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HONG KONG—As Covid-19 sweeps across China following the end of its strict pandemic controls, sparking a run on fever drugs and swamping hospitals, some people in the country are looking to cast blame.
One clear target has emerged: Those who called for opening in rare nationwide protests last month.
“The winter of 2022 is too cold,” read one post with thousands of likes on
the Chinese social-media platform, calling the protesters the “dregs of society.”
“Remember those who banged on the doors and smashed the walls for freedom,” it continued.
China spent close to three years promoting its strict pandemic-control policies as the key to preventing the widespread illness and death that has swept over much of the world. Then the government suddenly dropped many of those restrictions earlier this month in the face of protests, rising infections and a shellshocked economy. On Monday, China said it was ending quarantine for international arrivals, dismantling a travel barrier that had left the country largely cut off from the outside world since early 2020.
The rapid changes have left some citizens bewildered. As overflowing crematoria point to a surge in deaths, some have expressed anger at the swift reversal of the longstanding zero-tolerance approach. Those who called for changes are facing much of the blame, even as those at the top who ordered the changes have remained relatively shielded from criticism.
China dropped many Covid restrictions in the face of protests, rising infections and a slumping economy.
Photo:
Dake Kang/Associated Press
“Those whose livelihoods were unaffected but still wanted to open up so they had the freedom to eat, drink and play—who really thought that after opening up everything would be fine and they can have fun and stroll as they please—are stupid, so stupid it’s not even worth my fury and hatred,” Zhang Yian, an author of books on history in Beijing, wrote on Weibo.
Many countries have had fierce debates over how to contend with the coronavirus. In China, at least until recently, such discussions have been restricted. “Zero Covid” was a signature policy of the country’s leader,
Xi Jinping,
and while grumbling about implementation was tolerated, direct criticism and protest over the fundamental practice was met with censorship and the threat of arrest.
Now Chinese social media has opened up for those who want to vent about how much they prefer the old system, as long as they don’t target the leadership in Beijing.
Zero-Covid was one of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature policies and direct criticism of it met with censorship and the threat of arrest.
Photo:
Ju Peng/Zuma Press
“All of these criticisms are allowed to flow on the internet, but not to the degree of allowing criticism of who decided this, meaning Xi Jinping and the central government,” said Xiao Qiang, a researcher on internet freedom at the University of California, Berkeley. “They give certain room for opinions on both sides, a certain degree of debate and letting the information flow a bit, but there is a clear limit.”
Mr. Zhang, the writer, became one of the most vocal critics of the reopening after his mother, who had late-stage cancer, contracted Covid in a hospital and died on Dec.14. In several posts on Weibo, Mr. Zhang said he believed the coronavirus accelerated his mother’s death and her infection was the result of the hurried change in pandemic restrictions.
“In the eyes of many people, these elderly people should go,” he wrote. “But without the reopening, even in a case as serious as my mother’s, her vital signs would have been stable and she would have had a chance to continue treatment, slow down her illness and prolong her life.”
Mr. Zhang, widely seen as a staunch nationalist, says other countries offer even worse models of pandemic control. He declined an interview request, saying: “I think the death of more than a million people in the U.S. due to Covid-19 is more worthy of U.S. media coverage.”
His writing has found support from readers who also backed the previous policies. They have criticized those protesters who supported ending zero Covid of “lying flat,” or tangping in Mandarin, a slang term for a slacker lifestyle that state media has also used to indicate surrendering to the coronavirus. The phrase has now morphed into tangfei, or “reclining bandits,” to disparage those who wanted the country to open up again.
A worker delivering food at a quarantine hotel in Xiamen, Fujian province.
Photo:
mark r cristino/Shutterstock
A series of deaths among prominent retirees including Ni Zhen, 84 years old, a film scholar and writer, and the dancer Zhao Qing, 87, has added to the anger over opening up, with some online commenters saying those who called for the relaxation of Covid restrictions bear some responsibility.
“I see more of this every day, and people of all ages, not just the elderly,” a person in eastern China’s Zhejiang province wrote on Weibo in response to a post from an actor who said his mother died of Covid. “I suggest the tangfei start praying this doesn’t happen to you now.”
Daily infections in Zhejiang, home to e-commerce giant
, topped one million and were likely to plateau at around two million cases a day by New Year’s Day, a local health official said on Sunday. China’s National Health Commission has stopped issuing daily reports of infections and deaths, which public-health experts said vastly underestimated the toll of the current wave.
The online attacks on people who supported opening up has meant that the protests against lockdown last month, which were widely censored, are now being discussed more widely. Related phrases that had been restricted are reappearing on Weibo. But the posts that use words such as “A4,” a reference to the blank sheets of paper held by demonstrators in a commentary on censorship, are now almost all denunciations of the protests.
“That kind of narrative channels people’s frustrations toward those who were pushing for reopening,” said
Yanzhong Huang,
a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. “There’s a sort of buck-passing strategy.”
Outside Mr. Xi and the rest of the senior Communist Party leadership, the list of potential targets is large, according to Berkeley’s Mr. Xiao. “Everything else can be scapegoats, including local officials, vaccine makers, foreign forces,” he said.
Other targets of online vitriol include Zhang Wenhong, an infectious-disease expert in Shanghai, who has been attacked for saying the peak of infections is near and the outbreak would only last a couple more months—projections seen as overly optimistic by critics of the reopening.
Hu Xijin, the influential former editor of the Communist Party-owned Global Times newspaper, has also come under fire after he switched from singing the praises of the government’s zero-tolerance pandemic policy to urging the country to get behind the loosening of restrictions.
Messrs. Hu and Zhang didn’t respond to requests for comment on Monday.
China has stopped issuing daily reports of infections and deaths.
Photo:
/Associated Press
Mr. Zhang the writer, said on Weibo that he recognized that China couldn’t maintain its Covid fortress forever and acknowledged that the severe restrictions caused hardships, particularly among the working-class people who lost their jobs because of restrictions on movement. He portrayed the anti-lockdown protesters as a privileged class who acted in the interests of their own comfort.
He said that the country should have changed its policy in a more predictable manner, with clear advance preparations such as renewed vaccination campaigns and stockpiling of drugs and other medical supplies that are now hard to find.
“Easing is inevitable, but easing should not be done in this way,” he wrote. “If the epidemic is compared to war, this is not a retreat, this is a flight.”
Write to Austin Ramzy at austin.ramzy@wsj.com
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