China’s zero-Covid rules spark social media storm as article recalls 'isolationist' Ming, Qing era

As China continues with its zero-Covid policy, an article on the "closed-door" policy of the Ming and Qing eras and its role in keeping away Western colonisers has triggered a tempest on the Chinese internet.

The last two imperial dynasties' policies of closing China off from the rest of the world for about 500 years led to its decline before the new People's Republic was formed in 1949, South China Morning Post reported quoting the article.

The article says it wasn't a policy of complete isolation, but of "self-restriction" to protect national interests and stop foreign invasion.

However, while this delayed "the bloody eastward expansion of the Western colonialists" to some extent, the policy was "highly conservative" and had its limitations, it concedes.

The article, published in June in a Chinese Academy of History journal, has recently been doing the rounds on social media. It is attributed to a research group, with no authors named.

"The concept of seclusion and isolation of the country did not exist in ancient China, nor was it the inherent image of China in the West … It is not an objective description of foreign policy in the Ming and Qing dynasties," the article said.

"[The so-called closed-door policy] did not stop the growth of China's foreign trade or the exchange of knowledge between Chinese and Western cultures during the Ming and Qing dynasties, but it did lead to passive defense and a lack of interest in advanced Western technology," the report said.

Some social media users, especially on China's Twitter-like Weibo, were up in arms against that line of thinking, saying it attempted to "reverse history", while others said it promoted the benefits of isolationism, likening the imperial stance to China's current Covid-19 policy.

"The greatest danger of this paper is that it gives people a wrong impression-[that] if China is closed today, it is in response to the invasion of Western capitalism, and it is also a foreign policy that is in keeping with the times," commented one Weibo blogger with more than 340,000 followers.

But Hu Xijin, former editor-in-chief of the nationalist tabloid Global Times, defended the article. He said it was "harmful" to see the argument as a move away from China's policy of "opening up."

"China's determination to continue opening up is very strong, the audits oversight agreement reached by China and the United States is the best evidence," Hu said.

Last week, the US and China came to an important preliminary agreement that will let US officials check on Chinese businesses to keep them from being taken off US stock exchanges.

On the argument that Beijing's Covid-19 policies were obstructing the country's communication with the outside world, Hu asserted this was "a temporary problem" that China was determined to resolve.

However, Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor at Renmin University, said the "self-restriction" concept proposed by the Academy of History research group was not mature and needed to be reconsidered.

"Over 150 years of history prove China needs to insist on being independent while absorbing advanced ideas from Western countries or other places by opening up … and undergoing its own reform. These two [ideas] should complement each other," he said.

This comes as many Chinese cities are still fighting sporadic Covid-19 outbreaks under a dynamic zero policy.

The northeastern city of Dalian, for example, is under "silent management," which means that there are partial lockdowns that limit movement. In central Wuhan, where the pandemic was first reported in 2020, residents have to get tested every two days, or their electronic health codes will turn grey and they won't be able to go into public places.
As the southern tech hub of Shenzhen fights a new outbreak caused by a new variant, big events have been canceled and people in several districts have been told to stay home as much as possible.

China has yet to completely open its borders since pandemic measures were first introduced more than two years ago, but has recently allowed international students to return and lifted some restrictions for overseas travellers, moves seen by many as a major step towards reopening the country.