Finally, during the pandemic, he [That'd be Xi Jinging, of course] seems to have alienated vast reaches of the Chinese public, in ways that are only beginning to be truly visible.

For a time, China’s approach to covid was highly popular.

In 2020, after failing to contain and cover up the initial outbreak, in Wuhan, the Party adopted a “zero-covid” strategy, of closed borders, mass testing, and strict quarantine procedures, which allowed much of China to resume normal life, even as schools and offices in the U.S. struggled to maintain basic operations.

Tech companies and the government collaborated to assemble huge tranches of medical and location data to assign everyone a health code—green, yellow, or red.

Lockdowns were finite; volunteers went to work for the ubiquitous testing-and-enforcement crews, in white Tyvek suits that earned them the affectionate nickname dabai (“big whites”).

But, over time, the zero-covid strategy combined with the politics of fear to produce extraordinary suffering. Local apparatchiks, fearing punishment for even tiny outbreaks, became rigid and unresponsive.

In Shanghai, most of the twenty-five million residents were confined to their homes for two months, even as food and medicine ran low. A woman whose father was locked down so long that he nearly ran out of heart medication told me, “We don’t have to imagine a bleak future with robots controlling us. We’ve lived that life already.” After citizens took to their balconies to sing or to demand supplies, a video circulated of a drone hovering above a compound in Shanghai, broadcasting a dystopian directive: “Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window to sing.”

Some patients with problems other than covid were turned away from hospitals. Chen Shunping, a retired violinist with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, was vomiting from acute pancreatitis before he jumped from his apartment window. In a note left for his wife, he wrote, “I couldn’t stand the pain.” In perhaps the greatest provocation, parents who tested positive were separated from their babies and toddlers, who were taken to state wards.

Last November, demonstrations erupted in Shanghai and other cities; protesters held up blank sheets of paper to symbolize all they could not say. Dozens were detained, and an unknown number remain in custody. Kamile Wayit, a Uyghur college student who shared video of the protests online, was sentenced to three years in prison for “promoting extremism.” When the zero-covid policy was finally abandoned, the following month ...

... , the change was so abrupt that at least a million people died in a matter of weeks, according to independent analyses; the state stopped publishing cremation statistics.