In China’s campaign to get its population of 1.4 billion vaccinated against COVID-19, the magic number is 77.6 percent. Government agencies all over the country, from Inner Mongolia to Jiangsu, uniformly pledge to get this exact percentage of their populations vaccinated. A rural township in Harbin boasts that it’s fully vaccinated 11,025 of its population of 14,198, 0.05 percentage point above the sacred target of 77.6 percent. So, just what is the significance of 77.6?

Numbers game

This eerily specific target emerged in late March when a document was circulating across different levels of the Chinese government’s sprawling apparatus. It stated:

Based on COVID-19’s R-naught [basic reproduction number] of 2.6, the herd immunity rate must be 61.54 percent or higher. Factoring in the Sinopharm inactivated virus vaccine’s efficacy rate of 79.34 percent, our nation needs to achieve a vaccination rate of 77.6 percent or higher.

The document does not give the source of this calculation, but the math behind it is surprisingly unsophisticated. The herd immunity rate is derived from the presumed R-naught of 2.6, through the equation 1-2.6^-1. The Sinopharm efficacy rate of 79.34 percent was derived from the interim phase-three trial data for efficacy against hospitalization of symptomatic adult patients. Dividing 79.34 into 61.54, one arrives at 77.6.

Yet this formula is plagued with uncertainty. The R-naught of COVID-19 unclear—scientists’ estimates range from 1.5 to 6.68. Moreover, the Sinopharm vaccine’s efficacy rate fluctuates from as low as 72.8 percent to as high as 86. In addition, the Sinopharm jab is among the many vaccine options currently available in China. Proxying a wide variety of vaccines with one trial data point of one vaccine seems arbitrary.

If the number 77.6 rests on such thin ground, why has it gained national prominence? The short answer is that China’s bureaucracy needs a numeric target to mobilize around. The command-and-control system is put on high gear when complex workflows converge on a single data point that easily percolates down the chain of command—however imperfect the data point is. At each level of the government, officials are held responsible for inoculating exactly 77.6 percent of the population and are even told to “sweep the street” for unvaccinated citizens. In a race to be the first to hit 77.6, local authorities offer competitive incentives such as free groceries and even cash payments, as unvaccinated citizens rush to the highest bidder. This numerical target, though arbitrarily derived, has become the anchor of China’s mobilization of an astonishing amount of medical, financial, human, and political resources.

From COVID-19 to climate

Such valorization of a single number may seem like a throwback to Mao-era socialist planning, except that China has never parted ways with this model of governance. As my research shows, despite extensive market reforms in industries such as textile and electronics, target-based national planning remains central to the management of contemporary China, especially in the environmental realm.

Lately, target-setting has gained renewed attention in China and elsewhere, as global climate governance increasingly relies on quantitative goals and commitments by governments. Some observers describe the pandemic as a “test run” for how the world would respond to climate change. If that is the case, China’s race to 77.6 could offer a glimpse into the nation’s emerging response to climate change. With the goals of carbon peak before 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060 already in place, the Chinese political system appears poised for aggressive campaigns, mobilizations, and races to combat climate change. Will they work?

The Chinese government clearly thinks so, boasting the supposed advantage of its centralized regime in handling crises like COVID-19 and climate change. This optimism may be premature, however, because what undergirds China’s race to inoculate 77.6 percent of the population is in fact the opposite of what the world needs to address the climate crisis.

Top-down authority and its discontents

Despite its seemingly scientific appearance, racing to 77.6 reduces science to grade-school algebra. The elevation of 77.6 to the status of national importance reflects the bureaucratic need for a credible-looking number, rather than a genuine commitment to let science guide policymaking. To effectively take on climate change, science needs to play a much more substantial role in China’s decision-making. A good place to start would be for government representatives to refrain from treating science as a mere instrument of the state.

Furthermore, the race to 77.6 is, by definition, a one-off campaign that expires as soon as the target is fulfilled. As such, local officials are able to set up makeshift vaccination stations and pop-up service centers because these undertakings do not involve long-term personnel, budgetary, or resource commitments. The 77.6 race is similar to China’s poverty alleviation campaign, which shows quick, tangible results of one-off “success” but provides insufficient support for lasting prosperity. The climate crisis is not going to dissipate in the face of a one-off campaign. It calls for an entirely different response strategy—one that requires sustained, coordinated interventions with an eye on long-term future scenarios. Such a strategy would entail less fanfare but more hard work.

To be sure, the Chinese government has made substantial commitments to combating climate change. Centering on President Xi Jinping’s overarching goal of achieving carbon peak before 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060, China’s climate response strategy features impressive initiatives in renewable energy, energy efficient buildings, electric vehicles, and consolidated emissions trading. With the recent announcement that the all-powerful agency for economic planning, National Development and Reform Commission, will take back regulatory power over climate change, these green initiatives are on track for further expansion and growth in the foreseeable future. As such, a lot more numeric targets like 77.6 will spring up across all levels of the government to show, at least superficially, efforts to meet the 2030/2060 pledge.

Commendable as these efforts are, their top-down style is increasingly getting in the way of effective, durable enforcement. As Judith Shapiro and I show in our research, Chinese state-led environmental programs have the tendency to succeed when they are committed to genuine citizen participation and bottom-up engagement, as was the case in the waste import ban, but often misfire when the state gives in to the authoritarian imperative of coercion without consent, as when a sudden switch from coal to natural gas left citizens literally in the cold. While our findings may seem counterintuitive, the reality is that the effectiveness of China’s brand of state-mandated environmentalism hinges not on a strong state, but on mechanisms that place state power in check.

If top-down, state-centric campaigns like the race to 77.6 continue to dominate China’s regulatory landscape, the negative consequences will become increasingly costly and even irreversible.

The climate crisis does not have a vaccine-like silver bullet. China’s climate ambitions are already at odds with powerful coal interests, evident in the revived coal-fired power plant construction as part of the pandemic recovery and slow roll-out of the emissions trading system. Pulling off a win-win happily-ever-after campaign is one thing, but combating vested fossil fuel interests is quite another.