There are a lot of parallels that show how hard it will be to roll back zero-Covid in the short run,” says [Professor] Wang Feng, a sociologist and China expert at the University of California, Irvine. “At the time, the size of China’s population was deemed a national emergency and all measures were taken to bring it down through forced sterilisations and abortions. “It was very hard for the government to walk back the policy, despite the excesses that it caused, due to the huge bureaucracy established to enforce it,” Wang adds.

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