Yeah. When people in mainland China saw all the unmasked foreigners at The World Cup it spawned a lot of ideation. I'll summarize the ideas I've seen floating around the Chinese internet:
- It's a money-making scam by the COVID test manufacturers
- It's a money-making scam by the temporary quarantine center manufacturers
- It's a failure of bureaucracy ”层层加码”
- It's a ploy to increase the depth of state surveillance
- It's a ploy to lock people at home and increase the birth rate
- It's a ploy to keep the poor poor to ensure that they keep working hard
- It's to mitigate war with the United States. Apparently the Geneva convention has a clause against going to war with a nation stricken by a pandemic.
Here's a recent commentary from a WeChat group (translated via deepl):
> The current situation is that Western water forces, through insidious and poisonous means such as the Internet, have created a very dangerous atmosphere of public opinion and incited the people to rebellion. If we are deceived and held hostage by these rumors, what China will end up with will only be a disaster. We have to believe that the country, more than anyone else, wants an early end to the epidemic, and more than anyone else, wants an early end to this costly and socially expensive epidemic prevention activity, so that society can return to normal and the economy can recover as soon as possible. We believe that the Party and the government will be able to lead the people of China to work together to overcome the epidemic! China will win! [fist][fist][fist]
That must be propaganda because it should be obvious to a lay person that it started in late 2019. China government has been trying for 3 years to “have an early end”
> saw all the unmasked foreigners at The World Cup it spawned a lot of ideation
Is there any evidence this is about masks versus gatherings?
> the Geneva convention has a clause against going to war with a nation stricken by a pandemic
The U.S. would go to war with China if it invaded Taiwan, conventions or not. (I also believe the relevant text is with respect to medical personnel, not a general prohibition on armed conflict.)
The US would not go to war and attack china over Taiwan. MAYBE They will fund Taiwan to attack. Maybe they will just put their troops there. And not fight. But they won’t go to war.
If the US is ruled by a government that will start a war with a nuclear power for any reason other than an attack against it, we need to do everything possible to replace that government. Because doing that is insane, and we cannot let madmen in charge of a nuclear football.
I just do not understand why he did not “declare that China won against COVID and how CCP is great”.
(If there is a problem with vaccination rates, the CCP has tools to make that happen. Yes Sinovax vaccine is not very effective but with 3 doses it will cut death rates by 90% or so.)
So the question here is really why Xi decided to keep zero-COVID. Maybe he is not so smart? Or maybe there is a big insider power war going on?
It is obvious at this point that China's "zero covid" policy has nothing at all to do with public health.
What many of us do not want to admit, is that our leaders have taken advantage of the crisis for their own benefit. I think most western media is reluctant to report on what is happening in China, because it would start uncomfortable conversations at home.
Seeing the Chinese government so nakedly use what's left of the pandemic to oppress their population is very problematic to our pandemic narrative. People might start to ask if perhaps their governments too have been doing that too.
The official narrative in the west has been that anything the government does to us in the name of protecting us from COVID is always correct and anyone who criticizes it is an evil "anti-vax" lunatic.
> If there is a problem with vaccination rates, the CCP has tools to make that happen.
Xi has been notably against vaccine mandates, even going so far as to reprimand a city that started asking for vaccine proof. I suspect that he himself is probably unvaccinated (afraid of needles, maybe?)
Plus, it gives a great excuse to track tracking everyone’s movements at all times.
> It's to mitigate war with the United States. Apparently the Geneva convention has a clause against going to war with a nation stricken by a pandemic.
It is a sort of funny conclusion to end up at — the US wants to have a war with China, but is stopped by the Geneva convention.
I thought they didn’t have as effective vaccines as we’ve got in the west (on top of the general, uh, hands-off approach western counties tend to take around public health). Different facts on the ground, different policies, right?
I would guess the real reason the US won't ever willingly go to war with China, not even under the most fantastic of hypothetical scenarios, has a lot more to do with a combination of the anticipated importance of tech in a modern war between major powers, and the USA's near-complete lack of domestic electronics manufacturing infrastructure.
From my uninformed outside perspective the explanation is so much simpler: decisionmaking structures of the organization in charge are failing to facilitate an overdue strategy switch. They had the best possible approach back when vaccines were a few months out and the strains in circulation were still easy to contain (much easier than the current ones), but now they keep trying to repeat that triumph, and because questioning that approach back then was bad (as evidenced by past successes) there's still no questioning now. But circumstances have changed, a lot, and the same structures that seemed surprisingly competent working on a blank slate (after merely a few days of trying to silence that ophthalmologist, I believe that this part of history was greatly exaggerated in western media) are now completely falling to adapt, because now there's an established party line and we I the hypothetical scenario that everyone knew that it was outdated, nobody would question it, more reward in feigning support.
Hahahaha, that's a good one. Yeah, welding shut apartment buildings with COVID positive inhabitants was the perfect approach to dealing with a strong lung infection for sure!
well, at least bunch of them are right - there are lot of people making money in testing & quarantine business, it IS failure of bureaucracy, it IS increasing state surveilance through mandatory health codes and location tracking, it IS used to lock people at home or disperse previous protests by switching health codes to red to lock people at home (not so sure about helping to increase birth rate)
disagree only with last two
I don't think most Chinese care that much about state surveilance with WeChat already in their phone anyway, but first two money making scams are definitely spot on, which is why they are also often mentioned. It was not different in west with testing centres and vaccination business, especially VDL exchanging private messages with Pfizer CEO how to defraud EU citizens for billions of euros on useless vaccines almost nobody healthy wanted voluntarily (unless they fell for nonsense that it somehow stop/lower transmission rate fake news).
It would show that people in other countries are allowed to gather in sports events. There are currently large protests going on against covid measures, and for freedom in general.
Everything get's blamed on the west. I was just reading on facebook about the lockdowns and even the replies are blaming the US for covid and so its the US fault that China has lockdowns.
We don't really know much at all. Comment from CNBC:
"It was not immediately clear whether the protests reached a meaningful scale in a country of 1.4 billion people, or whether a wide demographic participated"
I've seen pro government social media commentators say that the second half of the Foxconn worker statement was not reported by western media, but I won't pretend I know one way or the other.
Given that just yesterday a Japanese person tried to lecture me about how snorkels might have been banned in swimming pools because someone probably died and that they are probably dangerous, I'd say east Asians anxiety level is different from ours.
EDIT: funny to see people to get so upset. But anyone who has spent Covid in east Asia knows that they have had an extremely different approach to the Europeans all over the board and that in a lot of countries over there people are still deeply fearful of Covid. And while Taiwan has been bashing China's approach they still wear their masks everywhere and still have a somewhat lax but existent quarantine procedure.
You cannot have a serious conversation about a topic based on the information provided solely from one side no matter how much you distrust the other.
What is going on with China's continuing zero-covid policy? Either it's the most expensive face saving exercise the world has ever seen, or they know something about it that we don't.
Or, more likely in my opinion, they're having issues keeping people under control with the economic downturn, and covid lockdowns are the tool they're using to quash dissent. Seems like an irrational strategy, but totalitarian regimes often become victims to their own lies.
The USSR showed us that enforcing lies on your own people eventually leads to bizarre, irrational behavior from the government when it tries to operate within a fake framework of lies.
I don’t buy that. No other country was able to completely arrest the spread of COVID through lockdowns, even Australia and New Zealand which are islands surrounded by giant oceans were not able to stop the flood of infections.
China borders 14 countries. If there’s “no COVID” it’s because it’s being suppressed, with or without Beijing’s knowledge.
China has a 87% COVID vaccination rate, which is higher than the US (79%). However, the Chinese-made vaccines are not very effective, and many of the unvaccinated are elderly.
I'm stumped they didn't consider buying other vaccines. Maybe they don't want to be reliant on the west. They're indeed doing a mistake keep the lock strategy...
> The sperm concentration of the COVID-19 negative group was significantly higher than those in the COVID-19 positive group. No statistically significant difference was detected between the groups for sperm motility and morphology. It was observed that men with COVID-19 had decreased sperm concentrations suggesting that COVID-19 may have a negative effect on male fertility. However, in the long term, more comprehensive studies with a large sample size are needed to understand better the changes in sperm concentration.
Given what I know about the modern man in general (being one, being around them), it's possible that more healthy men do not catch covid and also have higher sperm counts to begin with. Not sure if the study took that into account.
I'd guess it's mostly about saving the face instead admitting they were wrong and you can't outrun COVID anyway, just postpone infecting whole population.
But honestly, if I were XJP worried about losing face I'd cancel all restrictions and sell it as China's success since they were able to wait out more dangerous variants and now they can let it spread with harmless Omicron. But that time passed though now with protests it will show him as weak listening to protesters, which could give ideas also to other people who might think protests will work.
Though losing face reason is minor, the real reason for COVID zero are health codes and total control over population. Sure, even before you could make one's life difficult without WeChat/Alipay access, but now you can legally imprison anyone not having health code and you can track all their movements and put them under home imprisonments, so very efficient way against protesters, well at least it was until now.
Let's not forget these widespread protests are still completely negligible compared to Chinese population, even if just 1% of Chinese protested that would make like 14M people and total number of protesting people right now will be closer to 140K, so basically nobody participates in these protests, so unless people will get courage and start protesting en masse nothing will really change, certainly nothing about CCP role, the very best scenario is lifting meaningless COVID restrictions and even that's way too optimistic.
Trying to save face. The number 1 priority of the CCP is staying in power and they can't afford to lose even a tiny bit of face by admitting that their chosen Covid strategy is a failure. So they truck on to the bitter end.
There's undoubtedly a lot of face saving going on, but that's because Sinovax isn't as effective as the Western vaccines. And quite a lot of the elderly aren't vaccinated at all. So they can't liberalize without the death rate skyrocketing. Maybe that would be more acceptable now? Difficult for the Chinese people to discuss.
Interesting that whilst they’re willing to violate human rights in a number of ways, they’re not prepared to force people to take the vaccine or e.g. take away employment for refusing.
It’s probably easier that way to spin the situation as “your fault for not taking it”.
Its another social control tool. Get near protests and your covid code gets red. Problem is, it works like a chain reaction, galvanizing protests. Paranoia killed the beast.
>What is going on with China's continuing zero-covid policy?
They know Sinovac won't cut it so this is them buying time until they can get their homegrown mRNA vaccine out to the public. I'm guessing they had problems at the clinical trial stage or are struggling to get vials produced in the quantities they need.
It might just be good practice for them, as they expect something much worse than covid will eventually get out of the lab somewhere (not just China) or a virus in nature will mutate naturally into something worse than covid.
It’s not clear to me why China wouldn’t just get Pfizer and/or Moderna to sell white label versions of their vaccines to at least vaccinate the older population in China. And if not the US vaccines then the Oxford vaccine, which is being sold without a profit even in the West and is far superior to the Chinese equivalent, would be a cheaper option.
A big driver of the problem however is that a regime built on controlling the population will almost always default to controlling the population as the answer to its problems.
Getting the sequence and using it to design a vaccine are light-years apart. We've been able to sequence genomes for decades but designing an mRNA vaccine is bleeding edge.
they know something we do also know - Covid is bad.
Mass infections in Western countries is already an identifiable factor in reduced labour force participation - millions of people not working because of long covid, or need to take care of people not working. Add in the long term (maybe permanent?) cognitive impact, letting Covid run free is a objectively a bad idea. The problem for China is that the entire world has done this, and there are increasing problems with being an outlier - economic, psychological, political. PRC will have to cave, and let it go, but they were not wrong to do covid zero - we all should've done this, together
> (...) letting Covid run free is a objectively a bad idea (...) there are increasing problems with being an outlier (...) they were not wrong to do covid zero - we all should've done this, together
I do not understand this argument. It seems to me like you're saying that zero-COVID is better in the long term, but now worse for China in the short term as they are the only ones clinging on to it.
If we all had done zero-COVID together, then now the entire world would still be in some form of lockdown - can you explain how that would be better than the situation we are in now?
Example: in The Netherlands, the last Omikron wave basically was a small bump with very little hospitalizations...how would a zero-COVID lockdown like China has now have been better?
They expect repeated exposures to mean the west is weakened with lots of people unable to participate in the economy, while their population won't have that issue.
It seems unlikely that "weakening the west with lots of people unable to participate in the economy" is the goal here, since the zero-covid policy also does exactly that, both short term and long term by weakening the economy and mental health of residents.
Is this the article that says brain damage but simply means the nerves in your nose (aka brain) can sometimes be damaged for sometime but later heal? If so that article is the one that made me completely switch my feelings on the news. I refuse to believe any of it anymore. Built to scare.
This is such a ridiculous claim and also extremely easy to debunk if you have any friends in China they will show you immediately this is false. Yet not a single one comment mentions it. Goes to show the level of discourse happen in the west about anything china related.
There are multiple examples from different Tweet authors confirming that crowds aren't being shown. Can you post anything (other than unfunded claims) to refute these?
Edit: my comment can come of as aggressive, but I'm genuinely curious, didn't mean to attack you
I just went back to the first full match broadcasted by CCTV, and made screenshots just for you: https://ibb.co/2MJrnWkhttps://ibb.co/c3Zcq3S
Initially they claim all fans are blurred. Now they claim close-ups are not shown. I am pretty sure that they will claim it's specific matches that don't have close-ups later.
There's like a thousand cameras in the stadium, and I have no idea if they show things like replays of individual fans cinematic reactions for dramatic purposes (they do that in my country), but that might be a cultural difference more than anything else.
Definitely doesn't look like they're avoiding crowds per se, or blurring.
You don't need to be in China to dubunk those. You just need to do some independant research easily, say by visiting the CCTV video site. Knowing some Chinese helps, but it won't stop anyone who is determined to find the truth.
There were multiple protests happened last week to memory people burnt to death because the inappropriate lock down of building. People release anger against the inhuman lock down policy. The definitely need hide as much evidence as possible.
They probably could've slowly dialled back the lockdowns and declared that they're doing so because they've managed to get the situation under control. But they can't do that now, it'll look like they're giving in to the protesters. So they're stuck with zero covid for a while longer
China did eradicate CoVID for long stretches of time.
From about April 2020 - April 2022, there were only isolated outbreaks, caused by imported cases, which were quickly contained. The vast majority of people in China could live relatively normally, as long as they didn't have to travel internationally. Most people didn't experience any lockdowns during this period.
A couple of things have happened that have made things more difficult. The rest of the world has decided to "live with CoVID," and China has reduced border quarantine times to make international travel easier, so there are much larger numbers of imported cases in China than before. Omicron spreads faster, and since most Chinese people (particularly young people) are vaccinated, they have fewer symptoms, meaning outbreaks are not identified as quickly. Finally, the government has tried to take a lighter touch, which means they have let outbreaks grow to larger sizes before imposing lockdowns.
A few weeks ago, after the Party Congress ended, the government announced 20 new measures aimed at loosening CoVID restrictions. When the latest outbreak began, local governments did not react nearly as aggressively as they previously would have. That meant that the outbreak has spread much more widely than any previous outbreak (even the original one in Wuhan). Some cities have responded by reversing some of the 20 measures, leaving people confused about what the policy is.
One major issue is that while China's overall vaccination rate is quite high, the vaccination rate among the elderly is quite low. For whatever reason, it has been very difficult to convince old people in mainland China (but also culturally similar places, like Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore) to get vaccinated. If China allows the virus to spread widely, a lot of old people will be at risk.
My understanding is that the additional piece of the jigsaw is the refusal to import more effective vaccines as it would reflect poorly on Sinovax and the prounouncements around it. No idea how significant this aspect is but I thought it was worth mentioning for completelness.
Even without vaccines, the current covid strain is not even that harmful.
If they had done complete lockdown during 1st wave or during Delta wave it was one thing (which they already did at that time and majority of world). But after 2 years it is something else.
There literally is a world cup happening half around the world, with maskless people and stadiums filled to the brim.
I have read online they are doing this nonsense due to various factions within CCP fighting with each other. This 'zero-covid' stuff as far as I know first started in Shanghai, which I heard the Shanghai CCP faction was fighting against the Xi faction.
(Just some rumour I read on internet, no idea if it is true.)
> Even without vaccines, the current covid strain is not even that harmful.
Among the unvaccinated (of which there still exist a shocking amount), it absolutely is harmful. Even amongst the triple or quadruple vaccinated, it can be dangerous. My s/o's sense of smell was impacted for months, we were out of work for two weeks - but a friend of ours for six months and she's still not at the performance mentally that she was prior to catching that virus. There's estimations that anything between 5 to 50% of cases end up as "long covid" [1] - and in a country like the US, which has had about 98 out of 331 million people infected with COVID, even going for the lower end with 10% still means almost ten million people whose productivity will be seriously impacted for a long time.
Add on top of that that many people of labor intensive jobs moved on during the pandemic to better employment conditions... and you see the problems like we do in Germany: public transport has gone utterly downhill to outright collapsed in some regions because so many people catch COVID, RSV or other bugs and there aren't enough staff left to replace them, the medical system is ablaze because the workers are burnt out after three years of pandemic with the last two years having to listen to politicians that "the virus isn't bad" while they see in their daily work that the politicians are lying. The death toll was immense as well - for healthcare workers it's one thing if an old person dies of cancer or of old age because that's how life tends to end, but so many young and healthy people died as well.
I don't know if it's correct to call China a "dictatorship" but I'll humour you for a moment. The idea that dictatorships have everything under control and can conduct themselves however they please is true ... until the point that it isn't. So while a dictator technically doesn't necessarily need to justify themselves or to have a reasonable, fair plan for some given situation that pleases their subjects - they probably don't want to needlessly push things too far if they can help it.
However in this case a badly managed change in their Covid strategy doesn't collapse the country or cost the CCP their control over China, but it could cause a bit of a power struggle within the party as factions jostle for position and attempt to shift blame and some higher-ranking politicians will probably lose their position or go to jail for reasons. If you're one of those people, you probably want some kind of plan.
For a long time, a combination of lockdowns and mass vaccination to keep the virus at bay at home and hope that the West would follow suit out of its own interests - which did work reasonably well for a long time in China, but collapsed with Omicron as Sinovac and the other domestic vaccines were/are ineffective against it and its sub-lines and they had gone all-in way too early in the pandemic by claiming that their domestic vaccine was good and no Western experimental technology needed. Additionally, Western governments lost the popular support for COVID containment measures after the second or third waves (begin of 2021) thanks to Russia-backed misinformation campaigns, which led to a ton of deaths and the development and spread of Omicron.
The problem is, their original exit strategy doesn't work any more, but the CCP can't change course without Xi Jinping "losing face" - they made him effectively a half-god, he can't admit to mistakes, even improvements (since that would mean the old course was not perfect).
> Could they feasibly claim to have eradicated covid?
Again, until Omicron appeared, I would say so, yes - and factually, there was at least one line of influenza that was eradicated as a side effect of the anti-COVID measures, and RSV was also kicked down hard (although it came back with a vengeance the last months as there currently is no vaccine). Even taking into account that the COVID numbers were fudged in China on all levels out of political motivations, it is clear that the general idea of border closing and strict isolation for positive people worked (e.g. New Zealand).
Strict isolation and border closing can work if you catch it before community spread. The cases cited of this working (NZ, AU) are notably already geographically isolated and also were in the summer season when mass spread elsewhere began; it’s not at all obvious that strategy could have applied with the same effect in the northern hemisphere at the same time.
>> Additionally, Western governments lost the popular support for COVID containment measures after the second or third waves (begin of 2021) thanks to Russia-backed misinformation campaigns, which led to a ton of deaths and the development and spread of Omicron.
Is it Russian misinformation causing Chinese people to rebel against containment measures?
vaccine does not help. The death rate is very low, and mostly old people with some existing conditions. The party is trying to keep the death number lower than what is happening around the world, which is almost impossible.
I find much more interesting how Twitter is now flooded with accounts which are suddenly posting NSFW escort tweets containing Chinese city names in Chinese characters and one account is able to post 3000 tweets in 24 hours to flood search results with nonsense.
No surprise, the new CEO fired the team responsible for detecting and taking down bot accounts. Previously these teams were taking down 500,000 bot accounts every day, which suggests that Twitter might be accumulating 3.5M bot accounts every week.
I'm sure something of the sort would have happened without him. But he's not the type to do anything in response to this or confront CCP with the regular praise he heaps on them. He even said Taiwan should be part of China like HK.
Readit News
- It's a money-making scam by the COVID test manufacturers
- It's a money-making scam by the temporary quarantine center manufacturers
- It's a failure of bureaucracy ”层层加码”
- It's a ploy to increase the depth of state surveillance
- It's a ploy to lock people at home and increase the birth rate
- It's a ploy to keep the poor poor to ensure that they keep working hard
- It's to mitigate war with the United States. Apparently the Geneva convention has a clause against going to war with a nation stricken by a pandemic.
> The current situation is that Western water forces, through insidious and poisonous means such as the Internet, have created a very dangerous atmosphere of public opinion and incited the people to rebellion. If we are deceived and held hostage by these rumors, what China will end up with will only be a disaster. We have to believe that the country, more than anyone else, wants an early end to the epidemic, and more than anyone else, wants an early end to this costly and socially expensive epidemic prevention activity, so that society can return to normal and the economy can recover as soon as possible. We believe that the Party and the government will be able to lead the people of China to work together to overcome the epidemic! China will win! [fist][fist][fist]
> 当前形势是西方水军通过网络等阴险毒辣的方式，已经营造了一个非常危险的舆论氛围，煽动民众叛乱，如果我们被这些流言所蒙骗和裹挟，最后中国迎来的只会是灾难。我们要相信，国家比任何人都希望疫情早日结束，也比任何人都希望早日结束这种耗资巨大、社会成本巨大的防疫活动，让社会恢复正常，经济早日复苏。相信党和政府，定能领导全国人民，同心协力，战胜疫情！中国必胜！[拳头][拳头][拳头]
That must be propaganda because it should be obvious to a lay person that it started in late 2019. China government has been trying for 3 years to “have an early end”
Is there any evidence this is about masks versus gatherings?
> the Geneva convention has a clause against going to war with a nation stricken by a pandemic
The U.S. would go to war with China if it invaded Taiwan, conventions or not. (I also believe the relevant text is with respect to medical personnel, not a general prohibition on armed conflict.)
Taiwan isn't worth ending the world over.
I just do not understand why he did not “declare that China won against COVID and how CCP is great”.
(If there is a problem with vaccination rates, the CCP has tools to make that happen. Yes Sinovax vaccine is not very effective but with 3 doses it will cut death rates by 90% or so.)
So the question here is really why Xi decided to keep zero-COVID. Maybe he is not so smart? Or maybe there is a big insider power war going on?
What many of us do not want to admit, is that our leaders have taken advantage of the crisis for their own benefit. I think most western media is reluctant to report on what is happening in China, because it would start uncomfortable conversations at home.
Seeing the Chinese government so nakedly use what's left of the pandemic to oppress their population is very problematic to our pandemic narrative. People might start to ask if perhaps their governments too have been doing that too.
The official narrative in the west has been that anything the government does to us in the name of protecting us from COVID is always correct and anyone who criticizes it is an evil "anti-vax" lunatic.
What is the point of having all that propaganda apparatus if you can even do that?
Xi has been notably against vaccine mandates, even going so far as to reprimand a city that started asking for vaccine proof. I suspect that he himself is probably unvaccinated (afraid of needles, maybe?)
Plus, it gives a great excuse to track tracking everyone’s movements at all times.
It is a sort of funny conclusion to end up at — the US wants to have a war with China, but is stopped by the Geneva convention.
I thought they didn’t have as effective vaccines as we’ve got in the west (on top of the general, uh, hands-off approach western counties tend to take around public health). Different facts on the ground, different policies, right?
A very handy about face!
Deleted Comment
Hahahaha, that's a good one. Yeah, welding shut apartment buildings with COVID positive inhabitants was the perfect approach to dealing with a strong lung infection for sure!
disagree only with last two
I don't think most Chinese care that much about state surveilance with WeChat already in their phone anyway, but first two money making scams are definitely spot on, which is why they are also often mentioned. It was not different in west with testing centres and vaccination business, especially VDL exchanging private messages with Pfizer CEO how to defraud EU citizens for billions of euros on useless vaccines almost nobody healthy wanted voluntarily (unless they fell for nonsense that it somehow stop/lower transmission rate fake news).
This account reports these events from China: https://twitter.com/vivianwubeijing/status/15969485319184302...
"It was not immediately clear whether the protests reached a meaningful scale in a country of 1.4 billion people, or whether a wide demographic participated"
I've seen pro government social media commentators say that the second half of the Foxconn worker statement was not reported by western media, but I won't pretend I know one way or the other.
Given that just yesterday a Japanese person tried to lecture me about how snorkels might have been banned in swimming pools because someone probably died and that they are probably dangerous, I'd say east Asians anxiety level is different from ours.
EDIT: funny to see people to get so upset. But anyone who has spent Covid in east Asia knows that they have had an extremely different approach to the Europeans all over the board and that in a lot of countries over there people are still deeply fearful of Covid. And while Taiwan has been bashing China's approach they still wear their masks everywhere and still have a somewhat lax but existent quarantine procedure.
You cannot have a serious conversation about a topic based on the information provided solely from one side no matter how much you distrust the other.
Dead Comment
The USSR showed us that enforcing lies on your own people eventually leads to bizarre, irrational behavior from the government when it tries to operate within a fake framework of lies.
China borders 14 countries. If there’s “no COVID” it’s because it’s being suppressed, with or without Beijing’s knowledge.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1279024/china-coronaviru... vaccination-rate/
Deleted Comment
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jmv.27971
But honestly, if I were XJP worried about losing face I'd cancel all restrictions and sell it as China's success since they were able to wait out more dangerous variants and now they can let it spread with harmless Omicron. But that time passed though now with protests it will show him as weak listening to protesters, which could give ideas also to other people who might think protests will work.
Though losing face reason is minor, the real reason for COVID zero are health codes and total control over population. Sure, even before you could make one's life difficult without WeChat/Alipay access, but now you can legally imprison anyone not having health code and you can track all their movements and put them under home imprisonments, so very efficient way against protesters, well at least it was until now.
Let's not forget these widespread protests are still completely negligible compared to Chinese population, even if just 1% of Chinese protested that would make like 14M people and total number of protesting people right now will be closer to 140K, so basically nobody participates in these protests, so unless people will get courage and start protesting en masse nothing will really change, certainly nothing about CCP role, the very best scenario is lifting meaningless COVID restrictions and even that's way too optimistic.
It’s probably easier that way to spin the situation as “your fault for not taking it”.
Dead Comment
They know Sinovac won't cut it so this is them buying time until they can get their homegrown mRNA vaccine out to the public. I'm guessing they had problems at the clinical trial stage or are struggling to get vials produced in the quantities they need.
A big driver of the problem however is that a regime built on controlling the population will almost always default to controlling the population as the answer to its problems.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Mass infections in Western countries is already an identifiable factor in reduced labour force participation - millions of people not working because of long covid, or need to take care of people not working. Add in the long term (maybe permanent?) cognitive impact, letting Covid run free is a objectively a bad idea. The problem for China is that the entire world has done this, and there are increasing problems with being an outlier - economic, psychological, political. PRC will have to cave, and let it go, but they were not wrong to do covid zero - we all should've done this, together
I do not understand this argument. It seems to me like you're saying that zero-COVID is better in the long term, but now worse for China in the short term as they are the only ones clinging on to it.
If we all had done zero-COVID together, then now the entire world would still be in some form of lockdown - can you explain how that would be better than the situation we are in now?
Example: in The Netherlands, the last Omikron wave basically was a small bump with very little hospitalizations...how would a zero-COVID lockdown like China has now have been better?
They expect repeated exposures to mean the west is weakened with lots of people unable to participate in the economy, while their population won't have that issue.
* Here is a collection of threads describing all the possible negative influences COVID has on the cardiovascular system, the brain, kidneys and the autoimmune system. https://twitter.com/laurieallee/status/1521178772023652352
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/long-covid-even-m...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5
hence no point of zero policy. Emperor has no cloth.
Deleted Comment
Edit: my comment can come of as aggressive, but I'm genuinely curious, didn't mean to attack you
reuploaded a random example clip: https://files.catbox.moe/vx9q03.mp4
There's like a thousand cameras in the stadium, and I have no idea if they show things like replays of individual fans cinematic reactions for dramatic purposes (they do that in my country), but that might be a cultural difference more than anything else.
Definitely doesn't look like they're avoiding crowds per se, or blurring.
From about April 2020 - April 2022, there were only isolated outbreaks, caused by imported cases, which were quickly contained. The vast majority of people in China could live relatively normally, as long as they didn't have to travel internationally. Most people didn't experience any lockdowns during this period.
A couple of things have happened that have made things more difficult. The rest of the world has decided to "live with CoVID," and China has reduced border quarantine times to make international travel easier, so there are much larger numbers of imported cases in China than before. Omicron spreads faster, and since most Chinese people (particularly young people) are vaccinated, they have fewer symptoms, meaning outbreaks are not identified as quickly. Finally, the government has tried to take a lighter touch, which means they have let outbreaks grow to larger sizes before imposing lockdowns.
A few weeks ago, after the Party Congress ended, the government announced 20 new measures aimed at loosening CoVID restrictions. When the latest outbreak began, local governments did not react nearly as aggressively as they previously would have. That meant that the outbreak has spread much more widely than any previous outbreak (even the original one in Wuhan). Some cities have responded by reversing some of the 20 measures, leaving people confused about what the policy is.
One major issue is that while China's overall vaccination rate is quite high, the vaccination rate among the elderly is quite low. For whatever reason, it has been very difficult to convince old people in mainland China (but also culturally similar places, like Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore) to get vaccinated. If China allows the virus to spread widely, a lot of old people will be at risk.
If they had done complete lockdown during 1st wave or during Delta wave it was one thing (which they already did at that time and majority of world). But after 2 years it is something else.
There literally is a world cup happening half around the world, with maskless people and stadiums filled to the brim.
I have read online they are doing this nonsense due to various factions within CCP fighting with each other. This 'zero-covid' stuff as far as I know first started in Shanghai, which I heard the Shanghai CCP faction was fighting against the Xi faction. (Just some rumour I read on internet, no idea if it is true.)
At this point they are basically face saving "pot committed" to zero COVID.
In a face saving culture you can't just come out tomorrow that zero COVID was a strategy that makes no sense when you went "all in".
Ultimately, people would probably lose more faith in the party if they did a zero COVID 180.
Surely we are over reacting to the few protests we see online. The vast majority of people in China are just going to go along with this.
Among the unvaccinated (of which there still exist a shocking amount), it absolutely is harmful. Even amongst the triple or quadruple vaccinated, it can be dangerous. My s/o's sense of smell was impacted for months, we were out of work for two weeks - but a friend of ours for six months and she's still not at the performance mentally that she was prior to catching that virus. There's estimations that anything between 5 to 50% of cases end up as "long covid" [1] - and in a country like the US, which has had about 98 out of 331 million people infected with COVID, even going for the lower end with 10% still means almost ten million people whose productivity will be seriously impacted for a long time.
Add on top of that that many people of labor intensive jobs moved on during the pandemic to better employment conditions... and you see the problems like we do in Germany: public transport has gone utterly downhill to outright collapsed in some regions because so many people catch COVID, RSV or other bugs and there aren't enough staff left to replace them, the medical system is ablaze because the workers are burnt out after three years of pandemic with the last two years having to listen to politicians that "the virus isn't bad" while they see in their daily work that the politicians are lying. The death toll was immense as well - for healthcare workers it's one thing if an old person dies of cancer or of old age because that's how life tends to end, but so many young and healthy people died as well.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01702-2
However in this case a badly managed change in their Covid strategy doesn't collapse the country or cost the CCP their control over China, but it could cause a bit of a power struggle within the party as factions jostle for position and attempt to shift blame and some higher-ranking politicians will probably lose their position or go to jail for reasons. If you're one of those people, you probably want some kind of plan.
Deleted Comment
For a long time, a combination of lockdowns and mass vaccination to keep the virus at bay at home and hope that the West would follow suit out of its own interests - which did work reasonably well for a long time in China, but collapsed with Omicron as Sinovac and the other domestic vaccines were/are ineffective against it and its sub-lines and they had gone all-in way too early in the pandemic by claiming that their domestic vaccine was good and no Western experimental technology needed. Additionally, Western governments lost the popular support for COVID containment measures after the second or third waves (begin of 2021) thanks to Russia-backed misinformation campaigns, which led to a ton of deaths and the development and spread of Omicron.
The problem is, their original exit strategy doesn't work any more, but the CCP can't change course without Xi Jinping "losing face" - they made him effectively a half-god, he can't admit to mistakes, even improvements (since that would mean the old course was not perfect).
> Could they feasibly claim to have eradicated covid?
Again, until Omicron appeared, I would say so, yes - and factually, there was at least one line of influenza that was eradicated as a side effect of the anti-COVID measures, and RSV was also kicked down hard (although it came back with a vengeance the last months as there currently is no vaccine). Even taking into account that the COVID numbers were fudged in China on all levels out of political motivations, it is clear that the general idea of border closing and strict isolation for positive people worked (e.g. New Zealand).
Is it Russian misinformation causing Chinese people to rebel against containment measures?
1. Figure out a working vaccine of their own (or maybe just license and rebrand a western one)
2. Become increasingly authoritarian - like a high-tech North Korea
I have no idea how likely or realistic that is, but seems like an option too.
Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore had the exact same problem with vaccine hesitancy among the elderly. It's a cultural thing.
https://twitter.com/dong_mengyu/status/1596749168462401536
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/27/twitter...
Deleted Comment
https://p11.tv/digital-overlay-advertising-at-real-madrid-ho...
The best one of sports overlays is from The Running Man:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093894/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc8kTma-36c