China’s Hasty Reopening Is a Risky Bet That Beijing Can Control the Narrative

China is finally reopening. After three years of mass testing and harsh lockdowns that crippled the nation’s economy and antagonized its citizens, President Xi Jinping’s government has dismantled its absolutist approach to dealing with Covid-19 at an unexpectedly rapid pace.

Gone is the policy known as Covid Zero, which portrayed the novel coronavirus as a dangerous pathogen that had to be eliminated, even if that demanded coercive and intrusive methods. Now come public exhortations that the omicron variant spreading across China is no more dangerous than the seasonal flu. Zhong Nanshan, the country’s most influential epidemiologist, proffered in a recent speech that omicron could simply be called “a cold.”