Struggling to understand China’s endgame here. Assuming they achieve zero covid, surely they will be left with a population that is still vulnerable to covid, while the rest of the world (which has largely stopped caring) will have developed immunity the hard way, and therefore China must maintain permanent quarantine/isolation to avoid reintroducing the virus?
I have been puzzled by this too, especially given my general perception of Chinese leadership as highly competent. My best theory is that Chinese people are very paranoid about infectious disease, and that the leadership believes that their political legitimacy would be threatened by mass infection numbers.