The zero covid policy is brutal.  The thinking behind it was to suppress covid within China at the beginning of the pandemic.  The WHO lauded this as the only pandemic in history that could be contained.  In the end they got it all wrong. 

From the perspective of initial containment, China actually attained that in 2020 and 2021.  It came at an enormous cost and was never really a stable and long term solution.  Yet for those two years, expats in China experienced an extremely unique situation when life was relatively 'normal' while the rest of the world was battered by pandemic chaos or useless lockdowns.  

In that sense you could say the zero covid policy "succeeded" but it was only buying time.  Ultimately, any benefits from that policy were squandered.  Worse yet, the Chinese got very smug over this so-called success and we expats living in Shanghai were boasting of our normal life and going to gyms and bars etc...  I'll never forget that, especially how we thought this was going to be a permanent reality.  Later in 2022 it would all come around to blow up in our faces. 

What exactly 'dynamic zero covid' means, from the source in China itself, is the ability to dynamically clear cases once they occur.  For example, a city will be able to cut off multiple transmission chains and bring new cases to zero.  Failure to clear cases means the virus becomes endemic in the population which is the reality in every other country now.

By no means was China the only country that tried the zero covid policy.  Most all countries tried at first, and the lockdowns in Australia and Vietnam were absolutely brutal at the beginning.  The covid pandemic also accelerated the nationalist global autocracy.  Even before covid this phenomenon had been building, it led to governments everywhere having way too much power over our lives.  China gets singled out for this, but why should Australia, Canada and other western countries be given a pass for their covid mismanagement and all the lockdown supporters?  We need to remember that nationalist autocracy is is not a China problem, it is the key global problem of the 21st century.

Once Omicron entered the scene, zero-covid policy faced diminishing returns and even larger costs.  Yet the Chinese government stuck to it unswervingly.  It meant the rest of the world experienced a return to normalcy once most governments eventually gave up the strict rules ans decided that Omicron could be handled like a cold or a flu.  But in China, lockdowns remained the tool of choice.

Just when it looked like things would get better, we would 'start over' with a new round of restrictions.  On and on this would go with each wave, and there was never a timeline or a plan to exit this pandemic and/or move to the endemic stage.  That would be considered 'lying flat' or trying to live with the virus.

The hope that borders would open and travel could resume kept playing out for years only to never materialize.  In the end, most expats decided the only way to solve this dilemma was to leave China and a huge number of them did exactly this.  They continue to after the Shanghai lockdown.