The protests against China’s ruthless Zero Covid policy continue to grow as President Xi Jinping shows no sign of changing tack despite even Hong Kong easing towards a more liberal approach. Ian Williams writes about it in the Spectator.
Another COVID-19 lockdown, another angry confrontation. This time it was on the streets of Shenzhen, China’s high-tech hub, where videos this week showed an angry crowd facing off against police officers wearing protective medical gear, including blue gowns, masks and plastic visors. “Lift the lockdown,” the protesters yelled, pushing against hastily erected barricades. Some threw plastic bottles at the police. In one clip, a woman can be heard shouting, “The police are hitting people”.
The protest, one of several reported in the city, followed an order for residents of three districts to stay at home after just ten infections were detected. Subway stations were closed, and affected areas cordoned off. The city of 18 million people, which is located next to Hong Kong, has faced a series of lockdowns this month. Covid outbreaks have been reported in more than 100 cities since early September.
The authorities have stepped up their ruthless and often chaotic restrictions ahead of a key meeting of the Chinese Communist Party next month, at which Xi Jinping is expected to be anointed as party boss for an unprecedented third term. ‘Defeating’ the virus has become central to the cult of Xi, for whom it is a measure of the CCP’s superiority over bungling western democracies. Party propaganda has gone into overdrive ahead of the congress. The Chinese people have faced a barrage of slogans relayed online, as well as on television and by loudspeaker, urging them to “Extinguish every outbreak!” and telling them that “History will remember those who contributed”.
This weekend is the beginning of China’s week-long National day holiday, usually a time when tens of millions travel. Instead they are being urged to stay at home, and those still planning to travel to Beijing, where the CCP’s congress is to be held, must show a negative PCR test result taken within 48 hours of travel and take two more tests within three days of arrival.
Another slogan, “We have won the great battle against Covid” is clearly a little premature, but it neatly sums up the party’s obsession with zero-Covid. And although the policy is widely regarded as nonsensical among medical experts inside and outside China, to publicly question it is to question Xi, and that is a dangerous thing to do in today’s China.
Yet the economic costs continue to mount, Williams writes, leading Hong Kong to defy the Beijing policy and loosen its own measures.
Hong Kong is abandoning quarantine requirements for inbound travellers, which have been blamed for an exodus of talent and undermining the city’s international status. Today it announced a further easing of social distancing rules, including lifting a restaurant cap that had restricted groups to six per table. Now 12 can dine together.
The Chinese economy is suffering considerably under the extreme suppression measures, and of course the people are too. How long will Xi and the CCP decide to keep this up? We’re approaching the three-year mark. The virus isn’t going away.
Worth reading in full.
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China has painted itself into a truly awful corner now. Lockdowns, masks, and antisocial distancing mandates of any kind are a classic “burn the village to save it” approach. What some people don’t realize is that eventually, the proverbial village returns the favor….
And China’s demographic crisis of a declining working age population (and horrendous gender imbalance). What worries me is how the CCP might react to an increasingly restive population, both domestically and internationally – Taiwan for example.
And the Evegrande-induced financial crisis that still has yet to run its course as well. They are truly on the wrong side of the moon now!
The song “Land of Confusion” by Genesis comes to mind.
If only….
Maybe not today or this year, but I will predict that the CCP won’t meet their 2049 targets (100th anniversary of the communist rebellion).
Tactics that were “Made in China” ( a common term for many products now ). Maybe there won’t be so many, if the manufacturers lose custom ( or “lose face”, to use the local term over there ).
‘…a woman can be heard shouting, “The police are hitting people”‘. Brought back memories of Trafalgar Square 26th September 2020.
Another warning, as if we needed it, that Totalitarian regimes are all about equality for the people. Equally poor, equally hungry, equally frightened,,
I wonder, could zero “covid” turn out to be a modern variant of “kill all the sparrows”? Still, I suppose if the regime could survive the starvation that brought about, maybe they will survive this (whatever that may take in domestic and international policy).
They like a good famine do the Communists… Someone has to be tending the fields, don’t they..?
They see life as a zero-sum game, thus that’s literally all they ever can conceive of. That was the ultimate fatal flaw of Marxism and it’s even more toxic derivatives. A truly dead-end ideology if there ever was one.
It’s time we start to think the unthinkable. That is that Covid 19 does not, and never has, actually existed.
The only place it ever existed, was in our minds.
It’s actually a far, far deadlier illness to humans known as Mass Psychosis.
As Carl Jung famously said:
“Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.”
I’ve seen absolutely no evidence that an unusually nasty respiratory disease has been going round.
I’ve seen lots of evidence that people have been hurt by being injected with experimental gunk.
A very great thinker. A rational man. And yet he speaks of something called synchronicity, events having a coincidence in time, creating the feeling that a deeper motivation is involved.
Colonel Max Radl, on Karl Jung in The Eagle Has Landed.
Rather appropriate.
I went for my flu jab today. Scores of us over 65’s were coralled into the enclosed waiting room at our group practice as we snaked towards the jab. Only 2 or 3 were actually coughing. As a bonus we were all offered another Covid jab,.When I said “No chance….” the jabber applied no coercion at all…wonderful. Maybe increased Covid is associated with such queues and not the actual jab.
It would probably be a good idea to start viewing the flu jab with that same sceptical eye
Over here in the States, yesterday I saw a small independent pharmacy in Upstate NY with a sign in the window saying “Flu and Shingles Vaccines Here”. No mention at all of the Covid jabs, interestingly.
I grew up being awed by the bravery of students in tianneman Square. China has a disgusting history of brutality, yet John Kerry refuses to denounce it.
How Xi thinks cordoning off areas is going to stop an AIRBORNE virus is anyone guess.
The biggest irony of all: Lockdowns and related restrictions, an inherently Hobbesian Leviathan-style policy if there ever was one, have made life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, as Hobbes would say.