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China Briefing
This Week in AsiaOpinion
Wang Xiangwei
Wang Xiangwei

China Briefing | Hainan’s Covid chaos exposes the bad, ugly – and scary – of China’s virus control measures

  • My family’s 23-day holiday nightmare is finally over. But it serves as more that just a cautionary tale for travellers in zero-Covid China
  • It’s a story of local officials ignoring direct orders from Beijing, and an arbitrary, abusable health code system being used for social control

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Medical workers go door-to-door in Sanya, Hainan province, to take swab samples for Covid-19 testing amid the city’s lockdown earlier this month. Photo: Xinhua
Wang Xiangwei
My daughter and I finally returned home to Beijing on Tuesday, a full 23 days after we had arrived in Hainan for a planned one-week beach holiday and became trapped in a travel nightmare by China’s extreme Covid-19 suppression measures.
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For almost a month, we were forced to become nomads – first stranded on the tropical island province, then trapped thousands of kilometres away in Tianjin for a week as we waited to be cleared for our return to the Chinese capital.

We have experienced the good, the bad and the ugly of China’s pandemic control measures, but our sorry saga is much more than just a cautionary tale for travellers. It also shows how fragmented and chaotic the country’s bureaucratic command structure still is, especially in a crisis.

Since coming to power a decade ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping has consolidated power in the central government. Photo: Xinhua
Since coming to power a decade ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping has consolidated power in the central government. Photo: Xinhua
Since coming to power in late 2012, President Xi Jinping has consolidated power both in the central government and his own hands. Local mandarins may cower in his presence and publicly pledge loyalty to him and the central authorities, but the truth of the matter is that regional governments often ignore or obfuscate explicit directives from Beijing.
This explains the widespread scepticism about Beijing’s grand plans, announced in April, to develop a “unified domestic market” that promises to remove the local protectionism and economic segmentation that has bedevilled the country for centuries.

The chaos and confusion has been on full show amid Hainan’s outbreak. Initially, we assumed that local authorities were to blame for us being stranded in the island province, as they seemingly feared censure if the highly infectious Omicron subvariant was allowed to spread to the rest of the country.

But it turns out that was only half the story. It has since transpired that local governments across the country covertly banned flights from Hainan as soon as tourist hotspot Sanya, ground-zero of the island’s outbreak, announced a citywide lockdown on August 6.
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