Cover Story

How we chose this week’s images

Insert a clear and simple description of the image

Sometimes an event has so many repercussions that it is hard to illustrate. After nearly three years of shutting itself off from the world, China is reopening its borders on January 8th, thus dismantling the last remnant of its “zero-covid” policy. Our issue this week contains thousands of words of careful reporting on how this might affect China itself and the global economy. But how to sum them up in a single image?

One approach is to use a photograph. In the short run, because the Communist Party has failed to prepare adequately for the end of draconian lockdowns by properly vaccinating the elderly, hundreds of thousands of Chinese people are likely to die of covid-19. A picture of a masked patient captures this tragedy starkly.

This image shows the abruptness of the party’s U-turn. A couple of months ago the official line was that zero-covid was working brilliantly thanks to the wise leadership of Xi Jinping. Now it has suddenly been scrapped. The bullet holes in the road sign suggest both dots on a viral membrane and the horror of mass infection.

However, our cover story is not just about the alarming spread of the virus in China (a topic we put on the cover before Christmas). It is also about the effects of China’s reopening, economic and political, good and bad. The Chinese economy could contract in the first quarter, as infections surge, and then rebound sharply as the wave passes. Countries that sell commodities to China, or that welcome a new outpouring of Chinese tourists, will prosper. Other countries will be hit by higher commodity prices, pushing up inflation and forcing central banks to keep monetary policy tighter for longer. China’s reopening will be the biggest economic event in the world this year.

Big events in China are sometimes announced with a gong. So our artists sketched a gong with the familiar coronavirus spikes. This was promising, so we worked it up into a more colourful version. The sun is glinting off the gong. “China opens up” is a good, grabby headline.

However, this image was too positive. Gongs are used to announce festivals or (in the old days in the West) dinner. It didn’t feel right for a story that included so much suffering. So we thought of a wave, representing not only the “exit wave” of covid infections but also the powerful forces that China’s reopening will unleash. To hint at the effects on global trade, we put a cargo ship on the wave.

In the end, though, we went for simplicity. The wave carries a silhouette of the virus. The picture hints at yin and yang. The reader is left with a sense that something huge is coming, for good and ill. Waves can smash things; they can also be surfed.

In Britain and Europe, we returned to a sore topic: how to mend the cross-channel ties that were wrecked by Brexit.

An early idea was to depict an unhappy relationship with naked feet under a duvet. Britain and Europe, identifiable by their flag-motif slippers, are in bed together but estranged, facing huffily in opposite directions. It’s a lovely image, but understates the complexity of the problem. This couple could presumably roll over, kiss and make up. For Britain and Europe, making up will be much harder to do.

This image, of two jigsaw pieces that don’t fit together, in bold blue and red to suggest the EU and UK flags, looks suitably awkward. It hints that the two sides have barely started to solve the puzzle, and there are a thousand pieces left to go.

Just before Britain’s general election in 2019, Boris Johnson posted a picture of himself holding a traditional British pie. “Our deal is oven-ready,” he promised. “Let’s get Brexit done.” It was a brilliant slogan, appealing to the huge number of Britons who just wanted the issue of Brexit to go away. And plain traditional British cooking subliminally hinted that Mr Johnson was not only a patriot but also speaking the plain truth. He won the election, but his deal was far from oven-ready. Three years after Brexit happened, it is proving not merely destructive but unworkable. So our designers offered a picture of some raw poultry, implying that Mr Johnson was talking giblets.

But the headline we liked best was “The end of magical thinking”. Brexiteers promised benefits from Brexit that proved illusory, while the damage was all too real. Remoaners, too, indulge in hocus-pocus when they suggest that Britain might rejoin the European Union any time soon. Desirable though that would be, the political obstacles are, for now, insurmountable. So we played around with images of a conjuror’s wand drooping pathetically…and snapping in half.

Another idea was to show a man and a dog, in the style of René Magritte, walking implausibly in the air, poised to plunge to earth. One of our editors suggested flipping the image, so that man and dog were walking back towards solid ground.

In the end, though, the image that worked best was of a bruised and battered rabbit emerging from a magician’s top hat. Brits were promised freedom, prosperity and shorter queues in hospitals. Instead we got a battered bunny of a deal, which will need bandages for years to come. Our cover story offers a prescription to patch it up.