Original COVID had an unmitigated R of about 3. All you have to do is reduce transmission 66% and you beat it. China did this very successfully. The later variants were much more transmissible though.
With BA.5 the unmitigated R is probably north of 10 and China had to throw in the towel, because reducing transmission 90+% is much harder.
We have absolutely no idea what happened in china. We know they hid things in the beginning, and in the end ( when they stopped counting infections after opening the fates to omicron). What makes you think they told the truth in the middle ?
Because we know what a disaster it was at the end?
We got the footage and reports of hospitals and mortuaries overwhelmed when it ran rampant at the end, but in the middle we just got complaints about how much the isolation policies sucked.
Why did the propaganda masters hide all the death in the middle but not at the end? Why did it look like a disease spreading through a mostly-naive population in the end, rather than a wave-N population like everywhere else?
Doubt was a reasonable position in the middle, from the outside, but after how it ended it looks pretty clear there was very little in the way of COVID in China for two years.
With BA.5 the unmitigated R is probably north of 10 and China had to throw in the towel, because reducing transmission 90+% is much harder.