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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

Struggling to understand China’s endgame here. Assuming they achieve zero covid, surely they will be left with a population that is still vulnerable to covid, while the rest of the world (which has largely stopped caring) will have developed immunity the hard way, and therefore China must maintain permanent quarantine/isolation to avoid reintroducing the virus?

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The Chinese government does not care about its people catching covid. It is not about covid but about clamping down. It's a training exercise for what to do during rebellion.

Are the Chinese people at risk of rebelling and overthrowing their government or is this more weird anti-China xenophobia based on absolutely nothing?

It is not xenophobic to be anti Chinese government. You should know that Xi's government has a recent history of increasing repression and paranoia. It is not that the people are "at risk" of rebelling, it is that the government is paranoid about it.

I have been puzzled by this too, especially given my general perception of Chinese leadership as highly competent. My best theory is that Chinese people are very paranoid about infectious disease, and that the leadership believes that their political legitimacy would be threatened by mass infection numbers.

I mean, we thought that too about Putin et al, about the UK, and about the US. I think we may need to reexamine our priors about how intelligent our leaders are.

> therefore China must maintain permanent quarantine/isolation

And how is that bad for Chinese gov? That's exactly what the gov wants - total control over peoples lives, over crossborder flow, but the main reason are health codes allowing total control over population. XJP literally wants his China be NoKo 2.0, COVID was just extremely good excuse, if COVID leaked from Chinese lab I would not be suprised if this was the their goal - introducing COVID zero strategy to have control over whole population under pretense of fighting the virus.

Meanwhile my family can't really come to visit abroad (and they are the lucky ones having passports, good lucking getting new passports and being allowed to travel abroad for pleasure), we could in theory visit China but it's too troublesome and risky under these conditions.

I mean they built a very large wall once.

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