Two days before anti-lockdown protests erupted in dozens of Chinese cities in late November, WeChat, China’s do-everything app, deleted an open letter that questioned the wisdom of unyielding COVID-19 measures. In addition to widespread grievances about pandemic strictures, demonstrators would later also rally against the government’s hard-line approach to censorship.
The widely read post, scrubbed a day after being published on November 22, included a rhetorical question about the FIFA World Cup, which had opened in Qatar the weekend before. Comparing jubilant, maskless soccer fans with the millions of Chinese living in lockdown, the author asked whether China was “even on the same planet.”
Longtime China watchers told Newsweek that the tournament may have played some role in pushing the Chinese public’s frustrations over the edge; others said its influence on the country’s pent-up sports fans were overblown. Already after the opening games, however, rumors claimed Chinese broadcasts were blurring out fans to avoid showing maskless faces. The reality, as in most cases, lay somewhere between.
CCTV-5, the sports channel run by China’s state broadcaster, has been reducing the number of close-up crowd shots shown to Chinese audiences, said Mark Dreyer, a Beijing-based sports commentator and author of Sporting Superpower. The station typically puts a 30-second delay on its stadium feed from FIFA, allowing it to edit out many, but not all, close-ups of singing, shouting and screaming fans, he explained in a recent Twitter thread.
The broadcaster, which was still reducing crowd shots in matches on Tuesday, has a history of scrutinizing Western sporting events for “offending material,” said Dreyer, who in a recent interview recounted the controversy of the 2004 Super Bowl, which Americans remember for Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction. In China, officials remember the halftime show for a minute-long voting ad, which flashed a photo of 1989’s “Tank Man” on Tiananmen Square.
“But for this World Cup, COVID is without question a major factor,” Dreyer told Newsweek. For three years, CCTV highlighted mass deaths in the United States and carried Beijing’s narrative that only China’s party-state system had kept the public safe. The same outlet now airs scenes of joyous crowds in Qatar. “It’s like when the curtains get pulled back. It doesn’t look like everyone is dying overseas and they’re not wearing masks, so maybe COVID isn’t all that bad,” he said.
Whether CCTV’s quasi-censorship has any meaningful impact is debatable. “The cat’s out of the bag,” Dreyer said. But it’s symptomatic of Beijing’s need to avert any contradiction to its official line, which until recently had argued that sky-high costs—the anguish of lockdowns, a stuttering economy, and countless deaths unattributable to COVID—were a necessary trade-off to keep the virus at bay.
‘Pageantry of Empire’
Challenges to China‘s zero-COVID rationale were emerging internally, too.
After years of self-imposed isolation, President Xi Jinping has already traveled abroad twice this year. His first trip to Kazakstan and Uzbekistan included in-person meetings with counterparts such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin. But the Chinese leader skipped the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s maskless dinner in Samarkand, in what observers believed was a sign of caution about potential infection.
There was no such inhibition last month, however, when Xi flew to Indonesia for a G20 summit and then attended an APEC gathering in Thailand. The Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, People’s Daily, described a confident Xi who took center stage in Bali, where he scolded Canada’s Justin Trudeau in front of the cameras at a packed gala on the last day.
Days earlier, CCTV showed Chinese audiences images of Xi shaking hands with Joe Biden in their first face-to-face talks as presidents. The two men were the only ones in their respective entourages without face masks. The party’s propaganda organs used Xi’s trip, coming mere weeks after he had secured an unprecedented third term as its leader, to showcase China’s bullish return to world affairs.
“The word that keeps coming to mind is ‘tone-deaf,’” said independent scholar Philip Cunningham, whose Substack newsletter, China Story, carries daily summaries of CCTV’s prime-time news program, Xinwen Lianbo.
Chinese audiences may not have noticed the subtleties of CCTV-5’s World Cup feed if they didn’t know where to look, he said, but few would’ve missed the wall-to-wall coverage of Xi and Peng Liyuan, the first lady, on their travels in November, at a time when some 400 million people across the country were still living in some form of lockdown, according to economists at Nomura.
The Chinese leader’s continued call for zero COVID at home was betrayed by his own example, Cunningham said. If Xi believed the dire warnings China’s state media were broadcasting at home, it wasn’t obvious. “There is no doubt he was confident without a mask in Bali. Everyone in the room had a mask on but Xi Jinping. It was a power symbol.”
Despite the Communist Party’s considerable control over agenda-setting, November’s anti-government protests seemed to belie the argument that the Chinese public would unquestionably toe the party line on Xi’s indefinite hold on power, especially when their livelihoods were at stake. “It’s the pageantry of empire; the new undisputed leader. People know arrogance when they see it,” Cunningham said.
In an interview with Newsweek, Cunningham traced the first signs of public discontent to Peng Lifa, the man who had staged the lone demonstration on Beijing’s Sitong Bridge on the eve of China’s twice-a-decade party congress, where Xi’s rule was extended. Before Peng was arrested, social media images showed him unfurling banners that challenged the president’s signature zero-COVID policy, as well as a slogan that called for “dictator and traitor Xi Jinping” to be overthrown.
Propaganda Whiplash
Before Beijing performed a stunning reversal to begin its formal exit from zero COVID on Wednesday, China’s state media were already testing the waters ahead of what is sure to be an extensive domestic propaganda effort to assuage anxieties about the country’s reopening among large sections of its risk-averse public, particularly in rural areas.
After months of pointing to America’s million-plus death toll as a reason not to “lie flat” and let the virus rip through society, Beijing must now explain why it’s choosing to do the same amid unease about tens of millions of unvaccinated senior citizens and insufficient ICU capacity—problems that remained unaddressed as resources were poured into mass testing and building centralized quarantine facilities.
On November 29, the day after the major unrest had largely settled, a People’s Daily column written by “Zhong Yin,” the central government’s pen name, said the country’s COVID response would be refined to meet the mutating virus.
“This is not relaxing epidemic prevention and control, let alone letting go or ‘lying flat,’” it said, before telling localities to “unswervingly implement the general guideline of ‘dynamic zero COVID,’ resolutely overcome the mentality of paralysis and slackness and the wait-and-see attitude.”
The government’s message was nebulous enough to place much of the burden on local officials to balance outbreaks against the economy and the public’s tolerance for more social restrictions. Whether Beijing was later influenced by the demonstrations or had already planned to move off zero COVID may never be known, but it has started the all-important messaging campaign it hopes will help ease the country out of pandemic isolation.
Tuesday’s People’s Daily carried a page 4 interview with Tong Zhaohui, vice president of Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, who said the Omicron strain was causing mild or no symptoms in 90 percent of positive cases. He went on to explain China’s established treatment protocols for the elderly and those with underlying conditions.
Tong’s expertise was also cited on a CCTV program the previous evening, when a chyron read: “Omicron variant causes less pneumonia or severe disease than influenza.”
China has guided public opinion using “affect and emotion,” said Shu-ting Liu, a policy analyst at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei. In the early days of the pandemic, state media aired live streams of workers constructing field hospitals. “It diverted public opinion while promoting a political achievement in a way that showed the flexible responsiveness of the Chinese Communist Party‘s internal propaganda mechanism.”
Beijing would continue to guide public opinion in line with the party’s interests, she said. “Faced with a wave of public discontent in China, state media have aschewed all mention of the ‘dynamic zero-COVID’ policy to avoid further stimulating public opinion, while replacing it with the softer-sounding ‘optimization of prevention and control measures.’”
China’s news outlets would likely pursue a similar messaging strategy going forward in order to stabilize public opinion, Liu said.
One-Party State Inertia
Experts are puzzled as to why China chose not to use its vast propaganda apparatus to help smooth its exit from zero COVID when it had the chance, before public sentiment boiled over. The answer, many say, can be found in the way Xi elevated the country’s pandemic response into a competition between liberal democracy and one-party rule.
After a successful first year of containment allowed Xi to channel China’s model of governance in its external propaganda and public diplomacy, the momentum generated by the political campaign may have been too difficult to stop, even as the world watched the economic and humanitarian toll of the disastrous lockdown of Shanghai this past spring.
Some argue the social control afforded by zero COVID, through location- and identity-tracking health apps and the like, were simply too good to give up. Xi himself has argued that his policy also considered the political costs of loosening pandemic measures, but he wasn’t able to keep public opinion onside in the end.
Chinese officials haven’t openly admitted that the recent protests moved the needle in Beijing, but the party knows how to concede without making concessions at all.
Over the weekend, a WeChat post by Communist Youth League, a faction led by China’s former leader Hu Jintao, said the government’s prompt communication and improvements had effectively quelled “some opinions” about its COVID policy, before taking issue with recent remarks by Antony Blinken and other U.S. officials who had voiced support for the peaceful protests.
“What do China’s own affairs have to do with America? Or were you the ones who planned these events?” the post asked, before accusing the U.S. of trying to “create chaos” in China.
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