Why did China suddenly loosen its notoriously strict COVID-19 rules a few weeks ago? Was it because of that rioting in Shanghai and elsewhere protesting the lockdowns? Spare me. That might have helped a bit, but China under Xi Jinping has shown no great patience with citizens who don't behave. Just ask the residents of Hong Kong.
I think the answer is much simpler. Consider this extensive timeline of China's recent history:
October 23: Xi is formally elected to his unprecedented third term as Chinese president. Nothing was likely to stop this, and Xi was determined to make sure that nothing would stand a chance.
December 7: COVID lockdown rules are eased and replaced with nothing. Overnight, China goes from have the world's toughest COVID rules to having almost no rules at all.
Yes, there were a few riots between those dates. But they probably didn't mean much. What really happened is that Xi was dead set on keeping things calm in the run-up to his triumphant election, and once that was in the bag he figured it was a good time for the inevitable. He couldn't keep China locked down forever, and his "grip on power," as it's universally called, was firmly unassailable. Might as well bite the bullet and let the peasants die.
That's my take, anyway. One thing for sure, though, is that Xi has demonstrated no concern at all for taking any steps that might reduce either COVID cases or deaths. It's every man for himself as long as things stay serene and obedient in Zhongnanhai.
I think you mean Xi and not Li
My buddy's mother makes $50 per hour working on the computer (Personal Computer). She hasn’t had a job for a long, yet this month she earned $11,500 by working just on her computer for 9 hours every day.
Read this article for more details.. https://payathome.blogspot.com/
As good a theory as any. As to why now, I suspect they were freaked about the economy, and figured get this over with now. Just wait until everyone is on a train together for Chinese new year (which is Jan. 22, so in the days before that everyone is traveling).
Listening to those around me while traveling over the Christmas season, coupled with the thousands and thousands stuck together in terminals thanks to weather and one airline’ Mother of All FUBARs and I suspect the only difference with the US is absolute figures.
Xi was trapped in a paradigm where the zero-COVID program was creating economic strain that was eroding the CCP's grip on stability and power. That tension was magnified as Chinese figured out that the World Cup was going on without restrictions and that the CCP was trying to trick them about the World Cup.
China had been ensnared by its nationalistic hubris which kept western-developed vaccines out of China. Still without an effective vaccine* nearly two full years since the start of the pandemic, Xi's pathway towards extricating himself from the paradigm he created, is twofold: (1) shift responsibility for opening/closing provinces and cities to locals, who then get to shoulder the blame for those infections and deaths, and (2) deliberately change how they classify COVID deaths, so as to obscure the true scale of the problem.
* -- China has yet to approve any of its domestically developed mRNA vaccines. Phase III for Walvax's vaccine just started earlier this month. I suggest maybe there are problems with China's mRNA vaccines, specifically that their targets were poorly chosen.
Their non-mRNA vaccines we're effective, just not as effective as "Western" vaccines. As such, multiple boosters needed, but vaccine hesitancy was a problem and rates with booster shots dropped off if I recall correctly. Our friend in China may know better.
One thing lacking was good anti-viral treatments to give those coming down with Covid. I just read (somewhere) that China is now importing anti-viral agents to treat Covid. I just hope that they imported tons of them before changing mandates.
That's quite the understatement. Efficacy (illness) of the two mRNA vaccines were at ~95%. The two Chinese vaccines were near the threshold of 50%, and dropped below 50% for Omicron. The only thing that increased efficacy of their original non-mRNA vaccines was a booster mRNA shot.
To hide this deficit, you'll see a lot of talk about how the two original Chinese vaccines had 70%+ efficacy against death from Omicron. By that metric, the western mRNA vaccines are at around 99%.
It's debatable if multiple boosters are necessarily helpful if there is antigenic shift and you're boosting for the original variant, at least in the case of neutralizing antibody production. With antigenic sin, you may inhibit T-cell response with multiple repeated boosters.
Just saying, their nationalistic hubris does not match their capabilities, and the zero-COVID policy was failing to hide this.
That's a good point about shifting responsibility onto locals. That may be a weak point of the Chinese system which is about to get a serious stress test.
I really do think the global manufacturing order isn't as set in stone as China had assumed, and is showing serious signs of breaking apart. Between Covid restrictions and the real possibility of conflict due to their increasingly belligerent policies, companies are now making moves to de-risk their production out of China.
Ditching Covid restrictions seems like a pretty blatant move to slow that global retreat before it really gets going.
China has a major demographic problem, too many old people, not enough young workers and kids on the way. Xi wants to keep the peasants and lose the retirees
"Li has demonstrated no concern at all for taking any steps that might reduce either COVID cases or deaths"
This is utter nonsense. China has been locked down, and people have been vaccinated. Wikipedia (Vaccination in China) says "As of July 2022, it is estimated that about 89.7% of the country's population has received a vaccine, and about 56% of the population has received a booster dose". These numbers are better than those in the US. Now how reliable the numbers are and how effective the Chinese vaccines are may be questionable, but there is no doubt that very drastic actions have been taken to reduce the impact of covid.
Kevin may not know it, since he persistently focuses on European countries which are similar to the US, but several countries in Asia, including Australia and New Zealand, greatly reduced covid deaths by drastic lockdowns or isolation until nearly everyone was vaccinated. Infection rates have been high in these countries when they did open up, but death rates are low, much lower than in the US. China may be attempting a similar strategy, or Xi may have had something else on his mind, but Kevin doesn't know what his objectives are. Kevin also doesn't know what the actual death total in China is now, much less what it will be in the future. There is no justification for his phony graph of future deaths.
There is evidence about which strategies work to reduce covid deaths. If the vaccination in China has been thorough and the vaccines work as well as the ones in the other Asian countries, it will probably have a much lower death rate than the US.
Kevin's take is a bit off. Protests—in many cases full-throated riots—had reached a critical mass the runup to December 7th. The Party prioritizes its hold on power above everything else, and the threat of regime destabilization was growing real. They had to act. If the continued operation of zero covid was critical they wouldn't have hesitated to use force to maintain it. That much is true. But by early December it was becoming clear the policy wasn't working satisfactorily even as a covid mitigation policy. Infections were spreading rapidly here in Beijing and in other cities in early December. University students were being sent home and K-12 schools were closing. To say nothing of the economic toll. Combie the increasing futility of zero covid with the exploding protests and the logic for shifting strategy had become overwhelming.
One thing for sure, though, is that Li has demonstrated no concern at all for taking any steps that might reduce either COVID cases or deaths.
Kevin's off on this part, too. It's not lack of concern but lack of means. The regime should have been putting the pieces in place to transition from zero covid by mid 2021. You can't change on a dime. The country doesn't have enough ICU beds. It doesn't have large enough stockpiles of medicine. It doesn't have MRNAs. It doesn't have enough of its elderly boosted. But the Party actually is frantically trying to make improvements in these areas. Paxlovid supplies are finally being made available, for instance. There's a huge-in-scale campaign to increase elderly vaccination levels. Manufacture of anti-fever medicines is being prioritized. And so on. But these things take time, and the incompetent assholes running China waited too long.
"Infections were spreading rapidly here in Beijing and in other cities in early December" - Do you live in Beijing?
Right
Yeh, I figured. But you did say "here" in Beijing. And it would be interesting if you did live in China. So I took a chance. I will go back to believing you live in Boston.
Who is Li?
Anyhow another point is that zero COVID was already failing due to Omicron. Outbreaks were happening faster, bigger and broader. Maybe he did hold on until party congress and then protests speeded up what was going to happen anyway. I think the protests did matter because the zero covid rules changed exactly there. But it was a timing thing.
How about this? He can’t invade and occupy Taiwan until he gets the country out of the pandemic lockdowns and the wave subsides.
The explanation is actually quite simple.
1. Local governments were running out of money to implement “dynamic zero COVID” around the country.
2. The public was growing tired of the unpredictability of lockdowns.
3. The country’s economic numbers were looking increasingly bleak, in large part due to COVID restrictions.
But those factors weren’t what pushed the policy over the edge, but they created political space for change.
When China’s State Council issued guidelines to “optimize” the implementation of COVID controls on November 11 - BEFORE the widely publicized demonstrations and protests - outbreaks were emerging rapidly throughout the country. This was new because previous outbreaks were localized and limited to a handful of locations. By early November COVID, however, there were outbreaks in more than 200 Chinese cities - despite mandatory testing and verification, aggressive quarantining and contract tracing, etc. The geographic spread within China was completely unprecedented.
This posed a conundrum for the government: Implementing Shanghai-style lockdowns in growing numbers of cities and/or instituting a general lockdown like it did in 2020, wreaking further havoc on its citizens and economy and global supply chains while also facing the risk that even those measures may not be sufficient to stop the spread of the highly contagious BF.7 variant, or it could change course. The government changed course.
Sound like those with the wherewithal are looking to get the flock outta Dodge: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-64102176 Not exactly a comforting development.
Why would the resumption of overseas tourism be discomforting?
Because so many in China appear to have the virus, with Xi only knows what variants: https://news.yahoo.com/milan-reports-50-passengers-china-154902106.html
That’s fifty percent of arriving passengers, for those not wanting to follow the link.
I'm in NZ - we did exactly what China did
Kept the virus out for a couple of years then when the pressure became too great opened the door
We went from LESS deaths than usual to over 2000 dead
But we still ended up being one of the most successful countries 710 dead per million
If China can match our experience they will have about a million dead
If they end up as bad as the USA it will be 4.6 million dead
I suspect they won't be quite as successful as we were but still a ton better than the USA
I'm in NZ - we did exactly what China did
Really? Kiwis were shut up in apartment buildings for 2 and 3 weeks at a time (couldn't even step outside on the grounds for fresh air)? You were required to queue up for mandatory PCR tests two/three times weekly just to to maintain the ability to visit a grocery store or ride a bus? Mandatory, centralized quarantine hell holes for asymptomatic infections?
New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan and several other countries maintained comprehensive and effective NPI policies that minimized covid mortality until the population could be vaccinated. Good on them (you). But what China did was on a whole other level. Also, the duration of China's zero covid policy renders any comparison with other countries' policies untenable. Even "strict" countries like NZ and Australia had the decency and common sense to begin a gradual transition to normality as 2021 wore on. But China was maintaining its draconian regulations until three weeks ago (hence the protests), and during this time it has effectively banned overseas tourism by its citizens.
The practices followed by democracies were (thankfully) a pale imitation of what a dictatorship like the PRC can get away with.
+1
Historically, Chinese dynasties have been killed off by one of two things: peasant rebellions and steppe nomad invasions. The steppe is no threat to the Communist Dynasty thanks to modern military technology, but the threat of peasant rebellion remains and they know it. They can keep a lid on the people only up to a point. If things start threatening to boil over, they know they have to turn down the heat.
Take some time to study the history of actual revolutions that overthrew governments. They all looked impossible for a long time, not happening and not happening and then not happening some more even as problems festered and built up and then BOOM they happened. The Party knows that there are limits to what the people will put up and the people were putting them on notice that they were approaching the limit. They were afraid for real, and right to be afraid.
+1
Your graph is ridiculous.
Half of China is getting COVID this month. In the major cities like Shanghai and Beijing it is well over half, but rural areas have slower spread.
This is the coldest time of year, there are no medication stockpiles, and hospitals were totally unprepared.
December deaths are probably on the order of 1MM, maybe 2MM. We will never know the true number - the most important order from the top is not to count or report COVID deaths.
December deaths are probably on the order of 1MM, maybe 2MM.
This seems a wild exaggeration. Most of the guesstimates (and that's all they are) I've seen suggest perhaps 1-2 million deaths over the next six months. Zero covid wasn't abandoned until December 7th, and national infection numbers aren't likely to peak until next month, or possibly February. I'd be surprised if the country as a whole sees more than 200k deaths in December.