China's Ineffective COVID Control Won't Topple Xi From His Perch

Across China, cities are locking down their residents, supply lines are rupturing, and officials are scrambling to secure the movement of basic goods -- as its largest ever recorded outbreak of COVID-19 threatens to spiral into a national crisis of the government's own making, Simone McCarthy wrote in an analysis for CNN.

Photo Insert: Chinese leader Xi Jinping has placed his personal stamp firmly on the "dynamic zero-COVID" objective.

At least 44 Chinese cities are under either a full or partial lockdown as authorities persist in trying to curb the spread of the highly transmissible Omicron variant, a report from investment bank Nomura and CNN said on Thursday.

In Shanghai, the epicenter of the country's latest outbreak, scenes once unimaginable for the hyper-modern financial capital have become part of the daily struggle for 25 million people.

There, residents forbidden to leave the confines of their apartments or housing blocks for weeks have been desperate for food and freedom -- some seen in social media clips screaming out of their windows in frustration or clashing with hazmat-clad workers. Even after the release of a tentative plan Monday for the partial relaxation of measures, there appears to be no end in sight.

The current situation may mark the most significant challenge for the country -- and, arguably, for Chinese leader Xi Jinping -- since the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan over two years ago. And for Xi, it comes at a particularly sensitive time, months before his expected step into a nearly unprecedented third term in power at the twice-a-decade Party Congress this fall.

The stakes are high for the leader -- China's most powerful in decades -- as he has placed his personal stamp firmly on the "dynamic zero-COVID" objective driving these unbending measures, where even a small number of cases can spark sweeping disease controls.

"We need to overcome paralysis in the face of risk, war-weariness, leaving things to chance and becoming relaxed," state media reported Xi saying Wednesday, calling on the nation to "strictly implement normalized prevention and control measures."

In China, local officials rolling out COVID-19 measures, like those in Shanghai, typically get blamed for mismanagement when there are problems even as the people privately slam Xi for his incompetence, with some billionaires describing Xi as a “clown.”

However, it is not expected that the COVIDcrisis will imperil the clown’s likely third term.

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