( AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon) / AP Photo )
Eunice Yoon, Beijing bureau chief and senior correspondent at CNBC and NBC News, reports on the rare protests happening in China as people are growing frustrated over COVID lockdowns and policies, and the implications politically, and for the economy.
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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We haven't talked on this show yet about the zero-COVID lockdowns in China and the unusually large number of people there joining protests against it. There are implications, of course, for public health and for the economy and for the balance between individual freedom and public responsibility in China, but also economically for the world with so much of the global supply chain for so many things running through China.
This all comes as Xi Jinping is beginning an unprecedented third term as the most powerful individual leader people are saying since Mao Tse-tung in China and with the death of former leader Jiang Zemin just this week being remembered by many in the country as leading China in a less controversial period of dramatic economic growth in the 1990s. Even that now may play into this story of both dissatisfaction and democracy in China. Back with us now, CNBC Beijing Bureau Chief Eunice Yoon, who also anchors their show called Inside China, and herself living with China's COVID rules. Eunice, it's always good of you to give us some time from over there. Welcome back to WNYC.
Eunice Yoon: Thank you so much for having me.
Brian Lehrer: Can you begin by describing how the zero-COVID policy affects you compared to your time there before the pandemic?
Eunice Yoon: Living here is just very uncertain. The way that it's changed my life personally, I never really know if I'm going to be able to get out of my apartment, whether or not I'll be able to go to the doctor. Will I be able to get on the subway or go to a coffee shop? Will it be open? Will it not? [chuckles] It's just that the rules are always changing, so you don't really know. Then there are just so many excesses with the zero-COVID policy.
Most people that I know at this point in the past five or six months have been in some sort of quarantine, so that means sometimes in their home or are taken away to government isolation facilities. Actually, I personally don't know anyone who's gotten COVID here and no one that I described, yet they have not gotten COVID and they don't know anybody who's gotten COVID.
It's just that the connection is really indirect where the government will hear that you are-- For example, a friend of mine, her husband was in contact with somebody who seemed to be in contact with a COVID case. She was in quarantine and he was in quarantine, and they were put into government isolation facilities. They actually were quarantined separately. Then after that when they got home, they had to quarantine again. You don't have to be sick with COVID to be taken away.
That's the constant fear that people have is that they're going to get a knock on the door. Some guy in a hazmat suit's going to be there. They're going to be hauled away to government center. You don't really have a whole lot of recourse here. It's quite taxing just mentally because you're in this fear. Then just going around, it's really hard. Because at this point now, if I need a COVID test to get into a park-- Actually, no, that's not right. The parks are all shut right now in Beijing.
Brian Lehrer: Wow.
Eunice Yoon: Before, I would have to get a COVID test to get into a park. The current regulations are so scrambled that even though officially in Beijing, for example, we are supposed to have 48-hour negative COVID tests. Some of the businesses and locations that might be open say that you need a 24-hour negative COVID test. It's just this constant testing, the constant scanning. You're always tracked, and then you could potentially get caught in a dragnet. That just starts to grind down business. It feels really risky to do anything, which is one of the reasons why there's just been so much of a pushback against these controls.
Brian Lehrer: Did you say the parks in Beijing are all closed, the outdoor parks?
Eunice Yoon: Yes, that's right. They're closed.
Brian Lehrer: Because?
Eunice Yoon: They closed them a couple of weeks ago because of all the concerns about COVID spread because the government has been seeing the number of infections rising. Right now, we're hovering countrywide around 40,000 or so. In Beijing, they've been jumping up. The government had been indicating that this is a serious matter. They started to close all of the businesses and the parks and everything else to make sure that the COVID wouldn't spread amongst the population.
Brian Lehrer: As I'm sure you know, Eunice, even the limited lockdowns we had in this country or that Europe has had have been met with big protests and political upheaval. I think one narrative about the recent elections in this country over the last couple of years is that the anti-lockdown factions turned out to be more powerful than what public health people would consider the pro-public health factions. Given that, why has Xi Jinping decided that this is worth it to this extreme and for this long?
Eunice Yoon: Well, President Xi, who's really intimately associated now with this COVID policy, has consistently said that this is a way to protect the public, that these lockdowns and quarantines and shutdowns are good for the people, and that the priority of the Communist Party is to save lives. That is the narrative that we have been hearing here for the past three years.
One of the reasons why it's been so difficult for the government to make a switch, we're starting to see some indications actually just in the past two days where he actually has like a lockdown czar. She's considered this lockdown enforcer and a vice-premier who has a bit of a nickname as the Lady of Lockdowns. Wherever she goes, people fear that there's going to be more lockdowns. For example, she went to Shanghai. Suddenly, we saw the brutal lockdown there. She said it just this week that the pandemic fight is starting to enter a new phase.
She started to talk. She was talking about how Omicron isn't as dangerous and as harmful or causes as much disease as the previous iterations. What was also interesting is that she notably did not mention zero-COVID in a discussion to health experts. This is being taken as a signal that the government is trying to move slightly away and trying to message to the public that some of the potential impact and harm that it could do to the body isn't going to be as severe. In fact, that's what state media has been quoting a lot of the researchers and just today saying that long COVID isn't as serious.
That's just because the population here has been fed the same message for the past three years that COVID is really dangerous, that the after-effects are terrible, and that the only way we could get through this is with struggle and fight, and that Chinese people and that the country is much stronger than the West or other countries. In Chinese, they say "lie flat," which is their way of saying "slack off." He's been trying to rally the population to stick with this strategy as opposed to living with the virus, which is what everywhere else and the rest of the world is doing at this point.
Brian Lehrer: These easings of the rules that you were just describing just in the last couple of days, do you think those were a response to the big protests over the weekend and they're trying to walk a line now between being responsive to public opinion, but without looking like the government can be bullied into losing its authority?
Eunice Yoon: Yes, absolutely because, right now, the authorities have not yet acknowledged the protests at all. In fact, there was a meeting of high-level officials who were talking about social security and stability. They didn't address the protests directly but said that it was imperative that China cracked down on what they described as hostile forces or illegal activities. That was seen as a way that China was trying to send a signal that they didn't want more protests without actually mentioning it.
Then on the health side, there has been some easing where it's mainly on the margins, I would say. For example, in Beijing, they said that it's now illegal for a building to put a barricade in front of the entrance to a residential compound. However, the buildings within that compound can be locked down and people can be locked in their homes. Some of these things shouldn't have been done anyway, but what they're doing is they're trying to get rid of some of the more excessive curves. They've described these as layers.
They say that they're optimizing zero-COVID, but they also say they're not straying from zero-COVID because they don't want any perception that the path that China's been on was in any way a mistake. They're saying instead that they're optimizing the zero-COVID policy as a face-saving way to try to make some of these changes at this point. They've also been doing some things quite typical of the leadership here, and that is blaming the local officials. They're saying it's the local officials that have been the ones who haven't been proper in the implementation of zero-COVID. Instead of taking responsibility on the upper level, they're saying that it's the problem with these lower-level officials.
Brian Lehrer: That must make the mayors all over China furious, but they probably don't feel like they can say anything about it, right?
Eunice Yoon: Exactly. I think it makes them crazy though [laughs] because they have to stick with the priority of trying to keep the caseload at zero, but they also now have to be perceived as optimizing and easing and opening up. That's why you're seeing this conflict constantly in terms of the rollout and why we don't really know how things are going to play out.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, do you have connections to people in China and want to help us report or describe the story of COVID lockdowns or say or ask anything else, China-related on the economy, on US-China relations, the recent meeting between Biden and Xi, or anything else? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer for Eunice Yoon, Beijing bureau chief for CNBC. Of course, CNBC is a business channel.
Let me ask you, Eunice. The Chinese economy has been the country's pride and joy for so many years as the US and elsewhere have had all these mixed fortunes in recent decades. We remember Donald Trump didn't want a COVID lockdown because it would soil what he considered his biggest political asset during the reelection season, economic growth. This is again a political question. How does the Chinese government come to this position on the trade-off that the economic pain is worth the public health gain?
Eunice Yoon: That has been a debate that's been going on in China for quite some time. Obviously, the private sector has been in a lot of pain, not only because of regulations, especially in the tech sector, but also because they have been really feeling the economic impact. In some of my discussions with private enterprise, they'll talk about how a quarter of their staff is in lockdown or in quarantine.
They can't have meetings. I've known certain company executives that would arrange their own transportation and closed loop they describe as basically an end-to-end type of transport system so that they could have some meetings in certain situations. It's affecting all of these decisions for all these businesspeople. It's even on a micro-level where, for example, I have a woman who comes to my house, helps me with vacuuming, and things like that for four hours on the weekend.
She was in lockdown for 15 days because there was a couple of cases in her compound. All the buildings were shut and she can't earn money during that time. There are a lot of people in the service sector who can't earn money when they're in lockdown. You mentioned the big economic growth that China has had. I've been here for quite a number of years at this point. Even when you would hear about an economic slowdown in China, people would ask me, "Oh, what is it like in Beijing?"
You couldn't really see it. You would know that there was a slowdown, but it wasn't really visible. That's the difference with this particular economic slowdown. You do see a lot of closed shops, a lot of desperate people, businesses where people will not be able to sell, and restaurants not be able to sell their meals or their goods. They'll come outside and then they'll have it all laid out on the street. I've seen more and more homeless people, which is almost unheard of in downtown Beijing.
Then there's just a lot of talk about joblessness and fear of losing jobs. The official data for youth unemployment has been around 20% or so, which is incredibly high. Because it's official data, people are thinking, "Oh, well, actually, the real number must be higher." It's just before, even in slower times, you would see more cars on the streets. You would see more shops vibrant, but that's just not the case these days. The economy is very much under strain.
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Brian Lehrer: Go ahead. No, I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Eunice Yoon: No, I was going to say that that's why it's been hard because you see that on the one hand, Xi Jinping has been pushing ahead with the zero-COVID policy, but then there are people who are more reform-minded or more economically-minded in the government who have been warning and are concerned such as the premier, Li Keqiang, who has been out there until recently, really warning about the impact on the economy.
Then just in the past couple of weeks or so, there have been more measures to try to support the real estate sector because the real estate sector has been in dire straits. Even though there's support to the liquidity of these developers, one of the big issues is that people don't want to buy houses at this point. They see the real estate sector falling. They don't want to part with their cash.
As you probably know, the Chinese tend to save more. They tend to be more savers than spenders. The natural inclination is, "I'm just going to save because I don't know what's going to happen in the future." Because of zero-COVID, it just exacerbated that whole situation. You know that there are parts of the government that are worried about the economy. Because the leadership has already stuck with zero-COVID and Xi Jinping has tied himself to zero-COVID, it's difficult to see what the exit ramp is going to be.
Brian Lehrer: It means that the leadership must have been making the calculation for almost three years now that all of that that you were just describing is better than experiencing what, say, the United States is experiencing hundreds of thousands of COVID deaths a year times four because China has four times as many people as the United States.
Eunice Yoon: Yes, I think that they maybe didn't prepare for the idea that the lockdowns and the quarantines weren't going to work. One of the criticisms and grumbling that we hear here is that the population hasn't been properly vaccinated. The official numbers are quite high that about 90% or so of the population is vaccinated, but the vaccinations are with the Chinese vaccines.
It seems as though the leadership doesn't have a whole lot of confidence in their own vaccines, though they officially tell them and say that they're amazing. By their action, it doesn't seem as though they're so confident in their own vaccines. At the same time, they don't import any foreign vaccines. It's impossible for us to be able to get Pfizer or Moderna or anything. When I have conversations with my friends in the US, people tell me that you could go to a CVS or something and just get a jab anywhere.
I can't even imagine what that's like because it's just not available here at all. The only time there was some discussion about bringing in foreign vaccines was when the German chancellor came here. Then there was some discussion that they might import some for foreigners who live in China. From my understanding, those discussions haven't really gone anywhere at this point. It might only be for Germans now as opposed to foreigners and maybe next year or later. We don't know.
Brian Lehrer: Les in Bay Ridge, you're on WNYC with Eunice Yoon, CNBC's Beijing bureau chief. Hi, Les.
Les: Hi, how are you doing? I just was telling your associate there that my wife is Chinese. I've been over to Jiangyou a couple of times. Her mother's over there. They had a quarantine. We have a relative staying with her. She's very sick, very old. At some point, there was no food left. You're not allowed to leave the building to get food. Give me a break. He has a fit with these guys because it's a front-gate situation.
It's just like in Flushing, where they have the buildings and they have a front gate so they can keep you in or keep you out so they can control you. He goes over and he says, "Listen, if you don't let me out, I'm turning on the gas. I'm starting a fire. I'm blowing up the building. She's going to die." They said, "Okay, you sneak out the back. You don't tell anybody." He goes out and he runs out and gets the food. Somebody else will see that. There's a second-hand system going on there to survive.
The other point is my wife would like to go over. I'd like to go over. It seems nearly impossible that we'll ever get over there because how do you go over if you're going to get quarantined up front when you get off the plane? Maybe the person you want to see is in quarantine. You don't know yet. It might happen in the interim. Then if you were able to finally get there and get out, you probably have to be quarantined again before you left the country. A two-week stint might be like six weeks. [laughs]
Brian Lehrer: Les, thank you. Thank you for sharing all that. Eunice, does your reporting back up what he said, including about people running out of food and not allowed to go out and get more food?
Eunice Yoon: Absolutely. Les's story is one of-- I'm grateful that there wasn't a serious tragedy and that his family was able to get some food in the end. There are so many stories of these individual tragedies because of the controls. I think that was really what triggered the protests. We saw that the pressure has been building up because people have been dealing with these lockdowns for the past three years.
What tipped off the protests, I think, was more not about an individual lockdown but the perceived injustice of the whole system, the fact that people fall into these tragic situations because the zero-COVID system from their perspective is failing. The one incident that sparked it all was a building fire in the far western city of Ürümqi, which is in a Muslim region called Xinjiang, and 10 people died there.
The broader perception was that the rescue efforts for those people were hampered by COVID controls. The authorities deny that. Actually, it only just made people angrier. What really bothers people is not only the exhaustion of the controls but the abuses and the severity of it. Again, because it's an authoritarian system, there's little recourse. Very similar stories of people starving in their homes, not able to go to the hospital, tragic stories of a pregnant woman who lost her baby because she didn't have a COVID test, so she wasn't allowed to go in. Sick children being separated from their parents in Shanghai and then thrown into wards. All of these stories just show how it really frustrated people because they believe that this is an injustice and a very unfair system.
Brian Lehrer: Here's a question about the protests coming in from Frank in Huntington. Frank, you're on WNYC. Hi.
Frank: Hey, Brian. I hear these stories. You don't know what to believe on social media. You really got to do your due diligence to find the truth. I'm so glad you have a guest on that's telling the truth. Thank you for that. My question is, is it true that the CCP brought in the military to disperse the peaceful protesters? I want to back that question up with, does it have an eerie feeling of a Tiananmen Square situation?
Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Frank. Eunice?
Eunice Yoon: In terms of the level of the security, I don't know if it was military-related or not. For sure, police and security did break up a lot of the protests and continue to try to hunt down some of the protesters now. I was just in contact with one protester in Beijing. They said that the tracking has gotten to the point where they were in a taxi in the street. The police stopped the car and then checked the phone.
What we're hearing in Shanghai and I know in Beijing is happening is that they actually open your phone and then they're looking at your foreign apps like Telegram, for example, which is an encrypted app in a way that a lot of protesters and activists communicate. They're trying to find who the organizers are in order to silence the rest of the protesters. In terms of the comparisons to Tiananmen, for sure, there is a lot of people drawing comparisons, not only because students have been taking part, but also because it has been the most open show of resistance to the Communist Party since the crackdown in 1989.
Brian, you had mentioned former President Jiang Zemin. Those comparisons were amplified by his death. Jiang Zemin ran the country in the '90s and the early 2000s. He died now at age of 96. He was considered a political conservative, but at the same time, he's being seen as a figure from a happier time. What people are seeing now is that during the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989, what triggered it were memorials for the death of another major figure in Chinese politics, a man named Hu Yaobang, who was a favorite among Chinese reformers.
Now, we have Jiang Zemin, whose funeral is next Tuesday. People are wondering if there are going to be vigils and memorials and whether or not that's going to eventually lead to more protests. Will they feed into these protests? We already have indications that the leadership is worried about it because, since yesterday, they've been censoring any discussion about the memorials just online of Jiang Zemin.
Brian Lehrer: That's fascinating. I guess the question that some people in this country are asking is, New York Times framed it the other day as, "Is this a movement or is this just a moment in China?" I guess I won't ask you to predict and time will tell. Let me ask you one Jiang Zemin question before you go. There's so much skepticism. Again, this relates back to you working for a business channel. There's so much skepticism now about President Clinton in this country in the '90s, opening the economy here to more imports from China, more globalization, in the hopes that the rising tide of free trade would lift all boats. People have really soured on that here. A lot of that was Clinton and Jiang Zemin, right? How about in China?
Eunice Yoon: I think that at this stage, people would love to go back to the idea of a more open China and being plugged into the rest of the world. I think it's interesting because he's not beloved by Chinese reformers like Hu Yaobang was, but he was seen as quite an interesting guy that he could joke in English. He would break out into cheesy songs. He had met with President Clinton.
Under his watch, a lot had happened. China joined the WTO. Hong Kong was returned from the UK to China. A lot of American companies came to China. It was just in this period of tremendous economic reform. When people are looking at Jiang Zemin at this stage, they're thinking about that time, the kind of time when there was a lot of hope. China was much poorer, but it was much more hopeful.
Now, we're in a situation where people don't see the economy growing quickly. They don't see a whole lot of hope for their livelihoods getting better. They see a China that's getting closed off from the rest of the world. It couldn't be any more different. That's one of the reasons why people are wondering if these protests just went underground and if they're going to surge again.
I think one of the big factors is going to be how well the leadership on the health side is able to address the anger over the COVID restrictions. If the students and the protesters feel like it's enough because of the heavy price they would have to pay if they continue to protest, maybe they're going to say, "Okay, this is good enough." What was interesting in these protests this time was that it was mainly about the COVID controls. There were some people who even were calling for the resignation of President Xi Jinping.
Others were calling for freedoms like freedom of speech, freedom of information, freedom of the press, even freedom to play video games. I know it sounds kind of ridiculous, but I think it shows you just how intrusive the government has come into people's lives. I think the fear among the leadership would be that the public anger towards the COVID controls could morph into anger directed at the Communist Party and the overarching regime that the people here have to live with.
Brian Lehrer: Our guest has been CNBC Beijing Bureau Chief Eunice Yoon, who also anchors their show called Inside China. Must be around midnight there, huh?
Eunice Yoon: Yes, a little bit before one o'clock in the morning. [laughs]
Brian Lehrer: Well, thanks so much--
Eunice Yoon: Actually, my days are totally upside down since this was on.
Brian Lehrer: Because you're reporting into the US news cycle?
Eunice Yoon: Yes, that's right. Brian, I just wanted to say, I think I've said this to your producers before. You are such a treasure. You are such a connection. I listen to you all the time. I know that I'm supposed to be a guest as well. I know I'm sure your listeners all feel the same way, especially during this pandemic time. Because for you guys, things have opened up. [chuckles] I hear that people are living life as if the pandemic's moved on. Here, we're still living in the pandemic and in lockdowns. Hearing your voice and your show is a connection to the outside world. A very welcome one.
Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Eunice. That's really nice, and thanks for staying up till almost 1:00 in the morning with us. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Eunice Yoon: [chuckles] Anytime.
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