China's Covid zero strategy: Xi holds few cards to end historic protests

Beijing says it won't set up gates to block access to Covid-hit compounds anymore

The protests that erupted against China’s Covid-Zero strategy represent one of the most significant challenges to Communist Party rule since the Tiananmen crisis more than 30 years ago. The protests are broad and Xi has few good options to defuse the widely-shared anger, analysts say. A “crackdown is predictable,” like Tiananmen Square in 1989 and Hong Kong in 2019, says Perry Link, a professor at the University of California, Riverside. Xi will “sacrifice all kinds of things in order to stay in control.”

“You’d expect them to have a heavy-handed repressive approach, but that risks creating martyrs, fuelling another wave and giving a rallying cry to the protesters that have already come out,” John Delury, a China expert at Yonsei University in Seoul, told the Financial Times. 

Easing the strict Covid lockdowns, as the protesters want, would also likely cause a spike in illness and death, especially since a large share of elderly Chinese are unvaccinated or not boosted, and those who are had received China’s less-effective vaccine. Xi could end China’s ban on importing foreign mRNA vaccines and focus on inoculating citizens, but “acknowledging such mistakes would undermine the argument for placing so much authority in the hands of one man,” Bloomberg noted.

Chinese authorities eased some anti-virus rules but affirmed their severe “Covid-zero” strategy on Monday. The city government of Beijing announced it would no longer set up gates to block access to apartment compounds where infections are found. 

It made no mention of a deadly fire last week that set off the protests following questions about whether firefighters or victims trying to escape were blocked by locked doors or other anti-virus controls.

The BBC said Chinese police had assaulted one of its journalists covering a protest in the commercial hub of Shanghai and detained him for several hours, drawing criticism from Britain’s government which described his detention as “shocking”. China disputed the account and said the journalist had not identified himself as a reporter.

An analysis showed that searching for major Chinese cities such as Beijing and Shanghai returned results filled with pornographic content or other spam, The Wall Street Journal reported. Stanford Internet Observatory’s Alex Stamos estimated that searching for ‘Beijing’ showed 95 per cent spam results.

Meanwhile, speaking about the possible next moves of the government, Yasheng Huang at MIT suggested that “a combination of easing the zero Covid measures while going hard after a few protesters they consider as leaders” would “buy them some time" while not conceptually disavowing the “zero Covid” concept Xi has held up as superior to the West’s approach.

Apple set to lose 6 million iPhone Pros

Turmoil at Apple’s key manufacturing hub of Zhengzhou is likely to result in a production shortfall of close to 

6 million iPhone Pro units this year, according to a person familiar with assembly operations. The shares slumped in early US trading. The situation remains fluid at the plant and the estimate of lost production could change, sources said. Much will depend on how quickly Foxconn Technology Group, the Taiwanese company that operates the facility, can get people back to assembly lines after violent protests against Covid restrictions. Apple’s shares fell 1.9 per cent in premarket trading.

Foxconn offers $1,800 bonus to keep workers 

Apple partner Foxconn is offering bonuses of as much as $1,800 to existing workers at its Zhengzhou facility, hoping to sustain the staff levels it needs to run the world’s largest iPhone factory. Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry, will top up wages by as much as 13,000 yuan per month in December and January for full-time workers who’d joined at the start of November or earlier, the company said in a notice over the weekend. Zhengzhou — the capital of Henan province known as “iPhone City” — relocated 870 workers to a hub about 230 miles away in a neighbouring province. 

Volkswagen-FAW plant halts production, BMW sees risk

Volkswagen and FAW’s plant in Chengdu, China has halted production for the past week due to rising coronavirus cases, and two of the five production lines at its Changchun plant are on hold, a VW spokesperson said on Monday. The two lines in Changchun have been halted because of a lack of available parts, the spokesperson added. Other plants are stable, but the situation is volatile, they said. Meanwhile, BMW said it expected further Covid-related lockdowns in China as a risk for next year, despite healthy demand there for the carmaker’s fully-electric models and expectations of stable global sales. “In China, lockdowns are currently increasing, not decreasing,” Chief Executive Officer Oliver Zipse said to reporters. agencies