New economic data shows that China’s policy of “Dynamic Zero Covid,” or maintaining the lockdowns-and-testing regimen long abandoned in the West as a tool for controlling COVID-19 outbreaks, was not the economic drag Western experts predicted it would be.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics said on Monday that the country’s gross domestic product increased by 3.9% in the third quarter of 2022 as compared to the previous year, China Daily reported. Moreover, in the first three quarters of 2022, China’s GDP grew by 3%.

Both are strong increases from China's second quarter numbers, which showed just 0.4% GDP growth over the previous year and a 2.5% increase for the first half of the year overall. Still, that is substantially lower than Beijing’s revised economic target of 5.5% growth for the year.

The news comes as the Communist Party of China wraps up its 20th Party Congress, in which Chinese President Xi Jinping was confirmed for a third five-year term in office. Many observers also expected the congress to serve as a bellwether for the future of Dynamic Zero Covid, which Beijing has maintained since the summer of 2021, when the Delta variant arrived in the country.

Instead, Xi hailed the “all out people’s war to stop the spread of the virus,” telling delegates that his administration had done everything it could to protect people’s health and put “the people and their lives above all else.”

Dynamic Zero Covid involves several practices that were established as successful COVID-19 control measures early in the pandemic, but which have long since been abandoned by Western nations. Social lockdowns, mass testing of entire urban populations, and funneling of food, medicine and other necessities to people in quarantine have succeeded at taming even the ultra-infectious Omicron variant of the virus.

On Sunday, China’s National Health Commission detected a total of 1,076 cases and no new deaths. It has recorded roughly 600 COVID-19 deaths in all of 2022, which is how many are dying of the virus in less than two days in the United States, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

However, according to numerous Western experts, this combination of suppressing COVID-19 and maintaining economic growth was not possible.

As early as January, shortly after the Omicron variant arrived in China and prompted lockdowns in several Chinese cities, the Wall Street Journal asked if Zero Covid was “starting to backfire.”

By April, British historian Niall Ferguson wrote in Bloomberg that Xi had “oversold” Zero Covid and it had become his “nemesis,” and that the virus had returned to exact “revenge on its country of origin,” floating the widely dismissed conspiracy theory that COVID-19 escaped from a Wuhan biolab in late 2019.

“The underlying reality is that, for social as well as economic reasons, Zero Covid will need to be quietly abandoned,” Ferguson argued. He then made a very explicit prediction: “Morgan Stanley’s base case is that China will not exit from Zero Covid until after the close of the 20th Party Congress in the fall. In practice, that may no longer be viable.”

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