With Zero Covid, China has proven to be pretty good at controlling. Judgment is more difficult.

WeChat has been widely circulated Article He speculated that the shortage of fever medicine reflected the government’s unwillingness to loosen control. And if the government had shown the same political will that it had in implementing “zero Covid,” the article argued, it could have ensured that there were adequate supplies of these medicines.

“She doesn’t care about ordinary people, letting them fend for themselves and even delight in their chaos,” the article said, urging officials to show up where the public needs it most to restore confidence.

Low trust in government forces people to help themselves and each other. In local WeChat groups, people have made arrangements to share fever medicine and rapid test kits with their neighbours.

Tencent, the social media giant, has also built a WeChat program where people can order medicine from strangers with more. The requests for help are modest: six pills of acetaminophen. Four tablets of ibuprofen. two sets of rapid test kits; one thermometer.

They seek help from strangers because they are not getting it from their own government.

“Don’t expect anything from Leviathan – there’s no point in appealing either,” Chen Min, a former journalist known by his pseudonym Xiao Xu, wrote in his WeChat timeline, referring to the central government. “In the end, we have to help ourselves.”

Only by building an extensive network of social connections, he continued, “we can weave a true social safety net in the darkest of moments, build a true Noah’s Ark and save countless lives.”

This is exactly the kind of governance crisis that Mr. Xi once warned the party about.

“It is not up to us to judge the ability or performance of our party in governance; people should and can only be judged by the people,” Mr. Xi said in a speech in 2013. “If we are arrogant and divorce ourselves from the people or put ourselves above them, they will give up.” About her for sure. This is the case for any party, and it is an iron law that admits no exception.