators mocked a lone demonstrator at an anti-lockdown protest in Auckland. Since then, crowds have grown, with thousands recently marching across the country against lockdowns and the vaccine mandates. While they have not matched the numbers or violence recently seen in Europe, these protests bring together a similar constellation of far-Right agitators, conspiracy theorists, wellness gurus and ordinary citizens increasingly marginalised and excluded from society. It’s part of a wider fragmentation taking hold in the country, with support for the Government’s handling of the pandemic dropping from 80% to 46%. Ardern’s personal popularity has also declined to 34%, while more people now think the country is heading in the wrong direction for the first time since 2008.

This is a far cry from the ‘Team of Five Million’ approach championed by the Government in the first 18 months of the pandemic. And Ardern seems fully aware of this: the Government recently rushed through new laws to lock in many of the draconian restrictions on the unvaccinated, bypassing the usual means of oversight and scrutiny, in a move labelled “a constitutional disgrace” by legal experts.

More from this author

What's the point of Australia?

By Shahar Hameiri and Tom Chodor

In short, over the course of the past four months, many of the key features of New Zealand’s pandemic response have been found wanting. Yet old habits die hard. While the rest of the world has largely opened up and travel has begun to stage a comeback, New Zealand’s plan for reopening its borders announced last week remains extremely cautious.

Fully vaccinated citizens will only be able to return from Australia from mid-January, provided that they quarantine at home for seven days. This will be extended to other countries in mid-February, while foreign nationals will not be allowed to enter until the end of next April. There is no detail yet on how long the seven-day quarantine requirement will remain in place, and the tourism sector has reacted with dismay, describing the plan as a “body blow” that will delay its recovery until 2023. For a country approaching a 90% vaccination rate, this seems needlessly restrictive, a relic of the Zero Covid mentality, rather than the long-promised exit strategy.

And this was before the emergence of the new Omicron variant. Here, New Zealand has been depressingly ordinary, following many other countries in shutting the border to non-citizens from the nine ‘high risk’ countries in southern Africa, and holding out the possibility of delaying the border reopening plan. While labelled as ‘temporary’ and intended to buy time to learn more about the new variant, this response highlights the continuing reluctance to finally begin living with Covid.

As the pandemic enters its third year, New Zealand might end up with the worst of both worlds: facing the same problems as everyone else, but persisting with an unsustainable Zero Covid approach to them.

And yet, at least in Australia, there is nothing overtly remarkable about the interminable restrictions the Victorian capital has had to endure. Like every other state, its political leaders have been committed to a Zero Covid strategy — driven by a woefully unprepared health system — that necessitates lockdowns in response to uncontrolled outbreaks. Even New South Wales, the one state that tried “living with Covid’ at the start, folded in the face of a major outbreak in July and is currently in its third month of lockdown.

Nevertheless, other states’ shutdowns have not nearly been as lengthy. And spending almost half of the pandemic under restrictions has certainly left its mark on Melbourne.

There are the “stay at home orders” which mean that anyone not deemed an “authorised worker” must work from home. For approximately 65% of the workforce this has meant working longer hours as office life seeps into the home. Meanwhile, throughout most of the lockdown, schools have also been closed. The impact has been stark: children in Victoria are already falling behind their peers in the country.

But at least they can play outside again; the Government re-opened playgrounds following a three-week closure in August. For adults, however, there are only five reasons to leave home: shopping for essentials, authorised work, exercise, caregiving and medical appointments. Yet even these luxuries are restricted. For example, only one person from a household can go shopping, once a day. And unless you’re exercising, you must wear a mask outside, even though a number of health experts believe there is no medical basis for this.

Suggested reading

Hong Kong's Zero Covid deception

By Philip Cowley

Even with a mask on, where can you go? I have walked the same route every day to my local café, where the staff greet me with varying degrees of despair or weary optimism that we might open up “one day”. Fortunately, Melbourne prides itself on its cafes, so there is likely to be one within 5km of your house, which, until two weeks ago, was the limit for how far you can travel. As a result, I’ve walked through every single green space within 5km of my home, sometimes with a friend, since the Government has allowed exercise with one other person.

That radius has now expanded to 15km — though residents still can’t stray too far. A curfew, which runs from 9pm-5am, is still in place, turning life into a “reverse Groundhog Day”, where each identical day becomes less comforting and amusing.

Things are not much better in the city’s economy. Melbourne’s famed vibrant 24-hour city life has been gutted, as workers stay at home and bars and restaurants are closed. The arts and entertainment sectors — an afterthought when it comes to government support — have also been crippled. To top it off, economists estimate that around $1 billion is lost from the economy for each week of lockdown, and one in three small businesses are seriously considering closing. While city life sprang back into life after last year’s lockdown was lifted, there are serious doubts if it can do so again.

In the broader community, too, the institutions that keep society together — the sports teams, community groups and voluntary organisations — are all closed. Mental health experts say people in Melbourne are now up to seven times more anxious, depressed and stressed than before the pandemic, and the number of people experiencing loneliness has increased by 54%. Compared to 2019, calls to mental health and suicide prevention lines in Australia have increased by 40%, with three of Lifeline’s busiest days in its 58-year history coming in August 2021, as lockdown returned to Victoria.

Admittedly, Melbourne’s lockdown is not unique, with many other parts of the world going through similar restrictions at various points in the past year. What is different, though, is not only its length, but also the fact that it keeps happening again, and every time in a different context. In reality, Melbourne’s lockdown is defined by three very different periods, the culmination of which has made dealing with these restrictions increasingly difficult.

The city’s first lockdown, from 30 March to 12 May 2020, was, if not exciting, at least novel and unprecedented. While certainly coupled with fear of the unknown, it was also a shared experience with the rest of the country and other parts of the world. This made it easier to bear, especially once Australia’s federal government eventually doubled the unemployment benefit and provided a generous wage subsidy scheme. Indeed, studies have shown that Australian’s overall mental health actually improved during this period, as society adjusted relatively well to the new reality.

Suggested reading

What's the point of Australia?

By SHAHAR HAMEIRI AND TOM CHODOR

But this all changed during Victoria’s second lockdown, from 8 July to 27 October 2020. This 111-day ordeal, sparked by failures in the state’s hotel quarantine system for returning citizens, was particularly draining, especially when harsher measures, such as the curfew, were introduced. It was also doubly difficult watching the rest of the country getting on with their lives, oblivious to what life was like in the “lockdown state”, but quick to sneer at the management of the outbreak.

Yet the combination of external disparagement and parochial defensiveness meant that the second lockdown was wildly popular, with 72% of Victorians supporting it, while Premier Dan Andrews sparked a fanatical following on social media, prompted in part by a newfound obsession with his sartorial choices.

Moreover, once the lockdown ended, Melbourne enjoyed a glorious summer, where bars, restaurants and city life returned to “normal”. A short, five-day lockdown in February was a brief reminder the pandemic was not over, but the city quickly reverted to its usual rhythms.

However, the fourth (14 days), fifth (12 days) and sixth (ongoing) lockdowns, which began on 27 May, in effect constituting a single lockdown, are a different story. From the start they have been accompanied by a sense of disbelief that we are doing this again, after all the “hard work” of last year.

And so there has been anger: with the state government for imposing vaccine mandates; with mass protests flooding the (empty) city streets and getting into violent confrontations with the police; with states like NSW for allowing the current outbreak to spread into Victoria; with Covid-free Queensland and Western Australia posturing about the virtues of lockdowns while not experiencing them; with the federal government for refusing the provide the same economic support as last year; and with it again for its disastrous vaccine “stroll out”, which has left the population completely unprepared for the Delta variant (only 21% of Victorians were fully vaccinated when the latest lockdown began on 5 August).

More from this author

New Zealand's Zero Covid delusion

By Tom Chodor

It is unsurprising, then, that there is none of the enthusiastic support for the Premier’s handling of the pandemic of last year, with polls indicating that voters are turning on the Government. In its place is either outward hostility, as with the protests, or indifference, as people gradually stop following the lockdown orders. Indeed, compliance is visibly down, with the Premier reduced to pleading with people to stay the course. But after more than 250 days of lockdown, the community has few reserves left to draw on.

To its credit, the Government seems to have realised this, abandoning its cherished goal of Covid elimination, and instead aiming to open up when 80% of adults are double-jabbed, no matter the case numbers. And, importantly, it has promised that there’s no going back this time, that once we open, we will stay open, perhaps recognising a seventh lockdown would simply crumble in the face of non-compliance.

Whether this determination can hold if cases explode, or if there’s a new outbreak, remains uncertain. But it does point to the grim truth that lockdowns — an already blunt tool in the pandemic management toolbox — get blunter the more you use them, and produce more and more damage in the process. As Melbourne has finally realised, lockdowns can’t last forever.

That was the premise of EM Forster’s science fiction novella The Machine Stops. Like all good sci-fi, the story can be read in multiple ways. But for me the key thing is what happens when the machine begins, slowly but ineluctably, to break down. Trivially to begin with — strange noises, the wrong music, smelly bath water — but then things begin to get more serious when the food starts to go off, and eventually the machine collapses and everyone is killed.

Yet until it’s too late, these flaws do not make people challenge the machine or wonder whether they might in fact be better off living on the surface of the earth. Although each flaw is resented at first, people just get used to them and begin to think them normal. “Time passed,” Forster wrote, “and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine”.

I confess to not having given the story much thought since I studied it back in school, decades ago. But it has clearly been lurking somewhere deep in my memory — because all it took for it to leap out from the subconscious was the right cue.

It turned out that the right cue was Professor Sophia Chan Siu-chee. Professor Chan is Hong Kong’s Secretary for Food and Health, with responsibility for many of its Covid restrictions, and so for those of us living here she is a figure of some import. She is firmly of the Safety First, Can’t Be Too Careful school of thought, to the point where she makes Chris Whitty look like an especially rabid anti-vaxxer.

Suggested reading

How science has been corrupted

By Matthew Crawford

This approach served Hong Kong well in the early days of the pandemic. Moving swiftly, and encouraged by most of the population who often urged the Government to take more drastic action, Hong Kong has managed to avoid both mass outbreaks and any large-scale full lockdowns of the sort seen in the UK. The Covid death toll here stands at just 213 — fewer than died from SARS — and there now hasn’t been a locally transmitted case for over a month.

Faced with the choice between remaining Asia’s World City or prioritising Our Friends in the North, it has now chosen the latter, aiming for a zero Covid policy and hoping that the border with the mainland will open again soon. This has resulted in some of the tightest travel restrictions in the world – 21 days in a quarantine hotel for someone from the UK, for example, even if fully vaccinated. In turn, this has had a disastrous impact on the vaccination programme. Vaccines are freely and easily available, but uptake has been slow, with the most vulnerable being the least likely to have been jabbed. The figure for the over-80s vaccinated is still below 20%: when you’ve got zero Covid, and if you don’t want to travel anywhere, why bother?

Yet however frustrating some of this might be — and however much we might wonder if this is sustainable — these are all legitimate policy choices. Given the mainland’s own zero Covid policy, and the importance of cross-border traffic, it’s difficult to see what Hong Kong could really do. Plus, however much pain this causes many foreigners and others with relatives overseas, there’s little doubt that it is popular within the wider population.

All this I can cope with, just about. But last month, Professor Chan claimed that in Hong Kong there is now “local normalcy” — and it was this that provoked my Forster flashback.

Suggested reading

The cruelty of Australia's endless lockdown

By Shahar Hameiri

She was trying to argue that however grim the quarantine rules might be, life once here is fine and dandy. This might strike you as a bit “apart from that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”, but you can at least see her point: if they allow normal life to continue, maybe it’s possible to justify very strict travel restrictions.

Yet life is clearly not normal in Hong Kong, even if we just confine ourselves to the restrictions brought about by Covid. Rather, Chan’s claim is one of the best examples of the ratchet effect in public policy I’ve seen for ages.

Let’s just take just the things that affect me on an almost daily basis. Mask wearing is compulsory in public, for everyone, even when outdoors. There are limits on group gatherings, with still no more than four people allowed to gather outdoors (although unlike in the UK, say, there has never been any limits on private gatherings). Table sittings in restaurants are also restricted, usually to four, although some places are allowed to go really wild up to six, depending on the extent of staff vaccinations. Tracking entry and exit via an app into any public building or restaurant is compulsory.

Most schools are still not back to full-day provision, even though pupils are now in their sixth term of disrupted schooling, and even when at school there are innumerable restrictions on what they can do. Meanwhile, at home, there is routine compulsory testing of areas or groups. These can involve locking down whole blocks with no warning — so-called “ambushes” — even with the possibility of breaking into your home if you don’t answer the door.

And hovering above it all is the ever-present threat of being carted off to a government quarantine centre. Should one of your close contacts tests positive, there’s none of the would-you-mind-awfully-staying-at-home-please attitude here. Instead, you get picked up, with almost no notice, and chucked in a room in a quarantine centre for up to three weeks, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Suggested reading

Don't blame Brexit for shortages

By Philip Pilkington

If you actually have Covid, you are taken into hospital. There is little care for family separation, as with the children taken away from their parents — or the breastfeeding mother separated from her four month old baby, despite the child being unable to take formula milk. (That one was solved only because women donated spare pumped breast milk).

It is common to see praise in the West for how countries like Hong Kong have managed track, trace, and isolate programmes, without being aware of what the reality of the isolate bit often means. We have a bag ready, by the front door, packed with emergency provisions, just in case the guys and gals in Hazmat suits come knocking.

These examples are illustrative, not exhaustive. Everyone in Hong Kong could list others. And remember: these are the restrictions currently in place with the Covid stats down to zero.

Just as when Forster’s machine starts to break down, some of this might be considered fairly trivial, but some of it is not. Some of it may even be justified in the short or medium term. But none of it is normal, and we should not let politicians — in Hong Kong or elsewhere — ever tell us otherwise.

In short, New Zealand’s latest outbreak has merely reinforced pre-existing convictions on both sides of the Zero Covid argument.

But the reality is more complex. While New Zealand has pursued an aggressive elimination strategy, it has — until now — worked, and at relatively low political, economic and social costs. Indeed, the more urgent question now is whether the country’s relative success has lulled it into a sense of complacency, and left it lacking an exit strategy once the pandemic subsides.

Over the past eighteen months, New Zealand has been one of very few countries committed to elimination rather than suppression, with Ardern declaring she wouldn’t put the lives of citizens at risk by trying to live with the virus. The decision was hailed as proof of her leadership driven by empathy and compassion, in stark contrast with the “let it rip” approaches of Johnson or Trump.

Suggested reading

The cruelty of Australia's endless lockdown

By Shahar Hameiri

However, while it certainly complemented Ardern’s brand, in reality her commitment was driven by the cold reality of a woefully unprepared health system — gutted by decades of austerity — which would struggle to manage even a low number of cases. A March 2020 audit found New Zealand only had 221 ICU beds for a population of 5 million, while its testing and track and tracing capacity was deemed inadequate.

It was in this context that the Government announced a strict “Level 4” lockdown on 25 March 2020, which closed almost all retail, hospitality and education settings, banned public gatherings, limited the reasons for leaving home and closed the international border to everyone but returning citizens and permanent residents who had to quarantine. Despite being draconian, these restrictions succeeded in eliminating Covid-19 in the country; by 8 June the lockdown ended, with effectively all restrictions being lifted, except for closed borders. In total, New Zealand experienced 1,504 cases of Covid and 22 deaths between February and June 2020. (The UK experienced 4,432 Covid deaths in March alone.)

Having achieved elimination, New Zealand doubled down, vowing to swiftly respond to any future outbreaks with snap lockdowns. It was a wildly popular decision, with Ardern re-elected in a landslide in October, and 75% supporting the government’s strategy as recently as July 2021.

The reasons for this are not hard to understand. Unlike Australia’s disastrous hotel quarantine system, which has resulted in more than 20 instances of the virus leaking into the community, New Zealand has seen limited breaches, which were quickly contained. As a result, since June 2020, there have only been two brief lockdowns in Auckland, the largest city. Indeed, for the past 16 months, New Zealanders have been living remarkably normal lives; while the British recently rejoiced at “Freedom Day” by flooding pubs, restaurants and football matches, New Zealanders have been enjoying these liberties for over a year.

Suggested reading

We are hostages to Government fear

By Timandra Harkness

Similarly, the economic costs of Zero Covid have been relatively low so far. While the initial lockdown initially led to a drastic 11% decline of GDP, a generous wage subsidy scheme prevented job losses and growth rebounded 14.1% the following quarter. Admittedly, the recovery has been uneven, with the tourism sector — accounting for 18% of the economy — hit particularly hard by border closures. Nevertheless, with unemployment at 4% and debt-to-GDP ratio of 33%, the country’s economic performance compares favourably with most other nations.

So it seems that New Zealand’s commitment to elimination so far has been less “a never-ending nightmare” than an understandable policy with overall low costs. But that doesn’t mean that the country is out of the woods. For ultimately, the issue with Zero Covid is the need for an exit strategy — and this is where the current outbreak has exposed NZ.

On paper, the most obvious exit strategy from Zero Covid is for the whole world to follow it, eliminating the virus once and for all. But the fact that the vast majority of countries have deemed this unfeasible has left New Zealand vulnerable. After all, elimination in one country is not viable in the long term without total isolation from the rest of the world.

The other exit strategy is vaccination. Yet here, New Zealand has stumbled, with only 19.79% of the population fully vaccinated, leaving it second-last in the OECD. The main issue has been complacency. With Covid eliminated, vaccination has not been a burning priority. This resulted in not only the Government setting low vaccination targets that it then crowed about meeting, but among the population only 40% gave any thoughts to vaccination in July. Splendidly isolated in their own little bubble, New Zealanders convinced themselves that the pandemic was happening elsewhere, and did little to prepare for its return. ICU, capacity, for example, has only been increased by 63 beds since March last year, and less than two weeks ago, experts warned a Delta outbreak would risk collapsing the health system.

Suggested reading

How science has been corrupted

By Matthew Crawford

Now that the Delta strain has arrived, however, the folly of this complacent strategy has been exposed. As other countries have found, measures that worked in crushing the virus last year struggle with its more infectious variant. Cases have grown every day, and the lockdown has already been extended to two weeks, while experts gloomily proclaim the country is on “a knife edge”.

What this means for NZ’s commitment to elimination remains to be seen. If the Government gets on top of the outbreak, faith in Zero Covid will persist, bolstered by proof of succeeding where no other countries have with Delta. But this will only reinforce complacency, meaning underlying structural issues will remain unaddressed. Once the country finally does start to open to the world again, these will come to the fore; if Covid returns, lockdowns will once again be a tempting proposition, even with high vaccination coverage. Whether the population will remain tolerant of these remains an open question.

If, on the other hand, the lockdown extends into months, the low-cost nature of elimination will come to be questioned, especially as previous successes recede from view, while the rest of the world moves on from the virus. As Australia shows, overconfidence can quickly give way to recriminations once an elimination strategy leads to a never-ending spiral of lockdowns. In this case, New Zealand may find that Zero Covid is a dead end, from which there is no easy way out.

It could be that Arden’s government is starting to realise this. While committed to stamping out the current outbreak, its Covid-19 Response Minister has conceded that the highly infectious nature of Delta raises “big questions” about the strategy, and that “at some point, we will have to be more open in the future”. Whether a government which has so explicitly nailed its colours to Zero Covid can execute such a pivot remains to be seen.