China Set To Ease Zero-COVID Policies Following Weeks of Mass Protests

Chinese authorities are set to ease their zero-COVID policies after weeks of mass protests, a decision that some are describing as a rare show of weakness from Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The expected announcement would result in a reduction in mass testing and comes after sustained anger and frustration over what is considered the toughest curbs in the world. Despite the stringent policies, cases across China remain near record highs.

China's Zero-COVID Policies

However, the expected changes to the policies come as cities have already started to lift their lockdowns in recent days and a top official said that the ability of the virus to cause disease was weakening.

While Chinese health authorities announced the easing of policies in their areas, they did not mention the protests. The demonstrations are the biggest show of civil disobedience in China in the last few years and ranged from relatively peaceful candle-lit vigils in Beijing to more violent street clashes with police in Guangzhou, as per Reuters.

The measures that officials are set to announce could include a reduction in the use of mass testing and regular nucleic acid tests. They could also allow positive cases and close contacts to isolate within the confines of their own homes under certain conditions, said a source familiar with the matter.

The expected changed policies are a sharp turn from previous protocols that have caused the public to be frustrated as entire communities were locked down, sometimes for several weeks, even after only one positive case in the area.

According to Fox News, a former Tiananmen Square protest leader that the cutback in strict policies is a rare show of weakness from Xi. in an interview, a human rights activist and former student leader during the Tiananmen Square protests, Zhou Fengsuo, said that it is very difficult to predict the outcome of the protests.

Rare Show of Weakness

While China's zero-COVID policies have limited the number of deaths to under 6,000 among its roughly 1.4 billion population, citizens have grown weary of the stringent limitations. Xinjiang officials started loosening restrictions over the weekend, focusing on areas with low community spread. They declared that they had basically achieved "societal 'zero-COVID.'"

Despite the expected announcements of policy changes, protests continued to spread across social media platforms, which is seen as a rare lapse from China's censorship network. Several videos surfaced on Twitter and TikTok that showed demonstrations in various cities in China.

Zhou applauded some of the protests that have included anti-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chants as part of what he called a situation where the people were "going through a baptism of political activism." He noted that as a survivor of the horrific Tiananmen massacre, he became emotional when he watched the protests chanting "end CCP" in Shanghai, which was the birthplace of the party.

On Wednesday, China's vice premier, Sun Chunlan, said that the decreasing toxicity of the omicron variant, increasing vaccination rate, and accumulating experience in outbreak control and prevention were factors that prompted the country's pandemic containment to face a new stage and mission amid the pandemic, CNN reported.