Sébastien Le Belzic (in Beijing), edited by Alexis Rey-Millet
modified to
5:06 p.m., May 13, 2022
A little phrase that does not pass for Beijing. On Tuesday, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) delivered a rare criticism of Chinese power. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has indeed asserted that the “zero Covid” policy stubbornly defended by Beijing was not sustainable. The “zero Covid” being firmly defended by the highest communist leaders, in particular President Xi Jinping, the censors quickly intervened to counter the dissemination of these remarks. On the Weibo microblogging site, the hashtags #Tedros and #OMS no longer yield any results on Wednesday.
As for users of the ultra-popular social network WeChat, they cannot republish or transfer an article from the official UN account, published on the platform and which mentions the WHO boss’s criticisms. For its part, the press remains silent.
“We are really prisoners”
The statement by the head of the WHO had the effect of a bomb in China, where part of the population, exasperated and hungry by repeated confinements, regularly comes to blows with the police. For several weeks, screening tests have become daily for the 23 million inhabitants of the city of Beijing, while Shanghai has been confined for more than 40 days. “We are really prisoners of this place”, confided already in April on Europe 1, Matthieu Laurent, an expatriate confined to Shanghai with his young daughter and his wife about to give birth. And to add: “We say to ourselves: ‘Let’s get the hell out of here as quickly as possible.'”
In a China where the restrictions have provoked scenes of revolts, while penalizing supplies and weighing heavily on the economy, the government persists and signs. “We hope that those concerned can take an objective view of our epidemic prevention policy, learn more about the facts, and refrain from making irresponsible remarks,” he said in response to the complaint. ‘WHO Zhao Liijan, spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
For his part, the former editor of the nationalist tabloid GlobalTimes, Hu Xijin, very influential on the internet, considered the criticism of the WHO inappropriate. “If they say the Chinese method is not sustainable, they should come up with one that is more effective and sustainable. But they don’t give any!”, He wrote to his 24 million Weibo subscribers. “WHO will not take any responsibility if China relaxes its health policy and a lot of people die.”
A risky challenge?
According to official figures from Beijing, the country has deplored since the start of the pandemic in Wuhan just over 5,200 deaths from the coronavirus. A number of victims which could become much more important according to a Chinese study published Tuesday in the famous review Nature.
According to Fudan University in Shanghai, abandoning the “zero Covid” policy could lead to the death of at least 1.6 million people due to the country’s low vaccination rate. By way of comparison, France has so far recorded 147,000 deaths from Covid-19.