"Xi Won’t Yield Over Zero-COVID Pressures" By CWP Upcoming Fellow Eyck Freymann
In long-suffering Shanghai, victory seems to have arrived. The city reopened on June 1, with jubilant locals in the streets—even as tens of thousands remain in COVID-19 quarantine. Beijing seems ready to declare victory over its own outbreak soon.
But all is not well for Chinese President Xi Jinping. Although the Beijing and Shanghai outbreaks have been controlled for now, the rapidly spreading omicron variant keeps breaking through the wall of China’s “dynamic zero-COVID” policy, as officials describe it. With several months left before the 20th Party Congress, the economy is cratering, thanks in large part to the uncertainty of constant lockdowns. And top officials such as Premier Li Keqiang are signaling skepticism about the zero-COVID policy. Members of the business and public health communities are voicing dissent to foreign journalists. Chinese-language overseas media are churning with rumors that Xi may not seek a third term. Though the details are hazy, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might be facing a major internal rift.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/08/xi-china-zero-covid-policy-ccp-pressures/ - JUNE 8, 2022, 12:00 PM
By Eyck Freymann, the director of Indo-Pacific at Greenmantle, and Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Eyck Freymann is a doctoral candidate in China Studies at the University of Oxford, where he researches the geopolitics of climate change. He is Director of Indo-Pacific and global pandemic coverage at Greenmantle, a New York-based advisory firm, and a Non-Resident Research Fellow with the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.
In the 2022–23 academic year he will be a joint Fellow at the Arctic Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Columbia-Harvard China & the World Program.
Freymann’s first book, One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard UP 2020), is assigned as required reading in Harvard’s “United States and China” introductory course for undergraduates. He also writes on a range of other current affairs topics, including U.S. politics and foreign policy and COVID-19. Freymann’s writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Economist, and The Atlantic, among others, and he is a reporter and columnist for The Wire China.
Freymann holds two masters degrees in China Studies: the first from Harvard University and the second from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Harvard-UK Henry Scholar. He earned his bachelors degree cum laude with highest honors in East Asian History from Harvard College.
Photo Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/mariohagen-17468991/
