What China gets wrong

IT IS OFTEN said that China’s government plans decades ahead, carefully playing the long game as democracies flip-flop and dither. But in Shanghai right now there is not much sign of strategic genius. Even as the rest of the world has reopened, 25m people are in a citywide lockdown, trapped in their apartments and facing food and medical shortages that not even China’s censors can cover up. The zero-covid policy has become a dead end from which the Communist Party has no quick exit.It is one of a trio of problems faced by China this year, alongside a misfiring economy and the war in Ukraine. You may think they are unconnected, but China’s response to each has a common root: swagger and hubris in public, an obsession with control in private, and dubious results. Rather than being the product of statecraft with the Yellow Emperor’s time horizon, China’s actions reflect an authoritarian system under Xi Jinping that struggles to calibrate policy or admit when it is wrong.