Abstract
China is exploring ways to leave its current policy of elimination of covid in favour of a more sustainable strategy of mitigation with full opening of borders. This has been floated several times by the respected Shanghai professor Zhang Wenhong, a figure some distance from the government, with furious responses from hardline online voices.
This time, however, the head of China's CDC (infamous for claiming in January 2020 that the virus is under control and does not transmit well between people), the most establishment expert of all, is making the argument for a transition away from the ZeroCovid policy to one of living with the virus, in an interview with the Caijing magazine. His argument is worth reading in its entirety; it shows that just as in the West, the Chinese medical establishment sees no other way than to normalize covid as a kind of flu and focus on better vaccines, treatments and simple individual protection measures as the tools to fight "a protracted war" (a term coined by Mao Zedong for the stalemate war with Japan in 1939).
Also just as in the West, the focus is on limiting fatalities and serious hospitalized cases and there is no mention of long-term sequelae of covid as a major public health risk.