TIt all started with a casual visit to Yunnan University in Kunming on May 18. In full confinement in Shanghai, Prime Minister Li Keqiang indulged, to everyone’s surprise, in a walkabout without wearing a mask. Its boss, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Xi Jinping, had just confirmed the maintenance of zero Covid measures, China’s radical strategy to keep the pandemic in check.
Then it was, a week later, a very large “(tele-)conference of 100,000 executives”, where he dared to paint a very gloomy picture of an economy struggling because of the fight against the epidemic. To the point of turning the spotlight of the international media on this discreet number two of the Chinese regime, at the head of the Council of State, the “go…
