At first, these measures further infuriated Chinese citizens, but their successes at containing the outbreak enabled propagandists to flip the narrative and present the regime not as the source of the people’s grievances, but as their savior. From the ground in China, where I spent most of the first two years of the pandemic, I saw how, in a period of just two months, life had basically returned to normal for most people outside of a few designated high-risk areas.

The public anger had transformed into a sense of triumphalism, with the Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping, emerging from the crisis with more popular support than ever before. But a side effect of two years of this relentless messaging is that the Communist Party has inadvertently tied its claim to legitimacy to its ability to keep the coronavirus at bay.

That’s why Chinese authorities have gone to such great lengths to contain small, localized outbreaks in the lead-up to the Olympics. It’s also why no tickets have been sold to spectators and everyone participating in the Games is being kept isolated from the general public. Most important, it’s the main reason why Beijing is unlikely to relax its strict pandemic-control measures even after the Olympics.