From one extreme to the other: A week ago, millions of people were still locked in their homes because somewhere in their neighborhoods a suspected covid case might exist. Now the opening cannot happen fast enough. China plans to take a crash course in living with the virus.
The state media outdo each other in praising the new policy, ignoring the fact that just last week they propagated zero-Covid strategy as the only true way forward. It is downright staggering how brazenly state news agency Xinhua declares the fight against the pandemic to be over and sells China’s new strategy as a unique approach and great success. Not a word about the utterly excessive lockdowns in Shanghai last spring, which paralyzed large parts of the economy. Nor a word about the apartment building fire in October in Urumqi, where people burned to death in their homes because of the Covid lockdowns. As if Xi Jinping’s personally decreed zero-Covid had never existed.
Now regulations are being lifted so crudely that health experts already sound the alarm. Unlike in the rest of the world, where high vaccination rates and previous infections have led to a basic level of immunity, China still lacks it. Experts predict millions of deaths in the coming months if the virus sweeps the country too quickly. Many emergency rooms in Beijing and other cities are already overcrowded before the wave even starts to build up, says Fabian Kretschmer. Curiously, this is not reflected in the official numbers. In the statistics, the number of new infections has been declining for days.
Building trust – this seems to be something that Xi Jinping continues to be unfamiliar with.
The end of zero-Covid in Beijing (China.Table reported) is clearly noticeable in the cityscape: All stores have reopened, and the lockdown barriers have practically all vanished. Meanwhile, signs already point to a sharp rise in infection numbers – just as experts feared after the contact restrictions were lifted.
At noon, the queue in front of the Covid clinic of Beijing’s Chaoyang Hospital already reaches to the next street corner: Wrapped in down jackets and face masks, dozens of people are waiting to be let in. And a crowd has also formed outside the pharmacy across the street. Most of them, however, will have to go back home disappointed: self-tests and fever-reducing medication are sold out.
After more than two and a half years of close monitoring and contact prevention, the country is now trying to “live with the virus”. Whereas the government had previously kept the risk of infection to a minimum with mandatory quarantine, mass testing and lockdowns, every citizen of the country is now largely responsible for their own health.
The State media publish educational videos: Instructions range from correct self-testing to the proper behavior in case of infection. One lesson many Beijingers have clearly not yet learned is obvious: Far too many people march to the hospital even at the first suspicion of a Covid infection, and hospitals are now reaching their limits.
However, society urgently needs to learn a smart way of dealing with the virus. China’s first nationwide Covid wave since the beginning of the pandemic is rolling even faster than expected. For example, in an unusually critical article, the online magazine Yicai reports about a Beijing hospital where the emergency room is already overcrowded: “Many of the patients are tested positive,” a nurse is quoted as saying.
And the former Vice Director of the National Health Office, Feng Zijian, even expects that up to 60 percent of China’s 1.4 billion citizens could become infected during the winter wave – and up to 90 percent by the time the situation stabilizes again. Depending on the speed of the vaccination campaign and thus the mortality rate, several million deaths could be expected. By comparison, official numbers show that only slightly more than 5,000 people have died from the virus in China, most of them in 2020.
While Omicron is clearly spreading, the officially reported case numbers have been falling for several days. Nationwide, the health authority reported only slightly more than 21,000 reported cases on Thursday, and in Beijing even less than 3,400. Trust in these numbers is therefore sinking.
Even without deliberate manipulation, these numbers would no longer reflect the actual incidence of infection, just as they do in Germany: Since mandatory testing has been lifted, many Chinese recover at home without reporting their infection. But there is also reason to suspect that the health authorities forge the numbers. Many Beijingers who got tested in the past few days have not received any results.
Many users on social media are also aware of how unrealistic the daily reported numbers are. A resident of the city of Baoding in the Beijing region wrote on the online platform Weibo: “Yesterday there were nine cases in Baoding? In my family circle alone, there are already 12.” Fabian Kretschmer
China’s state and party leader Xi Jinping has embarked on a three-day visit to Saudi Arabia – and launched his biggest diplomatic campaign in the Arab world to date. After his arrival on Wednesday, Xi met with Saudi Crown Prince and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman on Thursday. On Friday, Xi will also attend the Gulf Cooperation Council summit with six states in the region.
It is a strategic visit: In times of the Ukraine war and a global energy crisis, energy supplies are obviously high on the agenda. Xi will also try to gain geopolitical capital out of the current tensions between Saudi Arabia and the United States. And new topics such as digitalization, artificial intelligence, and security and military technology have also been added.
As the Saudi Arabian news agency SPA reports, a total of 34 agreements were signed on Wednesday alone. 20 more agreements worth the equivalent of 28 billion euros will follow. They include
Experts say the oil deal has brought the two countries closer together. “Saudi Arabia has become China’s largest trading partner in the Middle East and North Africa, and China’s top global supplier of crude oil,” Naser al-Tamimi, an Arabia expert at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies ISPI, told China.Table. “China’s oil imports from Gulf countries jumped this year to over four million barrels per day,” al-Tamimi said. This accounts for more than 42 percent of China’s total crude oil imports.
China also wants to tie its Belt and Road Initiative closer to the region. In turn, Saudi Arabia sees the new economic power as a welcome alternative to the United States. According to Al-Tamimi, China’s political influence will increase as a result. “The Gulf states see China as a superpower in the making and expect it to remain a top destination for their energy exports for the foreseeable future, making it vital to cultivate strategic relations with the rising power,” Al-Tamimi explains.
Saudi Arabia is a traditional close ally of the United States. But the relationship between Riyadh and Washington has recently taken a severe hit – and Xi wants to step into the emerging gap. First, US President Joe Biden blamed the Saudi crown prince for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And now the oil-exporting countries led by Riyadh and Moscow have also throttled their oil production – despite a massive international price surge.
Biden attempted to calm tensions with a visit to Jeddah in July, but the US president was not granted more than a chummy fist bump with MBS, as Prince Mohammed bin Salman is also called. Biden must have realized that, too, when he said, “We will not walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia or Iran.”
But that is precisely what Xi is now trying to do. The timing of Xi’s visit to Riyadh shows how important it is: He is under massive pressure back home, and last week protests broke out across the country against his strict zero-Covid policy (China.Table reported).
He is welcomed with open arms in Riyadh. On Wednesday, the purple carpet was rolled out for the Chinese leader at the airport. On Thursday, Crown Prince bin Salman received him in the magnificent royal residence, the Palace of Yamamah.
Gedaliah Afterman is not surprised by this. “When countries in the Gulf think of their future, they see China as a key partner,” the Asia director at the Abba Eban Institute for International Diplomacy in Israel told China.Table. “Unlike any other player, China is uniquely equipped to serve as a long-term partner, buying their oil, building their cities including providing the technology to make them smart.” At the same time, MBS will try to use his good connection with Beijing to establish Saudi Arabia as an international player. Saudi Arabia is also using the occasion to send a message to the United States that […] Riyadh also has other options
The Saudi royal family regards China as a more agreeable partner than Western states anyway, because Xi will not insist on compliance with human rights, nor will he call for a fight against corruption and nepotism.
In the Khashoggi murder case, Beijing also accepts the official explanation that the murder was the result of a rogue operation. In return, not a single word of criticism has come from Saudi Arabia about China’s treatment of the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.
But Riyadh will not completely turn away from Washington in favor of Beijing. “Although GCC states seek economic and diplomatic benefits from a greater Chinese role in the Middle East, they know they must balance such long-term benefits against the more immediate imperative not to alienate the United States,” Naser al-Tamimi says.
After all, there is one major problem between China and Saudi Arabia: their relations with Iran. While China is also increasingly courting the regime in Tehran, Saudi Arabia struggles for regional supremacy and harbors religious and ideological enmity. And here the currently so unpopular United States guarantees military protection to the Saudi royal family. Riyadh will not want to forgo this.
When Western economists and historians analyze China’s spectacular economic transformation over the past four decades, they tend to emphasize the productivity boom unleashed by the start of market-oriented reforms in 1978. But the role of the country’s political elite as a key driver of its emergence as an economic power has remained under-examined.
This is partly because it is hard to measure the contribution of political elites to a country’s economic development. Fortunately, a new study by Tomas Casas i Klett and Guido Cozzi from the University of St. Gallen provides a useful conceptual framework for understanding the Chinese economic model. Casas and Cozzi developed the annual Elite Quality Index (EQx), which measures and ranks the value that national elites create for a country.
Much like other East Asian countries, China has relied on strong state capacity and an effective bureaucracy to foster and coordinate economic development. In the most recent Elite Quality Index, the country ranks 27th (out of 151), the highest score among upper-middle-income economies. In the study’s political power index, which measures national elites’ influence over business regulation, rule-making, and labor law, China ranked 60th.
While Chinese elites maintain a tight grip on state institutions, the index clearly recognizes their enormous contribution to China’s economic development. In terms of elites’ role in income redistribution and in public security and welfare, China ranked sixth and ninth, respectively. While the report finds that elites create value for Chinese society in the political domain, China ranked 32nd in elites’ contribution to markets and economic growth.
Mainstream economic theory prevalent in the West cannot explain China’s unique growth model. China’s combination of markets and industrial policy has confounded Western observers, who overemphasize the state’s extractive tendencies and downplay its nourishing role. But the report highlights the Chinese state’s function as a driver of economic dynamism and success. In terms of “coalition dominance,” which refers to the power of insiders in the country’s political economy, China ranked 138th. At the same time, it ranked sixth in “creative destruction,” suggesting that its elite-oriented system is far better at adapting to changing external conditions than some Western economists believe.
The Schumpeterian nature of China’s political elite may baffle foreign observers. But it will not come as a surprise to people who are well-versed in the country’s long history and familiar with how the Chinese state was first formed several millennia ago. As the late Chinese-American historian Ray Huang observed, China is a politically precocious country that completed the process of becoming a modern state 1,500 years before Europe did.
Huang, along with political scientist Francis Fukuyama, was struck by the exceptionally short reigns of feudal Chinese rulers. The tiny warring kingdoms that preceded Imperial China were incapable of resisting frequent invasions from northern nomads or managing natural disasters, creating a political need for a unified government. This came in the form of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who ruled China between 221 and 210 BC, and whose political project was to establish a powerful centralized regime.
Qin’s China was, in many respects, the antecedent to the modern state, as defined by sociologist Max Weber, with a vast, centralized bureaucracy and a well-structured tax system. Europe, by contrast, did not take its first steps toward political modernization until the fifteenth century.
But early development also had disadvantages. Whereas European merchants were able to accumulate political influence before the formation of centralized states, the Chinese regime’s consolidated power enabled it to nip such developments in the bud. That is why capitalism could not emerge in ancient China, despite its relatively modern state institutions. The result was the so-called “Great Divergence,” as Western states industrialized first and overtook China.
Following unification, China’s huge population and efficient bureaucracy allowed successive Chinese empires to experience long periods of prosperity and achieve remarkable advances in science, technology, and culture. But China also sealed itself off from the world for centuries, leading to its gradual decline.
China’s experience over the past 40 years shows that economic growth goes hand in hand with integration into the global economy. That process is still ongoing, and the road ahead is long, as China ranks 80th in trade freedom and 104th in economic globalization in the EQx index. But China’s rich institutional legacy is conducive to strong economic growth, as is China’s cultural emphasis, traceable to Confucius, on education and savings.
Many countries today struggle to stimulate growth, owing to bureaucratic incompetence, regulatory capture, and rampant corruption. But China’s trajectory highlights the power of a capable, dynamic political elite to drive prosperity – as well as the danger of downplaying the crucial economic role of a strong, efficient state.
Zhang Jun, Dean of the School of Economics at Fudan University, is Director of the China Center for Economic Studies, a Shanghai-based think tank.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2022.
www.project-syndicate.org
It eats bamboo and is home in the mountains of Sichuan in southwestern China. But apart from its name, the red panda, or lesser panda (as it is called in Chinese), is not at all related to the more famous giant panda. The red panda is also endangered. Only 10,000 are believed to exist in the wild. #cop15 #biodiversity
From one extreme to the other: A week ago, millions of people were still locked in their homes because somewhere in their neighborhoods a suspected covid case might exist. Now the opening cannot happen fast enough. China plans to take a crash course in living with the virus.
The state media outdo each other in praising the new policy, ignoring the fact that just last week they propagated zero-Covid strategy as the only true way forward. It is downright staggering how brazenly state news agency Xinhua declares the fight against the pandemic to be over and sells China’s new strategy as a unique approach and great success. Not a word about the utterly excessive lockdowns in Shanghai last spring, which paralyzed large parts of the economy. Nor a word about the apartment building fire in October in Urumqi, where people burned to death in their homes because of the Covid lockdowns. As if Xi Jinping’s personally decreed zero-Covid had never existed.
Now regulations are being lifted so crudely that health experts already sound the alarm. Unlike in the rest of the world, where high vaccination rates and previous infections have led to a basic level of immunity, China still lacks it. Experts predict millions of deaths in the coming months if the virus sweeps the country too quickly. Many emergency rooms in Beijing and other cities are already overcrowded before the wave even starts to build up, says Fabian Kretschmer. Curiously, this is not reflected in the official numbers. In the statistics, the number of new infections has been declining for days.
Building trust – this seems to be something that Xi Jinping continues to be unfamiliar with.
The end of zero-Covid in Beijing (China.Table reported) is clearly noticeable in the cityscape: All stores have reopened, and the lockdown barriers have practically all vanished. Meanwhile, signs already point to a sharp rise in infection numbers – just as experts feared after the contact restrictions were lifted.
At noon, the queue in front of the Covid clinic of Beijing’s Chaoyang Hospital already reaches to the next street corner: Wrapped in down jackets and face masks, dozens of people are waiting to be let in. And a crowd has also formed outside the pharmacy across the street. Most of them, however, will have to go back home disappointed: self-tests and fever-reducing medication are sold out.
After more than two and a half years of close monitoring and contact prevention, the country is now trying to “live with the virus”. Whereas the government had previously kept the risk of infection to a minimum with mandatory quarantine, mass testing and lockdowns, every citizen of the country is now largely responsible for their own health.
The State media publish educational videos: Instructions range from correct self-testing to the proper behavior in case of infection. One lesson many Beijingers have clearly not yet learned is obvious: Far too many people march to the hospital even at the first suspicion of a Covid infection, and hospitals are now reaching their limits.
However, society urgently needs to learn a smart way of dealing with the virus. China’s first nationwide Covid wave since the beginning of the pandemic is rolling even faster than expected. For example, in an unusually critical article, the online magazine Yicai reports about a Beijing hospital where the emergency room is already overcrowded: “Many of the patients are tested positive,” a nurse is quoted as saying.
And the former Vice Director of the National Health Office, Feng Zijian, even expects that up to 60 percent of China’s 1.4 billion citizens could become infected during the winter wave – and up to 90 percent by the time the situation stabilizes again. Depending on the speed of the vaccination campaign and thus the mortality rate, several million deaths could be expected. By comparison, official numbers show that only slightly more than 5,000 people have died from the virus in China, most of them in 2020.
While Omicron is clearly spreading, the officially reported case numbers have been falling for several days. Nationwide, the health authority reported only slightly more than 21,000 reported cases on Thursday, and in Beijing even less than 3,400. Trust in these numbers is therefore sinking.
Even without deliberate manipulation, these numbers would no longer reflect the actual incidence of infection, just as they do in Germany: Since mandatory testing has been lifted, many Chinese recover at home without reporting their infection. But there is also reason to suspect that the health authorities forge the numbers. Many Beijingers who got tested in the past few days have not received any results.
Many users on social media are also aware of how unrealistic the daily reported numbers are. A resident of the city of Baoding in the Beijing region wrote on the online platform Weibo: “Yesterday there were nine cases in Baoding? In my family circle alone, there are already 12.” Fabian Kretschmer
China’s state and party leader Xi Jinping has embarked on a three-day visit to Saudi Arabia – and launched his biggest diplomatic campaign in the Arab world to date. After his arrival on Wednesday, Xi met with Saudi Crown Prince and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman on Thursday. On Friday, Xi will also attend the Gulf Cooperation Council summit with six states in the region.
It is a strategic visit: In times of the Ukraine war and a global energy crisis, energy supplies are obviously high on the agenda. Xi will also try to gain geopolitical capital out of the current tensions between Saudi Arabia and the United States. And new topics such as digitalization, artificial intelligence, and security and military technology have also been added.
As the Saudi Arabian news agency SPA reports, a total of 34 agreements were signed on Wednesday alone. 20 more agreements worth the equivalent of 28 billion euros will follow. They include
Experts say the oil deal has brought the two countries closer together. “Saudi Arabia has become China’s largest trading partner in the Middle East and North Africa, and China’s top global supplier of crude oil,” Naser al-Tamimi, an Arabia expert at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies ISPI, told China.Table. “China’s oil imports from Gulf countries jumped this year to over four million barrels per day,” al-Tamimi said. This accounts for more than 42 percent of China’s total crude oil imports.
China also wants to tie its Belt and Road Initiative closer to the region. In turn, Saudi Arabia sees the new economic power as a welcome alternative to the United States. According to Al-Tamimi, China’s political influence will increase as a result. “The Gulf states see China as a superpower in the making and expect it to remain a top destination for their energy exports for the foreseeable future, making it vital to cultivate strategic relations with the rising power,” Al-Tamimi explains.
Saudi Arabia is a traditional close ally of the United States. But the relationship between Riyadh and Washington has recently taken a severe hit – and Xi wants to step into the emerging gap. First, US President Joe Biden blamed the Saudi crown prince for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And now the oil-exporting countries led by Riyadh and Moscow have also throttled their oil production – despite a massive international price surge.
Biden attempted to calm tensions with a visit to Jeddah in July, but the US president was not granted more than a chummy fist bump with MBS, as Prince Mohammed bin Salman is also called. Biden must have realized that, too, when he said, “We will not walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia or Iran.”
But that is precisely what Xi is now trying to do. The timing of Xi’s visit to Riyadh shows how important it is: He is under massive pressure back home, and last week protests broke out across the country against his strict zero-Covid policy (China.Table reported).
He is welcomed with open arms in Riyadh. On Wednesday, the purple carpet was rolled out for the Chinese leader at the airport. On Thursday, Crown Prince bin Salman received him in the magnificent royal residence, the Palace of Yamamah.
Gedaliah Afterman is not surprised by this. “When countries in the Gulf think of their future, they see China as a key partner,” the Asia director at the Abba Eban Institute for International Diplomacy in Israel told China.Table. “Unlike any other player, China is uniquely equipped to serve as a long-term partner, buying their oil, building their cities including providing the technology to make them smart.” At the same time, MBS will try to use his good connection with Beijing to establish Saudi Arabia as an international player. Saudi Arabia is also using the occasion to send a message to the United States that […] Riyadh also has other options
The Saudi royal family regards China as a more agreeable partner than Western states anyway, because Xi will not insist on compliance with human rights, nor will he call for a fight against corruption and nepotism.
In the Khashoggi murder case, Beijing also accepts the official explanation that the murder was the result of a rogue operation. In return, not a single word of criticism has come from Saudi Arabia about China’s treatment of the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.
But Riyadh will not completely turn away from Washington in favor of Beijing. “Although GCC states seek economic and diplomatic benefits from a greater Chinese role in the Middle East, they know they must balance such long-term benefits against the more immediate imperative not to alienate the United States,” Naser al-Tamimi says.
After all, there is one major problem between China and Saudi Arabia: their relations with Iran. While China is also increasingly courting the regime in Tehran, Saudi Arabia struggles for regional supremacy and harbors religious and ideological enmity. And here the currently so unpopular United States guarantees military protection to the Saudi royal family. Riyadh will not want to forgo this.
When Western economists and historians analyze China’s spectacular economic transformation over the past four decades, they tend to emphasize the productivity boom unleashed by the start of market-oriented reforms in 1978. But the role of the country’s political elite as a key driver of its emergence as an economic power has remained under-examined.
This is partly because it is hard to measure the contribution of political elites to a country’s economic development. Fortunately, a new study by Tomas Casas i Klett and Guido Cozzi from the University of St. Gallen provides a useful conceptual framework for understanding the Chinese economic model. Casas and Cozzi developed the annual Elite Quality Index (EQx), which measures and ranks the value that national elites create for a country.
Much like other East Asian countries, China has relied on strong state capacity and an effective bureaucracy to foster and coordinate economic development. In the most recent Elite Quality Index, the country ranks 27th (out of 151), the highest score among upper-middle-income economies. In the study’s political power index, which measures national elites’ influence over business regulation, rule-making, and labor law, China ranked 60th.
While Chinese elites maintain a tight grip on state institutions, the index clearly recognizes their enormous contribution to China’s economic development. In terms of elites’ role in income redistribution and in public security and welfare, China ranked sixth and ninth, respectively. While the report finds that elites create value for Chinese society in the political domain, China ranked 32nd in elites’ contribution to markets and economic growth.
Mainstream economic theory prevalent in the West cannot explain China’s unique growth model. China’s combination of markets and industrial policy has confounded Western observers, who overemphasize the state’s extractive tendencies and downplay its nourishing role. But the report highlights the Chinese state’s function as a driver of economic dynamism and success. In terms of “coalition dominance,” which refers to the power of insiders in the country’s political economy, China ranked 138th. At the same time, it ranked sixth in “creative destruction,” suggesting that its elite-oriented system is far better at adapting to changing external conditions than some Western economists believe.
The Schumpeterian nature of China’s political elite may baffle foreign observers. But it will not come as a surprise to people who are well-versed in the country’s long history and familiar with how the Chinese state was first formed several millennia ago. As the late Chinese-American historian Ray Huang observed, China is a politically precocious country that completed the process of becoming a modern state 1,500 years before Europe did.
Huang, along with political scientist Francis Fukuyama, was struck by the exceptionally short reigns of feudal Chinese rulers. The tiny warring kingdoms that preceded Imperial China were incapable of resisting frequent invasions from northern nomads or managing natural disasters, creating a political need for a unified government. This came in the form of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who ruled China between 221 and 210 BC, and whose political project was to establish a powerful centralized regime.
Qin’s China was, in many respects, the antecedent to the modern state, as defined by sociologist Max Weber, with a vast, centralized bureaucracy and a well-structured tax system. Europe, by contrast, did not take its first steps toward political modernization until the fifteenth century.
But early development also had disadvantages. Whereas European merchants were able to accumulate political influence before the formation of centralized states, the Chinese regime’s consolidated power enabled it to nip such developments in the bud. That is why capitalism could not emerge in ancient China, despite its relatively modern state institutions. The result was the so-called “Great Divergence,” as Western states industrialized first and overtook China.
Following unification, China’s huge population and efficient bureaucracy allowed successive Chinese empires to experience long periods of prosperity and achieve remarkable advances in science, technology, and culture. But China also sealed itself off from the world for centuries, leading to its gradual decline.
China’s experience over the past 40 years shows that economic growth goes hand in hand with integration into the global economy. That process is still ongoing, and the road ahead is long, as China ranks 80th in trade freedom and 104th in economic globalization in the EQx index. But China’s rich institutional legacy is conducive to strong economic growth, as is China’s cultural emphasis, traceable to Confucius, on education and savings.
Many countries today struggle to stimulate growth, owing to bureaucratic incompetence, regulatory capture, and rampant corruption. But China’s trajectory highlights the power of a capable, dynamic political elite to drive prosperity – as well as the danger of downplaying the crucial economic role of a strong, efficient state.
Zhang Jun, Dean of the School of Economics at Fudan University, is Director of the China Center for Economic Studies, a Shanghai-based think tank.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2022.
www.project-syndicate.org
It eats bamboo and is home in the mountains of Sichuan in southwestern China. But apart from its name, the red panda, or lesser panda (as it is called in Chinese), is not at all related to the more famous giant panda. The red panda is also endangered. Only 10,000 are believed to exist in the wild. #cop15 #biodiversity
