Summary of the today’s top items:

1. Reopening to the world - The PRC has reopened its borders, issued the 10th edition of the diagnosis and treatment protocol for COVID-19 and downgraded the classification of Covid-19. It is going to take a while for airlines to ramp up operations but we should finally be able to have normal travel between the world and China again. While there is still no good public central government data on the number of infections, a health official for Henan province said cases had peaked and that 89% of the people in the province, or over 88 million people, had been infected.

2. Reopening propaganda work - A long Xinhua article over the weekend lays out the evolution of the Covid policies from “dynamic zero-Covid 动态清零” to letting it rip. The article does not use the term “dynamic zero-Covid 动态清零”, though 清零 zero-Covid does appear once. The article paints a picture of a coordinated and planned policy shift, one that started well before the late November protests…