Virtually every person on the planet now recognizes that they are simply going to have to live with the coronavirus from now on, in the same way that we have learned to live with the seasonal flu. Even countries that clung to China’s mass containment model well into 2021, such as Australia, New Zealand and Germany, are now abandoning it.

Yet the Chinese Communist Party continues to pursue the impossible dream of COVID Zero.

Now, you might say that no political organization likes to admit it was wrong. In fact, when asked recently why China refused to recognize that COVID was now endemic, a top official of the National Health Commission simply said, “If we stop all containment measures now, it means all the previous efforts are for nothing.”

But at an even deeper level, I see the Chinese Communist Party’s insistence on lockdowns as an expression of its drive for total control.

I am reminded of the CCP official who, in 1980, at the very beginning of the one-child policy, confidently proclaimed: “We are a socialist country. We can control reproduction in the same way we control production: under a state plan.”

Now Xi Jinping’s attitude seems to be: “We are a socialist country. We can control the replication of a virus in the same way we control production: under a state plan.”