Rest of the World Will Pay the Price for China’s Abrupt Removal of International Travel Restrictions: Author

An airline staffer guides Chinese tourists who are in line to get a seat on a flight to Wuhan at Suvarnabhumi airport, Bangkok, Thailand, on Jan. 31, 2020. (Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP)

After widespread protests against the lockdowns in November, the Chinese regime abruptly walked back its stringent Zero-COVID policy in early December. Without prior notice or the disclosure of steps for a gradual withdrawal of the policy, the change was made.

Since then, COVID has ravaged China’s vast population, which was unprepared for the sudden change and lacks natural immunity against the virus after nearly three years of zero-COVID restrictions.

Despite the upsurge of COVID cases across the country, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hastily announced its removal of  international travel restrictions, that starts on Jan. 8, and consequently the world is expected to be swamped with Chinese tourists very soon.

The CCP’s new policy will incur costs for its own people and other nations, said Bradley Thayer, the director of China policy at the Center for Security Policy.

“So the Chinese people are going to pay for this, and the rest of the world is as well, with increased incidences of COVID,” Thayer told “China in Focus“ program on NTD, the sister media of The Epoch Times.

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“Because as new variants, as well as the existing variants, essential or unknown variants spread throughout the world, we face again, the pressure placed on public health around the world to deal with this virus and potentially new variants,” he added.

According to Thayer, new mutations of the virus are very likely to emerge “as a result of that population being locked down for so long, in such draconian conditions.”

“We should expect, again, that we really have the conditions which are ripe for a new wave of existing variants as well as new variants,” he said.

Continuous Lies

By the regime’s account, only eight people have died from the disease since it lifted COVID curbs in early December. This figure is based on the regime’s recently narrowed definition of a COVID death, which excludes all but those who die from respiratory failure and pneumonia directly associated with a COVID infection, a calculation method unseen elsewhere in the world.

As co-author of the book “Understanding the China Threat,” Thayer characterized official data on the number of COVID infections and deaths put out by the CCP as “absurdly low” and thus, untrustworthy.

“We still cannot trust the data coming out of China where they’re reporting ridiculous [ridiculously low] numbers of deaths,” he said.

“They covered at the outset, the genesis of this pandemic, and they remained so, they lied, they deceived the World Health Organization, they did not share information with World Health authorities as they should have done,”

According to a leaked memo from a recent high-level meeting of health officials, it is estimated that 248 million Chinese people had likely contracted the virus in the first 20 days of December.

The expert said the CCP has “the culpability for allowing COVID to spread originally in 2019-2020.”

“And the fact that we again see this wave also is directly responsible for [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping’s policy and the policies of the Chinese regime,” Thayer stressed.

“With this regime in place, the world is going to suffer once again from COVID due to the fact that they maintained their mendacity, that they continue to lie, and they continue to deceive the rest of the world about its scope,” he said.

“So China’s going to have to ride through this and that’s going to lead to an economic downturn, which is going to hurt the party,”

A More Belligerent Xi Jinping

Thayer elaborated on some incidents that showed Xi’s success in reinforcing his power.

“He got through the 20th Party Congress with flying colors. He got everything that he wanted at that 20th Party Congress,”

“Hu Jintao was humiliated, and Jiang Zemin has died,” he said, referring to Xi’s predecessors.

China’s former top leader Hu Jintao was unexpectedly led out of the closing ceremony of a key Communist Party meeting in Beijing with no explanation. Multiple analysts see elements of power play in Hu’s abrupt departure.

“So the Jiang Zemin faction, which was opposed broadly to Xi Jinping, now does not have a leader and does not have the force that it once did,” Thayer said.

“So we’re seeing an individual who’s secure enough, both in terms of dealing with his party opponents as well as popular movements,” he added, referring to the mass protests against the CCP’s Zero COVID-19 policies that broke out throughout the country at the end of November.

With Xi  getting his house in order, Thayer believes that the world will see a more active and belligerent Chinese leader on the international stage.

He pointed to Xi’s trip, for the first time since COVID began, to Uzbekistan in September to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization—a China-led security and economic grouping that brings together nations from India to Iran—and his participation at the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, in November.

“We’re seeing a more active Xi Jinping … I think this is an individual who is very active on the world stage,” Thayer said.

“We’ve seen aggression against the Indians on this disputed border, we’ve seen the largest number of incursions against Taiwanese airspace, and we’re seeing a belligerence directed against Japan in terms of co- exercises with the Russians, and Chinese forces conducting mock attacks against Japanese targets,” he added.

“So a very active, very bellicose, Xi jinping is what we should expect in 2023. And as the Chinese economy is going to be in a downturn, we should expect that bellicosity to not lessen,” he opined.

Joint Efforts to Protect Taiwan

In Thayer’s opinion, the United States should rally its allies’ support around Taiwan to protect the self-governing island that Beijing considers to be its territory.

“It’s very important for the United States to signal its strong military support for Taiwan as well, in conjunction with Canberra, with Japan, with India, and with NATO states, as well,” he said.

He further suggested that NATO be present in Taiwan. “That it would not be unusual if India were to send force advisors to Taiwan, and obviously Australia, too,” he added.

“The U.S. presence, which already exists, perhaps in a covert, or a clandestine form, might be expanded and made overt on Taiwan,” he said.

“So there’s much to do there in a very short period of time to strengthen Taiwan’s ability to offer a conventional deterrence to China and begin to operate under the American nuclear security umbrella as well,” Thayer said.

Eva Fu contributed to this report.