China's reopening chaos: What has happened to the Chinese Communist Party’s organizational and planning capabilities of which its leaders are so proud and keep reminding the world?

Lack of direction and coordination may have something to do with the uncompleted political cycle of leadership changes.

Thought of the Day on China

Wang Xiangwei

What has happened to the Chinese Communist Party’s organizational and planning capabilities of which its leaders are so proud and keep reminding the world?

That is one of the most frequently asked questions I have recently received from some overseas investors who have years of experiences of doing business and dealing with the Chinese bureaucracy. They have been shocked and dismayed about chaos and confusion unfolding across the country following China’s sudden 180-degree turn on ending the zero-Covid policies at the beginning of this month.

Being the last major economy to reopen, China has had nearly three years of preparing for pandemic controls to be lifted and learning from other countries.

But what has transpired over the past 20 days have shown a woeful lack of planning, organization, coordination, and communication on the part of the government.

According to witness accounts and reports and videos on social media, hospitals are swamped, the death toll is soaring among the elderly, fever medicine is in short supply and morgues are overwhelmed with bodies.

All these harrowing experiences seem to belie the party’s organizational and planning capabilities.

Indeed, China is known for its forward planning and it seems to have a plan for almost everything from economic to social to cultural developments. The five-year plans are the most prominent examples. It has a proven record to fulfil most targets and goals

In particular, the Chinese leadership’s philosophy on risk management has always been grounded in the thinking that the party should always maintain crisis awareness and prepare for the worst-case scenario.

Since President Xi Jinping came to power late 2012, he has constantly exhorted officials to foresee various risks and challenges, and make contingency plans for the unforeseen “black swans” and obvious but ignored “grey rhinos”.

One of Xi’s signature phrases is “to adhere to bottom line thinking” which means preparing for the worst-case scenario.

Then the obvious question is: why China is so woefully underprepared this time?

The consensus view is that Beijing was forced to reopen ahead of schedule because of unprecedented mass protests late November.

Until the sudden reopening, many analysts including this writer believed that the Chinese government intended a gradual approach of relaxing its Covid controls, known as “taking small steps forward without pause” to ensure China’s most important political cycle involving its twice in a decade leadership changes go off without a hitch.

At the party’s 20th congress in October, Xi secured his third term as the party chief and packed the new leadership line with his allies with ease. But the political cycle will continue until March when China’s legislature National People’s Congress confirms Xi as the state president and approves formation of a new cabinet.

But the protests are just the trigger. The underlying issue is that China’s leaders have finally comprehended the magnitude of the devastating impact of the zero-Covid policies on the economy.

Several influential businessmen and officials are believed to have an important role in convincing the Chinese leadership to reopen the economy more quickly.

According to my sources, Huang Kunming, the new party secretary of Guangdong, is believed to have made a personal appeal to Xi about the urgency of moving away from the zero-Covid policies. Huang, China’s propaganda minister until October, is one of Xi’s closest allies, and Guangdong is one of China’s major economic powerhouses, contributing about one quarter of China’s total exports.

Terry Gou, founder of Apple supplier Foxconn which employs hundreds of thousands of workers in assembly plants in China, also reportedly wrote a letter to the Chinese leadership and argued that the country’s zero-Covid policies could threaten the country’s position in the global supply chain. Guo’s office reportedly denied he wrote the letter.

Still, all these do not explain why China does not have an exit plan from the Covid, which is uncharacteristic of its long-trumpeted governance model.

As seen in other countries, it is imperative to get the most vulnerable groups including the elderly fully vaccinated with booster jabs before re-opening. But China’s efforts in this regard are haphazard and painfully slow as vaccine hesitancy is very strong and widespread among the elderly (for more details, please check out my substack article:

As China is to see a significant spike in Covid cases and death toll, its top leaders must lead by example, taking booster shots publicly to encourage vaccination

).

Moreover, China’s propaganda machine is known for its efficiency and fulsome efforts to prepare the Chinese public to welcome and embrace the party’s new policies.

But this time, the propaganda officials have done a terrible job in explaining the sudden U-turn, leaving the ordinary people confused and angry.

The best line they can come up with is that the country’s draconian coronavirus suppression measures which basically isolated itself from the rest of the world over the past three years had won the population of 1.4 billion valuable life-saving time. The latest Omicron variants may be highly contagious but the symptoms they caused are mild just like flu. But until last month, the official media and prominent epidemiologists still warned the virus was serious and deadly in the official narrative to justify the zero-Covid policies. Moreover, they tried to give impression that the sudden reopening which occurred in the middle of winter when the respiratory viral infections usually peak, was planned and thought out.

Their lack of preparation can be illustrated by an example that until Christmas Eve, China’s National Health Commission continued to release misleading daily updates of new coronavirus infections at ridiculously low figures around 4000 cases a day. In fact, the NHC’s internal meeting estimated nearly 250 million people may have caught Covid-19 by December 21. (For more details, please check out my substack articles:

China’s National Health Commission has finally come to its senses and stopped the release of misleading updates of new Covid infections but it must boost transparency to reassure the public

; https://wangxiangwei.substack.com/p/chinas-daily-coronavirus-updates)

It may take a while to find out exactly what has happened.

But lack of direction and coordination may have something to do with the uncompleted political cycle of leadership changes.

The party’s 20th congress may have finalized officials’ party positions but they have to wait for the NPC confirmations to take over their government posts in the new cabinet.

That has given rise to a peculiar situation in which the incumbent officials who are set to retire in March may want to just go through the motions while their successors can not do anything while waiting for their turns.

All in all, China’s reopening chaos still cannot escape from the doomed cycle whereby relaxation leads to chaos, which, in turn, leads to tighter controls (一放就乱，一管就死)

End.