More than two years after a deadly strain of coronavirus was first identified in the central city of Wuhan, China remains locked in a COVID crisis. Around 400 million people are currently thought to be living under some form of lockdown across the country. One of China’s largest cities, Shanghai, has been paralysed for the past month, with many of its residents hemmed in by hastily erected metal fences. The capital, Beijing, is now striving to avoid a similar fate.
The extraordinary story of China’s ongoing, and increasingly desperate, struggle against COVID-19 combines hubris at its own early public health successes with a failure to sufficiently vaccinate its elderly people, and is fuelled by rising anti-Western sentiment over the last five years. The result is that China now faces a dilemma: either the high numbers of deaths and overwhelmed health services that would result from a rampant virus, or the rapidly mounting social and economic costs of prolonged lockdowns and stay-at-home orders nationwide.
