China’s Great Covid ‘Reopening’ – WSJ

The easing appears to be substantial given the heavy-handedness of zero-Covid over the past three years. Authorities will no longer be able to cast whole city blocks into lockdown limbo at the first hint of a positive Covid test in the neighborhood, and Chinese citizens finally are free of expensive and intrusive frequent testing as they go about their daily lives or travel domestically.

Yet the new rules merely create a Covid regime equivalent to the regulations that Western countries largely abandoned a year ago. Those who test positive may still be required to self-isolate at home—an improvement on the hospital quarantines they faced—and international travelers remain subject to quarantine requirements when they enter China. Many countries have long since abandoned the rules Beijing now is implementing because even the looser regulations proved economically and socially unworkable.

Meanwhile, China is left with the mechanisms of political and social control the Communist Party developed during the pandemic, such as the use of smartphone apps to monitor and regulate every citizen’s movement. Don’t imagine for a minute the Communist Party will give up those surveillance tools now that Beijing’s propagandists have declared the pandemic emergency over.

As for that emergency, China is entering the great unknown. Omicron and its virus subvariants have proven more transmissible but less severe elsewhere in the world. But that was among populations with higher vaccination rates than China’s with more effective vaccines and in places where many people already were exposed to earlier virus strains. Mr. Xi and his citizens—and the rest of the world—have to hope that Omicron will prove similarly mild in a country that stifled natural immunity and refused superior Western mRNA vaccines for nationalist reasons.

The message to foreign businesses is that China remains far from the status quo pre-Covid. After three years of zero-Covid, the Chinese economy now faces an indeterminate period of milder restrictions—unless there is more widespread serious illness.

Beijing’s easing of zero-Covid marks a tactical retreat in the face of nationwide protests. But this is not a sign Mr. Xi has tapped some hitherto unknown liberalizing instinct. Having abandoned his effort to crush the virus, the continuing China risk concerns what he will do to redouble control over the Chinese people.