After three years of tightly controlling people’s lives, portraying Covid-19 as a deadly threat and mocking the ” chaos “ reigned in the United States, Chinese propaganda struggled to find the tone at the opening hour. On December 7, China announced the end of its zero Covid policy: no more widespread testing, no more isolation centers for the sick, no more confinement for entire cities. No more daily counts of the number of people infected either, since tests are no longer mandatory. Under these conditions, the virus is spreading at exceptional speed, creating a first wave more like a tsunami in a population that had never experienced Covid-19 until now.
As elsewhere, hospitals are beginning to saturate, and crematoriums are running full. But this new situation is more difficult to defend for a regime which has made the low number of victims in recent years a source of legitimacy, even if this policy was costly for a large part of the population, deprived of their freedom.
One of the symbols of this 180 degree turn in official communication is one of the new popular slogans: “Each person is individually responsible for their own health. » The message first appeared in a letter sent to citizens of Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei, south of Beijing – an area that dropped mandatory PCR testing as early as November 13, before backtracking amid public concern. confused citizens. The same slogan appeared later on 1er December on the Canton Tower, the tallest skyscraper in the capital of Guangdong, one of the first cities in China to relax controls in the face of Covid-19. Since then, it has been taken up everywhere, displayed on banners in yellow sinograms on a red background, and reaffirmed by the authorities, accompanying for example a message advising students to exercise to strengthen their immune system. A few weeks earlier, in mid-November, a series of editorials in the very official People’s Daily, were still calling “resolutely apply the zero Covid political dynamic”.
The State, which interfered even in the intimacy of the Chinese without leaving them the choice, to ” protect them ” of a threat constantly amplified by propaganda, today advises Chinese citizens to fend for themselves. The message gets across badly. “They opened up the country really overnight, without any preparation, without training for the staff, without preparing enough medicine. And without preparing the population to fight against the fear that people have of the virus, after having demonized it for three years, judge Mr. Zhang, a 49-year-old Beijinger whose mother died of Covid-19. A first establishment, saturated, had refused to welcome his mother, who lost precious hours before having access to care. “All that for this: they should have stopped with zero Covid last spring. I don’t see what use these eight months of zero Covid policy have served them”, he sighs.
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