What is China’s Covid-19 endgame?

The government’s political stake in the strategy’s early success has become a barrier to recovery.

For most of the past two years, China’s “zero-COVID” strategy was seen as a drastic but effective way to maintain impressively low infection rates. The Chinese government locked down millions of people at a time, ordering them to stay in their homes—or even in schools and office buildings. Last winter, the city of Xi’an was locked down for an entire month. All of its 13 million residents were confined to their homes, where they had minimal access to necessities such as food.