For the last sixteen months, the world’s most populous country has kept its borders almost entirely closed. Visitors can usually enter China only for specific “business” purposes, and if they have received a Chinese vaccine. Students, non-essential workers, and family members have seen their visas rejected. Those who get approval must submit to a hotel quarantine lasting 14 to 21 days — plus humiliating, medically unnecessary, weekly anal swabs. Unsurprisingly, the flow of foreign visitors has slowed to a trickle. 

China’s State Council reportedly plans to start reopening its borders in the second half of 2022. But this timeline is not credible. Covid-19 likely cannot ever be eradicated globally. And while China’s vaccine rollout has been extraordinary, Chinese vaccines barely work against the Delta variant, which is now dominant around the world. Reopening borders next year would therefore mean telling the Chinese people to tolerate infections and outbreaks after being virtually virus-free for over a year. 

Chinese President Xi Jinping will not run this risk before the 20^th National Party Congress in late 2022, where he needs a rubber-stamp for his third term. After the Congress, the same logic will hold: Ultra-tight borders and new measures to block troublesome foreigners help the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) preserve social order and control over information.

Keeping the borders closed may make it easier to govern China near-term, but the broader consequences would be tragic and potentially dangerous. Nationalist hardliners in both the U.S. and China would be the biggest winners, free to caricature the other with no fear of being contradicted. Businesses will find it increasingly difficult to operate across a largely closed border. On a strategic level, from nuclear arms control to Taiwan, misperceptions about the other side’s intentions could lead to accidents, or even war between China and the United States. In the long run, it will be hard to keep U.S.–China relations stable and productive if China remains closed. For all these reasons, the Biden administration and its allies should work to help China reopen, even if this requires short-term concessions. 

A COVID-FREE ISLAND

China is the only large country in the world to have effectively wiped out Covid-19. On January 23, 2020, China shut down Wuhan, then Hubei province. Domestic travel was restricted. Provinces and cities where outbreaks had been identified were immediately sealed off. It was a national lockdown in all but name. 

By May last year, life in China was almost entirely back to normal. Offices, restaurants, and public transportation were again at full capacity. Schoolchildren, commuters, and office workers took off their masks. In most of the country, few people observe social distancing guidelines anymore. China effectively became a Covid-free island, like Australia, New Zealand, or Taiwan. 

The Chinese government has maintained a zero-tolerance approach. In January, there was a small outbreak in Beijing, so the government told citizens not to travel home for the Lunar New Year, while schools shifted online and mask wearing became virtually universal. Last month [June], Guangzhou also had a small outbreak: Local officials tested almost the entire population of 18.7 million in the course of three days, shutting down the spread. In April, Fujian province announced that it would reduce the quarantine for “qualified Taiwanese visitors” from 14 days to two. Then Taiwan had a tiny outbreak—and the program was scrapped within a week. The bottom line is that the Chinese public likes being Covid-free. That makes it politically hard to reopen the borders. 

AN AUTOCRAT’S DREAM

Meanwhile, the CCP has used recovery from the pandemic as a domestic propaganda tool. As the influential nationalist commentator Hu Xijin argues, the U.S. “should be ashamed to criticize China on human rights considering its own Covid-19 death toll.” Americans’ tolerance for mass death has shown that “the highest human right — the right to life — has never been the top priority in the U.S.” By contrast, Hu added, “China’s system will protect its people from the intrusion of this deadly virus, and we are zero tolerant of its appearance in China.”

The closed border has helped the CCP sell its alternative facts about the origins of the pandemic. While the Biden administration investigates whether the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab, Chinese state media are peddling baseless rumors that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated at a U.S. military base at Fort Detrick, Maryland. None of the evidence that The Wall Street Journal has presented for the lab leak hypothesis is available on the Chinese internet, so most Chinese netizens have no way to know how out of step this is with the international consensus.

Border controls will help Beijing avoid the risk of embarrassment at the 2022 Winter Olympics next February. U.S. politicians from Mitt Romney to Nancy Pelosi have called on the Biden administration to boycott the games over human rights abuses in Xinjiang province, as have 200 human rights groups and lawmakers in Canada and the Netherlands. Covid-19 is a convenient excuse for China to ban potentially troublesome foreigners from attending the Games. 

Xi also wants to assure a smooth transition to his unprecedented third term at the 20th National Party Congress in Beijing, set for October or November 2022. Before past party congresses, the Chinese public security apparatus went all-out to avoid negative headlines, even ordering Beijing taxi drivers to lock their windows, lest dissidents try to distribute leaflets. If Xi wants his coronation to be perfect, it makes little sense to risk letting a foreigner spark a super-spreader event. But even thereafter, the same logic will hold.

CUTTING TIES

Meanwhile, China has been aggressively cutting people-to-people ties with the rest of the world. Under CCP pressure, the social network platform LinkedIn has begun to ban scholars who have posted “prohibited” content — including me — from accessing their Chinese friends and colleagues. “China no longer wants to be studied,” Princeton professor Rory Truex has observed. “The message is pretty clear. Fieldwork, archives, even language training — it’s all in jeopardy now.”

China no longer wants to be studied… The message is pretty clear. Fieldwork, archives, even language training — it’s all in jeopardy now.

Rory Truex, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University

Real-life friendships and professional relationships between Chinese and Western students, researchers, businesspeople, and military officers are important backchannels for exchanging information, building trust, and de-escalating crises. These relationships have taken years to build up, but it is impossible to maintain them through digital channels monitored by CCP censors. As Fiona Cunningham, an assistant professor at George Washington University, suggests in a disturbing new paper, a lack of trust between negotiators is one reason why the U.S. and China have failed to begin urgent arms control talks. Each side is convinced of the other’s bad intentions.

HOW TO REOPEN

To reopen safely, China needs to vaccinate its population with mRNA vaccines that are more effective against the Delta variant. This spring, China’s Fosun Pharma struck a deal to manufacture one billion BioNTech doses in China. Production will start next month. The global vaccine race has been so politicized that it may seem heretical to call this a good thing. But the Chinese people deserve to be safe from Covid-19, too. 

Western governments, businesses, and universities need to help their Chinese counterparts travel abroad for candid, closed-door talks. This must be done carefully, since Beijing fears that Western intelligence agencies use these meetings as recruiting opportunities, or to spread disinformation. Social media platforms like LinkedIn may be too open to serve this purpose. But there are ways to solve this problem by keeping records and making this process narrower and more formalized. 

China’s decision to close itself off to the world probably cannot be reversed, but it can be managed. Certain principles are clear. Western scholars and journalists must not be forced to self-censor to preserve their access. Some decoupling in people-to-people relations is probably desirable. And if the CCP is committed to sealing China off, there is little the rest of the world can do. Within these constraints, there are concrete steps that we take to keep lines of communication open. We must take them before it is too late. 

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