Their strategy is extremely successful. They have an excuse to lock people down and turn parts of the country into a prison any time they want.. forever!

Are you saying that the CCP just wants to lock up people for the perverse pleasure of having random people locked up?

Regimes lock up particular people when particular people are a threat. They may lock people up unnecessarily just to err on the side of caution. But if they overdo it it can backfire. So far the main reason I hear from Chinese people to criticize Xi and the CCP is mostly about COVID and lockdowns, and never for any of the reasons westerners point the finger against the regime

It's sort of a neo-hukou system? A positive covid signal is basically house arrest. Since they do covid tests in batches of 20, it is expected to get false positives.

It's surprising how successful it is given relatively low immunity among the population and how infectious the new variants are. And yet its both unsustainable and will have to be maintained forever. There is currently no plausible path out of the measures.

If you had to choose between a 1% risk of being crippled by COVID, or a 100% risk of living under the strictest lockdown measures your country had for the rest of your life, what would you choose? And the actual risk of long-term consequences is lower.