Xi’s iron grip on his country is stopping the Covid U-turn it so desperately needs | Isabel Hilton

As the rest of the world breaks free of the virus, China has doubled down on draconian measures

Last week, Covid-related images provoked outrage on Chinese social media: one showed a young woman kneeling on the ground with her hands tied behind her back after she and a friend had picked up a takeaway meal without first donning masks.

Neither had Covid, neither was even a close contact, but both had been detained by the increasingly resented big whites", the hazmat-suited zero-Covid enforcers who bound the women's hands and left them kneeling in the street, an exercise in humiliation that provoked indignation among China's netizens.

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