China gets its Covid boost, but we can’t rejoice Business

These seem driven as much by dogma as by the demands of the highly contagious omicron variant; Chinese belief in the country’s innate superiority has risen sharply since the financial crisis, which brought Western economies into disrepute and bolstered China’s faith in its own autocratic systems of governance.

“You were my teacher,” Wang Qishan, a Chinese vice premier, reportedly told Hank Paulson, US Treasury Secretary at the time of the crisis, “but now I’m in my teacher’s domain, and look at your system, Hank. We are no longer sure that we have to learn from you.

This same narrative has heavily influenced Beijing’s approach to Covid, where a relatively insignificant infection and death rate is regularly contrasted with a seemingly chaotic Western response that has seen citizens die in the hundreds of thousands. .

As Europe and the United States sank under repeated waves of the virus, China released images of giant water parties in Wuhan, where zero Covid policies had apparently brought things back to normal.

The boot is now on the other foot, only Beijing cannot admit so much neither to its own people nor to itself.

“China’s remarkable institutional advantages and strong national strength have been fully demonstrated in the fight against the pandemic,” People’s Daily wrote last week without apparent irony as Shanghai residents resigned themselves to the prospect of further imprisonment in their own homes.

China’s vaccines have proven relatively ineffective and, incredibly, almost half of the over-80s have not been fully vaccinated anyway, leaving little choice but to respond with further social distancing measures.

There is a certain justice in China that gets its reward, given its previous and culpable triumphalism as it was at the origins of the pandemic.

Better not celebrate, though. China’s setbacks only make our own return to normalcy even more difficult.

The pandemic may have been overshadowed by events in Ukraine, but its aftermath will be with us for a long time.