We all know China is the nation responsible for unleashing the COVID-19 pandemic onto the globe, all while lying about its origins and pretty much everything else. We also know the Chinese Communists continue to enforce one of the most draconian responses to the virus well after much of the rest of the world has effectively recovered and moved on, in part to contain civil unrest.

Protests broke out in several Chinese cities following Beijing’s latest implementation of its tyrannical “zero COVID” policy, which effectively amounts to locking people in their homes until party enforcers decide the threat has passed. The irony is that rather than dealing with the problem and ensuring that these outbreaks of COVID don’t suddenly hit Chinese cities, the zero COVID policy does the opposite — it ensures that healthy young people are prevented from contracting the virus and developing immunity, thereby ensuring that COVID remains a constant deadly threat to China’s older population in a country that continues to lack the hospital capacity to care for mass numbers of sickened individuals.

Of course, this goes a long way to explain China’s bogus COVID mortality number. In a nation with a population of 1.4 billion, the party apparatchiks insist the death toll remains an absurdly low 5,233 — and American media outlets largely play along with that ridiculous fiction. Furthermore, Beijing has repeatedly peddled the myth of its zero COVID policy being superior to that of the Western democracies.

Since zero COVID is and was a flawed policy from the start, what’s stopping Xi Jinping from ending it and adopting a more successful approach that includes accepting the offer of mRNA vaccines? The answer ultimately lies in China’s communist authoritarian government ideology, which, to sum it up, demands that the people exist to serve the state, rather than in a democratic form of government where the state existing to serve the populace.

To reject the zero COVID policy would be to admit defeat to the West, something that Xi is not about to concede. Furthermore, the ChiComs know that the massive zero COVID lockdowns do damage at home, but they also disrupt the global economic supply chain, damaging western economies and specifically the U.S.

“Big American companies in general earn a lot of profits in China,” said Brookings Institution fellow David Dollar. “Definitely, profits are not growing given the stagnation in the economy. There are key products, like certain types of smartphones, that are seeing clear supply chain bottlenecks. These bottlenecks jump around from sector to sector, city to city, and impact production in complex ways.”

So, while a lockdown in one of China’s large cities may not appear to directly impact the U.S., it does negatively impact the prices Americans see at retail stores like Walmart. Furthermore, Xi may see the zero COVID policy as a means of useful leverage against Joe Biden when it comes to Taiwan. Beijing can significantly affect global supplies by locking down major cities and blaming the pandemic. It’s a means of pushing what amounts to temporary economic sanctions while avoiding all the inconvenient international political blowback.

Playing such games is also one reason behind Dr. Anthony Fauci’s continued, albeit admittedly less vociferously pushed, rejection of the lab leak theory being the most likely explanation for the origin of COVID. The Biden administration would rather bow to the ChiComs than stand up to them.