The collateral damage from China vs Covid-19

China’s leaders have a story to tell. The Communist Party, they say, leads the nation on behalf of the Chinese people, and it does so far more effectively than US and European leaders govern their own countries. The so-called Western democracies are plagued with greed, arrogance and dysfunction. Americans, who can’t even agree on the legitimacy of their current president, want to tell us what’s best for our people. Europeans, who have built their prosperity atop the enslavement of their former colonies, want to lecture us on human rights.

There is no better current example of the clear superiority of China’s political system, its leaders argue, than the life-saving benefits of its “Zero-Covid-19” policy. According to its official statistics, Covid-19 has killed fewer than 5,000 Chinese citizens in a nation of 1.4-billion people. Yes, the Zero-Covid-19 policy has imposed lockdowns and forced testing on tens of millions of people, but are those people now less “free” than the…