Five years after the novel coronavirus first emerged, China’s major metropolises bear virtually no visible scars of their unprecedented battle with COVID-19. The streets of Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen have shed all traces of that extraordinary period – gone are the ubiquitous testing booths and hazmat-suited workers that once dominated the urban landscape. The bustling crowds that defined these cities before the pandemic have returned in full force. In January 2024, Sinovac, a major inoculation manufacturer in China, reportedly halted its COVID-19 vaccine production. Indeed, the term “xinguan” (COVID-19) has all but vanished from state media and social discourse, as if the virus were merely a passing shadow, a brief aberration in the nation’s unstoppable rejuvenation.
Yet beneath this veneer of normalcy, deep fissures remain. The promised economic renaissance following the abandonment of the zero-COVID policy in December 2022 has failed to materialize. International tourism lags far behind pre-pandemic levels, while political control has only been tightened. The collective silence surrounding the pandemic speaks not of healing but of fear – people avoid the topic not because they’ve moved on, but because they’ve learned the price of speaking too freely about those turbulent years. Privately, an increasing number of individuals are complaining of long-term side effects following their COVID-19 vaccination.
The jarring disconnect between China’s surface normalcy and its underlying tensions raises a fundamental question: How has COVID-19 – and more importantly, the government response to it – fundamentally reshaped Chinese society?
Despite official attempts to move past this chapter of history, the pandemic left an indelible but mixed imprint on everything from patterns of socio-economic development to China’s state apparatus and foreign relations.