Back in the dark days of Victoria’s shameful Covid era, the Premier Daniel Andrews suddenly became globally infamous – at least for those of us who cared about massive infringements of individual freedom and rights. One nation that thought Andrews had gone too far was … China! Yes, the Chinese Communists thought that Daniel had jumped the shark on Covidmania.
Well, Victoria has recently come out of the Covid emergency era. Officially. On 12 October. The world’s worst former Covid dictator has “moved on”.
https://www.premier.vic.gov.au/changes-pandemic-management
Not so in China, which created the virus – with or without help from Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak – and which patented the infamous “China solution”, so popular subsequently in the West. Of course, Daniel Andrews has the inconvenience of an election coming up in late November. His buddy in Beijing, Xi Jinping, has no such constraints. He is currently waltzing through the Chinese Communist Party’s Congress with his own future longevity as boss all but guaranteed.
As the Guardian reports:
China’s president, Xi Jinping, walked into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Sunday to open the Communist party summit and lay out his vision for the next five years. He is expected to be formally returned to power this week …
He wasn’t meant to. Deng Xiaoping put in place a two-term rule for presidents back in the day. Xi has quietly dispensed with all that, just as his regime has quietly dispensed with all moral decency and good sense in fighting the virus. For Xi is the zero Covid’s man’s zero Covid man. He has locked up great swathes of the country in what can only be described as savage lockdowns, despite the rest of the world sheepishly (and by no means completely or uniformly)
China’s population is currently (2020) 1.402 billion. Its Covid case numbers are puny by any measure, let alone in relation to China’s population. They had 1193 new cases on 15 October. The numbers have been flat since the last big spike in April this year. By comparison, Victoria’s latest (now only reported weekly) case numbers were 8061 as the week’s total.
https://www.coronavirus.vic.gov.au/victorian-coronavirus-covid-19-data
Victoria’s population is (again, in 2020) 6.7 million. You get the point.
Which raises the question, why on earth is China pursuing zero Covid, and in such a maniacal way, when even the most extremist Covid warriors have either toned down their regimes or have abandoned them entirely?
But first, what does China’s current approach to Covid look like? The Financial Times reported in September:
In Shenzhen, one of the world’s most important technology and manufacturing centres, all it took was 35 coronavirus cases for officials to lock down swaths [sic] of the city of 17.5mn people. Officials in Chengdu, in China’s south-west, on Thursday announced a citywide lockdown affecting 21mn people after 156 new local cases were reported. Since Sunday, partial lockdowns, mass testing campaigns, public transport suspensions and school closures have been imposed across a number of Chinese cities, including Harbin and Tianjin in the north-east. Yet experts believe President Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy will continue into 2023, until Chinese scientists develop vaccine technology to stop coronavirus from spreading or for a dominant mutation to emerge with significantly less severe health consequences than the Omicron variant.
https://www.ft.com/content/09f43ab0-74b9-4237-9080-a12986db87c8
Omicron severe? I think not.
Any second thoughts on the part of the regime? I think not. The BBC’s headline ran:
China congress: Xi Jinping doubles down on zero-Covid as meeting opens.
Zero-Covid was a "people's war to stop the spread of the virus", he said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-63226230
Well, no good communist could refuse a “people’s war”.
The economic costs of the lockdowns to the country have been severe, as the same Financial Times piece outlines. Economic growth as measured by GDP, down from an already anemic (for China) growth rate. Internal travel crushed. Housing markets crashing. Investment down. Manufacturing shrinking. A little less “made in China”, then. The regime must know the impacts that its own inane approach to Covid is having. And with such low case numbers.
So, again, why zero Covid? Obvious answers spring to mind. Because they can. Because they are always doing things to keep their people under rigid control, as in the one child policy and social credit. Because they are bastards. All true, but it still begs the question. A case can be made that Chine spread the virus globally either deliberately or knowingly. Its motives would not have been all that mysterious. To defeat Trump? Plausible and successful. To crush the West’s economies and societies? Very, very plausible and accomplished magnificently. Sheer hubris in thinking that man can defeat a virus, even greater hubris than in the West? Maybe. Stubbornness? Yes, of course. The Covid approach in China is owned by Xi. He is even more Mark Drakeford than Drakeford. No admitting mistakes, or letting others think that you bungled. Western leaders have, to a large extent successfully, walked back the extremist approaches of 2020-22 without hardly anyone noticing or taking them to task. Perhaps even an all powerful Xi feels he cannot do the same. Maybe there is also some flattening of the curve going on, in view of China’s rickety health system. Having rejected most overseas vaccine technologies, China is still waiting for the magic bullet solution. Maybe they just believe all the false binary rubbish about Covid cures. That it is either lockdown or the vaccines. Man’s greatest sin is pride. Perhaps Chinese dictators simply cannot abide defeat, even by a virus. A virus that we made!
China indeed has had a very good Covid, as I have argued at length previously.
March 2020 was an opportunity and a teaching moment for China, having manufactured the virus. Pre-Meloni Italy was the first, infamously, to buy the political cure, what with all those Chinese Italians returning from Chinese New Year celebrations in Wuhan and linked cities. And Professor Lockdown in London couldn’t believe his luck. His modelling plus Chinese totalitarianism would keep him in the news and in grants for years to come. All he had to do as convince Boris. Then Chinese lockdowns came to Britain, then to the rest of the world. Never have so many dominoes fallen so quickly, with such little resistance.
But that was march 2020. Surely the geopolitical gains China made from teaching the West how to be evil and destructive are now in the past. While China’s joint control of the World Health Organisation (shared with Bill Gates) continues and may even grow, with the proposed Pandemic Treaty likely to give the co-owners of WHO almost unassailable control of global public health, the big gains for Chinese world domination made through its export of zero Covid policy were once-off, I would think. There is nothing to be gained now internationally through a zero Covid policy at home.
The political scientist Graham Allison wrote one of the most cited and influential works of politics in his 1971 book Essence of Decision. Though the book was about the (again highly relevant) Cuban missile crisis, his way of looking at decision-making is of great interest in thinking about Covid policy.
… Allison constructed three different ways (or "lenses") through which analysts can examine events: the "Rational Actor" model, the "Organizational Behavior" model, and the "Governmental Politics" model.
As has been suggested often among the sceptical Covid dissidents, there has been precious little during Covid to suggest that the rational actor model is of much remaining use in explaining political decisions. Half a century’ science was overturned in a month. No, China’s response was never any more “rational” than anyone else’s. Even less so, now. So, if Allison is right, it must be a combination of the other two models, even in totalitarian China with its top-down control of all things political.
Perhaps no one in China is game to disagree with the regime. If we think that the Western approach to Covid dissidents has been relentless, cruel and inhumane (and it has been all three; just ask Mike Yeadon why he moved to America), just imagine what they do to them in China. It wouldn’t do much for your social credit score to go putting anti-lockdown anti-vaxx messages on WeChat, now would it?
And so, the policy madness goes on, with no end in sight. With apologies to the Twitter-fighting hero, Alex Berenson, if we agree that “virus gonna virus”, we might have to conclude, with reference to China, that “dictatorship gonna dictatorship”. Covid proved that West can do totalitarianism. Rather easily, as it happens. That doesn’t mean that China can do democracy. From the time of Mao, they have been in the people-crushing business. It was only gullible Westerners who thought, far too optimistically, that China would change once it got a whiff of capitalism under Deng. No such luck. Covid proves that no opportunity is too ludicrous or insubstantial to get back to people-crushing. No other explanation really nails it. Certainly not rational decision-making.
Cruelty and mindless control are in China’s political DNA. Just ask the freedom-fighters of Hong Kong. The martyrs of Tiananmen Square. Falun Gong. Cardinal Zen. Taipei. Covid brutality is, sadly, a walk in the park.
Paul Collits
17 October 2022
I have long thought that China is just a disaster waiting to happen, for many reasons. But the fundamental reason is a serious infection by the stupidity, ignorance and arrogance virus.
In the case of China arrogance predominates. Their leadership, with the usual enthusiastic followers, have delusions of grandeur. The ancient Greeks knew this as hubris and they knew the inevitable result.
Some think there are no viruses at all. That is called terrain theory and as no one has yet isolated or seen a virus then either could be true.
There have also been tests to see if they can be transmitted between sick and healthy people, but it seems they could not do it even when injecting mucus from the sick person.
When you look at the history of vaccines it makes you wonder if the vaccine is not the best way to infect a person.
The Lethal Injection for Sterilisation. History of vaccination will make us all anti-vaxxers
https://www.bitchute.com/video/8TiSkSm6DFfy/
More evidence is found in the NSW covid data that shows almost all patients had been vaccinated.
NSW data
https://bit.ly/3ujYTQG
China is probably using the faulty PCR tests to lockdown cities so they can blame the failing economy on the "virus". If the people ever find out what a scam the whole Plandemic was then Xi is gone!