Residents line up to take nucleic acid test on January 26,2022,at Fuchengwuqi community in Yanjiao town, Sanhe, North China's Hebei Province.Sanhe reports one positive COVID-19 case on Wednesday. Photo: Hao Lei/GT

It is a fact that the Chinese mainland has pursued one of the most effective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic the world has ever seen. Despite being disadvantaged with a population of 1.4 billion people and some of the most densely populated cities in the world, China has pursued a strict zero-COVID approach which has consisted of comprehensive, "no stone unturned" all population testing, targeted localized lockdowns and use of high technology to log the travel history of cases and their contacts on an unprecedented scale. By taking this approach since the initial outbreak in Wuhan in 2020, China has seen only 106,000 cases and 4636 deaths, contrasting the tens of millions of cases in Western countries and death tolls spanning the hundreds of thousands (900,000 in the case of America).
Despite this strategy, which has brought unprecedented stability to Chinese society to allow economic growth to continue, Western media and governments have from day one used the pandemic to wage a public opinion war against China in almost every aspect possible. The angle continues to shift: from allegations of a cover-up, from unsubstantiated claims of downplaying numbers, to the weaponization of a blatant conspiracy theory with the Lab Leak story, to waging a campaign against Chinese vaccines. Now, however, with Western nations having all moved towards surrendering to COVID upon losing the political will to implement any more restrictions due to fierce opposition from the public, the mantle of the narrative has moved towards attacking China's "zero-COVID" strategy as oppressive.
This noticeable shift in discourse materialized around December last year in media coverage of China's lockdown in the city of Xi'an and the surrounding Shaanxi Province. The BBC, a leader in pushing anti-China propaganda narratives, explicitly began pushing atrocity propaganda stories accusing China's authorities of imposing "starvation and death" in the city, an outrageous claim to make given the scale of human life lost in the West and the authorities' ultimate quashing of the outbreak. This narrative nonetheless has carried on and has become a staple of mainstream media attacks towards the Winter Olympics in Beijing, with many journalists on the ground in the city attacking the "COVID bubble" or complaining about procedures on social media. In every instance, zero COVID is now "bad."
Similarly, in the Hong Kong special autonomous region (SAR) the narrative has shifted. At the very beginning of the pandemic, before the implementation of the national security law, the city's zero-COVID approach was in fact praised by the Western media, framing it as part of the city's resistance to the mainland and as an ideological argument for democracy. Whilst of course the SAR's longstanding expertise in combatting pandemics continued irrespective of the NSL, again the city has come under attack by the Western media for its zero-COVID policy which is now also portrayed as arbitrary and oppressive. It is frequently used to weaponize the broader narrative that the city will "lose its status as a financial center" through its policy choices, whilst local authorities were also criticized for their "hamster cull" policy after COVID-19 was proven to be transmissible through the animals.
However, there is one obvious contradiction in this anti-zero COVID narrative. Whilst the Western media now attacks zero-COVID in Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland as oppressive and costly, it habitually ignores the same policy being implemented in the Taiwan region which instead, is praised for its policy choices regarding COVID. Why is it that zero-COVID and travel restrictions are framed to be disruptive to businesses in the mainland, but not in Taiwan? This blind spot goes to show how virus criticism is being wielded as a political weapon, with Taiwan itself having also been weaponized against the mainland since the very start of the pandemic in the bid by pro-independence forces to try and push their agenda. A recent article placing Taiwan at the "top of the global COVID recovery index" only goes to affirm this obvious political and ideological bias.
Yet, it is intrinsically unfair to offer COVID praise to Taiwan yet not the mainland given that in terms of geographic and population size, the challenge of combatting COVID are not comparable. The sheer scale of human organization required in order to control COVID in China can demand absolutely nothing less than the measures which have been implemented so far. For the West to allow millions to die in the name of individualism, freedom and democracy, and then to frame China's own measures as oppressive and authoritarian, is ultimately demonstrative of the sheer bad faith and propaganda war that has been waged against the country in almost every single domain since the Trump administration reset American policy. In this lopsided world, death is life, and life is death. The thought of China doing better has just been too much to take.

The author is a political and historical relations analyst. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn