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Coronavirus China
OpinionComment
Winston Mok
Winston Mok

The View | China can safely exit zero-Covid by giving local cadres the right incentive

  • To accomplish the mammoth task of vaccinating its unvaccinated and undervaccinated population, Beijing needs to suitably loosen the reins and encourage local policy innovation
  • It could replace GDP growth with vaccination targets as a key measure of local cadre performance

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A medical worker administers a dose of the Covid-19 vaccine to an elderly resident at a community health service centre in Jinhua, Zhejiang province, on December 5. China’s vaccine drive has been hampered by the lack of a vaccine mandate. Photo: China Daily via Reuters
Winston Mok
Despite the State Council’s assurance to the contrary last week, China’s exit from zero-Covid – which has begun in megacities – could unfold in a chaotic, rather than orderly, manner across the country.
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Even before the new relaxations were announced, the State Council’s previously outlined 20 measures to guide the easing of Covid-19 controls were not consistently observed even within Beijing. This led to bargaining between overzealous grass-roots organisations that were sometimes acting under verbal directives from the level above, and residents – with the residents prevailing in many cases.

How China’s exit from zero-Covid is likely to play out must be understood in the framework of its decentralised governance under centralised political control.

Regional decentralisation, particularly for economic matters, has been fundamental to China’s governance, particularly since economic reforms began. This has provided incentives and flexibility in the economic adaptation and development that drove China’s growth.

While local cadres are given wide leeway as to how they generate economic growth, they are sometimes assigned political tasks that must be strictly implemented. Before China belatedly changed course to boost the birth rate, the one-child policy was one such measure whose enforcement took utmost priority. Many cadres have understood their role in the zero-Covid policy similarly: for such paramount political tasks, achieving outcomes takes precedence over all else.
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Another outcome of China’s decentralisation is the minimisation of bad news that has to be broken to the higher-ups, a practice which may lead to manipulation or fabrication. Back in early 2020, as Covid-19 spread in a Wuhan that was in the midst of the local and provincial “two sessions”, the motivation was to control the problem locally rather than report it transparently.

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