A good article was published in the Spectator’s Coffee House blog this morning by Ian Williams, a former foreign correspondent for Channel 4 News and author of The Fire of the Dragon: China’s New Cold War. He argues that President Xi’s authoritarian ‘Zero Covid’ policy is the contemporary equivalent of the one child policy – a form of totalitarian control that quickly became an end in itself and had disastrous unintended consequences. Here are the opening few paragraphs:
It has been a remarkable few days for China’s increasingly absurd and at times chilling zero-Covid campaign. There was outrage on social media after the death of a three-year-old boy from carbon monoxide poisoning, which his father blamed on delays obtaining treatment because of a lockdown. Angry residents who took to the streets were confronted by riot police. While videos from the world’s largest iPhone factory in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou, where 350,000 are employed, showed workers scaling barricades in what amounted to a mass break-out following attempts to lock them in their dormitories after a Covid outbreak.
A surge in cases across the country has seen restrictions imposed in 28 cities, home to more than 200 million people. They range from Xining and Lhasa in the west, to Beijing, Guangzhou, and even Wuhan – where the virus was first detected almost three years ago. There have been the now familiar appeals for food and medical supplies from those locked in their homes or in the vast quarantine facilities sprouting across China.
Yet stock markets in Shanghai and Hong Kong bounced last week on rumours that Beijing might ease its zero-Covid policy, that it had finally seen sense in the face of growing anger and frustration. It seemed like wishful thinking on the part of investors who have been heading for the exits almost as rapidly as the hapless iPhone workers. And that is how it proved on Saturday when a spokesperson for the National Health Commission told a much-anticipated press conference in Beijing that there would be no wavering. China will “unswervingly adhere” to the zero-Covid policy, which is “completely correct”, she said.
She was echoing the words of Xi Jinping, who a few days earlier described zero-Covid as a “people’s war to stop the virus”. In his speech to the Communist party congress he gave not so much as a nod towards the economic and social pain caused by a policy that has become part of the cult of Xi. It was as if the endless lockdowns, waves of mass testing, and the claustrophobic restrictions and surveillance, where all to be celebrated, a mark of party virility, the new normal for Xi’s China.
The ‘people’s war’ rhetoric was reminiscent of the era of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. Except instead of fanatical red guards waving little red books, Xi is deploying an army of fanatical white guards, the hazmat-suited enforcers of zero-Covid banging down doors and waving their swabs and thermometers before dragging people away to quarantine.
It’s a tempting analogy, but a more accurate one might be the now discarded one-child policy. Like China’s cruel and crude attempt at population control, zero-Covid has become an industry in itself with its own enormous bureaucracy and army of zealous enforcers, whose work is a measure of loyalty to the party and its leader. As with one-child, abuse has become routine, and voices warning of the obvious economic damage are suppressed or ignored. The one-child policy sought to control women’s bodies, zero-Covid is about broader social control. Both seek to tightly constrain the way people live their lives. Like one-child, zero-Covid has developed a political logic of its own, divorced from its original purpose of protecting health – a Frankenstein monster of a policy.
Worth reading in full.
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For a while I thought the current Chinese leadership were smarter than their predecessors but it looks like success has gone to their heads.
If the Chinese people decide enough is enough and really kick-off all hell will break loose and the result will be utter carnage.
The Chinese people are a fully domesticated, neutered population.
They will put up with anything and everything.
And we’re being taken down the same path. They’re just further ahead than us.
They decided that in Tiananmen Square and look where that got them. The current numbers of the PLA are estimated at 2.5million. That’s an awful lots of guns and tanks etc etc to overcome.
They aren’t smart at all they are corrupt idiots.
Of the corruption I never had any doubt. But for a time they seemed like they were playing a clever game of balancing authoritarianism with providing material prosperity. But they seem to have got carried away – I guess a common character flaw.
And here net zero is the new zero COVID policy.
It had to be zero something.
Could be have zero-rulers?
So very true, unfortunately.
I had thought for many years that I would like to visit the Chinese Civilisation (for it is not a country, as most understand a country to be).
The last few years have, well…. altered my plans, in that regard.
You have to go through long quarantines and plenty of dehumanising rituals.
Unless you are part of an accepted global elite, like the German Chancellor, in which case you can enter and exit easily.
Funny that the most protected individual in China, Xi Jingpin, is somehow allowed to meet a visitor who hasn’t gone through the strict health control measures they demand of everyone.
Either Xi is a very brave man, putting himself at risk like that to take an important meeting, taking one for the team as it were. Or maybe he doesn’t really think ‘the virus’ is actually a danger.
Hmm, I wonder which one it is…
Tricky question ….
China’s Zero Covid policy dehumanising evil
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This article I think gets somewhere near the truth but still misses the point to me. Yes ‘Zero Covid’ is about totalitarian, and not infection, control, but the author can’t seem to explain WHY. China already had enough control to manage its vast population through profound economic and social changes and is poised to become the most powerful nation on earth. Covid is a run-of-the-mill cold virus. So the alleged outbreak is being used either as cover for something, or in lieu of something. I agree with Denis Rancourt that covid is a war measure, designed to put pressure on supply chains and thereby inflict economic harm to its competitors, whilst ensuring the total compliance of its domestic population in a time of war.
Or to descend the rabbit hole, it could be a continuation of population control measures but less explicit than a one child policy. In this case other governments have made common cause through their use of lockdown and mass injections.