[2023-01-05] 华尔街日报 - 动态清零为什么在中国原地掉头

 

BEIJING—By the end of an otherwise triumphant Communist Party Congress for Xi Jinping in October, it was growing harder for China’s leader to argue that his zero-Covid policy was working.
北京——到 10 月习近平的共产党代表大会结束时，中国领导人越来越难以证明他的动态清零政策正在奏效。

Reports were flowing into central government headquarters of rising infections nationwide, a surge taking place despite the strict lockdowns that had kept Covid-19 at bay for most of the prior three years, according to officials and government advisers close to Beijing’s decision-making.
据接近北京决策层的官员和政府顾问称，尽管在过去三年的大部分时间里，武汉肺炎受到严格封锁，但有关全国感染率上升的报告仍在涌入中央政府总部。

The containment measures had come at a high cost, cutting sharply into the nation’s exports and retail sales, draining local finances and driving parts of the population to a near-breaking point.
遏制措施付出了高昂的代价，大幅削减了该国的出口和零售额，耗尽了地方财政，并将部分人口推向了濒临崩溃的边缘。

But Mr. Xi wasn’t ready to reverse his stance. As late as mid-November, he was wavering on whether and how to unwind a policy with which he had so closely associated himself, according to the officials and advisers.
但习近平并不准备改变立场。据官员和顾问称，直到 11 月中旬，他还在犹豫是否以及如何取消这项与他密切相关的政策。

A rare wave of protests in China’s largest cities in late November, coupled with urgent pleas from many corners of the government, finally prodded Mr. Xi to shift, according to the people. The policy was largely scrapped in early December.
据知情人士透露，11 月下旬中国大城市罕见的抗议浪潮，加上政府多个部门的紧急请求，最终促使习近平做出转变。该政策在 12 月初基本被取消。

That abrupt reversal thrust China into a new public-health emergency.
这一突然逆转将中国推入了新的公共卫生紧急状态。

Doctors and nurses across the country’s hospitals, as well as officials at local branches of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, were given no advance warning of the shift, leaving them to face a spike in patients with no stockpiles of medical essentials.
全国各地医院的医生和护士，以及中国疾病预防控制中心地方分支机构的官员，都没有得到有关这种转变的预先警告，这使他们面临着没有医疗必需品储备的患者激增。

China’s top health authority no longer publishes daily case tallies and has reported fewer than a dozen Covid deaths since the beginning of December.
中国最高卫生部门不再公布每日病例统计，自 12 月初以来报告的武汉肺炎死亡人数不到 12 人。

But nearly 250 million people were infected with the coronavirus between Dec. 1 and Dec. 20, according to notes of a National Health Commission meeting on Dec. 21 seen by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed as authentic by officials familiar with the matter. The notes said half of Beijing’s 22 million residents had already been infected.
但根据《华尔街日报》看到的国家卫生健康委员会 12 月 21 日的会议记录，并经知情官员确认其真实性，在 12 月 1 日至 20 日期间，近 2.5 亿人感染了武汉肺炎。 笔记说，北京 2200 万居民中有一半已经被感染。

 

Amid the surge, Mr. Xi, who has embarked on his third term as the country’s most formidable leader since Mao Zedong, has increasingly curtailed policy debate and sidelined anyone raising public doubts about the zero-Covid strategy.
在激增的情况下，作为自毛泽东以来中国最强大的领导人，习近平开始了他的第三个任期，他越来越减少政策辩论，并让任何引起公众对动态清零战略产生怀疑的人置身事外。

China has also shunned foreign advice, a shift from the global financial crisis in 2008, when senior Chinese officials sought out American experts, including ones at the World Bank, for consultation. When the World Health Organization’s director general said in May that China’s zero-Covid policy was unsustainable, China fired back, saying he should “get more knowledge about the facts and refrain from making irresponsible remarks.”
中国也回避外国建议，这与 2008 年全球金融危机时的情况有所不同，当时中国高级官员寻求包括世界银行专家在内的美国专家进行咨询。 当世界卫生组织总干事 5 月表示中国的动态清零政策不可持续时，中国予以回击，称他应该“了解更多事实，不要发表不负责任的言论”。

While in past decades decisions were made by a small number of Chinese leaders reaching consensus after rounds of internal deliberations, today Mr. Xi has been dubbed the “Chairman of Everything,” for his control over every lever of power from the military to the economy.
在过去的几十年里，决策是由少数中国领导人在经过数轮内部审议后达成共识后做出的，而如今，习近平被称为“万能主席”，因为他控制着从军事到经济的每一个权力杠杆 .

“As with other man-made disasters in China’s history,” said Mary Gallagher, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Michigan, “political loyalty to the core leader now means no dissent, no collective decision-making and a lack of debate and discussion within the party on critical policy shifts.”
“与中国历史上其他人为灾难一样，”密歇根大学中国政治学教授玛丽·加拉格 (Mary Gallagher) 说，“对核心领导人的政治忠诚现在意味着没有异议、没有集体决策和缺乏辩论 以及党内关于关键政策转变的讨论。”

Swamped with patients
挤满了病人

The director of the National Health Commission, Ma Xiaowei, said the outbreak was growing rapidly, according to the minutes of the December meeting. “I want to emphasize that deaths are inevitable,” the notes recorded him saying.
根据去年 12 月的会议纪要，国家卫生健康委员会主任马晓伟表示，疫情正在迅速蔓延。 “我想强调的是，死亡是不可避免的，”笔记记录下他说。

The National Health Commission declined to comment.
国家卫健委拒绝置评。

Emergency rooms and intensive-care units, from prosperous cities to villages, have been swamped with patients unable to get a hospital bed or even basic fever medication. Many of the patients were elderly and had insufficient or no vaccine protection after an inoculation campaign had stalled months earlier.
从繁华的城市到乡村，急诊室和重症监护病房都挤满了无法获得病床甚至基本退烧药的患者。 许多患者都是老年人，在接种活动几个月前停滞后，疫苗保护不足或根本没有。

Crematoria have been filling up with dead bodies, forcing some desperate families to plead with emergency workers to pick up corpses at home, or to take bodies hundreds of miles away for cremation.
火葬场一直堆满尸体，迫使一些绝望的家庭恳求急救人员在家中收尸，或者将尸体运到数百英里外火化。

 

Spokespeople for China’s cabinet, known as the State Council, didn’t respond to requests for comment. Beijing has defended its policy shift as being the right move at the right time, pointing to the lower fatality rates associated with the Omicron variant.
中国国务院发言人没有回应置评请求。 北京捍卫其政策转变是在正确的时间采取的正确举措，指出与 Omicron 变体相关的死亡率较低。

In a televised speech Saturday to mark the New Year, Mr. Xi appeared to acknowledge that his U-turn on zero-Covid has dented public trust in his leadership. “We have entered a new phase of Covid response where tough challenges remain,” he said. “It has not been an easy journey for anyone.”
在周六庆祝新年的电视讲话中，习近平似乎承认，他对动态清零的大转弯削弱了公众对他领导层的信任。 他说：“我们已经进入应对武汉肺炎疫情的新阶段，挑战依然严峻。” “对任何人来说，这都不是一段轻松的旅程。”

Since the initial lockdown of Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province in the early weeks of 2020, China had adhered to a regimen of mass testing, home confinement and quarantines to snuff out even small outbreaks of Covid.
自 2020 年初几周武汉及湖北省周边地区最初被封锁以来，中国一直坚持大规模检测、居家隔离和隔离的制度，以遏制即使是小规模的武汉肺炎疫情。

The measures allowed China to quickly reboot the economy early in the pandemic as the rest of the world was engulfed by waves of Covid variants and deaths.
这些措施使中国能够在疫情期迅速重启经济，因为世界其他地区正被一波又一波的武汉肺炎变种和死亡所吞没。

Even though the lockdowns hurt livelihoods and stoked dissatisfaction as they were extended into a third year, Mr. Xi’s Covid approach came to underpin his belief in the superiority of the Chinese system over that of the Western world.
尽管封锁措施在延长至第三年时损害了生计并激起了人们的不满，但习近平控制疫情的方式方法逐渐巩固了他对中国制度优于西方世界的信念。

When the highly transmissible Omicron variant arrived in Shanghai in the spring of 2022, Mr. Xi initially tried to give the country’s wealthiest and most cosmopolitan city leeway to use targeted, rather than blanket, lockdowns, hoping it could offer a template for coexisting with the virus in the years ahead.
当高度传染性的 Omicron 变种病毒于 2022 年春天抵达上海时，习近平最初试图给这个国家最富裕、最国际化的城市一定的余地，以使用有针对性的而非全面的封锁措施，希望它能提供一个与病毒共存的模板。 未来几年的病毒。

But as cases surged and other localities complained about Shanghai’s outbreak spreading to them, Mr. Xi ordered the city’s party chief, Li Qiang, a close ally, to reinstate the broad lockdown playbook.
但随着病例激增以及其他地方抱怨上海的疫情蔓延到他们，习近平命令该市的党委书记、亲密盟友李强恢复广泛的封锁策略。

Focus on Party Congress
聚焦党代会

The priority for Mr. Xi at the time, said the officials and advisers close to decision-making, was to make the Party Congress in October in Beijing a smashing political success for himself. That required muffling any challenge to his authority, including over the health policy. On May 5, the Politburo, in a meeting presided over by Mr. Xi, pledged to “resolutely fight against all words and deeds that distort, doubt, or deny” the zero-Covid policy, according to an official account of the meeting.
接近决策层的官员和顾问表示，习近平当时的首要任务是让 10 月在北京举行的党代会为他自己取得巨大的政治成功。 这需要压制对他权威的任何挑战，包括对卫生政策的挑战。 据会议官方报道，5 月 5 日，在习近平主持的一次会议上，政治局承诺“坚决反对一切歪曲、怀疑或否认”动态清零政策的言行。

 

Omicron outbreaks continued to simmer across China and then began to creep up in the fall. Rather than secure and administer more vaccine doses, stockpile antivirals and other Covid treatments, or expand and upgrade hospitals and emergency wards, Beijing chose to plow more resources into building temporary quarantine facilities, enforcing strict lockdowns and mass testing its citizens.
Omicron 的爆发在中国继续发酵，然后在秋天开始蔓延。 北京没有确保和管理更多的疫苗剂量、储备抗病毒药物和其他武汉肺炎治疗药物，也没有扩建和升级医院和急诊病房，而是选择投入更多资源建设临时隔离设施，实施严格的封锁并对公民进行大规模检测。

As a result, as recently as late November, some 40% of Chinese citizens aged 80 or older weren’t fully vaccinated, and China counted fewer than four ICU beds per 100,000 people, compared with 7.1 in Hong Kong and 11.4 in Singapore.
结果，就在 11 月下旬，约 40% 的 80 岁或以上的中国公民没有完全接种疫苗，中国每 10 万人拥有不到 4 张 ICU 病床，而香港为 7.1，新加坡为 11.4。

Many economists and citizens across China had come to expect a loosening of Covid restrictions after the Party Congress ended on Oct. 22. But little changed even after Mr. Xi secured his third term in power. When German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Beijing on Nov. 4, Mr. Xi didn’t signal any shift on Covid, even as cases were surging and businesspeople urged Premier Li Keqiang to relax the country’s Covid policies.
10 月 22 日党代会结束后，中国各地的许多经济学家和公民都曾预计会放松对武汉肺炎疫情的限制。但即使在习近平获得第三个任期后也几乎没有什么变化。 当德国总理奥拉夫·舒尔茨 11 月 4 日访问北京时，尽管病例激增，商界人士敦促李克强总理放宽该国的武汉肺炎政策，但习近平并未暗示对武汉肺炎有任何转变。

In the days that followed, Mr. Xi was flooded with signals that his zero-Covid policy was becoming a source of social instability and economic turbulence.
在接下来的几天里，习近平收到了大量信号，表明他的动态清零政策正在成为社会不稳定和经济动荡的根源。

At the world’s biggest iPhone assembly plant, in the central city of Zhengzhou, thousands of Foxconn Technology Group workers clashed with police in violent demonstrations aimed in part at pandemic restrictions. Foxconn founder Terry Gou warned that zero-Covid controls were threatening China’s position in global supply chains.
在位于中部城市郑州的全球最大的 iPhone 组装厂，数千名富士康科技集团的工人在暴力示威中与警察发生冲突，部分目的是为了限制疫情。 富士康创始人郭台铭警告说，动态清零管控正在威胁中国在全球供应链中的地位。

 

Exports, which had been China’s main pandemic-era growth engine, dropped for the first time in 2½ years in October, while retail sales, which had been rising in the months after Shanghai’s spring lockdown, also turned south. The data spooked China’s leadership, according to the officials and advisers close to decision-making.
出口曾是中国在疫情时期的主要增长引擎，但在 10 月份出现了 2.5 年来的首次下降，而在上海春季封锁后的几个月里一直在增长的零售额也出现了下滑。 据接近决策层的官员和顾问称，这些数据吓坏了中国领导层。

Trying a gradual approach
尝试循序渐进的方法

Even then, Mr. Xi wasn’t ready to give up on zero-Covid altogether. Instead, he settled on a gradual approach to relaxing the measures, with no clear exit timeline.
即便如此，习近平也不准备完全放弃动态清零。 相反，他决定采取渐进的方式来放松措施，没有明确的退出时间表。

On Nov. 11, as China’s official daily Covid infection tally surged above 10,000 for the first time in months, China announced 20 measures that eased restrictions, including shorter quarantines for inbound travelers and those identified as close contacts of infected patients.
11 月 11 日，随着中国官方的每日武汉肺炎感染总数数月来首次突破 10,000，中国宣布了 20 项放宽限制的措施，包括缩短对入境旅客和被确定为感染患者密切接触者的隔离时间。

While the measures sparked a stock-market rally and raised hopes of a broader reopening, the People’s Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, squelched the optimism by describing the measures as “fine-tuning” of the Covid-containment strategy rather than a loosening. Without a clear signal from Mr. Xi, some local officials even tightened restrictions.
尽管这些措施引发了股市反弹，并引发了更广泛的重新开放的希望，但共产党的喉舌《人民日报》将这些措施描述为对武汉肺炎遏制战略的“微调”，而不是放松，从而打消了乐观情绪。 在习近平未发出明确信号的情况下，一些地方官员甚至收紧了限制措施。

Reports began to reach the leader of housing complexes across the country banding together to stage small revolts against rules confining residents to their homes, according to the officials and advisers close to decision-making.
据接近决策层的官员和顾问称，全国各地住宅小区的领导人开始收到报告，他们联合起来发动小规模反抗，反对将居民限制在家中的规定。

On Nov. 26 and 27, protests erupted across some of China’s biggest and wealthiest cities. The rare display of public anger, with some protesters directly criticizing Mr. Xi and the Communist Party, alarmed Mr. Xi and his inner circle, the officials and advisers said.
11 月 26 日至 27 日，抗议活动在中国一些最大和最富裕的城市爆发。 官员和顾问说，罕见的公众愤怒表现，一些抗议者直接批评习近平和共产党，令习近平和他的核心圈子感到震惊。

 

As the battle to keep the virus from spreading appeared increasingly futile, with the social and economic costs mounting, Mr. Xi decided to all but abandon zero-Covid, the people said.
知情人士说，随着阻止病毒传播的斗争越来越徒劳，社会和经济成本不断上升，习近平几乎已决定放弃动态清零。

In a closed-door meeting with European Council President Charles Michel in Beijing on Dec. 1, Mr. Xi described the protests as reflecting frustration, mainly among students, and also acknowledged that the pandemic had entered a less deadly stage, according to European officials familiar with the situation, signaling a shift in Beijing’s thinking.
据欧洲官员称，12 月 1 日在北京与欧洲理事会主席查尔斯·米歇尔举行的闭门会议上，习近平将抗议活动描述为反映了主要是学生的挫败感，并承认疫情已经进入了一个不那么致命的阶段 熟悉情况，标志着北京思维的转变。

On Dec. 7, China removed the last major pieces of the zero-Covid regime. On Dec. 14, the National Health Commission stopped reporting daily asymptomatic totals, and, on Dec. 25, it stopped publishing daily infection totals altogether.
12 月 7 日，中国删除了动态清零制度的最后主要部分。 12 月 14 日，国家卫生委员会停止报告每日无症状感染总数，并于 12 月 25 日完全停止发布每日感染总数。

Finally, on Dec. 26, Beijing announced the lifting of international travel restrictions, essentially ending the country’s self-imposed three-year isolation.
最后，在 12 月 26 日，北京宣布取消国际旅行限制，基本上结束了该国自我实施的三年隔离期。

In the party’s version of events, the decision to end zero-Covid measures was optimally timed.
在党的事件版本中，结束动态清零措施的决定是最佳时机。

“The timing is right and the basic conditions are met,” Li Qiang, the Shanghai party chief who left his post after the Party Congress and who is set to become China’s premier in March, said at a Dec. 25 nationwide teleconference, according to a written summary of the meeting reviewed by the Journal and confirmed as authentic by the officials and advisers.
“时机成熟，基本条件具备，”上海市委书记李强在 12 月 25 日的全国电话会议上说，他在党代会后离职，将于 3 月成为中国总理。 经《华尔街日报》审阅并经官员和顾问确认为真实的会议书面摘要。

According to the meeting summary, Mr. Li urged senior officials overseeing healthcare, transportation and other sectors of the economy to affirm that message—as well as what he described as the “great achievements” of Mr. Xi’s zero-Covid policy.
根据会议纪要，李克强敦促负责医疗保健、交通运输和其他经济部门的高级官员确认这一信息——以及他所说的习近平动态清零政策的“伟大成就”。

The timing, however, has been questioned even by some top government health officials.
然而，这个时机甚至受到一些高级政府卫生官员的质疑。

“If we look at it purely from the perspective of public health, we would rather delay the time [for reopening],” Zeng Guang, a Chinese epidemiologist and senior adviser to the National Health Commission, said at a public health forum in Beijing on Dec. 16, while urging more vaccination of the elderly. Mr. Zeng didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“如果我们纯粹从公共卫生的角度来看，我们宁愿推迟[重新开放]的时间，”中国流行病学家、国家卫生委员会高级顾问曾光在北京的一个公共卫生论坛上说。 12月16日，同时呼吁老年人多接种疫苗。 曾先生没有回应置评请求。

标红字体均为楼主更改，与原文作者无关。

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