Is China finally easing its zero Covid strategy?

China’s president Xi Jinping has shaken hands with more world leaders over the last two days than he has met in three years. Xi hasn’t worn a mask throughout the G20 summit: from the moment he and his opera singer wife stepped off the plane in Bali, emerging from a Covid cocoon. When the summit finishes tomorrow, Xi will go straight to Thailand to meet other Asian leaders at the APEC summit. His outgoing deputy Li Keqiang has also been meeting other southeast Asian leaders in Cambodia. For China’s leaders, pressing the flesh has been unthinkable since the pandemic first broke out in China in December 2019. Now the pathological zero Covid approach may be easing up.

 Xi’s appearance at the G20 coincides with some slight opening up for ordinary Chinese too. According to directions issued by the State Council in Beijing last Friday, quarantine has been reduced to eight days for close contacts of positive cases and new arrivals into the country (five days in a central quarantine centre and three at home), down from ten, while contacts of contacts will no longer be traced, tested or quarantined. The guidelines also say that city-wide testing should only happen when there are unexplained chains of infection or over a sustained period of community infection. Emergency services, for example for the elderly and pregnant women, should not be compromised in the name of pandemic control, the National Health Commission vice minister Lei Haichao emphasised (another pregnant woman suffered a miscarriage last week, with the zero Covid strategy a contributing factor).

None of this easing up will sound remotely liberal to the British reader, but considering the Kafkaesque heights of zero Covid implementation that some Chinese have endured (in Shanghai earlier this year, for instance), they are certainly steps in the right direction.

Local officials, responsible for interpreting the centre’s directives for their own regions, have started to turn these directions into action. Shijiazhuang, a city of 11 million, which had previously required residents to have a negative Covid test and a green health code to move around, opened up overnight at the weekend. Schools, supermarkets, restaurants and cinemas are now all fully open, with some testing booths taken down, even though there were almost 3,000 new cases there yesterday. The city's government issued a letter explaining the sudden change of direction, claiming that they are not ‘lying flat’. ‘Each person is ultimately responsible for their own health,’ it said.

From Yanji in the north to Fuzhou in the south, major cities are ending their requirement to regularly test entire cities. In Guangdong, the latest Covid hotspot where cases are still rising, supermarkets have opened at 75 per cent capacity, though cinemas and gyms remain closed.

Yet some local officials remain apprehensive. They know that if anything goes wrong, the central government – and public opinion – will blame them, even if they were just following orders. Already, parents in Shijiazhuang are pulling their kids out of school on health grounds, while shelves in the city have run empty of lianhua qingwen, the Chinese medicine that has been endorsed by the government as something of a Covid miracle drug. After all, people in China have been told for years that Covid is something to fear. And infections across the country continue to rise, with over 20,000 new cases yesterday. Will Beijing’s resolve still last if this wave gets out of control? This next week will be pivotal to watch.

Despite the shift in approach, one thing hasn’t changed: no sustainable reopening of the country can happen without much better vaccine coverage. Only two thirds of those over 80 have been jabbed twice; only 40 per cent have received a booster (or third shot). A new, inhalable vaccine is doing the rounds, developed by CanSino, but the government has still not approved a vaccine that targets the Omicron variant. Only now is Pfizer’s vaccine starting to be brought in, but exclusively for foreign nationals. The optimist might hope that this is the first step to allowing the mRNA vaccine to be used by Chinese citizens too. But any rollout of those pioneering, western-developed jabs, remains some way off.

Zero Covid will not go away overnight, but with Xi back on the world stage and some of the policy’s most ridiculous excesses a thing of the past, the end of the pandemic in China may now be in sight. So long as Beijing swallows its pride and steels its nerves.