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The Economist January 1st 2022
staff to prevent contact with other people. An outbreak seeded by someone who en ters China for the games, or disruption of the event by domestically transmitted cas es, would be bad news for a government that prides itself on its covidcontrolling expertise. Xi’an’s travails will put the coun try on even higher alert. For China, there is no clear path to wards a more relaxed approach. Around 250m of its people have still not received two jabs, even though China is now vacci nating children as young as three. No mat ter how long China keeps its borders closed, the virus is not going to disappear. When the country opens up again, whatev er variant is circulating will fi nd its way in, creating what is often called an “exit wave”—an upsurge of cases caused by a re laxation of covidrelated restrictions. Two things may help China manage the transition, says Ben Cowling, an epidemi ologist at the University of Hong Kong. One is its possible development of new vac cines that confer higher levels of immuni ty. If China could revaccinate a large num ber of its people with such drugs, it could reduce the impact of the exit wave. But as yet no such vaccine is on the horizon. Nature itself may also lend a hand. If sarsCoV2 evolves to become less likely to cause serious illness, an exit wave will no longer be so worrying. Omicron shows hints of this property. It causes asymptom atic disease at a greater rate than previous variants. Four independent laboratory studies from around the world have shown that Omicron replicates very poorly in lung tissue compared with older variants, but is much better at doing so in the upper air ways. This suggests a virus that is more transmissible, but less dangerous. Western hospital systems are watching their patient numbers closely, looking for indications that Omicron does indeed pose less of a danger. One promising sign is that the proportion of covid patients ad mitted to hospital in London who need ventilation is lower than at any other time during the pandemic. But a big wave of less severe disease could still be a disaster for China if it does not improve its own vac cines, or abandon its politically motivated opposition to importing better ones. China has been waging what it calls a “people’s war” against the virus. In one sense this has worked. Even accounting for dodgy statistics and state control of infor mation, China has got through the fi rst two years of the pandemic with only a tiny pro portion of the death and disease seen in other countries, and without suff ering longterm economic damage. An exit wave, however big, is unlikely to bring China’s death toll up to levels seen elsewhere. But it might undermine the Communist Party’s eff orts to present itself as uniquely capable of controlling a terrible scourge. n
China
Classified directives
Decoding Xi
NEW YO RK
Even in secret, China’s leaders are wont to be cryptic
I
n november 2022 Xi Jinping will have served for ten years as China’s leader. In the coming months, state media will be fi lled with fawning tributes to his decade in power. Yet they will give little inkling of how he makes decisions or interacts with colleagues. Even more than his predeces sors, Mr Xi operates in the shadows. China has published many volumes of excerpts from his speeches. Only recently, however, has a rare leak of secret versions off ered a glimpse of how Mr Xi communicates be hind the scenes at a time of crisis, and how the bureaucracy responds. The cache comprises four talks, all deli vered in 2014. They relate to the party’s campaign against the “three evil forces” of terrorism, separatism and religious ex tremism in the farwestern region of Xin jiang, where nearly half of the population of 26m people—which is about the size of Australia’s—belongs to a mostly Muslim ethnic group, the Uyghurs. Copies were obtained in 2019 by the New York Times, along with numerous oth er classifi ed documents about Xinjiang. The newspaper described it as “one of the most signifi cant leaks of government pa pers from inside China’s ruling Commu nist Party in decades”. But it did not release the full texts. Only in recent weeks have these emerged. They were submitted by an unknown source to a group in London in vestigating humanrights abuses in Xin
jiang, known as the Uyghur Tribunal. There can be little doubt about their au thenticity. Several Western scholars have testifi ed to their credibility, including Adrian Zenz, a German academic. Mr Zenz has been at the forefront of research into China’s establishment in Xinjiang of a net work of “vocational education training” centres in which perhaps 1m Uyghurs have been held captive, without any legal pro cess, since 2017. Most analysis of the four speeches, which contain a total of about 36,000 Chi nese characters, has focused on what they suggest about Mr Xi’s role in the decision making that led to the building of these camps. They provide no proof that, in 2014, he was thinking about creating a gulag into which so many people would be tossed, of ten for trivial signs of devotion to their faith or culture, such as praying too much. But they did call for much tougher action against the three evil forces. On March 1st 2014 a group of eight Uyghurs armed with knives had stormed a train station in Kunming, a city in the southwest, killing 31 people. State media had compared the shock caused by this bloodshed to the September 11th attacks in America. On May 22nd fi ve Uyghurs drove two suvs into a market in Urumqi, the cap ital of Xinjiang, and detonated explosives, killing 43 people. One of the speeches was delivered in Beijing just six days after the violence in Urumqi at a meeting of leaders to discuss policy on Xinjiang. At the time, state media published only a few quotations from it, but they clearly refl ected Mr Xi’s rage. They quoted him as calling for “walls made of copper and steel” and “nets spread from the earth to the sky” to catch terrorists as if they were “rats in the street”. The classifi ed text of that speech as well as of the three others, which were deli vered by Mr Xi during a tour of Xinjiang in April 2014, contain the outlines of a strat egy for curbing the violence. But they are not an explicit blueprint. In them, Mr Xi did not directly call for the measures that have unfolded since 2017 and have prompt ed America to accuse China of genocide. In addition to the internments, these have in cluded forced sterilisations and the press ing of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs into forced labour. On December 23rd America’s president, Joe Biden, signed into law a ban on all imports from Xinjiang un
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