Loud success, quiet failure 一开始，中国的宣传和被洗脑的中国人民一起取得了巨大的成功，但失败却发生了，中国人假装不存在发生过的事情。

While the zero-COVID policy ended in failure and trauma, according to Hou, it was initially quite successful.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/21/china-tries-to-bury-the-memory-and-trauma-of-zero-covid-era

“In 2020 and 2021, we luckily didn’t really feel the pandemic in China,” he said.

After a late response to the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, the Chinese authorities subsequently managed to get the pandemic under control, and by mid-2020, normal life had resumed and social order was restored.

That was a contrast to several high-income countries in the Western world where health services struggled when the pandemic first struck, according to assistant professor Yan Long, who has studied the development of Chinese public health policies at the University of California, Berkeley.

That also made the zero-COVID policy a source of national pride in China and an opportunity for the Chinese leadership to showcase, at least domestically, that China had outdone countries such as the United States.

“It was a way to say, ‘Look, democracy has failed, we succeeded’,” Long told Al Jazeera.

The success began to fray, however, with the emergence of more infectious COVID-19 variants such as omicron. Immense resources were poured into constant rounds of mass testing and the implementation of lockdowns, but the measures failed to put an end to new outbreaks.

“The zero-COVID policy became financially unsustainable, and scientifically impossible, while the confidence in the policy also began to drastically decline,” Long said.

“By 2022, COVID was no longer the biggest fear. People were more afraid of the disruption of the lockdowns.”

Hou from Shanghai agrees that towards the end, the zero-COVID policy felt worse than COVID-19.

“The policy made life a living hell,” he said.

Hou knows of many people who experienced traumatic episodes during the lockdowns as well as in the subsequent rapid reopening of society.

“But unlike me, most people I know don’t want to talk about the COVID times. They just want to forget them,” he said.

Long, the academic, doubts that Chinese people have had a chance to heal after what happened.

“It is now a year later, and there has been no discussion about COVID, no reflection about what was right and what was wrong,” she said.

“When you bury the memory, you don’t learn any lessons, which means there is no guarantee that the same mistakes won’t be made again.”

“So many people suffered under the zero-COVID policy, and so many people died when it ended,” Ma said.

大声的成功，安静的失败

侯说，虽然零新冠政策以失败和创伤告终，但它最初相当成功。

“幸运的是，2020年和2021年，我们在中国并没有真正感受到疫情的影响，”他说。

中国当局对武汉最初爆发的 COVID-19 疫情反应较晚，随后成功控制了疫情，到 2020 年中期，正常生活已经恢复，社会秩序也得到恢复。

加州大学伯克利分校研究中国公共卫生政策发展的助理教授严龙表示，这与西方世界的几个高收入国家形成鲜明对比，这些国家的卫生服务在疫情首次爆发时陷入困境。

这也使得零新冠政策成为中国民族自豪感的源泉，也是中国领导层至少在国内展示中国已经超越美国等国家的机会。

“这是一种说法，‘看，民主失败了，我们成功了’，”朗告诉半岛电视台。

然而，随着 omicron 等更具传染性的 COVID-19 变种的出现，这种成功开始受到影响。 大量资源投入到不断的大规模检测和实施封锁中，但这些措施未能阻止新的疫情爆发。

朗说：“零新冠病毒政策在经济上变得不可持续，在科学上也是不可能的，而人们对该政策的信心也开始急剧下降。”

“到 2022 年，新冠肺炎不再是最大的恐惧。 人们更害怕封锁的破坏。”
医院走廊里的孩子们。 他们滴着点滴，戴着口罩。
在向北京询问有关“流感样疾病”的更多数据后，世界卫生组织得出结论，这不是一种新病原体[文件：Jade Gau /法新社]

来自上海的侯也同意，到最后，零新冠政策感觉比新冠病毒 (COVID-19) 更糟糕。

“这项政策让生活变成了人间地狱，”他说。

侯认识许多人在封锁期间以及随后社会迅速重新开放期间经历过创伤事件。

“但与我不同的是，我认识的大多数人都不想谈论新冠疫情时代。 他们只是想忘记他们，”他说。

龙这位学者怀疑中国人在经历了这一切之后是否还有机会痊愈。

“现在已经一年过去了，人们还没有讨论新冠病毒，也没有反思什么是对、什么是错，”她说。

“当你埋葬记忆时，你不会吸取任何教训，这意味着不能保证同样的错误不会再犯。”

“Because of that, my family and I are traumatised to this day.”