The politics of Shanghai’s lockdown

25 May 2022

As Shanghai maintains its ongoing lockdown in an attempt to contain an outbreak of the Omicron variant, many have speculated about whether ordinary Chinese people will turn against the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a result. While there are some signs that the popular mood is shifting, widespread unrest is highly unlikely, not least because the zero-COVID strategy remains quite popular in the rest of China. Focusing on unlikely threats to CCP rule also distracts from more interesting and urgent questions about the lockdown and Chinese politics: why have communications and logistics in the Shanghai lockdown been so poorly handled, and what can the reasons for those failings tell us about China moving forward? We can find important clues in Shanghai and Beijing’s tug-of-war over how to manage the outbreak.

Shanghai as Beijing’s failed test case for easing zero-COVID measures

Chinese propaganda and foreign media alike have tended to blame Shanghai itself for causing this crisis through incompetence, a lack of planning, or “being too loose and moving too slowly”. Therefore, it is easy to overlook the fact that Shanghai has not acted alone in its response to the current outbreak. As The Wall Street Journal reported in early April, the leadership in Beijing chose to use Shanghai as a testing ground for containing outbreaks of COVID-19 without involving blunt-force, citywide lockdowns. This permission for Shanghai to try more targeted approaches appears to have involved an interest among some Chinese officials in loosening the stringent restrictions and lockdowns that have been hallmarks of China’s approach to the pandemic since it contained the initial outbreak in Wuhan two years ago. It is easy to forget, for instance, that as recently as February, China’s National Development and Reform Commission “told local governments to avoid arbitrary lockdowns and barred unauthorised closures of restaurants, supermarkets, tourist sites, and cinemas”. Even amidst tightening restrictions in Shanghai and creeping controls in Beijing, quarantine times for incoming international travellers to China have been reduced, another sign of some Chinese officials’ interest in easing pandemic controls.

Disagreements between officials who rise through Shanghai’s ‘political hotbed’ and those in other factions have long been key to understanding the intra-CCP political dynamics and personnel shifts so important for determining policy outcomes.

However, it is also clear that there has been a fierce debate at the highest levels of the CCP about such easing. China’s pandemic controls remain some of the most stringent in the world, and they have persisted even as many other countries — including former adherents to zero-COVID like New Zealand and Taiwan — move towards an uneasy coexistence with the virus. Given this ongoing interest in strict controls, it is perhaps not surprising that upon seeing rapidly increasing cases in Shanghai in late March, Beijing was “alarmed” and “ordered authorities to reinstate the old playbook” of strict citywide lockdowns. Many Shanghai residents, therefore, blame Beijing for both their enforced isolation and the chaotic ways the lockdown has been handled.

Implications of Beijing’s intervention in Shanghai

Shanghai’s lockdown is just as much a product of central-local tensions in China as it is of local incompetence or lack of planning. Those tensions and the way they are being resolved — in Beijing’s favour — have three important implications for our understanding of China’s politics moving forward. First, the group of CCP officials that has been interested in easing pandemic controls has seen its prospects for policy influence dim. Until Shanghai locked down indefinitely, talk of China easing controls after this fall’s Party Congress was widespread. Such talk now sounds fanciful, not only because Shanghai has been pushed to lock down so hard — as recently as mid-May doubling down with harsh “silent periods” even as official case counts continued to decline — but also because outbreaks elsewhere in China continue and are unlikely to be fully under control for weeks or months.

Further evidence that significant opening remains unlikely in the near term can be seen in the difficulty of reaching the public health metrics that Chinese officials have offered as benchmarks for opening international borders. These unofficial metrics range from achieving full herd immunity (a goal most experts now view as essentially unreachable) to building out a more equitable distribution of healthcare resources (a goal that would likely take years to achieve) to securing greater availability of therapeutic medication (a goal with an uncertain timeline). In other words, “there is no indication the central government has begun to prepare for a coexistence strategy”. Second, Shanghai’s inability to control the Omicron outbreak using its preferred, less draconian measures is likely to accelerate preexisting trends towards more centralised control in China in other areas. Shanghai has long been mainland China’s most cosmopolitan city, where the central government can often feel far away and where many viewed the city’s governance as among the most effective in China. That Beijing has decided to both portray such a place as a failure and assert its own priorities there so forcefully indicates that the city’s relative independence may fade as pandemic measures offer an excuse to continue centralising control.

Third, the lockdown will have consequences for factional politics in the CCP. While predicting specifics is challenging, it is possible to venture some guesses based on public reporting. It has been widely reported that Li Qiang — Shanghai’s top party official and a close ally of Xi Jinping, who was previously thought to have a lock on a coveted Politburo Standing Committee position — has suddenly had his future cast in doubt. The deployment of Li’s fellow Politburo member Sun Chunlan to manage the city’s outbreak, for instance, indicates that Xi is to some degree-seeking to distance himself from Li. Given widespread views elsewhere in China that Shanghai is an outlier to blame for its own troubles, Xi’s image does not seem likely to suffer much unless places like Beijing cannot manage their own outbreaks effectively.

The question remains, though, what this means for higher-level dynamics in Chinese politics, such as the long-standing tug-of-war between a weakened ‘Shanghai faction’ and the ascendant Xi Jinping’s allies sometimes called the ‘Zhejiang faction’. Disagreements between officials who rise through Shanghai’s ‘political hotbed’ and those in other factions have long been key to understanding the intra-CCP political dynamics and personnel shifts so important for determining policy outcomes. Prominent China watcher Bill Bishop recently speculated that the Shanghai crisis could be an opportunity for Xi to gain leverage over the remnants of the Shanghai faction and further consolidate his rule. But especially given the most recent crop of rumours about Premier Li Keqiang’s substantial pushback against Xi and his economically costly approach to controlling COVID-19 outbreaks, it also seems possible that the Shanghai faction could be reinvigorated due to Beijing’s sudden and (in Shanghai) unpopular intervention, which many Shanghainese blame for the current chaos.

How these political dynamics will ultimately play out remains to be seen; China is not yet finished with this Omicron outbreak and events in Beijing will be particularly crucial in the next few weeks. Still, as we try to read the tea leaves and ascertain the likely impacts of the situation in Shanghai, it is worth remembering that in China, factional dynamics and central-local tensions like those between Shanghai and Beijing are never far from the surface.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Eric Hundman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at NYU Shanghai. His research focuses on Chinese politics and foreign policy, civil-military relations, and international relations. Image credit: Wikimedia (cropped).