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Comment by udev | Hacker News Reader

One thing that I observe about how China deals with COVID: leadership assumes that they have perfect control over perfect people.

Therefore they try these type of solutions like complete lock-down of a city of 26m people.

They assume that they are perfect as leaders, so planning is perfect and takes everything into consideration.

They assume that people will execute their orders perfectly, even under extreme hardship (hunger, lack of medication, being separated from children in hospital, being separated from sick parents, etc).

Of course none of that is true.

For all its failures, democracy at least has taught us to incorporate the human imperfection into the process and the decisions.

We have to compensate for human imperfection, the same way a good engineer takes into consideration the imperfection of the materials, imperfection of signals, numerical imperfections in algorithms, etc.

I am curious when China will adjust their model/plan for COVID to consider the vast amount of counter-evidence that is accumulating.

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>One thing that I observe about how China deals with COVID: leadership assumes that they have perfect control over perfect people.

This is absolutely not unique to China. How many times have we heard "if only everyone did this or that, the measures would have worked!" coming from official authorities here in the west? I know it happened a lot where I live, and It honestly surprised me how almost every measure was based on that crappy assumption.

I think the opposite: that China is a powder keg ready to go off at any moment - and the leaders know it very well and are generally pretty afraid of things blowing up.

There are a lot of protests in China we don't hear about.

Something about Chinese (in China) ... leads me to think they go big on memes. They revolt unlike anything we know of.

Do you remember the video form Feb 2020 in Wuhan? The madness, hospitals flooded?

Imagine all over China.

As long as the economy is steaming forward, people will look the other way.

But as soon as that starts to slow down, then I think it's going to get hot.

Edit, for my naysayers:

"The number of workers' strikes rose to a record level in 2015. The China Labor Bulletin mentioned 2,509 strikes and protests by workers and employees in China."

That's just labour disputes and doesn't include disputes concerning appropriated land, safety issues with products - i.e. the kinds of things where there's some tolerance for dissent. [1] And note that it's increasing every year.

Especially due to the power of Social Media, if China didn't have censorship the CCP would be out within months. They are well aware of this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protest_and_dissent_in_China

Revolutions use angry young men as fuel. China's young men population is proportionally small. Further, due to the legacy of the four-grandparent-policy and Confucian respect-for-elders tradition, the young that exist have high family responsibilities. Perhaps there will be something new in China - something that comes from the same place as revolution but without the testosterone.

> China's young men population is proportionally small

But their population of young women is even smaller.

I doubt their model is that people are perfect. I think their model assumes that if they set strong enough incentives, the human-error will only be a second order effect and can be safely ignored. I don't know how well they've estimated the political price for some of these incentives, and whether they have the political capital to expend to maintain this lockdown for much longer.

Their model is that you are assumed to be right, and when you're not, you save face by still acting like you're right. They're in too deep and they can't admit their policy is wrong since it admits that the west's approach is superior.

I like to use an analogy where every country is represented by a couple of people in a bar. China is the group who plans their consumptions two months in advance and sticks to its plan. America is the group that gets into a brawl in one moment, and in the next, builds a functional rocket in the parking lot.

I have an easier to understand analogy: China is the country that will try to solve an integral using Gaussian quadrature while USA will use some kind of Monte Carlo.

I presume you weren’t around when most of the posters here were clamoring for the same measures that are now failing in Shanghai?

‘Just 15 days to stop the spread!’

‘The lockdowns should be stricter, look at how well it works in China!’

‘If you are against lockdowns, you’re killing grandma and you should be locked up!’

> If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

Federalist No. 51, James Madison

> I am curious when China will adjust their model/plan for COVID to consider the vast amount of counter-evidence that is accumulating.

Probably it will take at least one year and a half - two years, at least that's how long it took the Western authorities to somehow change their discourse. Some people around the Western parts of the world still believe in mask mandates, to say nothing of the vaccine mandates if you want to visit their country (Greece, for example).

Thankfully all this China situation will have eased up the censorship reflex present in some Western media/social platforms, now it's again cool and super ok to complain about the lockdowns and to call them authoritarian because it's the evil Chinese that are implementing them. When us, the West, were doing them it was "for democracy" and for the greater good (for "the demos"). When the streets of NYC or London were empty because of lockdowns it was a civic thing, when the streets of Shanghai are empty (as The Economist was decrying in one of the its latest issues) is because the Chinese authorities want the worst for their people.

Where is this 'vast amount of evidence' anyhow?

So far they've had to have ugly lockdowns in a few cities, but it's a tiny fraction of the overall population.

If it goes on for a long while - this will be a problem, but if they got away with it by having lockdowns - even late into the game - I wouldn't call it a failure.

That said, we really don't know what a lot of the numbers are.

Here in Canada some provinces did use lock-downs (even with curfews) and some didn't, and comparisons made between them show that lock-down was one of the least effective measures.

I am sure similar data exists for US states, EU countries, etc.

The UK has chosen about 400 deaths a day instead as a level that the media are comfortable with.

> Some people around the Western parts of the world still believe in mask mandates, to say nothing of the vaccine mandates if you want to visit their country

Yes, people believe in mask mandates because masks are an effective way to prevent the spread of COVID. This is indisputable, so of course people support mask mandates.

> will have eased up the censorship reflex present in some Western media/social platforms

You can say whatever you want about COVID on social media in the west -- worst case your post is displayed with a warning stating it may be misinformation (and there is a lot of misinformation on western social media).

This is communism in a nutshell. The government decides the people are forced to follow. Even if it results in millions dead.

More like totalitarianism, that all well known communist systems have also been more or less totalitarian is something to think about tho.

This is not an accident. In 1888 (long before any socialist or communist country existed to validate the theory), the American socialist Benjamin tucker predicted that the Marxist form of socialism and it's derivates would necessarily lead to totalitarianism, with some eerily prescient predictions born out by the experiences in Venezuela, Cuba, china, USSR, etc.

If anyone claims that state socialism will have any other outcome (assuming they believe in science the process of prediction and confirmation) then it's on them to explicitly explain what, exactly, in their proposed implementation diverges from Tucker's model that would make their vision of state socialism turn out differently.

Yeah it's ridiculous that people keep using this no true scotsman fallacy argument about communism, even after 100 years of large scale experiments that all lead to the same outcome, with enormous loss and suffering.

And absolute monarchism, and classic dictatorship, fascism, etc. Communism isn't the only ideology which usually ends up totalitarian.

But it’s the only one that always does.

> leadership assumes that they have perfect control over perfect people

Only androids that are physically unable to empathise would make such an assumption. That's literally the definition of android from Philip K. Dick, and the basis of cyberpunk stories like Blade Runner. In this case the androids are the Communist Party of China and are trying to contain a virus with no knowledge or understanding how tens of millions of citizens would react to being locked in their tiny homes risking starvation.

At least the current evidences (excluding Shanghai) has shown that the virus can be contained. Yes, there are cases, but cities have managed to contain it and people are normally back to normal after two weeks semi-lockdown. Of course, with Shanghai keeps having new cases, things may change.

The government is pushing for old people to get vaccination. Old generation in China are not getting vaccinations because they worry it may have side effects. As far as I have heard, the government is pushing it by linking some money (old people get some government money for special occasions) with the vaccination.

Overall, the country will have to accept the fact that the virus will spread, especially if they want to open borders. The current strategy is to contain it as much as you can. Once it open up, it will have a peak similar to Hong Kong, maybe hundred of thousands of old people will die.

Yes if you ignore all the times when it doesn't work, then lockdown works. It's an irrelevant tautology with no intellectual or scientific merit.

There is no Shanghai exception for lockdown as a scientific policy, just like there is no Swedish exception. To decide if a policy advertised as based on universal biology is working you need to evaluate all the evidence, and cases where it doesn't work either disprove the theory or require refinement. As nobody can come up with a plausible refinement that means it's disproven.

Agree and disagree. Lockdown can work until it does not work. Science can evaluate the speed of spread, does not dictate what's happening. My city had a short lockdown a few month ago, Shenzhen and Guangzhou just finished lockdown. It is fair to say 9/10 worked. It is more difficult to contain Omicron, science can say that. Also virus won't spread when no one is moving, science can also say that. It is just a trade off in the end.

Unfortunately for some, whatever “science says” will be ignored next time.

This is yet more tautologies. Science doesn't dictate what's happening but it is meant to predict what's happening. That's the whole point of science. In this case the fake pseudo-scientists that claim to understand disease spread predict that lockdown will reduce disease spread but it doesn't. They can't explain why lockdowns don't work, which makes it not science.

As for your belief that 9/10 worked - please. Please! This is a tiger-protecting rock fallacy. Yes if you wear a rock around your neck, more than 99% of the time you will not be eaten by a tiger. The arguments that lockdowns work are all forms of this type of nonsense when examined. Correlation doesn't imply causation, you need to have very compelling evidence to show causality and "sorta overlaps sometimes, maybe" is not evidence of anything because people epidemics have natural cycles and governments tend to trigger lockdowns as they come up to their peaks. That doesn't mean the peaks are caused by lockdowns and it's the exceptions where they have no effect that prove this.

> In this case the fake pseudo-scientists that claim to understand disease spread predict that lockdown will reduce disease spread but it doesn't.

What's your basis for saying that lockdowns don't reduce spread? They do dramatically affect spread - that's been seen in every country. It's almost impossible for them not to affect spread. The virus propagates from person to person, mostly by them breathing the same air. If you reduce contacts between people, you reduce viral spread. This is about as well established as the statement that things fall.

Well, it has worked amazingly well for the last 2 years in China. It's been a CoVID-free bubble in which life has been close to normal for the vast majority of the time, for the vast majority of the people.

A lot of people commenting here are going on the basis of their experiences in countries that had on-again, off-again lockdowns, but in which the virus was largely allowed to spread. Yes, if you do a partial lockdown during the peak of a surge, and then start reopening once the surge starts to subside, you'll never eliminate the virus.

China's strategy has been completely different. It locked down hard in early 2020, and completely eliminated the virus within its borders. It then shifted attention towards stopping the virus from getting back into the country, by requiring international arrivals to quarantine. It also built up extremely good contact tracing systems, to identify and contain new outbreaks before they could spread widely.

That has worked remarkably well for over 2 years now. This is the first time that Shanghai has had to lock down since early 2020.

So yes, it's obvious that the overall strategy that China has followed is effective, and it does involve lockdowns, along with other measures like border quarantine and contact-tracing apps. This isn't a tautology. It's just an observation: there's a strategy that a massive country followed, which obviously worked.

Do you have any proof the CCP is not lying about the numbers? There were some people in China who claimed the official numbers are nowhere near the real levels. If the CCP is lying we have no evidence the virus can be contained.

"For all its failures, democracy at least has taught us to incorporate the human imperfection into the process and the decisions."

<Sarcasm>which is why all democracies defeated COVID with the three-week lockdown in which no one left home unless they had to and took proper precautions to ensure that they did not dare transmit any disease to anyone else</sarcasm>

No, I would say that modern democracies and enshrine human imperfections into the process in order to further the will to power that exists in those seeking office.

I think about these issues a lot in my spare time. I am curious if you have any favorite modifications/alternatives to democracies.

It is difficult to name a country that has "defeated" COVID. This video is from one of the best responses if you believe the lies the Chinese government pumps out about their COVID case counts. The situation today remains the same as the situation in March 2020 - anyone who doesn't die quickly of other causes is going to get COVID. The only surprise the entire way through the pandemic is they managed to rush a vaccine into mass production in ~12 months rather than a couple of years (very much a record!).

Even with that good news the damage from the lockdowns may not have been worth it, the world is re-emerging into a rather unstable environment with a lot of nervous people that looks ripe for WWIII. It is debatable whether the government interventions were actually a good idea, we don't have the full picture of what the costs were. I'd still rather have seen them pushing out honest, current information and then letting individuals make decisions for better or worse.

> then letting individuals make decisions for better or worse

That sounds a lot like anarchy to me. I believe we invented laws (and religion before that) exactly because individuals can't be trusted to make informed decisions in certain cases.

I don’t know what your culture claims, but freedom isn’t a privilege, and the only good social contract is a voluntary one. Things are never going to work otherwise in the US.

At least in Europe we never had a lockdown comparable to the Shanghai lockdown. People always could go to get food, medicine and get to work. The highest level of lockdown was that in-door and outdoor meeting in private were restricted somewhat (in Germany you could only walk with a single person from another household but couldn't sit down on a park bench).

I think western democracies had a much more commensurate approach to Covid even though they failed in protecting the nursing home population.

> They assume that people will execute their orders perfectly, even under extreme hardship

China has also taken 1 billion people out of poverty in just 3 decades.

> For all its failures, democracy at least has taught us to incorporate the human imperfection into the process and the decisions.

Since we’re talking counter evidence:

- Singapore is a benevolent dictatorship - Japan’s schooling system prepares its citizens to be model minorities, and most of the orderliness or Japan is because of cultural reasons. Additionally, people are expected to not make mistakes.

America does have other ways it recognizes and adapts to human flaws: by embracing the free market. Adam Smith’s wealth of nations mentioned it not out of altruism, but selfishness that everyone thrives.

It’s not entirely attributable to democracy. In fact, many are arguing to remove the electoral college. A popular vote would be more Democratic in the Ancient Greek sense no? But our founder fathers designed America against that, to prevent tyranny of the masses.

> For all its failures, democracy at least has taught us to incorporate the human imperfection into the process and the decisions.

This is not uniquely America or contemporary. Any great past civilization accounted for this if it lasted for a long time.

"China" didn't do that. The Chinese people did that after Deng Xiaoping got into a position where he could stop the government actively destroying all progress in the country.

And whilst I used to be impressed by this "lifted a billion people" take, the reality is that lots of countries industrialized, modernized and huge numbers of people left behind agrarian poverty. This isn't unique or special and in fact when ranked against other countries like Taiwan, Korea, Japan - let alone countries like the USA or UK - China has turned in one of the worst performances. China still has widespread poverty and in many ways is still a developing country, 80 years after Europe utterly destroyed itself in WW2 and Japan had two of its major cities leveled by atomic bombs.

There's really nothing impressive about China beyond the sheer number of people the government has managed to hold back. If your foot is constantly on the brake of a very large vehicle, lifting your foot even half way will cause a lot of mass to start moving. That doesn't mean you get credit for it.

> Taiwan, Korea, Japan

Japan has less than 1/10th China’s population. Taiwan has less than 20% of Taiwan.

Japan was far richer than China per capita before WWII. Japan was the superpower that believed it could take on the West. Until recent, did China ever try to expand and attack the West?

Japan was never occupied by a resource colonizer, while China had the opium war.

Right now, both Japan and Taiwan’s economy are at stagnating. How do I know? I’m a permanent resident of one, and have a passport from the other. The argument that democracy exists, and let people do whatever they want will lead to prosperous is false. Otherwise America wouldn’t be at risk of slowing growth, potentially civilization decline.

Also, what are your thoughts on Singapore which is a one family dictatorship ?

> Japan had two of its major cities leveled by atomic bombs.

Have you been or is this armchair philosophizing from intro to WWII? I’ve been to the monuments at both, but the fact of the matter is those were military cities. Those cities by themselves are not what crippled the Japanese economy post WWII.

> There's really nothing impressive about China beyond the sheer number of people the government has managed to hold back.

Is that why India and Africa with a billion people are in poverty still?

> Taiwan has less than 20% of Taiwan.

You are mistaken. Taiwan is 100% of Taiwan.

Being from Africa and now living in the first world, my experiences align with what native_samples is saying. We had colonialism and then most countries in Africa had governments with understandably anti-Western ideas - for decades.

Even today a very serious issue holding back progress there is thousands of little regulations that are designed to lead to bribes.

If Africa’s national borders and governments could be redrawn from scratch, it would organize itself into a much happier, richer place.

> It’s not entirely attributable to democracy. In fact, many are arguing to remove the electoral college. A popular vote would be more Democratic in the Ancient Greek sense no? But our founder fathers designed America against that, to prevent tyranny of the masses.

That's at least a gross oversimplification. One of the primary reasons for the electoral college was that it allowed the compromise with southern states that they could count slaves as population (well half actually), without letting them vote. There was also the difficulty of the voting process during those times. I'm not aware of documents actually stating that the electoral system was about preventing the "tyranny of the masses".

Federalist 10 (James Madison) does pretty explicitly state this. It seeks to explain how the proposed US Constitution protects against one of the key problems with representative government -- that of faction (aka, what we would call parties today). The tyranny of the majority is described as follows:

> When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens

And the remedy provided by the indirectness of the American system (i.e., election of representatives, senators, and electors instead of direct democracy) is that it will

> refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose

Generally I recommend reading this whole paper, 18th century prose aside, as it provides a fascinating insight into how the framers thought of some of the key points of the Constitution

https://billofrightsinstitute.org/primary-sources/federalist...

>China has also taken 1 billion people out of poverty in just 3 decades.

Capitalism took them out of poverty once Mao died and the Chinese government mostly got out of the market's way

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