China should be celebrating this Lunar New Year. Firecrackers, fireworks and large family banquets should have brought together the large Chinese family under the sign of happiness and reconciliation. In fact, these days, hundreds of millions of Chinese criss-cross the country to return to their villages of origin. However, the atmosphere is not one of grandiose festivities.
The whole country is emerging from three years of Covid epidemic, marked by the very repressive zero Covid policy. “The Chinese are groggy and in a terrible mental state, assures a European diplomat who has lived for the past four winters in the Chinese health turmoil. They need to breathe and live in freedom, but it is a completely devastated and anxiolytic generation that will emerge from this national trauma. »
In a Taoist temple nestled on the sacred mountain of Taishan in Zhejiang province, Wang Qu wants to breathe a little, take a step back and regain strength. “I was recently infected and I’m exhausted, close to depression, he acknowledges, but when I see the living conditions here in the countryside it completely demoralizes me. » And to tell how a line of elderly people wait in front of the temple where the monks offer traditional medicine concoctions supposed to protect them from Covid. “I’m skeptical, adds Wang Qu, but these people have no doctors around and no more hospitals, while others go to a shaman on the other side of the hill to hear the omens of the Lunar Year of the Rabbit which is beginning. » Wang Qu is going to meet her elderly parents in Hangzhou for the holidays. “But I will live next to them so as not to contaminate them. » A remote family reunion in post-Covid times in China.
“My business is at a standstill”
More than a thousand kilometers away, in Wuhan, a “martyrdom city” which first experienced the horrors of strict sanitary confinement, decreed on January 23, 2020 for seven weeks, the population wants to forget and rushes to stations and airports. . “I could talk to you for hours about my current state of mind, confides a Wuhanese refugee in Shanghai where she experienced a second confinement last spring, but I can tell you only one thing: I’m afraid for my children who haven’t been to school for months, my business is at a standstill, and I’m mentally at the edge of the abyss. » She will still have the strength to take a vacation to recover. Like the billion Chinese who have been abruptly released from health restrictions, stunned by the sweeping change in policy that has caused an explosion in Covid cases and an untold death toll.
“No one has escaped it within my entire extended family: parents, cousins, aunts, uncles… they have all been infected since the lifting of “zero Covid” on December 7, explains Amy, a sturdy woman from Chongqing who speaks perfect French, on the phone. But fortunately for us, no one died, unlike the families of some of my friends who saw their elders over 80 die one after the other…”
“A whirlwind of madness”
The chaotic handling of the pandemic has reinforced Amy’s misgivings about China’s authoritarian system. “For three years, the Chinese Communist Party (PCC) never stopped hammering that the virus was deadly to justify zero Covid, confinements, violence, tests, roundups to lock up the infected in inhuman isolation centers… And suddenly the government dropped everything, opening the prison doors without preparing the exit of the prisoners that we were, and there was no medicine: 90% of the Chinese have been contaminated and tens of thousands of dead are burning in the overflowing crematoriums. » She cracks: “And besides, the economy is dead…” Regaining morale will take time.
Yang, a tour guide at the beautiful site of Guilin in Guangxi Autonomous Province, is also very worried. “My tormented mind can’t escape this whirlwind of madness that lasted three years, confesses on encrypted messaging this young Chinese who was contaminated at the beginning of the month. Especially since I haven’t worked a single day during this whole period, nothing, nothing, not a yuan earned… and I don’t know yet how I’m going to bounce back because people have also lost a lot of money. » Yang is very angry with the government: “The Chinese Communist Party still works the same way, it lies, hides and deceives people for its own benefit, says it protects us but does nothing to save us when everything collapses. »
“Who decided to end zero Covid? »
The hundreds of thousands of messages posted by Chinese social networks in recent weeks reflect the deep doubts of part of public opinion about the credibility of the regime and its leader Xi Jinping. Questions arise: “Who is to be blamed? », “Are senior politicians and experts credible? », “Is the virus really harmless when hospitals are overflowing with sick people and crematoriums are overflowing? » And finally : “Who decided to end zero Covid? » So many thinly veiled interpellations addressed to the government. The Chinese are lost, many have the bitter feeling of having been manipulated.
“The 180° turn of the Covid zero has caused a new crisis to which the government will have to give explanations”, insists sinologist Minxin Pei, from Claremont McKenna University (California). In November 2022, the country was rocked by a wave of angry demonstrations against health measures, some even demanding the departure of Xi Jinping. A protest immediately repressed: dozens of young people are still imprisoned and cut off from the outside world.
“The party managed to carry out its Covid control campaign for three years, but failed to make its exit strategy understood,” stresses sinologist Zhuoran Li, professor at Johns-Hopkins University in the United States. Beijing has been overtaken by its own vertical, just-in-time command system for years. A real failure. “Xi Jinping will now have to save the economy, contain infections and restore his image,” says Minxin Pei. The trauma will not fade overnight.
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The battle of numbers
Beijing sticks to its mortality figures of 60,000 deaths in 35 days, after the lifting of its zero Covid policy, and judges the epidemic outbreak over.
On December 19, 2022, the scientific journal Nature yet reported projections of a million deaths in a few months.
British health modeling company Airfinity estimates, as of January 19, that 674,000 Chinese have died of Covid since the beginning of December, and forecasts 36,000 daily deaths in the heart of the Lunar New Year holidays.
480 million Chinese have already traveled before January 19, as part of this gigantic migratory rush which should last until February 15.
