China Can’t Have the Winter Olympics and ‘Zero Covid’

Over the past month, as China has struggled to contain an outbreak of the Delta variant of Covid-19, the government has deployed every tool at its disposal, from shutting down ports to imposing lockdowns that quarantined millions. Some of the strictest measures came in Beijing, which will host the 2022 Winter Olympics in February, including a ban on visitors from regions with even a single case.

In a sense, the draconian approach is working. On Sunday, for the first time since July, the government reported no locally transmitted cases. As the Olympics loom, though, this “zero Covid” policy looks increasingly untenable. If China has any hope of hosting the world’s largest sporting event, much less resuming its role as a driver of global growth, it will need to learn to coexist with Covid, and soon.

It won’t be easy. China’s zero-tolerance approach, first adopted during the initial Wuhan outbreak last spring, was widely lauded at home and abroad. While New York struggled with a spiraling death toll, Wuhan held pool parties. Partly as a result of such comparisons, the government enjoys strong backing at home for its aggressive policies, even as lockdowns have put economic growth at risk. Earlier this month, when a leading Chinese medical figure called for coexistence with the virus, state media circulated an essay by a former health minister disparaging the idea.

Although the essay didn’t explicitly mention the Tokyo Olympics, readers surely had Japan in mind. Chinese media regularly cite Japan’s case count, largely to highlight the perceived superiority of the local approach. Before the Olympics, Japan had never explicitly embraced a policy of coexistence. But the looming arrival of thousands of athletes, coaches, officials and media forced it to adopt one. This led to an incoherent set of rules. Athletes and coaches were required to undergo a three-day quarantine, for example, but they could opt out of it for a competition if they tested negative. The results were perhaps predictable: There were a total of 151 positive tests among Olympic participants between July 1 and Aug. 9. Cases surged in parallel among the general population, from 660 on July 1 to a peak of 5,773 on Aug. 12. Last week, the government extended a state of emergency to Sept. 12.

Given such risks, China’s options aren’t very appealing. The government’s current requirement that foreigners undergo two weeks of quarantine will likely be unacceptable to world-class athletes unwilling to forgo strict training schedules (and cede a competitive advantage to Chinese athletes). Likewise, NBC Universal, the largest funder of the International Olympic Committee, is unlikely to subject the nearly 2,000 staff it sends to a normal Olympics to such measures. But the alternative — a Japanese-style coexistence policy — remains politically unimaginable in a country where the government has staked its reputation and legitimacy on zero cases.

So far, there’s little indication of what Beijing plans to do. But the implications are huge for both the Olympics and for China more broadly. If the Beijing 2008 games were a symbol of China’s emergence on the global stage, Beijing 2022 might serve as an awkward metaphor for an authoritarian state rapidly closing itself off to the world. For the government, that could pose an unacceptable risk to its domestic and international prestige.

There’s still time to find solutions, of course. But every option creates a dilemma for Beijing. The best approach would be to finally establish a vaccine mandate for Olympic athletes and staff, something Japan unwisely avoided. Yet that would require China to recognize the efficacy of foreign-made shots, something it’s been loath to do. More ambitiously, the government could attempt to implement workable travel bubbles. Yet these have mostly failed elsewhere, and Beijing is unlikely to take such a risk while it’s under the global spotlight.

One way or another, it seems certain that China will need to learn to live with the virus if it hopes to resume its pre-pandemic role as a global destination for everything from business to sports. In all likelihood, the Olympics will offer a trial run.