As hospitals overflow, Xi fights to save face over Covid U-turn

China's leader Xi Jinping told his country it stands on "the right side of history" in a new year address last Saturday, but experts have warned that the president starts 2023 diminished by his chaotic U-turn on Covid strategy.

- Gregor Stuart Hunter and Emma Graham-Harrison

He may struggle to deflect blame for the human and economic costs of zero-Covid's failure, and control the national narrative, even if public signs of dissent are crushed.

Officially, China has registered just over 5,200 deaths from Covid, but there is a yawning gap between the picture presented by the usually efficient communist propaganda apparatus and the reality reflected in social media posts and anecdotes.

Hospital emergency wards are overflowing with desperate patients.

Medical supplies are running low, with pharmacies selling out of drugs ranging from anti-viral to basic painkillers. Police patrolled one Beijing crematorium where Reuters reported long queues of hearses last week.

In his first public comments to the Chinese people on Covid since his government changed course last month, Xi used his speech to claim the government and Chinese Communist party (CCP) had "put the people first and put life first all along".

For many in China, that phrase will ring hollow, particularly those fighting for medical care for loved ones newly struck down by the disease.

Questions about why the country clung so long to zero-Covid, at such heavy cost, and did so little to prepare for opening up are likely to undermine Xi, even if the damage to his authority isn't visible beyond the walls of the secretive leadership compounds.

"The fact that the CCP's posture towards the pandemic has now completely reversed after a popular uprising can only mar Xi Jinping's carefully cultivated air of infallibility," said Orville Schell, director of the Center on US-China relations at the Asia Society in New York.