China listened to its citizens when they went on the streets asking for covid lockdowns to be lifted. Now, it has done just that, and covid-19 is back with vengeance, and some streets are deserted because no one wants to come out. Magically the same people who protested are now suffering the impacts of an outbreak which the government had tried to prevent by using its zero-covid policy.
In the Igbo Nation, Diochi, the village palm wine tapper, will tell you that only a fool tells everything he sees on top of the palm tree (people taking showers in village stream, women on labour, etc). China knew that its jab was not effective and was using zero-covid policy to manage the paralysis. But the citizens watched BBC and CNN, and wanted freedom from covid-19, without knowing many here have more effective jabs.
Of course, the government would have been a “fool” by telling the citizens everything: the jab does not work well and if we follow the other countries’ models, many bad things will happen to you. And because we cannot trust the US or Europe to inject our people with their vaccines, the zero-covid strategy is the only option until we can get a better vaccine.
Read CNN: “Empty streets, deserted shopping centers, and residents staying away from one another are the new normal in Beijing – but not because the city, like many Chinese ones before it, is under a “zero-Covid” lockdown. This time, it’s because Beijing has been hit with a significant, and spreading, outbreak – a first for the Chinese capital since the beginning of the pandemic, a week after leaders eased the country’s restrictive Covid policy….Beijing, which prior to the new rules was already experiencing a small-scale outbreak, is now on the front lines of a new reality for China: not since the early days of the pandemic in Wuhan have Chinese cities dealt with an outbreak without hefty control measures in place.”
Leadership does not mean absolutely yielding to the demands of your citizens. Most times, the information asymmetry is the difference because you have information they do not have. The key is having open consultations, and arriving at a workable destination. China cannot yield to the protesters – and then allow them to die. It needs to find a plan to avoid scoring own-goals.
