If you live in China long enough you quickly learn that you'll never really understand what is happening here.  The information is simply not transparent, and the more you try to figure things out, the more you don't know.  But you can at least try to take a stab at it.

This journal serves as a good record of what actually happened and how it affected many of us so there's no reason to rewrite history.  If you told me a few months ago that zero-covid policy was going to change and the government would switch to a narrative of living with the virus, I wouldn't believe you.  After all, there was talk from the hardline sources of a permanent zero covid reality.  Despite several other countries who had strict zero-covid regimes and eventually gave them up, China was determined to keep that path but even they gave it up

The question has to be asked:  how were they able to spin this?

For starters, the leaders gave voice to the top epidemiologists who had been censored for much of the pandemic.  According to the chief CDC expert Wu Zunyou, he predicts 10-30% of Chinese people will get covid during this wave with a fatality rate of between 0.09% to 0.16%.  

The way things are going, that official prediction is a lowball.   But if you're being very conservative that's still over 500,000 deaths.  Even Shanghai alone would easily top 2000+ deaths per day at the peak right now.  Compared to the restrctions we peaked at around 500 covid deaths a day nationwide so the officials can simply argue, "The virus is less pathogenic now than it was in April and May which is why we can let it rip but the lockdown was necessary then, otherwise there might have been a million deaths"

One doesn't have to go that far back to recall the nonstop barrage of propaganda where leaders boasted about China's zero-covid policy being superior to the US.  They would say things, for example, that "living with the virus" led to over a million deaths in the US.  And yet now, that whole narrative has gone radio silent.

From the source himself, the expert argues, "The past three years have been extremely difficult.  We have waited for the virus to become weaker and for its threat to people's health lower.  The time when China chose to scale back restrictions was when the lowest number of deaths globally were reported for several weeks"

So I think it answers the question.  I'm pretty much convinced that even the top leaders knew they would have no choice to abandon zero-covid at some point and they were waiting for the fatality rate to go down.

You could then turn it around to argue about all the collateral damage that the lockdown caused and all the mental suffering etc..  not to mention how many people died from non-covid reasons such as missed surgery appointments.  Or you could ask what about my good friend who lost her husband due to him not being able to get to a hospital in time to remove a blood clot?  

At this point we could ask what if until the cows come home.  April and May was a horror show and the lockdown made for some many crazy stories.  Despite all odds my wife and I actually came out ahead and this ended up strengthening our marriage when it seemed at the time the whole world was falling apart.  Still, this reminded me what someone said many years ago that as great as living in Shanghai is, there are the unspeakable crashes.  When things crash, they crash HARD.