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“China-Style” Strategy 1 Step Nearer to Reopening Borders

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Signs are that there are several reasons to be optimistic China may consider to reopen its borders in the not so-distant future, with recent events indicating an underlying acceptance that COVID, even in China, will be something we just live with.

The first indications came recently through the subtle wording that is “dynamic zero-COVID policy”, which began ever-so-quietly emerging in some of Xinhua News Agency’s lesser-visited dungeons. 

Dynamic, of course, means changing, which in turn means zero that isn’t actually zero.

Then this Monday, 28 February, came a post on Weibo by Zeng Guang, who is part of an expert group working with the National Health Commission.

In reference to the strategy of keeping COVID at bay ad nauseam, Zeng said that it cannot “remain unchanged forever”. Referring to the goal of keeping deaths and infections at tolerable levels, he also remarked, “It is the long-term goal of humanity to co-exist with the virus”.

Zeng was previously chief scientist at Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. He also helped engineer China’s response to COVID in its earliest stages, reports WION.

Such moves are small steps for China in more or less confronting the inevitable; get over it, and live with it.

“In the near future, at the right time, the roadmap for Chinese-style co-existence with the virus should be presented”, Zeng said, reported Caixin yesterday, 2 March.

He was also unusually outspoken in his praise of Western countries, for their showing of “commendable courage”, in preserving their ways of life by learning to live with COVID. China, he said, should “observe and learn”.

But Zeng was more guarded in speaking with the Beijing News, saying there is still “no need to open the country’s doors at the peak of the global pandemic”.

Finally, there is the mounting and stratospheric economic cost. The Nanjinger spoke this morning with a high-level source who said there are those in the government who believe that unless things change soon, we may in fact now be only halfway down the hill which leads into the gigantic financial pit of COVID.

Pit, peak or no peak, we can have greater confidence that China’s borders will undoubtedly reopen. But will it be 2 years after COVID emerged or 3?

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