29.06.22_Edi_

With a half-sentence, Beijing’s top party secretary Cai Qi had sparked a minor mass panic in China. In an article in the state newspaper Beijing Ribao, the 66-year-old declared that „in the next five years, Beijing will resolutely, unremittingly, do a good job in normalizing pandemic prevention controls“. In plain language, that would mean five more years of lockdowns, mass testing, and closed borders. The many outraged comments on social media channels such as Weibo show that the population no longer simply supports the whole thing – censors were hardly able to keep up with deleting posts, as Fabian Kretschmer reports from Beijing. Even though Cai Qi’s comment has since been changed, the question remains the elephant in the room: Does China really want to isolate itself and its citizens from the rest of the world in the long term with its zero-Covid policy?