Why China’s Citizens Have Had Enough of Covid Zero

Beijing chanting we don't want lockdowns, we want freedom. If you're thinking to yourself, we've been talking a lot about China on this show lately, you're right, and we're doing it again today because, as is so often the case, what happens there reverberates around the world, and what's happening now is unhappy citizens are doing something you rarely see in China. They are taken to the streets in cities

across the country to protest strict COVID lockdowns. To help sort out why this is happening and what to make of it, I'm joined by Senior Executive editor John lu He's in Beijing and he oversees Bloomberg's China coverage. John Luthi, thanks so much for talking to me today. My pleasure. West. John, you're in Beijing, Can you describe what is happening, why

are people protesting, and what does it look like? So as you'll know, COVID zero has been in place for a long time here a lot of restrictions, a lot of people being locked down in their apartments, so not being able to leave their apartments for extended periods of time. That's obviously causes a lot of frustration. And it really boiled over when there was this fire in a room Chi the capital of Shinjoun that killed at least ten people, and a lot of people online we're saying that that

deathcount was so high because the fire. I just couldn't get to the apartment building because of barriers having been put up because of COVID zero. And so Sunday night last weekend, there were these calls for protests around the country. Here in Beijing, there was sort of a map somebody looked like somebody screen grab Google Maps and then just

wrote on it, you know, protest here. And so I went out there with some of our colleagues and other media other reporters here in Beijing, and at first there was very few people, mostly cops, and then around ten pm, just a woman on the bridge over by the Lama River in central Beijing just held up a piece of white paper which had been sort of the symbol of protests, and all of a sudden just had people started to gather and pretty soon in about half an hour, there

was maybe hundreds. At the peak, there was maybe about a thousand people here in Beijing holding up pieces of paper, channing slogans about wanting to end the COVID restrictions. The cops were out masked, but they generally let people be. It just kept going and go. It went on so long I ended up having to call it a night about one am and just went home. But I think it went well into the morning. And was there anything more than people protesting? Did it it all turned violent?

Was there any confrontation between police and the protesters. There was a little bit of jostling. I would say there wasn't any you know. The police didn't come out and riot gear and try to clear the crowd or anything like that. At about midnight, they did try to ask everybody to leave. They kind of walked around saying go home,

go home, it's late, everybody needs some rest. But after trying that and failing, they just sort of stopped stood, tried to make sure that people weren't in the middle of the street so the traffic could continue, but otherwise let people be. That is obviously change in the last couple of days. The last couple of days Monday night Tuesday night, we've seen a much more robust presence on

the street when it comes to the police. The police are checking people's phones when they come, they're asking people what they're doing. There's much more pronounced attempt to stop people from gathering before the crowd gets too big. John, you said that these protests are in response to China's policy, the COVID zero policy. Can you describe exactly what COVID

zero requires of people? I mean, I think the number one thing to understand about COVID zero is that it literally aims to get to zero, and what zero refers to has changed a little bit right now. Our best understanding is it means zero community spread, so zero infections outside of quarantine. And to get to that, you know, local governments literally have to lock people in their apartments. And what really upset people were local governments essentially chain

using chains to chain doors posed. There have been some instances where local governments have bolted doors shut, and that obviously in a situation where there's a fire in an apartment building, that could be extremely dangerous. And so the shintail fires, I think really set off this what if that was me moment for a lot of people, and you had this really strong reaction across the country because

of that. Of course, these COVID zero lockdowns are also coming amid a lot of other pressures that citizens in China are feeling. The economy has slowed a great deal. People are feeling that it's difficult to afford things. Um, how much of this is also an expression of larger discontents? Yeah, you know, I think a lot of stuff is built up over the years. It's obviously been three years, you know, trying to deal with COVID. This year has been harder

than most. I mean, part of the problem with China is the first year of the pandemic, the government, because of the variant that was going around not being as infectious as Amicron, they were able to get things really under control rather rapidly and to allow life to get back to something very close to normal, and so sort of the populations here didn't have to really deal with lockdowns and the virus all the way until Amicron really started to spread in two and since then, you know,

people haven't been able to travel, businesses have been closed. If you're a small business, person, You've probably lost a lot of money this year, and as a result, people are not spending and that's loft on top of you know, over the last decade or so, the amount of space for the sense for public discourse has shrunk tremendously. If you look at social media and China, it's more sensor

than it's ever been in the past. For instance, I actually signed up for Facebook in China back in the early two thousands, and so it was much more open ten fifteen years ago, and that's sort of shrieking of the space for word discussions really weighed on people as well, and that's something that JJ and Ping has really enforced in the time that he's been in power, a greater control social control over what people can see and what

they can say. You know. Si Jun Ping has made it one of his key priorities is to straight the national security here in China, and when the Chinese government the Party looks at national security, they see foreign influence as a counter to that, as deteriorating that, undermining that, and as such they've really cracked down on social media, the ability of people to communicate, to organize. When I came to China in the early two thousand's there was

much more of robust sort of civil society. There were human rights lawyers, there were people who would defend the poor if they got into trouble with the government. They would defend the farmers, you know, who were saying that their land was being taken away from them by the local governments. And when she came into power, he largely put it into that and the justification was that the

country needed to be unified. The splits of society, the confrontations and society were undermining national security, and he's used that to really tighten the party's grip over how the country's run. One of the things you mentioned a little earlier was that the symbol of the protests has become this blank white sheet of paper. What is the significance of that? So that blank white cheet of paper, it was used quite a lot in Hong Kong during the

protests there in the city. I think it symbolizes the fact that you know, whatever you say, ken it will

be used against you. And so people are not saying anything by saying nothing, expressing a lot through that, you know, when is notable for its absence, I think is what people are trying to get across, and one of the protesters that we talked to out in Beijing was saying, you know, one of her main gripes was that the fire and shin jab that killed at least ten people, there were no Chinese media reports about it, but that that happened just a few weeks after we had the

stampede and Soul during that Halloween weekend, and there were lots and lots of media reports in China about that stampede. Is she was just really upset about how that contrast between you know, when something bad happens overseas, there's lots of coverage of it here in China, but then when something like this happens here in China, the citizens don't know about it. It seems like it's being covered up, and so that actually upset a lot of people as well.

What else did people tell you when you were speaking

to them about why they were protesting. One of the things that kept coming up was just the amount of testing and the restrictions, and people just being tired of it, and people feeling like they didn't understand why the rest of the world seems to be moving on but the China could not and you know, part of this and some people raise this as you know, we have the World Cup going on at the moment, and if you turn on the World Cup, you can often see crowds

of tens of thousands of people in a stadium, not wearing a mask and seemingly living a very normal, happy life, and that just was such a contrast to the situation we have at the moment here in China where the infections are spreading. They're hitting record numbers and it's resulting in lots of lockdowns and people not being able to go to school, not being able to go to work, stuck at home. It's just this frustration of fatigue that has built up over the years. Are people taking great risks?

Are they in personal danger for going out in publicly protesting when there are so many surveillance methods that can identify them. They are certainly taking a substantial amount of risk to go out and protest. We've had reports in the past couple of days that the police have started calling people who were at the protests and that you know, without explicitly threatening, but you know, implicitly letting them know that they shouldn't go out again, and that they know

who they are. Yes, I mean the ability of the state here to track people being by phones, being by facial recognition cameras, it's very high, and I think that surveillance ability has pros and conins. Obviously, normally Beijing is an extremely safe city. There's very little crime on the streets. People feel very safe as a result of that. But at the same time, if there were protests, if there was something that the populace opposed in terms of government policy,

it can be used to suppress that as well. And so people are taking real risk when they go out. And you know, the crowds are large because protests of this sort are so rare in China that when you get a thousand people out, it stands out. It's substantial, it's unusual. But in the grand scheme of things, Beijing is home to somewhere between million people, so a thousand people out on a street quarter is not that large

a slice of the population. More with John Lou when we come back, John, what are people actually asking the government to do and is the government responding to them? So the government is responding a little bit too. Part of the requests so the request range from on one end, you know, get rid of COVID zero period, so open up. We want to be just like the US or Europe, you know, we want everything to be open, people to

be able to travel. And there are more specific requests, you know, things like don't make me get tested every day, or reopen the schools, or don't allow the local government official in my neighborhood to chain lock my door close because we have one infection in the building. And some of these more detailed, incremental things the government is responding to.

And so, for example, testing requirements in Beijing, they just announced if you're not going out, if you're not going to work, not going to school, you don't have to get tested anymore. They've told all the local governments it is not allowed to use chains or bolts or any sort of that thing to lock people into their apartments or to lock buildings up. That's been clearly forbidden. They have started to signal to the populace that they are

getting ready to roll back to exit COVID zero. We just had this announcement they're gonna make a major push to get those over eighty vaccinated. That's been a big roadblock. It's only those over eighty have gotten a booster, so a third shot, and so obviously that's the population that would be most at risk if there was an opening, and so getting them vaccinated will go a long way

and paving the way to exiting COVID zero. And you've had government officials come out and talk about how they know how badly people are feeling the pain of COVID zero. They're trying to do what they can to make it better, So trying to take a more soft approach to these requests. But at the same time you do also have, I guess, in addition to the carrot, you have the stick, which is, you know, the cops are out in force on the

streets at night, just in case there are protests. We had the top Communist Party Commission for Legal Affairs over a night saying that they are going to take strong measures against anyone who wants to cause disruption or to undermine the state. And so that obviously is an implicit

threat to anyone who's thinking of protesting more. And so it's a nuanced approach that's both carrot and stick, and I guess that in some ways illustrates the problem that the Chinese government has, which is, on the one hand wanting to seem responsive and wanting to quell protests, but on any other hand, not seeming like they're giving into

protests that they see as illegitimate. That's why I think the government does not want to make it seem like these protesters got out on the street and then we changed. Because of that, I think one concern is obviously prestige and what it makes the government look like. But I think the other concern is whether or not it feels more protests. If people think, you know, if I go out of the street, I get something immediately, it could

encourage more people to go out in the street. But if you look back over the last decade or so, protests have largely resulted in the government changing the way they do things. So we saw that when it came to pollution. Pollution, and it was a huge problem. I think you'll remember stories about how bad the pollution in maas you was. It was so bad that they had to cancel flights, for example, and people protested, they got really upset, and the government then came in and started

to slowly and surely change things. And now it is much better here in China in terms of pollution, and so at a local level. We've see that as well, where there have been disputes about land or other things, the government will slowly start to change. I think that adaptability is something that has become a hallmark of the

Communist Party. But I don't think this regime would still be in place that would have been able to oversee such miraculous economic growth over the last couple of decades if it wasn't able to change and adjust the way it does things to better fit the situation of what people are asking for. One of the other problems of the COVID zero policy seems to be that despite it, cases are still rising, and if they then open up the country and loosen these restrictions very quickly, you could

see an enormous rise in a number of cases. So that is the real danger, right. There's, obviously, from the protesters perspective, a real desire from people who, to be fair, are mostly young, healthy and not in the high risk population, who want the economy reopened because they need to work, they need to earn money, they need to pay their mortgage.

But you have this other population that is older, that has maybe underlying conditions that are really at risk, and that you know, I think, honestly are quite fearful of what a reopening would bring for them. China has only had five thousand something deaths, and a large part of the reason why that death count has been so low is because of COVID zero and all these harsh lockdowns

having kept infections in check. I think the government has to move though, because with an acron the new sub variants, they are just so transmissible that, you know, the playbook that the government has relied on doesn't really work as effectively as it needs to, and so you could have a situation the worst of both worlds, where you have lockdowns and yet as we've seen, you have lots of

infections across the country. I think the danger here is some sort of messy unwind where the country starts to open, but it's not totally ready. Vaccination haven't gotten quite where they need to be, the number of ICU beds has not been increased to the level they need, and then you see the health care system really start to come under strain, you see death start about you know, then I think that would be real trouble for the government here.

My conversation with John lou continues after the break John. We've seen not just protests, but in a few instances protesters actually calling for GJ and ping himself to step down. And that's a whole different level of protest. Yeah, I think there is frustration, and I think some of it has been directed as She because he is obviously demand in charge. I think we saw that with the most recent Party Congress. He's definitely got all the lovers of

power in his head. And you know, COVID zero has been something he has defended over and over and again. It's something that he's touted as showing that China is better in terms of its governments in the West. And so I think it's not surprising that the protesters would associate COVID zero with She. I think many people do that. Whether or not that is an actual thing that could happen, whether these protests could actually undermine She's grasp of power,

I think it looks right now extremely unlikely. You know, we've just talked about the Party Congress where he essentially appointed allies to the Standing Committee. He it seems to be well entrenched in power, and when an unprecedented third term setting himself up possibly to rule for life, there does not appear to be a challenger on the horizon, and so it seems unlikely that these protesters will breathe

any serious challenge, So she's grasp of power. That being said, I do think that she sees the need to change the way that COVID is dealt with here in China. You know, he himself has just been to the G twenty. He's been to a pack at the G twenty a pack he was out legally with his mask off. We've had a number of state visitors come to Beijing, the president of Cuba. We have the president of the European Commission about to come here at to Beijing as well.

So I think definitely the leadership and she himself sees the need to reopen. They are trying to do it in a way that avoids that Bessie unwinding that we talked about. How do you see this ultimately playing out in Hong Kong? Of course, before the pandemic there were large and sometimes violent protests which the Chinese government cracked down on quite forcefully. Do you see the possibility that something like that could happen in China itself if the

protests continue. I think if the protesters come out and get a force. The possibility of confrontation is high. I think that the likelihood that we will get more protests and large numbers is relatively low. I think it's low because the police are out in force. I think it's relatively low because they let people vent. Over the weekend. There were protests in Shahio Saturday, protests elsewhere around the country, including beij on Sunday. Those protesters were largely allowed to

protest and to vent. They actually allowed a lot of videos of people protesting and having confrontations with local authorities over the weekend. They allowed those videos to stay up on social media, and they're reacting by making these tweaks when it comes to testing, when it comes to the way the lockdowns are executed, and so I think that combination suggest that we are unlikely to see large numbers of protesters out on the street again. But something else

could happen. If there's another fire, if there's another tragedy, you could really see a spark that sets people off. And if that does happen, I think the chances for some sort of confrontation between the police and protesters is high because the police have sort of put their foot down to say enough is enough. I think they would feel they have to take a firm approach if they were to get that challenge. And John, I just had

one last question for you. Given how difficult to position the country is in now with cases that are high despite lockdowns, how do you think China eventually does get on top of COVID in a way that other countries around the world have been able to do. I think it's really going to come down to vaccinations, the number of vaccinations for the elderly, especially once they get that to a certain level. I think I see you beds trying to has very few. I see you beds and

its healthcare system. If there were a big uptick in serious cases of COVID, the health care system would come under a lot of trade. And so I think the authorities are going to be trying to get those two metrics up to where they feel more comfortable. And I think there will be a real thing and when they

do reopenate, I think it will be bumpy. I think it's almost inevitable that there will be more deaths just because we have so many people, I mean one point four billion people here in China, a large number of those people are over sixty, over eighty. Many of those people have underlying conditions, and so it's almost inevitable that

there will be more deaths. I think the question will be are they able to control that number it arranged that is not going to to one for some retrench with to return to lockdowns, and to not to spark some social upheaval as a result of it. John Luke, thanks so much for speaking with me today. Thank you pleasure to be here. You can read Bloomberg's extensive coverage of the protesting China at Bloomberg dot com. Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. To daily

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