Lauren A. Johnston is associate professor, China Studies Centre, University of Sydney. She is founder and managing director of New South Economics.
Under Xi Jinping's draconian zero-COVID policy, two-way flows of goods and people between China and the rest of the world have all but ground to a halt, with economists everywhere expressing angst over the damage to China's and the world economy.
Chinese history, however, suggests that it is worth considering a range of unexpected outcomes resulting from zero-COVID.
This is exactly what happened following the 1960s cholera pandemic, as Monash University professor Xiaoping Fang details in "China and the Cholera Pandemic: Restructuring Society under Mao," when, and under Mao in general, "diseases were radically politicized to justify the party's political legitimacy."
Across several cholera waves in infamously freewheeling Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, the system of registering cholera inoculations, for example, led to enhanced equivalent mechanisms for other forms of social registration too. Moreover, data collected on the health of China's rural population during the outbreak established newly detailed baselines for local statistical reporting systems.
Fast-forward then to COVID-19 and China under President Xi.
In another book, "Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China's Rise," published in October 2020, authors Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell point to a challenging-to-address policy imperative of today for which zero-COVID policies may produce turning point interventions.
Detailing a modern tragedy and potential future economic crisis of dramatic rural-urban inequality, especially in education, "Invisible China" builds upon the country's hukou system of residential registration that was introduced around the middle of the last century. Akin to a national passport and linked to maternal hukou, a person's hukou determines work, social security and public health rights.
In China under Mao, the new system offered a source of both stability and scarce resource allocation across hundreds of millions. Yet, from the 1980s onward, when tens of millions of rural Chinese took the chance to move to the city for work, these migrants nonetheless found themselves still denied the right of access to public services and social security in their new places of residence.
The children of this generation of migrant workers who transformed China's economy were either ghettoized into substandard urban migrant schools or sent back home to be educated in the laggard home village school under the care of their grandparents.
According to Rozelle and Hell, this has created a jaw-dropping education gap between today's Chinese urban elite who were forced to abide by the one-child policy and the children of what are typically multi-child rural families.
The result, they argue, is that most of China's future workers are, in fact, unemployable in a modern higher-tech environment. Entrenched human capital inequality, in other words, risks stagnating China's next phase of development.
As China's hukou system turns from source of stability to instability, what does all this have to do with China's zero-COVID policy? As the Chinese war proverb advises: loot from a burning house.
In other words, win by utilizing the weakness of those beset by disease, famine, corruption or crime. Just as they did during the 1960s cholera pandemic, China's leaders may again be pushing forward reforms that end up facilitating socioeconomic reordering and order.
On March 28, days before Shanghai went into a strict lockdown on April 1, and just as parents were preparing for the school enrollment period, the Ministry of Education issued a notice stating that inequalities related to school access must be overcome.
Families registered in an area for at least six months must have equal access to local schools and without facing pre-enrollment academic testing, the notice stated. In Beijing, China's most prized educational zone, municipality and district-level implementation guidelines followed soon after.
Furthermore, school application processes in Beijing and Shanghai were recently digitalized, with Shanghai having moderately relaxed the relevant admission requirements given the difficulties associated with ongoing lockdowns.
Come September, after decades of migrant child school lockouts and a long collective pandemic lockdown, it is now likely that classrooms in both cities may suddenly, newly relatively, reflect their true socioeconomic makeup.
A teacher demonstrates how to put on a mask correctly at an elementary school in Shanghai in September 2021: It is now likely that classrooms in the city reflect their true socioeconomic makeup. © VCG/Getty Images Another change announced during the Shanghai lockdown was that a centralized digital database of civil administration was nearing finalization. When complete, Chinese citizens will be able to avoid returning to their hukou hometown to undertake most, if not all, civil-related tasks, such as marriage, registering a business, or accessing a pension or unemployment benefits.
This reflects "the modernization of the national governance system and capacity, and plays an important role in the stability, unity and harmony of the whole society, as well as our response to the epidemic," said professor Liu Junhai, director of the Institute of Commercial Law at Renmin University of China.
This means that China's migrant entrepreneurs will no longer need to take time off to register changes to their business. Equivalently, grandparents supporting their children at home and abroad will be able to perform pensioner-related tasks online too.
COVID-19, it turns out, may be the catalyst for marking down elements of the value of an elite hukou in that it is enabling a digitization revolution. That, in turn, may eventually serve to better equalize labor productivity and social mobility across rapidly aging China.
Xi's zero-COVID policy may have exposed China's economy to lasting damage. But the long-term impact on China may not be fully understood for many years to come.