Lockdowns are suddenly over now in China. For a vast majority of the time for the past 3 years, there weren't any lockdowns. If they were locked down for the entire time, they wouldn't have been having those mass pool parties and concerts.

The lockdowns only occurred on a district/municipal level whenever cases rose up. And aside from fiasco's like the Shanghai one that lasted 2 months, most cities just had quarantines for 1-2 weeks. This strategy only stopped working recently due to people protesting and actors purposely spreading the virus in order to end the zero-covid policy. The government pretty much gave up, especially seeing as how the omicron variant wasn't as damaging as the initial outbreak.

In terms of if "China can do better", every country could have, but they probably had the least deaths ratio-wise. Yet, the most restriction of freedom.