Protests erupt across China in challenge to Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy | Hacker News Reader

Protests erupt across China in challenge to Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy

cnn.com

13 pointsrish1_28 comments

This comment is going to be controversial but hopefully we can have some genuine discussion about it. I am personally of the opinion that Covid isn't a big conspiracy from the elites but I am in the camp that believes it more likely than not came about as a lab accident. What worries me about China's zero covid policy, is that it doesn't really seem to have much benefit for the people in power. It doesn't benefit the CCP economically, it doesn't benefit them politically. So why are they persisting with it? I really, really hope it is because of internal reasons to do with Chinese culture and power structures that are non-obvious for outsiders looking in and not because the CCP has seen lab research and knows or strongly suspects something regarding the long term health implications of Covid infection that the West is currently oblivious to.

Path stickyness? IE, they got it wrong initially, and now its about individuals not having their power undermined?

Its pretty surprising.

They've got so many viable excuses to fall back on though. Economy, vaccines, weaker variants, other countries have opened up. They could even make up some completely new narrative if they really wanted to about how they're going to get overtaken by India if they don't open the economy up or how they were running some two year lab experiment to ascertain long term effects for the good of the people and just release some hastily made paper supporting their findings. I don't know, it just seems really weird that these individuals would feel so threatened to roll back on it when it seems to be causing them more problems than its worth.

Yeah, its very weird. In some ways, I'm surprised they ever went into lockdown at all instead of forcing the population to grind through the pandemic regardless.

In some ways, I see this policy as having a direct impact on globalism. With China being demonstrated to be an unreliable supplier, the pendulum on the movement towards a globally dependent economy seems to be swinging back again.

It definitely feels that way from a Western perspective but I imagine its a bit different in Asia. Boris Johnson did a speech at a business conference in Singapore recently and apparently they didn't take kindly to him criticising China. I don't think we're going to see much return of local manufacturing but I do think we're going to see a return to a world which reflects the original Nato meaning of 1st, 2nd and 3rd world as two separate trade blocs separated on ideological lines with a third group of non-aligned countries.

Why does there have to be some conspiracy or hidden agenda? Uncontrolled Covid spread would result in an extremely large number of deaths and overwhelm the healthcare system.

That doesn’t mean that zero-Covid is sustainable forever as time goes on, as lockdowns and other frustrations take more and more of a toll. New Zealand and Singapore already had to give up on it. Even putting protests aside, this wave could easily be the one that can no longer be controlled.

I think its because, from my perspective anyway, people who get to high positions tend to:

1) be competent at understanding the tradeoffs inherent in controlling a system

2) be competent at understanding how to maintain or advance their position of power

Almost every other country in the world has now opened up suggesting that the vast majority of leaders now consider a zero covid strategy to mean one or both of the following postulates is true:

a) the damage inflicted on the system by a zero covid strategy outweighs the damage caused in loss of life and the (temporary) health care system collapse

b) a zero covid strategy poses a serious risk to their position of power

It could well be that Xi/CCP have become hubristic about their positions of power and the extent with which they can control reality (arrogance). Or they could have simply misweighed the tradeoffs or underestimated the threat of a zero covid strategy (incompetence). If either of these aren't true then there must be an unknown at play which leads me to wonder if they have extra information regarding the tradeoffs that everyone else does not possess. If, for example, you knew or suspected that 25% of those infected would be dead within 10 years, it might be prudent to keep that information to yourself, particularly if you were a dictator who believed he would still be in power in ten years time and had military expansionist plans.

I do believe in Hanlon's Razor (never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity) so arrogance or incompetence are vastly more likely to be the real cause but, given the murky origins of covid, I'm not sure that we can entirely rule out the hidden agenda either.

Literally caging people in their apartments makes people mad.

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