Something extraordinary happened in China over the weekend. Not long ago I wrote at length, if in a rather different context, about the vital importance of courage in the defense of the true and the human against the cold, mechanistic evil that is nihilistic technocracy, the machine whose Conditioners forever lust after total control – not only over men, but ultimately over reality itself. Well, now we have just seen a stunning example of such courage in the streets of China, where people rose up to reassert their human dignity in the face of the most dehumanizing machine of control in the world today: the Chinese Communist Party’s “zero-Covid” terror-state.
For three years now, the Chinese government has maintained its policy of draconian city-wide lockdowns, endless daily mass testing and biomedical surveillance, digital Covid-passes that arbitrarily govern every aspect of daily life, vast camps to house those dragged into quarantine for weeks (or longer) at a time, and, more recently, such innovations as “closed-loop” factories, where workers are forced to work, sleep, and “live” completely isolated from the outside world so that they can continue to produce your iPhones.
But now over the past several days protests have erupted in at least a dozen cities and 79 universities across the country, with spontaneous demonstrations – often begun by only a handful of people, or even a single individual – quickly drawing crowds of hundreds, even thousands, of people willing to fearlessly demand an end to the zero-Covid nightmare.
In Wuhan, where it all began, swarming crowds smashed down containment barriers and “liberated” locked-down neighbourhood:
BREAKING : In Wuhan the anti-lockdown protesters are tearing down barricades shouting “It started in Wuhan and it ends in Wuhan!” #Wuhan #ChinaProtests #ChinaUprising #chinaprotest #china
— ▓ MIИИΞДPФLIS 2074⠐
pic.twitter.com/Sh16Ehf2rm(@Minneapolis420) November 27, 2022
In Lanzhou, they overturned Covid-testing booths:
In Shanghai, they railed against digital health codes:
In Chengdu, they chanted: “Give me freedom or give me death!”
And in the capital Beijing, a day filling the streets…
Led into a night calling for freedom…
And asking, “Are we not people?”
All across the country, many thousands of these protesters spontaneously echoed many of the same lines:
We don’t want PCR tests. We want to eat.
We don’t want Cultural Revolution. We want reform.
We don’t want lockdowns. We want freedom.
We don’t want a Great Leader. We want the vote.
We don’t want lies. We want dignity.
We aren’t slaves. We are citizens.
These are conspicuously the same lines as those of a banner hung from a Beijing bridge by a lone (since disappeared) protester, Peng Lifa, on the 13th of October, just ahead of the CCP’s 20th Party Congress and Xi Jinping’s re-coronation as Chinese leader for life.
Now, as recordings of the anti-lockdown protests are swiftly censored online, Chinese netizens have often simply been replying with “We saw it” – a phrase referring not just to the protests, but to Peng Lifa’s message.
His final and most striking line, on a second banner, happens to have been:
“Refuse to go to class. Go on strike. Remove the traitor Xi Jinping.”
And indeed in many protests over the last few days the people’s frustration with zero-Covid tyranny translated into something more: an outpouring of raw anger against the CCP and Xi.
It’s hard to understate how unprecedented this scale and openness of revolt is in today’s China. This is without doubt the largest wave of protest seen in the country since 1989, and will viewed by the government as an existential challenge.
But the majority of the protesters probably weren’t taking to the streets to make a statement specifically about their (previously fairly popular) political system. The overwhelming message of most – shouted from Beijing to Xinjiang – has been far more basic: “stop the lockdowns, we are human beings.”
It is the zero-Covid regime’s sheer crude lack of even basic respect for humanity that has really sparked these protests. On Thursday the 24th a fire at an apartment complex in Urumqi, Xinjiang, killed as many as 44 people, including children. Social media posts alleged they could not escape because the doors and windows of their building were literally wired shut (you know, for safety), and because responding firetrucks were not allowed past a checkpoint into the “quarantined” zone, preventing them from reaching the building (you know, for safety). While authorities have denied this (and instead casually blamed residents for lacking “the knowledge or capability to rescue themselves”), videos purporting to show the incident spread widely online anyway, and citizens are convinced otherwise.
In other words they can see the residents were killed by the sheer banal stupidity of the senseless, inhuman bureaucracy of China’s zero-Covid machine, which grinds on and on with seemingly no input from any human intelligence whatsoever. China’s citizens recognize full well that they could just as easily have been the ones consumed by its mindless gears, and could easily be next. It is their anger and frustration with this inhuman stupidity that prompted them to finally come out en masse.
Like every Kafkaesque technocratic nightmare, the zero-Covid machine is seemingly constructed entirely of purely arbitrary rules and pointless nonsense. This is a regime of such relentless stupidity that it deploys armies of flying robots to pointlessly spray vast quantities of (probably toxic) disinfectant into the air over entire cities:
Meanwhile, in China, “CCP drones spray unidentified chemicals onto cities” as the country’s ““Zero COVID” policy runs full steam ahead,” according to @PJMedia_com.https://t.co/ec4PmwcxsI
— Julia(@Jules31415) November 26, 2022
And complicated machines installed in libraries to painstakingly sterilize every book, even though the world has had overwhelming scientific evidence for at least two years now that the coronavirus doesn’t transmit through surface infection:
And quarantine zones as completely arbitrary as this one that is literally a square of open air in a park:
Most visibly, this is a regime well embodied by the Dabai (the “Big Whites”), the omnipresent “public health” thugs who have flawlessly succeeded in dehumanizing themselves into ideal regime robot-zombies by donning their iconic (and totally pointless) full-body white hazmat suits 100% of the time, no matter what their job is or what miseries they’re inflicting on the people today while just following orders.
China
— James Melville
Zero Covid rules.pic.twitter.com/BGRexGFPM2(@JamesMelville) November 1, 2022
Now at least some of the Chinese people, like these workers at a Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, seem to have had quite enough of them:
As have others:
Sorry Beijing, but this seems to me to be a classic case of that old expression of yours: 官逼民反 – “repressive behavior by officials [is what] incites popular rebellion”. You probably should have known better.
But again, the most surreal and tragic part of all of this – the lockdowns, the brutal quarantine controls, the hazmat suits, the obsessive disinfecting, the mass testing, the health pass and QR codes everywhere, the social atomization and isolation, the disastrous shuttering of the economy, the premature destruction of the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation and becoming the world’s largest economy… all of it – is that there is absolutely no practical or scientific reason for any of it.
As the protests raged, China’s Marxist authorities and state media reasserted again and again that, as with every policy, they will continue with zero-Covid because it is “scientific and effective.” But of course it is neither. Lockdowns don’t work (which was clear from very early in the pandemic). In fact the net effects of lockdowns are measurably a human catastrophe. Even masks don’t show any real evidence of providing any significant effect on transmission. Meanwhile the “Swedish Model” and similarly light-touch strategies for “living with Covid” have by now essentially been fully vindicated.
Pretty much the rest of the world has by now come (kicking and screaming) to accept this reality and allow people to move on with their lives. Which is why when Chinese citizens were in recent days perhaps unwisely exposed to insufficiently censored footage of the packed, maskless crowds of the World Cup, they were in for a level of shock that may have helped push the country over the edge.
I find one aspect of international media coverage of the protests and China’s zero-Covid policy rather strikingly odd, however. Read any Western news coverage or analysis – the BBC, the NYT, Axios, the FT, whatever, take your pick – and you will almost certainly run across roughly the same story: praise for the “freedom fighters” seeking free expression, democracy, and human rights etc., but also an almost wholesale echoing of the Official Line somberly asserting that China’s leaders are “in a bind” and can’t actually just open up like the people naively want. If they do the hospitals will immediately be overwhelmed, untold millions will die, the economic impact will huge. Zero-Covid might be a bit excessive – what with people starving in their apartments and throwing themselves off buildings and whatnot – and the government should probably shift course to loosen up somewhat, especially to get commerce flowing again. But ultimately top-down control will have to be maintained for the people’s own good. It’s an understandably difficult situation for Beijing.
But since I’m not a Serious Journalist I can go ahead and call total bullshit on this. To do otherwise would require pretending we don’t now have three years’ worth of collective experience from around the world, during which time every “expert” model predicting mass death in the dangerous event of freedom was consistently proved wrong, often by orders of magnitude. With only rare exceptions, health care systems in most countries ended up being able to handle the impact of the pandemic without any kind of collapse. Every big Covid wave quickly reversed itself and diminished. Because herd immunity works.
Ultimately SARS-CoV-2 is a virus with a greater than 99.9% overall pre-vaccine infection survival rate for those under age 69, and above 99.5% if even the most elderly are included (it’s pretty unclear how many in China know this information). And its one for which vaccines have now long been available for all those who want them. People are in fact able to assess their own risks while living as a human being, and to make their own choices, and nothing world-ending happens when they are allowed to do so. None of the civilization- and humanity-crushing germophobic paranoia and tyranny is necessary or ethically justifiable in the slightest, and never has been.
No, there is only one real reason for China’s insistence on the zero-Covid policy, and it’s one we also have some recent experience with in the West: pure ideological psychosis, rooted in the CCP system’s pathologically fearful psychological desperation to maintain total control of everything at all times (plus to protect Xi’s fragile ego), no matter how self-destructive the results.
An uncontrollable pandemic seems to have been the perfect bug to truly break the minds of the CCP’s Marxist-Leninist leadership. The propaganda narrative they quickly built up around Covid – the web of lies intended to inculcate a “healthy” fear of the virus and thereby enhance social cohesion and control – took on a life of its own and became self-perpetuating. Now, in a closed information environment, the tail is clearly wagging the dog and the Narrative is setting the policies of government instead of the other way around. Much as during other massively self-destructive episodes of CCP history (the Great Leap Forward comes to mind), they are trapped not by a difficult reality but by a collective unreality – one from which at least some of the Chinese people have now woken up.
Broadly speaking, the main thing China’s zero-Covid cataclysm has really managed to accomplish is to begin to shatter the image of modern China being some bastion of pragmatic and effective technocratic governance – as being a country run by sensible engineering PhDs, and possessing the sort of enviable authoritarian “state capacity” to quickly build marvelous, village-smashing mega-projects that has long made New York Times columnists and Canadian prime ministers alike daydream about all that could be accomplished if only their countries could be “China for a day.” But for many, first outside of China and now inside it, it has now become impossible to ignore the truth that technocratic central planners can in fact be possessed by horrifyingly blind ideological madness too. Who could have known?
So it seems pretty clear why mainstream international media finds itself largely unable to talk plainly about China’s zero-Covid mistake. To do so honestly would be to strike directly at the same animating myth that drove “emergency” Covid measures in their own countries. The lockdowns, and vaccine passports, and QR codes, and mass censorship, and unprecedented termination of basic civil liberties, and brutal treatment of dissenters that we saw gleefully implemented by governments all over the world during the pandemic – and which were based directly on the China model – were always worse than irrational and illiberal. To point out that such measures are a continuing crime against humanity in China would be to point out that they were a crime against humanity everywhere.
That could prompt some unwanted reflections about how things went down the last few times people protesting against lockdowns and calling for human dignity, human rights, free expression, and democratic accountability (aka packs of “dangerous far-right extremists” and “conspiracy theorists”) took to the streets in the West.
In places like Australia:
Never forget when Melbourne, Australia was a Covid Police State. Excessive violence & brutality, all in the name of safety!
— MilkBarTV (@TheMilkBarTV) October 7, 2022pic.twitter.com/L4ssBMgZkj
And Canada:
And France:
And Germany:
And the Netherlands:
And just about everywhere else.
That would be pretty awkward. So the mumbled criticism of what’s happening in China is no surprise.
(Though some of the brightest lights of the media’s more extreme pro-authoritarianism zealots are actually champing at the bit, eager to leap to the defense of the CCP’s policies more directly, including with the most audacious anti-scientific disinformation they can whip up to spew):
Besides, we’re not supposed to be done yet folks: new plans for sweeping, “technology-enabled ‘always-on’ global health infrastructure,” including a global digital health pass that will determine whether or not anyone anywhere “can move around,” was just agreed to by the G20 only like two weeks ago! The last thing our governments need is for something so grand and important to be derailed by the kind of pro-human independent spirit on display by a few Chinese profiles in courage.
People like Flower Man, who told a crowd that, living in “a country that has slaughtered so many people… Chinese people, we have to be braver!”
And Van Man:
And the students of Tsinghua University:
Or the amazing pudgy, maskless Patrick Henry of Chongqing (now known online as “Super Brother”) who declared that, “There is only one disease in the world: that is, being unfree and poor, and now we have both… [so] Give me liberty or give me death!”
Or the protestors in Xinjiang who casually chanted “let’s die together!”
Fortunately for all involved (except the people), police have since successfully flooded the streets of China, and the protests seem to have died down for the time being. Stability will likely be restored and “stability maintenance” stepped up. Revolution doesn’t seem to be in the cards. Regimes and their journalists everywhere will breathe a sigh of relief.
After all, what would the future be like if everyone was inspired to just stop obeying disembodied robot-megaphones demanding that we show our health pass?
That’s a grim future they’d probably rather avoid having to think about.
N.S. Lyons is a pseudonym. This article was originally published on The Upheaval , N.S. Lyons‘s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here. (Highly recommended.)
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And they call us ”conspiracy theorists”.
”KAMALA HARRIS: “When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and REDUCE POPULATION, more of our children can breath clean air and drink clean water.”
https://twitter.com/KamVTV/status/1679988804168347648
She is the perfect advert to reduce the population by one..
And she can’t even blame dementia!
I’m already onboard with the fact ( in my opinion ) that there’s a depopulation agenda going on and has been for years prior to the scamdemic and subsequent deployment of the death jabs. Just take a look at these quotes as an example of just how sick, twisted, but intent on lowering the population numbers some outspoken psychopaths are. Yet we’re meant to take public health advice from these dangerous scum? And note the obvious injection of misogyny in the second one;
”Alberto Giubilini of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and Francesca Minerva of the University of Melbourne in a paper published in the Journal of Medical Ethics:
“[W]hen circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible. … [W]e propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide,’ to emphasize that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus … rather than to that of a child.
“Therefore, we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk.”
”Barack Obama’s primary science adviser, John P. Holdren: “A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.
The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.”
So don’t call me and others ”conspiracy theorists” when the facts are out there in plain sight but you’re too naive/willfully blind to see!
https://lionessofjudah.substack.com/p/dont-believe-in-the-globalist-depopulation
Something important, which is rarely addressed, to throw at the Covid Inquiry. If lockdowns were so effective at saving lives and stopping the spread then why did low-income countries fare much better than rich countries? They don’t have a ‘lap-top class’ and people have to leave the house to earn a living because most live in poverty. Shouldn’t they have been dropping like flies, especially due to their living standards and poor health care? An interesting study focusing on Haiti. Just a bit more confirmation that the ”pandemic” was a hoax;
”Lockdowns were implemented and experienced differently by different countries and social groups. Low-income countries (LICs) present a unique set of empirical and ethical concerns when evaluating lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Debates about protecting “health” and/or “the economy” operate with a categorically different set of balances when the majority of a population lives below the poverty line and are dependent on subsistence agriculture; or live in an urban slum with no running water or an area prone to natural disasters and civil conflict.
A growing body of research has validated initial concerns that lockdowns and NPIs would have substantial and negative livelihood and health consequences for people in LICs (Bardosh, 2023). According to the 2021 United Nations (UN) Sustainability Development Goals report, “Years, or even decades, of progress have been halted or reversed. In 2020, the global extreme poverty rate rose for the first time in over 20 years. Hundreds of millions of people were pushed back into extreme poverty and chronic hunger”
Haiti has one of the world’s lowest reported mortality rates from COVID-19. Officially, there have been only 33,756 confirmed cases (through October 2022), with 857 deaths among a population of 11 million; in contrast, neighboring Dominican Republic (population 10.7 million) reported 646,000 cases and 4384 deaths.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953623004331?via%3Dihub
Remember that the validity of official records of causes of death is open to doubt, especially when comparing between states/nations in this case. I guess it’s possible that the residents in Haiti and similar places tend to have more robust immune systems than others. Not that some would use an idea like that to promote their political views – or would they?
But did you clock in the abstract, ”Despite the lack of testing…”? Therein lies the crux, in my opinion. I know that countries in the West went mental for mass testing, with even school kids being given them to test themselves twice/week, as well as employees of course. It just became routine. Certainly in the NL, if you didn’t have the death jab you had to provide a negative test result so you could get your precious QR code in order to participate in society in general. So there was a massive surge of testing because young people still wanted to go out and have a social life. I myself had to do a test just so I could attend my daughter’s birthday party at a venue. It was Vaxpass Nation. I don’t have the figures to hand but how did this compare to the testing going on in poor countries?
So there was the fraudulence of defining a ”Covid death” and the resulting misattribution plus the mass testing, it’s going to inflate the Covid figures considerably isn’t it?
Yes, comparing ‘Covid deaths’ between countries is a fool’s errand. Even within a single country we get changes in diagnosis and registration rules. The UK made changes to Medical Certificate of Cause of Death (MCCD) processes in the Coronavirus Act 2020 which make comparisons difficult (I stumbled across this on the National Association of Funeral Directors site in late March 2020 https://web.archive.org/web/20200926073015/https://nafdcovid19.org.uk/2020/03/coronavirus-act-changes-to-death-registration-in-england-and-wales/) . The only sensible comparison is all-cause mortality against a country’s own history.
For example: comparing Australia’s weekly all-cause mortality rates with UK’s as recorded in the Human Mortality Database (https://mortality.org) is confounded by the fact that Australia figures do not include deaths referred to a Coroner (apparently about 10% of deaths) – at all. UK includes them but lists them on the date of registration – ie late.
I asked Just Stop Oil what protests have taken place to disrupt military activities or calls for diplomacy to end conflicts given the military and weapons manufacturers are major consumers of fossil fuels even outside wartime. Reducing the need for military operations aligns with the goals of JSO. No answer.
Go on. Glue yourselves to the road in Moscow or Beijing – or even Aruba. Please.
Scott Perry in the Twitter clip was great. Just wish we had politicians like him in the UK who were willing to question the AGW hypothesis.
I’m not sure that AGW qualifies as an hypothesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis
“Britain’s China policy has been completely demolished”
Its been quite a while since I realised that China is selling us electric cars and wind turbines to reduce our CO2 output, but making them with electricity which comes from burning coal, and with the industry that we have gifted to them in order to reduce our CO2 output. And one of the key social media platforms for climate hysteria, is TikTok, owned by the Chinese Communist Party.
Plant the seeds and watch them grow. The long game, indeed…
Yet I can never understand how it is that Western countries blindly put themselves into allegedly disadvantageous relationships with countries they regard as enemies, and then blame those enemies for being cunning and devious.
It is Britain that voluntarily refuses to be self-sufficient in manufacturing, energy and the rest, and it is British climate scientists and governments that produce the climate alarm. It’s interesting that the only climate model that remotely models reality is the Russian one – they are telling us the true climate situation, yet we prefer our own self-deceptive lies.
It’s not so much that the Chinese are dashed cunning, but that the6y see we are damned stupid.
It is British governments, encouraged by small well financed middle class lobbyists. The rest of us abhor that policy.
I’m not so sure that “the rest of us” is that much of a majority. The campaign to paint Putin as a demon, Xi as a genocide, and both as unpopular tyrants seems to have many adherents amongst ordinary people here.
You might find this interesting..
https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-au/the-truth-about-tiktok#
Separating fact from fiction about Tick-Tok, which is NOT owned by the Chinese Government…
Why is Chinese Government interference naturally bad?..while US or EU interference on Twitter, Facebook and You Tube for instance is not as bad?
Is it China’s fault that the West, in its hypocrisy, let’s them manufacture goods that we buy….while we virtue signal?
Tangential to that, did anyone else hear the BBC report a day or so ago on some billionaire and his attempts to reverse ageing? The interviewer noted uncritically that he had received plasma transfusions from his young son, and given them in turn to his ageing father. “How interesting that this man is using his wealth to research longevity” was the vibe.
But my immediate thought was the “conspiracy theories” that say children are being trafficked from poor countries so that rich people can harvest their blood in a rather Faustian quest for eternal life.
Such a bizarre and unlikely story, until you hear the BBC featuring a billionaire who’s actually doing it (at least the transfusions – maybe he can’t afford the child trafficking, or at least to admit to it).
And then we have the equally bizarre stories, but true, of the independent movie on child sex trafficking reaching the top of the movie charts, despite theatres across America being mysteriously evacuated during showings, or people having their tickets refunded in advance because of multiple air-conditioning problems (some people have attended anyway, and found AC working in the lobby and the loos, but not in the auditorium).
And of course Epstein killed himself.
How hard it is nowadays to avoid paranoia.
Sound of Freedom came to mind too when I saw the headline (although turns out this miracle drug is likely yet more pharma unicorn poo). But yes, given that there are some unusually healthy people in the global gerontocracy, I share your paranoia.
It is noticable how many of the globalist leaders are very old men. I mean, how is Henry Kissinger still alive, or George Soros for that matter. I try not to think about it, but I fear beneath all the weird stuff we know about, is another layer of really weird stuff we don’t.
I can well believe that evil people try to prolong their lives by such means – I can’t believe that it actually works. I’d rather believe that privileged people are spared many causes of early death, and that evil people are preserved for a little by the devil.
I used to hear it was tiger and panda penis that prolonged your life! Now it’s kiddy blood!
Ffs
I guess we don’t know the half of it. I read an article by James Delingpole yesterday where he gave his views in the most recent Huw Edwards case as being just another scratching around the surface of what must be an enormous boil of, quite frankly, demonic depravity. I’m inclined to agree with him. Epstein, Saville, Prince Andrew, Heath etc are all small titbits, offerings if you like, that the media feed on without getting down to the main meal and what’s happening in the kitchen. This should be – in any rational and sane world – a gift to any journalist wishing to earn their spurs on true investigative reporting. Instead, they stop dead in their tracks with one or two reveals as if there’s nothing more to see. Until there is and then the whole circus starts up again. The fact that investigations into child abduction and child abuse always seem to be stalled or documents go missing or, in the case of Epstein, people (apparently) die (he may have been suicided or maybe he’s living elsewhere after plastic surgery)suggests a potential vast cover-up going all the way to the top.
https://open.substack.com/pub/delingpole/p/no-one-gives-a-flying-about-huw-edwards
I like that man, well done, we need more like him
And I truly hate, that’s hate, grifting, lying, grasping, and yes entitled charlatans like John Kerry and his ilk. Alleged war criminal Tony Blair and his spinning sidekick come to mind.
“Trans guidance will urge schools to help parents protect children”
Urge???
If parents need to be urged to protect their own children then they are not real parents!
“Harvard claims it found elixir of youth – but experts call it ‘hype’”
Dr David Sinclair, who is 102, discovered the substance behind a waterfall in the Hymilayas!
“The West must get Ukraine into NATO as fast as we can”
Thanks for your wisdom Boris! Hope you have a bunker for your family because there is no other action that would guarantee WW3 faster than that!
I’m done ranting, off for a lovely brunch fry up!
So, on the last post (Twitter link to John Kerry vs. Congressman Scott Perry), as if to drive home the fallacy of AGW, resorts to the ~98% scientific consensus argument once all his other vague arguments have failed. This is commonly pulled out of the bag as a desperate attempt to prop up one’s floundering case, lacking any evidence, for human induced catastrophic climate change – by stating this easily falsified consensus.
Here’s why the ~97% / 98% consensus argument is a false conclusion of the 2013 John Cook study that produced this nonsense statistic:
https://co2coalition.org/2021/10/31/97-consensus-what-consensus/