, Columnist
China Loves Zero-Covid. The Chinese? Not So Much.
A social-media backlash against harsh lockdowns in Xian shows that citizens are tiring of the government’s merciless approach to controlling the pandemic.
The lockdown means business in Xian.
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For more than two weeks, the government of Xian, a Chinese city of 13 million people, has confined residents to their homes as it tries to extinguish a Covid outbreak amounting to fewer than 2,000 infections. It's a continuation of the “zero-Covid” policy that crushed the initial outbreak in Wuhan in 2020.
China’s leaders have embraced zero-Covid as a badge of nationalist pride. China's low infection and death rates, they say, prove the superiority of China's form of governance to democracies that continue to suffer large-scale outbreaks.