What happened
Zero-Covid enforcement escalated well beyond standard quarantine practice. Authorities in multiple cities erected steel barriers around residential compounds, confiscated residents' door keys, and in many documented cases physically welded apartment doors shut or padlocked external gates, leaving people wholly dependent on centrally organised food deliveries that frequently failed. Shanghai's spring 2022 lockdown produced widespread, credible reports of hunger and of routine medical care — including for chronic illness and pregnancy complications — becoming unreachable for weeks.
The policy's human cost became undeniable even domestically after a November 2022 apartment fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang killed at least ten people who could not escape because their building's fire exits and doors had been sealed as a Covid-control measure. The deaths triggered the most widespread public protests in China in decades, spreading to multiple major cities and briefly including open calls for Xi Jinping to step down — a level of dissent almost unheard of under his government.
Within weeks of the protests, China abruptly abandoned zero-Covid almost entirely with no phased transition or vaccination campaign geared to the reopening, releasing a population with very low natural immunity into open transmission. Modelling by researchers at the University of Hong Kong and University of Texas at Austin, corroborated by leaked cremation data showing a 72% year-on-year rise in one province, estimated Covid killed approximately 1.4 million people nationally in the five to six weeks after the policy ended. Analysts widely attribute the years of harsh enforcement, and the reluctance to change course, to Xi Jinping's political need to avoid admitting policy failure ahead of securing his unprecedented third term in October 2022.