The first rule of tyrannies: The tyrant is never wrong.

What happens when the tyrant screws up? George Orwell had lots of thoughts on that point in 1984, and it looks like the Xi Jinping regime has decided to run Orwell’s playbook:

A day after China’s ruling Communist Party announced a broad rollback of the “zero Covid” restrictions that had smothered the economy and transformed life in the country, the propaganda apparatus on Thursday began the daunting task of promoting an audacious revision of history.

While the rest of the world concluded months ago that the coronavirus was becoming less deadly, Beijing presented the development as fresh news to explain its abrupt decision to undo the lockdowns that prompted widespread protests. In doing so, it also made a high-risk bet that vaccination rates in China are sufficient, or soon will be, to prevent a severe outbreak that overwhelms the nation’s hospitals.

“The pathogenicity of the Omicron strain of the coronavirus now is significantly reduced,” Wang Guiqiang, a health expert, told reporters in Beijing at a news briefing on Thursday that was widely covered in state media. “Everyone should treat it with a normal heart — there is no need to be nervous or even fearful.”

State television also trumpeted assertions that more than 90 percent of cases of the year-old Omicron variant are mild or asymptomatic, without explaining the sudden embrace of such conclusions.

Beijing went from We must make war on Omicron to We have never been at war with Omicron faster than one can say “Winston Smith.” The same CCP media organs that warned about the risks of Omicron for over a year have suddenly made it into a bad cold, while “zero COVID” slogans have entirely disappeared from those same outlets. Instead, they have shifted to cult-building for Xi again, the author of the disastrous “zero COVID” policy in the first place.

The problem with propaganda shifts of this magnitude, however, is that editing history is much more complex than Orwell suggested. Having manifested a massive paranoid neurosis across the country, its effects remain in place. Reuters reports that China’s population is happy to be released from perpetual home detention, but that fears are rising of a health catastrophe in the making. And they may be right:

Some analysts and medical experts say China is ill-prepared for a major surge in infections, partly due to low vaccination rates among vulnerable, older people and its fragile healthcare system.

“It (China) may have to pay for its procrastination on embracing a ‘living with COVID’ approach,” Nomura analysts said in a note on Thursday.

Infection rates in China are only around 0.13%, “far from the level needed for herd immunity”, Nomura said.

Feng Zijian, a former official in China’s Center for Disease Control, told the China Youth Daily that up to 60% of China’s population could be infected in the first large-scale wave before stabilising.

“Ultimately, around 80%-90% of people will be infected,” he said.

The country will probably face a large-scale outbreak in the next one to two months, state-owned magazine China Newsweek reported on Thursday citing health experts.

That in itself might produce another crisis of confidence in Xi, and perhaps a different form of revolt against Beijing’s rule:

Feng’s advice for addressing China’s Omicron wave was similar to that recommended in the West in 2020: flatten the curve. The public should reduce social gatherings, dining in, and recreational activities, and work from home when possible. Treatment protocols should also be established to avoid overwhelming the health care system, he said.

Daily figures published by China’s National Health Commission show more than 90 percent of positive cases involved mild or no symptoms. Coupled with the country’s above-90 percent vaccination rate, Feng said an infection could act as a “mild booster” to achieve what is known in the field as “hybrid immunity.”

But after years of Communist Party propaganda instilled in the public a sense of dread and stigma associated with COVID, the thought of hundreds of millions of infections may be hard to take.

Responding to Feng’s talk on social media, many were also taken aback by what Chinese experts likely knew but didn’t say: that a certain number of infections was always necessary as part of China’s post-pandemic rite of passage.

This is a great demonstration of the need for the First Rule of Tyrannies. The Second Rule of Tyrannies is that the sins of the tyrant must be laid upon the most dispensable underling. The worse this gets, the more pressure will come to bear on Xi’s toadies to for a blame-shift, accompanied by the Emmanuel Goldstein treatment and a series of Two Minute Hate sessions. Bet on it, because with China’s vaccines performing so poorly, the wave of infections coming will vastly swamp out their health care facilities and create all sorts of social and political pressures for at least the next several months.