As Australia and New Zealand last week pressed ahead with plans to ease border restrictions, Hong Kong this week introduced its toughest measures yet against COVID-19 and authorities in China locked down the aluminum-producing city of Baise, pushing the price of the metal to its highest levels in 14 years.
After two years battling the COVID-19 pandemic, and with the global vaccination campaign against it under way for more than a year, some parts of the world are trying to shrug off the disease, with the UK and the US increasingly reopening their societies, despite the highly contagious, but often less lethal Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2.
China still has the stated policy objective of entirely eradicating the virus — a so-called “zero COVID-19” policy — and Baise is not the first major city to be locked down since December last year.
Hong Kong is also trying to control its own outbreak, and reporting upward of 600 cases a day.
For now, the numbers of detected cases remain small. In Baise, officials reported about 100 positive cases, having tested about 10 percent of its 4 million people.
However, the spread is continuing, leading to growing concern that more people have been infected than official numbers suggest.
The Baise outbreak is seen as particularly difficult to control, with many people traveling in China during the Lunar New Year holiday. The chances of driving numbers in China to zero might be slim, but this is a political and a public health decision, closely tied with the reputation of the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese President Xi Xinping (習近平).
Since the start of the pandemic, China has increased surveillance and legal restrictions, largely under the guise of public health measures, while further restricting civil liberties and freedom of the press in Hong Kong.
The People’s Daily, China’s main party-run newspaper, has said that reopening Hong Kong with case numbers at the current level would spell “disaster,” while Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post ran an editorial suggesting that it was time to begin reopening the economy and living with the virus.
How Beijing chooses to handle the pandemic endgame will have affect its own future and relations with the rest of the world. It must decide whether and how to reopen its borders, admit foreign visitors, and allow its own people to come and go abroad.
As fluctuations in the aluminum market this week have shown, such decisions bring broader global economic implications.
A China that flips lockdown switches off and on across swathes of its economy would be likely to drag on global growth — but so, too, would a China where the pandemic gets out of control.
Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention chief epidemiologist Wu Zunyou (吳尊友) this week told the state-run Global Times that he believed the pandemic was on the wane globally, but that China would not adjust its “dynamic zero-tolerance” policy for now because vaccines alone could not control the virus.
That is substantially different to previously suggested policy on Hong Kong, which was in December reported to have decided to reopen its borders once 80 percent of its population, including vulnerable groups such as the elderly, have received a vaccine.
It is now at that level across the territory, but the elderly population is thought to be lagging far behind.
Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) this week announced a tightening of regulations, including limiting social gatherings to two families and closing venues — leaving the territory largely isolated from China, with 90 percent of flights canceled and stringent quarantine regulations in place.
China is not the only country to be cautious.
Japan on Tuesday reported 159 COVID-19 deaths, a daily record, prompting Tokyo to reintroduce restrictions across much of the nation even as countries such as Britain and the US tolerate significantly higher numbers for weeks on end.
South Korea has recorded fewer than 7,000 COVID-19-related deaths, but daily cases are soaring because of the spread of the highly infectious Omicron variant and it has extended social distancing rules.
Much of the Asia-Pacific region is in the process of reopening, with the twin holdout states of Australia and New Zealand now letting Omicron spread through their largely vaccinated populations before allowing foreign travel in and out later this year.
If China is to adopt that approach, it might require more sophisticated messaging than in the past to show that such an approach is justified and safe.
More than 80 percent of China’s population have been vaccinated, but — depending on the efficacy of its vaccines — there might still be big outbreaks and deaths on a scale that brings further criticism of the Chinese government.
However, that might not be the only factor in the decision. As Beijing has during the Beijing Winter Olympics discovered that the public health measures imposed for COVID-19 have proved a powerful tool for social control, and stifling protest and dissent.
Those in power might not wish to let that go — or let Hong Kong rediscover enthusiasm for a different path.
Peter Apps is a writer on international affairs, globalization, conflict and other issues. He is the founder and executive director of the Project for Study of the 21st Century think tank.
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