While Western governments reacted to the global pandemic by sending cash payments to households— in the United States, three rounds totaling $3,200– Beijing gave little financial support to people. It offered only meager increases to unemployment insurance, which only a fraction of the millions of unemployed workers were able to claim.

Beijing decided instead that the best way it could help workers was to get them back to work. In practice, it meant assisting companies to restart production rather than sending cash to households. It did that with its pursuit of the zero-Covid strategy, which involved taking drastic action to seal the country off from foreign travelers and imposing protracted lockdowns wherever it detected the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

5. Zero-Covid

China’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic embodies all of the engineering state’s merits and madnesses. It is a powerful reminder of how the engineering state could accomplish things that few other countries would even attempt, while revealing how its literal minded enforcement can lead to tragic results for human well-being and freedom. I lived through all three years of the zero-Covid strategy that China pursued to stomp out the highly transmissible virus. In the first year, the country felt like a realm of serene calm after it pushed out the virus that was raging far away.

It is a little bit difficult to praise the US response to Covid. In retrospect, the whole thing looks shambolic, with different states having different policies, mostly made worse under Donald Trump’s chaotic management. Americans stumbled into learning to live with the virus in large part because of the ineffectualness of the government. But the United States (under Trump’s Operation Warp Speed) produced mRNA vaccines that China could not. And in retrospect, China’s response to Covid looks shambolic as well. The engineering state tried as hard as it could to hold on to earlier triumphs, until it was forced to let everything go.

When I think back to this moment, it’s the lack of fever medications that really sticks with me. For three years, the government made it difficult for people to buy ibuprofen, Advil, and other fever reducers for fear that people might disguise their fevers to avoid detection. During an outbreak, pharmacies limited purchases of fever meds or removed fever meds from their shelves entirely. Therefore, much of the Chinese population met this Covid wave without medication on hand. As best as I can tell, China is the only country that denied its people fever medications during a fever-producing pandemic. It is a perfect encapsulation of the engineering state’s twisted logic.

Propaganda authorities had no special warning, though they shifted seamlessly from declaring that the virus must be stomped out in one week to saying that everyone had to be responsible for their own health the next. It felt like living through the scene in Orwell’s 1984, in which officials switched directions, mid-speech, declaring that Oceania was at war with Eastasia rather than Eurasia.

Xi’s question had produced fresh worry among businesses. Authoritarian systems aren’t good at disseminating bad news. The coronavirus had spread, after all, because local officials in Wuhan refused to let the news of a virus disturb their political serenity as they arrested medical whistleblowers. Companies and investors therefore wondered whether Xi was genuinely unaware of how much his policies had destroyed major segments of the economy. Perhaps nobody had told Xi that he was the most feared unicorn hunter of all.