For three years, China’s zero-Covid policy consistently received high-profile media coverage from the Chinese and the international press. During the first phase of the pandemic, China’s mass mobilisation of resources and strict regionwide lockdowns were seen as highly effective—a testament to the advantages of autocratic power. But after vaccines arrived and Western countries resumed normal economic activities, China’s ongoing restrictions became a source of growing concern.

Then, when the restrictions were finally lifted in late 2022, the press coverage dissipated, and the official Chinese position was silence. Just as the Chinese people were starting to regain their economic footing and reckon with the emotional fallout of the previous three years, the world stopped paying attention.

Yet the legacy of zero-Covid will not soon be forgotten. For three years, nearly every city was under various forms of lockdown, with as many as 370 million people isolated in their homes at the policy’s peak. Shanghai, China’s economic hub, was among the cities subjected to the most severe lockdowns. When it was shuttered for two months in 2022, economists worried that national GDP would fall by several percentage points.

Today, the pain is felt more broadly, with remuneration and jobs being cut across the urban economy. Salaries in typically high-paying technology and finance jobs have been slashed by 40%, and even civil-service jobs, which pay less but are considered more stable, are experiencing substantial pay cuts. Such reductions are especially painful in a country with an already low baseline income level. In 2022, urban China’s median per capita disposable income (after taxes) was US$6,224, compared to US$55,832 in the United States. (Of course, prices are higher in the US, but not by a factor of 8.97.)

Worse, the mass layoffs that started in the Chinese tech sector in 2021 have increased over time, with more than 200,000 tech jobs eliminated just between July 2021 and March 2022. And that figure doesn’t account for the knock-on effects in closely connected sectors such as finance and law, let alone the broader effect on consumption and wealth accumulation, where these jobs have a disproportionally large impact.

China’s much poorer rural areas have arguably suffered even more. In 2022, rural per capita disposable income was a mere US$2,777. Generally, rural households supplement their agricultural income by working as migrant laborers in cities, opening their hometowns to tourists from urban areas or abroad, and selling high-value commodities like tea or flowers in urban markets. But during the zero-Covid period, rural villages were cut off from urban markets and tourists, leaving their inhabitants to eke out a livelihood as subsistence farmers.

Making matters worse, the zero-Covid policy’s demands on public spending deepened local government debt, and now the country’s enormous real-estate sector is in crisis, with overall growth continuing to slow. These economic problems come at a time of acute personal suffering for many Chinese. Millions of migrant workers remain traumatised from living in dormitories or apartments without kitchens, surviving on instant noodles for weeks and months at a time. The full costs of Covid-19 and the lockdowns are still being tallied. While the youth suicide rate ticked up notably in the US during the pandemic, it doubled in China between 2019 and 2021.

When the government did finally finish lifting zero-Covid restrictions, the vaccination rate was still low among the elderly, and there was little time for hospitals and health workers to prepare for the one billion infections that soon followed. Given the sheer size of that figure, China did better than many expected. The virus didn’t mutate into a more virulent form, and the relatively less effective Chinese vaccine still protected the bulk of the population from serious illness or death. An estimated two million people died in the two months after the end of zero-Covid restrictions, but that means China (with its 1.4 billion people) still had a much lower mortality rate than the US.

China’s bigger problem was that all these deaths came suddenly, thus overwhelming funeral homes and forcing families to conduct expedient cremations and burials without traditional grieving practices. These experiences, combined with the official silence on the subject, have left a mute but palpable sense of collective pain.

Public reactions to these challenges have been mixed. Not surprisingly, young people who only ever knew China’s pre-pandemic ‘economic miracle’ are the most dispirited. Youth unemployment was at a record high of 21.3% this past June, before China stopped releasing such data altogether. Now, many younger Chinese simply want to give up (‘tang ping’) or leave the labor force to become ‘full-time children’.

The older generation is more stoic. Most of those born before the 1990s remember poverty. In the 1970s and 1980s, China was one of the world’s poorest countries, and a single bad harvest could mean starvation in the countryside. In 1978, the average city dweller had a mere 3.6 square metres of living space. Older Chinese can endure new hardships knowing that their children will still be better off than they were at the same age—no matter what happens.

Some are even cautiously optimistic following the shift in the tone of US–China relations. After years of rising tensions, recent diplomacy—including US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Beijing in June and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to San Francisco last week—signals a return to stability, even if not a fundamental improvement in this most important of international relationships. Stability can restore domestic and international investors’ confidence in the Chinese economy, thereby generating more tourism, trade, jobs and pay hikes. There is hope yet for more Chinese to escape poverty and resume a normal life.

In recent days, as Covid-19 cases have continued to mount in Australia, it occurred to me how effectively my memory has wrapped itself around the early phases of the pandemic, leaving something with rounded edges instead of spikes. I think this is representative of something broader that has happened since lockdowns finally came to an end in Australia.

We’ve lost the profound sense of uncertainty and political rupture that was present in the early stages of the crisis. I think the surreal feeling that marked the first half of 2020 itself might be the source of more useful lessons than much of the glut of writing still in production on ‘what Covid means’.

The virus emerged in late 2019 in Wuhan, China. That city was locked down on 23 January 2020 after weeks of denial and mishandling of the outbreak. The World Health Organization declared a public health emergency of international concern a week later.

If you’re anything like me, the picture of how the pandemic unfolded after that is blurry. Despite ample reason for it, panic only started to set in among some observers with the outbreak in northern Italy, the first country perceived as ‘Western’ to suffer on a significant scale. News reports abounded of morgues and hospitals being overwhelmed in wealthy Lombardy. At around the same time, Iran emerged as another focal point and there was much head scratching about what could be reliably gleaned from that country.

Yet, from where I was watching in the UK, life went on as normal, and it was some time before there was even widespread fixation on Covid-19 as a news item. Schools were closed on 18 March in Britain, but the country still didn’t really grind to a halt. My partner and I played in football games, and we attended a raucous Saturday evening pub gathering immediately before the country was sent into lockdown for the first time on the 23rd.

It was at that point that reality really set in—though what that ‘reality’ was remained fuzzy. We repeated conversations about whether to stay or go (How bad will it actually get? Is the grim reportage out of Italy to be trusted or were they just unprepared? Where would we rather be locked down? What if our parents back home in Australia get sick?). Airlines were slowly shuttered and there was an expensive rush on flights, though one we were fortunate to have the means to join if we so chose.

My partner is a doctor, but she wasn’t practising at the time. At that point we discussed whether she felt an obligation to go back on to a ward (which she does in between research, but continually disabuses me of my military-inspired assumption that many doctors feel that the personal risk of infection and harm is something they’ve already consented to).

I also recall discussions with close Australian friends, one of whom is a lawyer (over Zoom, though they were just around the corner), about whether the Australian government could legally bar citizens from returning to their own country. (It turns out it sort of can, sort of can’t, and of course won’t say that it is doing so. You were warned, you had your chance, and so on.) We decided to stick it out in the UK: this will probably be over by the northern summer, right?

Vaccines were still a long way off and it seemed strange that scientists could be so confident that an effective one would emerge. A young, healthy British friend got sick very early on, in a way that young men don’t usually get sick. Then he had something that looked, with hindsight, distinctly like long Covid. I got Covid a little while later, in a lull between lockdowns. While it was already clear that the disease was bad mostly, though not only, for the elderly and vulnerable, it was hard not to be mildly anxious when it reached me personally, given the (shall we say) febrile atmosphere. The friends I infected are all fine and so am I.

If you’re anything like me, recalling all this detail is actually something of an effort. Granted, I am fortunate not to have lost relatives to the pandemic, or worked traumatic hours in overwhelmed hospitals, and doubtless many who’ve had it worse retain sharper memories. But my mind has glossed it over, not even into some representative sense of what that time was like, but instead into an anodyne generalisation. Much time spent in lockdown, loved ones all thankfully unaffected, all something I’d rather not repeat, move along now.

This habitual, watered-down recollection of that time doesn’t dwell on the profound sense of uncertainty that shot through the first months of the pandemic. Coupled with that uncertainty was the dawning knowledge that, for better or worse, a whole clutch of things were indeed possible that hadn’t seemed so before. An influenza-like pandemic was happening; it wasn’t some silly fixation of epidemiologists. Borders could be closed. People could be forcibly cloistered away at home and turned away from hospitals.

This is about far more than the personal recollection I’m using here to evoke something very recent but seemingly already long lost. Global and national leaders were all making sense of the world, and making decisions, in a climate that shared at least some of these feelings.

Even early on, many things were said about what the crisis might portend in the long term, politically, economically and socially. Regardless of those predictions, some utopian and some deeply pessimistic, the sense that far-reaching, profound change was both possible and likely receded quickly. It seems to me that we have been left with perhaps one dominant narrative—about the death, or perhaps just decline, of globalisation.

But the early Covid-19 experience is the most useful analogue we have for any number of other major disruptions we might face, geopolitical or otherwise. We might do well to dwell on this dimension a little more. We must reach back some years for events that are genuinely comparable on the same global scope, arguably to World War II (though Covid has of course fallen well short of that event in fatality terms).

This isn’t really about the wholly unexpected, the so-called black swan possibilities. Covid-19 was the realisation of a risk that was, superficially, well understood. There are two categories of risks that come to mind.

First is the gamut of existential risks, sometimes discussed in the same breath as ongoing pandemic risks. Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk canvasses biotechnology risks, environmental change and artificial intelligence, among others. Andrew Leigh, now a junior minister in the new federal government, covers similar territory with the addition of nuclear war in his recent book What’s the worst that could happen?

The second (and not mutually exclusive) grouping is the range of geopolitical risks clearly present around the world. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reminded many of what, a few decades ago, were ever-present fears of escalation. Much has been written on the increasing risk of military escalation present as China asserts its place in the world. We’ve all quite quickly forgotten the era of ‘fire and fury’ with North Korea, too, though an uptick in missile tests is now providing a reminder.

So, in sum, two thoughts. First, these risks are all far more real than we feel when reading about them. Covid has shown us the gap between reading and believing. Anyone who works in or adjacent to the crafting of strategic policy should be mindful of this delta, and how it shapes decision-making when the crisis actually arrives.

Second, if any of these risks are realised, we will probably confront them with a similar surreal feeling to that which many of us, and many of our leaders, experienced in early 2020. We should expect the same palpable and unsettling sense of uncertainty. The world of the political possible will also open up, for better or worse.

We speak casually about living in ‘uncertain times’ a great deal. For a very large chunk of the population, the Covid-19 pandemic has been the only truly uncertain time they have experienced. We would do well to mine that experience itself for lessons, rather than trying to read the tea leaves for what Covid means for the future.

Originally published 10 August 2021.

On 24 July 2021, anti-lockdown protests across Australia led to chaotic scenes and arrests. Presented as demonstrations against Australia’s pandemic restrictions, the protests were also branded as part of a ‘World Wide Rally for Freedom’, leading to speculation about the relationship between domestic events and a global movement.

The demonstrations attracted a broad range of protesters and were promoted across chat and social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The messaging app Telegram appears to have played an important role in facilitating coordination of protests and dissemination of material between global and domestic accounts.

ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre has examined 12 Australian Telegram public discussion and announcement channels on which protest planning took place and two international channels. The analysis was not intended to be exhaustive, but looked at channels organising under the banner of ‘Freedom Rally’ or ‘World Wide Demonstration’. The largest ‘World Wide’ channel had more than 72,000 subscribers by 5 August 2021. All told, Australian ‘Freedom Rally’ channels had almost 20,000 subscribers, although there’s likely to be significant crossover.

On Telegram, users can set up ‘groups’ to chat or ‘channels’ to broadcast messages. We analysed data on seven group discussion channels on which most of the activity appears to have taken place.

Anti-lockdown protests have occurred often during the pandemic. In 2020, during its second lockdown, Melbourne experienced demonstrations in September and November. Global anti-lockdown protests have continued, often under the broad brand of the World Wide Rally for Freedom and the hashtag #WewillALLbethere. The chart below shows the number of posts with this  hashtag on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram between April and August 2021. Dashed lines mark the dates 20 March, 15 May and 24 July on which World Wide Rally for Freedom events were held.

An investigation by the fact-checking organisation Logically suggested that the World Wide Rally for Freedom protests in March and May were ‘astroturfed’ by an organisation in Germany known as Freie Bürger Kassel (Free Citizens of Kassel). Logically analysed 20 ‘World Wide Demonstration’ protest Telegram groups and found that at least 13 of them were set up in the same hour on 28 February and began with similar messages. Telegram accounts associated with Freie Bürger Kassel also promoted the 24 July protest, and its graphics were replicated across Australian groups. This activity aligned with sharp increases in the number of unique accounts posting in the worldwide Freedom Rally Telegram discussion channel (see chart below).

Unlike the selection of international Telegram channels examined by Logically, Australia-focused Telegram channels organised under the name ‘Freedom Rally’ were largely created before February 2021. Of the Freedom Rally Telegram channels set up for each major Australian city that we analysed, only the Perth channel was created after the launch of the ‘World Wide Demonstration Official’ channel on 18 February 2021. In general, Freedom Rally channels followed a similar organising principle, with one announcements channel and one chat group. Some had corresponding websites.

The Melbourne Freedom Rally channel appears to be the originator of the local Freedom Rally network, with a presence on a broad array of platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Gab and Discord. Its main Telegram channel group has been active since at least 4 September 2020. The Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane and Australia-wide Freedom Rally channels were created on 17 November 2020, with an organiser posting that the ‘Melbourne Freedom Rally is going Australia-Wide’. The organiser tells members to ‘DM the admins of Melbourne Freedom Rally to get in touch and build organizational teams locally’.

Unsurprisingly, messaging activity in Australian Freedom Rally channels generally tended to align with protests organised during lockdowns. Other than the Melbourne channel, most messaging in the Australian channels occurred after May 2021 (see chart below).

While the World Wide Demonstration channels followed the creation of most of the Australian groups, its message was quickly folded into the local ecosystem. Messages from its Telegram channel were being forwarded in Australian ‘Freedom Rally’ channels as early as 24 February 2021. And by early March, related events were heavily promoted. A 5 March 2021 press release from the ‘action group’ in Kassel, shared by the Melbourne channel, said it had received an overwhelming amount of support from many countries and was collaborating with organisers locally to deploy a wide variety of events.

On 5 March, one Sydney group user asked if the ‘World Wide Rally for Freedom’ was also planned for Sydney. A user named Dominic D (with an ‘organizer’ tagged account) replied that it would be, with ‘location to be announced soon’. In March 2021, The Guardian reported Dominic D’s real name to be Harrison McLean and explored his alleged ‘plans to introduce his “freedom” group to more radical political views’ (allegations he denied to the outlet). The Australia-wide Freedom Rally channel published a periodic list of ‘freedom’ channels to follow. These were forwarded into other channels. In January and February, this list included accounts associated with the Proud Boys and other far-right groups and media outlets.

A recorded Zoom call about the 20 March protest posted in the Melbourne channel on 17 March was tagged as the World Wide Rally for Freedom ‘Australian Team Zoom’. It included figures such as Fanos Panayides, who was notable in Melbourne’s 2020 anti-lockdown protests and a representative of the Informed Medical Options Party. In the clip, a man using a Zoom account tagged Harrison McLean says, ‘We’ve been working with an international coalition of people from over 100 cities around the world to put this event on.’ ‘Dominic D’ was active in every Telegram channel we analysed.

Analysis of the links and messages posted in six key Australian Freedom Rally Telegram discussion channels and in one worldwide Freedom Rally channel between 4 September 2020 and 29 July 2021 shows that they coordinate social media engagement across multiple platforms. Links to other Freedom Rally–associated social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram were some of the most shared links in the channels (see chart below).

Videos were also shared from YouTube, BitChute and Rumble, and mostly contained anti-vaccine and conspiracy theory content. A petition on the Australian Parliament House website was shared 125 times and requested the government to ‘uphold the Nuremberg Code’ and not make ‘experimental vaccines’ mandatory. It accumulated more than 300,000 signatures.

Forwarded messages accounted for 24% of all traffic in Australian and worldwide Freedom Rally discussion channels. In total, 6,954 Telegram channels had messages forwarded to the Australian Freedom Rally channels, and 130 channels went to all seven channels. These included QAnon-related channels, anti-vaccine groups, Australian far-right groups, international far-right groups and Australian politicians. Posts from MP Craig Kelly’s Telegram channel were forwarded 238 times. Posts from Russian state-controlled television station RT’s official Telegram channel were forwarded 190 times into all the Freedom Rally channels, but mostly in the worldwide and Melbourne-based channels.

Content often referred to a roll call of conspiracy theories and misinformation about Covid-19 and the pandemic. The graphic below, for example, references Event 201. This was a pandemic simulation held in October 2019 by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—a regular target of Covid-19 disinformation. The event has been used by some to suggest that Gates had prior knowledge of the pandemic.

Text mining suggested that people on these Telegram channels regularly used terminology reflecting a deep distrust of public institutions. Terms such as ‘false flag’, ‘fake news’, ‘fake cops’, ‘fake protests’, ‘trap’, ‘false positives’, ‘media lies’ and ‘government lies’ were among the most frequent and showed up at least 834 times across all Telegram channels between 4 September 2020 and 29 July 2021. The phrase ‘fake news’ appeared at least 140 times in the Melbourne-based Telegram channel alone.

As Australia’s pandemic response continues, more lockdown protests are likely—fed by these organising channels and by a mix of social platforms, influencers and community members expressing genuine distress and grievance. The wide variety of platforms used by such groups illustrates their ability to switch between more mainstream platforms to promote events and less moderated environments where conspiracy theories and misinformation can proliferate.

Australia’s borders and migration system are now the most secure they’ve ever been. With the third wave of Covid-19 now raging in Australia, it seems clear that our international borders will be all but closed to new arrivals for many more months—perhaps even years. From Parliament House in Canberra to the streets of suburbia, Australians understand the profound direct economic impacts of Covid-19. The deeper and potentially multigenerational economic implications of Covid-19-constricted migration to Australia are not as apparent.

Many Australians romanticise their historical connections with the bush and economic successes built on the sheep’s back. Of course, the wool industry has been an important contributor to our nation’s growth. Still, permanent and temporary migration has long been the secret sauce in Australia’s economic success.

Skilled migration has been central to maintaining Australia’s economic growth for more than two decades, including the country’s successful traversing of the global financial crisis.

While we wait for the release of the Department of Home Affairs 2020–21 annual report, the previous financial year’s data point to a significant migration problem with definite economic impacts. What’s more alarming is that these figures include only five months of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Australia’s permanent migration program fell by more than 20% from 160,323 in 2018–19 to 140,366 in 2019–20 (figure 1). The figures for 2020–21 will undoubtedly be even lower.

Figure 1: Permanent migration program and child places, 2017–18 to 2019–20

As expected, Covid-19 drastically reduced the number of temporary visas approved from 8.8 million in 2018–19 to 6.5 million in 2019–20, a reduction of more than 25% (see figure 2).

Figure 2: Temporary visas granted, 2017–18 to 2019–20

Temporary visa holders are critical to Australia’s migration program and economic success. This category of non-citizens, comprising students, holidaymakers and temporary workers, has kept Australia’s economy ticking away for decades. Some of them have brought new income streams into the economy, including in the tourism sector. Others, like temporary skilled workers, have provided Australian businesses with access to their much-needed talents. And some have offered cheap unskilled labour otherwise not available; many segments of the agriculture industry are reliant on this labour. Interestingly, before Covid this grouping also provided up to half of Australia’s permanent settlers each year.

The refugee and humanitarian program entry fell by almost 30% from 18,762 in 2018–19 to 13,171 in 2019–20 (see figure 3).

Figure 3: Refugee and humanitarian visas granted, 2017–18 to 2019–20

These and 2020–21’s likely low migration figures are indicators of an emerging threat to Australia’s economic growth. Australia’s migration program is in trouble, and it may take several years and clever policy decisions to address the shortfalls. Even so, the problem will hinder the economic growth needed to lift Australia out of the Covid era.

What can the government do in the interim? Two possible options come to mind straight away. First, the government should consider addressing the so-called legacy caseload. Second, it could seize the opportunity Covid-19 brings to harness Australia’s large number of unlawful non-citizens.

In the second half of 2011, Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s government was under pressure over its policies on ‘irregular maritime arrivals’ and the growing number of asylum seekers in the country.

With limited options, the government decided that many low-risk irregular maritime arrivals, so-called boat people, would be released into the community on bridging visas. Following health, identity and security checks, they were released under strict conditions until their protection claims were assessed.

In August 2012, in response to an upsurge in boat arrivals and deaths at sea, Gillard re-established offshore processing of asylum seekers. Less than a year later, in July 2013, her successor (and predecessor), Kevin Rudd, established offshore resettlement. Those decisions led to the creation of a new cohort of people: the legacy caseload, or those already in Australia waiting for their claims to be processed.

Almost 30,000 people have been sitting in limbo for years on bridging visas that allow them to stay in Australia while awaiting an immigration decision. Without policy intervention, they’ll be waiting for years to come.

Given the impacts of Covid-19, the government could consider offering a one-time amnesty for all legacy cases. An exemption could be granted to applicants without criminal histories or adverse security assessments. Such an amnesty would provide permanent residency, subject to passing a character test, and a path to Australian citizenship.

As of 30 June 2017, 62,900 unlawful non-citizens were residing in Australia. The number has remained roughly constant over the past few years. Finding publicly available data on how long this cohort of unlawful non-citizens has been in Australia is challenging. In 2017, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection provided the Joint Standing Committee on Migration with the most recent detailed (correct as of 30 June 2016) data on the issue, which showed that more than half of the unlawful non-citizens had been in Australia for five years or longer. Most of them had arrived on visitor visas, nearly 15% of which were student visas.

With Australia’s international borders now almost hermetically sealed, perhaps it’s time to bring this cohort of illegal non-citizens out of the shadows by offering them an amnesty to become full members of our communities.

Both measures make good economic sense. They would demonstrate the kind of pragmatism and big-heartedness that Australia prides itself on. These measures would also mitigate some of the impacts of the slowed migration program and reduce the not insignificant compliance costs for both of these cohorts.