New housing starts have fallen by a quarter, and sales of construction machinery have fallen by a third. Long-distance journeys are again nearing the nadir seen two years ago. The slump in services matches the delta shock last year. What looked like a Chinese triumph in mid-2020 has turned into a perpetual nightmare, with ever more malign consequences for the economy.Ĭapital Economics says output contracted by 3.2pc in March under its proxy measure of GDP.
Xi is doomed to persist with zero-Covid at least until his coronation – no longer so certain – at the 20th Party Congress in October. Multiply that by 200 for China and the figures become vertiginous. To relax would imply the sort of fatalities seen in Hong Kong, where deaths reached almost 300 a day in March. Some 40pc of those aged over 60 have not been fully jabbed. The population has no antibodies beyond the modest protection of its defective vaccines, and Xi refuses to let in Western vaccines. The state media has gone beyond the point of no return in weaponising China’s low death toll for propaganda purposes, deeming it a dazzling vindication of his leadership. To persist with “ dynamic zero-Covid” against omicron borders on insanity, but President Xi is trapped by his own triumphalism. I don’t see any path to the exit,” said Roger Garside, a former British diplomat and author of the China Coup: the Great Leap to Freedom. “The great totalitarian lockdown is failing but there is no sign that Xi intends to call it off. Communist Party cyber-censors are struggling to suppress netizen fury akin to the seditious rumblings two years ago over the treatment of Wuhan whistleblower Dr Li Wenliang. The financial capital Shanghai is in week four, and Beijing is again on a knife-edge. Much of Xilin has been a prison for almost seven weeks. Some 43 cities making up two fifths of Chinese GDP are in some form of lockdown at a time when the rest of the world is returning to normal. Xi faces a parallel reverse over Covid, having manoeuvred his country into a disastrous cul de sac. The autocrats overplayed their hand,” said George Magnus from Oxford University’s China Centre. “If the Russia-China statement was supposed to make the world safe for autocracy, it didn’t have a very long shelf-life. Xi ignored the warnings and now faces a grave strategic reverse. He even expects a resurrection of Francis Fukuyama’s Hegelian dream of democratic liberalism as the end-state for mankind, though Fukuyama himself (spooked by Trump) has since lost faith in the End of History. “The West will possess more ‘hegemony’, both of military power and in terms of values and institutions its hard power and soft power will reach new heights.” “The power of the West will grow significantly, Nato will continue to expand, and US influence in the non-Western world will increase,” said Prof Hu.
Prof Hu says the Ukraine war will be a watershed moment, but not in the way that Xi imagined when he issued his Sino-Russia manifesto for the new world order in February, proclaiming “no limits” to China’s bond with Putin’s Russia – the green light for the invasion of Ukraine. The Carter Centre ran an English version. The essay circulated for several days in China before being expunged, a sign of powerful dissent against the pro-Putin policies of President Xi Jinping. Prof Hu heads the Shanghai Public Policy Research Institute, linked to reformers at the State Council. So concluded a sizzlingly cogent essay by Chinese foreign policy guru Hu Wei in March after Russia’s blitzkrieg failed to take Kyiv. Beijing should instead seek a new concordat with Washington, acting as a conciliatory stakeholder power. The country should not be tainted by the retrograde adventurism of a loser. It should ditch Vladimir Putin immediately.
China should abandon all illusions that the West is in terminal decline, or that a new world order of authoritarian regimes is dawning.