KATSUJI NAKAZAWA, Nikkei senior staff writer
JANUARY 12, 2023 04:01 JST
Katsuji Nakazawa is a Tokyo-based senior staff and editorial writer at Nikkei. He spent seven years in China as a correspondent and later as China bureau chief. He was the 2014 recipient of the Vaughn-Ueda International Journalist prize.
In China, young people do not hesitate to offer their seats to the elderly in trains and buses. The Confucian culture has always had, and continues to have, a tradition of respecting senior citizens.
But as COVID-19 tears through China's 1.4 billion people, the 200 million senior citizens are bearing the brunt, being driven into a corner.
The number of elderly people who die per day has been at unprecedented levels since late December, perhaps earlier. The pandemic has taken the lives of some of China's best brains, such as the prestigious members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering in their 80s and older.
While the death rate is low among young people and many more are taking to the streets again in big cities, the fact that so many of the elderly are dying has raised questions over the humanitarian aspect of the government's missteps.
"Save the elderly." Lawyers in various parts of the country have signed and sent petitions to central government departments with this message, calling on them to take immediate steps, such as importing mass quantities of effective medicines from abroad and producing whatever possible at home.
The administration does not release figures that accurately portray the situation. But local work units, known as danwei, do keep track and announce credible information of individual deaths. Those added together show extraordinarily high numbers.
The number of cremations per day at funeral halls in an area of Fujian Province has surged five- to six-fold, compared with an average year, since the turn of the year.
Notices about many individuals' deaths are posted on university bulletin boards. Some individuals' deaths are announced on internet sites. The central government cannot hide the scale of the tragedy.
The deaths of 25 retired professors, teachers and other faculty members were announced on Jan. 3 by a university in the northeastern city of Dalian.
An expert who has long analyzed social trends in China calculates that the number of retiree deaths recently announced by universities across China are at least three- to sixfold compared with the previous years.
Since the beginning of the year, the number of daily funeral hall cremations in an area of Fujian Province has surged five- to sixfold, compared with an average year.
The deaths of teachers and other staff, primarily retirees and their family members, at universities in Fujian are said to be nearly 10 times what might have been expected before last year.
The death cause is usually not mentioned, out of a consideration for the central government. But there is little question that they were COVID-related.
Even officials at the World Health Organization, who were sympathetic to China in the early days of COVID, are now critical of the discrepancies between China's official COVID-related death numbers and the realities on the ground.
Yet, Beijing shows no sign of changing its stance. China's leaders did not highlight the issue of elderly deaths in their New Year messages. All they did was to reiterate slogans such as "Let the country prosper and its people live in peace."
Meanwhile on the ground, the situation is dire. Fever-fighting drugs have sold out at pharmacies across China. With many of its staff ill with COVID, hospitals have not been able to examine new patients.
Black marketeers are selling Paxlovid - a Beijing-approved COVID treatment developed by U.S. drug giant Pfizer -- at inflated prices of more than 10,000 yuan ($1,477) per box.
Empty shelves are seen in a pharmacy as customers tries to find medicine to prepare for a wave of COVID-19 outbreak in Beijing on Dec. 13, 2022.
When an earthquake devastated Sichuan in 2008, nongovernmental organizations stepped in to distribute medicines and conduct relief operations. At the time, these fledgling NGOs gave hope to the people that civil society was beginning to work in China.
Fifteen years on, the situation has regressed. Since era of President Xi Jinping, NGOs have not been allowed to freely conduct activities because they typically have Chinese Communist Party cells in them. "There are almost no volunteer relief operations amid the current explosion of infections," one observer said. "Clearly, civil society is retrogressing."
China has 200 million seniors who are 65 or older, equivalent to the entire populations of Japan and the U.K. combined, and the coronavirus is inflicting more damage on them than other age groups.
According to China's National Bureau of Statistics, the country had 10.14 million deaths in 2021. The number of deaths in 2022 will be announced sooner or later, making clear how high the human cost of COVID-19 is -- even if the causes of death are vague.
At a certain point, questions will arise over the mishandling of COVID. Bad policies have had consequences in China before. Mao Zedong's disastrous decisions to proceed with the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) caused upheavals so vast they distorted the nation's population pyramid, later research proved.
This time around, there was a way to prevent such levels of death. China might have been able to save many of the elderly if it had introduced mRNA vaccines from the West and mass-produced them at home.
Although the situation is grim, there are some bright signs. The current wave of infections is presumed to have peaked in some big cities, including Beijing, around late December. People are returning to the streets, and calm is being restored.
Children wearing face masks ride on their scooter with Chinese Year of the Rabbit decoration passing by residents shop for Chinese Lunar New Year decorations at a pavement stores on Jan. 7 in Beijing.
In China, infected people are called "sheep." That is because the Chinese word for "testing positive" includes the character yang, which has the same pronunciation as character for sheep.
"Have you become a sheep?" is the fashionable greeting when friends meet on the street. Most of the people taking to the streets are sheep, having had COVID at least once.
The long Chinese New Year holiday period that begins later this month will unleash a torrent of travelers. If more than 1 billion people return home on a cumulative basis to spend time with family after almost three years of being restricted, infections will spread further across the country.
The central government's best-case scenario is to bring infections under control by late February, achieve de facto herd immunity and then hold the annual session of the National People's Congress, China's parliament, in early March. It would be a good debut stage for No. 2 Li Qiang, who is expected to succeed Li Keqiang as premier at the session.
But this optimistic scenario is full of pitfalls. As countries across the globe have experienced, a first wave of infections is usually followed by second and third waves of mutant viruses.
The zero-COVID policy was not going to work against the highly infectious omicron variant. The writing was on the wall before the government abandoned it.
What hammered the final nail into the zero-COVID coffin were the "white paper" protests. The movement broke out either simultaneously or in a chain reaction at more than 160 universities and other locations. It is believed to have begun at a university in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, with students holding blank sheets of paper during a protest against the zero-COVID policy. Young people vented their pent-up frustration while communicating with each other through various means.
What the Chinese government should have been doing is to administer an effective vaccine to the public multiple times, primarily to the elderly, and to prepare large amounts of medicines such as fever reducers.
Instead, it was busy declaring victory in the fight against COVID, trying to make the government's response look good.
After wasting precious time, the Chinese government was forced to abandon the zero-COVID policy, abruptly.
Looking back, two Japanese prime ministers -- Shinzo Abe and Yoshihide Suga -- resigned, partly due to strong public discontent over their poor handling of the COVID-19 scourge. On the surface, it looks like Xi will have no such worries with no democratic elections.
Nevertheless, if many Chinese families continue to lose their elderly members, all amid an economic slump, that may change. If people begin to see this mess as a human-made disaster caused by policy mistakes, it will slowly hurt like a body blow to the Xi regime.
Such anger could lead to the next white paper protest.
