China’s Zero-COVID Policy and Authoritarian Public Health Control

The People’s Republic of China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has featured entrenched patterns of authoritarian control characterized by top-down governance and harsh local implementation, secrecy around scientific data, rigid adherence to policy protocols that have jeopardized vulnerable communities, and pervasive censorship and criminalization of criticism. The Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has repeatedly touted the zero-COVID policy as a Party success story. At the 20th National Party Congress in October 2022, Xi described it as the “people’s war to stop the spread of the virus,” and signaled its continuation.

Implementation of the zero-COVID policy has exposed planning and emergency management shortcomings and human rights violations in locations under full and partial lockdown, such as Shanghai, Jilin and Xi’an, and more recently in Lhasa and in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. News and social media highlighted food shortages, fatalities related to hospitals unwilling or unable to admit patients with urgent conditions, and limited access to medical care for vulnerable populations. Coercive isolation and quarantine controls to prevent community transmission have included taping up entrances and erecting fences to prevent residents from leaving their homes and forcing both COVID-positive and -negative residents to transfer to makeshift quarantine facilities. Cases of deaths in connection to these rigid control measures have been reported in China, many of which could have been prevented.

This hearing will feature the analysis of China experts in public health, information control, and authoritarian politics to examine the zero-COVID policy and its implementation, and to pay tribute to Chinese citizens who have risked their freedom to criticize it.

The hearing can be viewed via the CECC’s YouTube Channel.