China’s Selective Memory of COVID-19

On April 8, 2020 Wuhan – the city in central China where COVID-19 first left its mark – came out of its two-and-a-half-month lockdown. The strict quarantine had extended to 12 other cities in Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital, collectively encompassing over 50 million people.

A year later, in April 2021, China has long since declared victory over the pandemic. The country remains on high alert, with any uptick in cases swiftly resulting in a localized lockdown, whether at the neighborhood level (as has happened several times in the capital of Beijing) or of whole cities (in the case of Ruilin, Yunnan province, last month). Chinese citizens still have to carry their smartphones and show “green” status on one of several “health code” apps to visit a business, board public transportation, or even enter their own apartment buildings. Travellers from abroad are strictly limited, and are required to present proof of a negative COVID-19 test (or prove receipt of an approved vaccine, although those policy details are still being hammered out). Regardless of vaccine status, a 14-day quarantine upon arrival is still mandatory.

In other words, while China has successfully limited the virus’ spread, despite having the world’s first COVID-19 outbreak, it’s not entirely accurate to say that life is “back to normal,” either.

For its part, China’s government is hoping to transcend the old normal and come back stronger than ever. That was the message at a Foreign Ministry-hosted event on April 12, celebrating a year since the Hubei lockdown ended. Foreign Minister Wang Yi as well as the Communist Party secretaries of both Hubei province and Wuhan attended the event, which was given the lofty title of “Heroic Hubei: Reborn for New Glories.” According to the Foreign Ministry, the event was also “attended by 122 ambassadors or charges d’affaires ad interim.”

The event marked the latest, and highest-profile, effort to reframe the narrative around Wuhan and Hubei, which became known around the world as ground zero for the worst pandemic seen in a century. (China has pushed back strenuously against that assumption, insisting that the virus may have been brought from abroad, perhaps on frozen food packaging.) Wang tried to reframe perceptions of Wuhan as a global success story instead: “Wuhan was the first city to report COVID-19 cases and the first to bring the virus under control,” he said in his remarks.

For the purpose of the “Heroic Hubei” event, the main point of remaking Wuhan’s image was to actively court foreign investment. “The pandemic and post-COVID reopening have served as an opportunity to boost economic upgrading and transformation. Hubei has again scored impressive achievements in the major test of rebuilding and reviving development,” Wang declared. Hubei Party Secretary Ying Yong added, “A newborn Hubei is standing at a new starting point of history with a completely new image to promote regional development planning… create China's important growth pole, and firmly open its door wider to the world.”

“As a follow-up to the special promotion event, the foreign ministry will invite diplomatic missions and foreign correspondents in China to visit Hubei and conduct interviews, so as to further deepen the international community's understanding of Hubei and Wuhan, tap into opportunities for cooperation, and offer a platform for further opening-up and development of Hubei,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said the day after the event. China is clearly in full-on economic rebuilding mode, starting with Hubei.

Yet the relentlessly positive narrative of the event had the effect of minimizing the experiences of the people who lived through the lockdown, and the frenzied, fear-filled days before it, when rumors of a “new SARS” were rampant but the government was denying the reports.

Zhao declared that “the heroic people in Wuhan and Hubei have made enormous sacrifices for a national victory over COVID-19,” but that framing overlooks one detail: The people had little choice in what sacrifices they wanted to make.

As an online meme popular in Wuhan during the lockdown put it: “When you hear people say, ‘We will sacrifice everything at any cost,’ don’t misunderstand ‘we’ to include you – you are actually the cost.”

That meme was cited by Fang Fang, a Wuhan-based writer, as an echo of her experience. Fang captured the fear, confusion, and anger she and others felt during the lockdown in her “Wuhan Diary,” originally published as daily entries online (and nearly immediately scrubbed by censors). Some of her observations are nearly universal for anyone who lived through the pandemic, such as her “feeling of uncertainty about the fate of my city, that uncertainty about whether my family members and I had been infected, and all the uncertainties about the future.”

Other points are unique to China, such as her musings about the initial cover-up. She also rebukes the authorities for clamping down on expressions of pain from families mourning loved ones or desperately trying to find a hospital bed for a sick relative. At one point Fang seethes about a doctor who, serving as a government spokesperson, had initially declared the virus as “controllable and preventable”: “[H]ow could he see so many people struggling with illness and dying in desperate circumstances because of some irresponsible statements he made and not have any sense of the role he played in this?... Isn’t there even an ounce of guilt in this man’s heart?”

Judging from the celebratory event on April 12, it’s clear that China’s government, like the lone doctor Fang mentioned, has abandoned any sense of responsibility in favor of self-congratulations for a job well done.

Fang Fang has no doubt that Wuhan’s lockdown, painful as it was, “was clearly the correct decision.” But she is also clear about who the true heroes are: “Wuhan’s nine million residents worked together to cooperate with all the government’s requests; their restraint and patience helped ensure that Wuhan would be able to contain this virus.”

While China has so far kept case counts under control, the key to a full reopening is a robust immunization drive. As of April 12, China had administered 167 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines. Five Chinese vaccines have been approved for use, and four of those require two shots for full effect. That means the number of people vaccinated is less than the total doses given. Based on the ratio in previous data, when the headcount was included, the total number of people in China to have received at least one shot is likely around 124 million (roughly 43 million fully vaccinated, with another 81 million having had one shot).

However, questions remain about the effectiveness of the Chinese-made vaccines, as none of the companies involved has released full trial data. Data released by other countries that hosted phase three trials for Chinese vaccines have shown efficacy ranging from 50 percent to over 90 percent for the same shots, a worryingly wide spread.

Adding fuel to the fire, Gao Fu, the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, speaking at a conference in Chengdu, said that “current vaccines don’t have very high protection rates,” while praising the mRNA technology used in the vaccines made by Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech partnership (China’s vaccines use more traditional methods, such as inactivated virus particles, to build immunity). Gao later claimed he had been speaking about vaccines in general, not Chinese-made vaccines in particular, but declined to explain his comment on the mRNA vaccines.

Yes, China has vanquished the virus, but as the residents of Hubei can attest, it came at a price. Even today, local governments are poised for a lockdown at any moment if a COVID-19 cluster emerges and foreign travel is kept to a bare minimum. That’s not sustainable in the long term for any country, particularly the world’s number two economy and an international commerce hub. China – like every country in the world – needs an effective vaccination campaign to relax its current state of constant vigilance. Only then can Beijing truly declare a final victory over COVID-19.