China state CCTV avoids crowd close ups at the World Cup
twitter.com
twitter.com
- It's a money-making scam by the COVID test manufacturers
- It's a money-making scam by the temporary quarantine center manufacturers
- It's a failure of bureaucracy ”层层加码”
- It's a ploy to increase the depth of state surveillance
- It's a ploy to lock people at home and increase the birth rate
- It's a ploy to keep the poor poor to ensure that they keep working hard
- It's to mitigate war with the United States. Apparently the Geneva convention has a clause against going to war with a nation stricken by a pandemic.
> The current situation is that Western water forces, through insidious and poisonous means such as the Internet, have created a very dangerous atmosphere of public opinion and incited the people to rebellion. If we are deceived and held hostage by these rumors, what China will end up with will only be a disaster. We have to believe that the country, more than anyone else, wants an early end to the epidemic, and more than anyone else, wants an early end to this costly and socially expensive epidemic prevention activity, so that society can return to normal and the economy can recover as soon as possible. We believe that the Party and the government will be able to lead the people of China to work together to overcome the epidemic! China will win! [fist][fist][fist]
> 当前形势是西方水军通过网络等阴险毒辣的方式，已经营造了一个非常危险的舆论氛围，煽动民众叛乱，如果我们被这些流言所蒙骗和裹挟，最后中国迎来的只会是灾难。我们要相信，国家比任何人都希望疫情早日结束，也比任何人都希望早日结束这种耗资巨大、社会成本巨大的防疫活动，让社会恢复正常，经济早日复苏。相信党和政府，定能领导全国人民，同心协力，战胜疫情！中国必胜！[拳头][拳头][拳头]
That must be propaganda because it should be obvious to a lay person that it started in late 2019. China government has been trying for 3 years to “have an early end”
This does not mean that it cannot contain true statements, but that it could only be useful by providing clues about the goal that the authors want to achieve; not from taking the words as information. My 2c.
Like in the US?
China's approach had a better chance at bringing it to a fast end early on, but with greater risk if it doesn't end quickly. Now that it is a multi-year affair, they have worse natural immunity than everyone else, on top of their less-successful vaccine. And switching tactics would be an admission of failure, while keeping the current tactic is slowly destroying their economy.
> admission of failure,
I think you are wrong here. This is not how dictatorship works. In proper dictatorship one can easily change the narrative.
I assume there is something deeper that this: power struggle so no decisions can be made.
I think if & when they end "zero covid" they're in for a world of shock. Without a good plan, a good vaccine, and a good vaccination program - it's going to be opening the floodgates.
I don't think they're sticking with "zero covid" out of choice, but because they're not ready for what comes next. It's going to reveal that total lockdowns weren't a stop-gap measure, they were the primary measure - and there's no good plan to follow.
It worked for both SARS and MERS. Even though more contagious, it might have worked for Covid until it escaped to Europe in early Feb 2020.
An average Chinese person who encounters "astroturfer" for the first time would probably wonder what it means, just like we wondered what "water scouts" mean...
https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BD%91%E7%BB%9C%E6%B0%B4%E5%...
Online water scouts are hired online writers who publish specific information about specific content in the Internet. They are usually active in e-commerce websites, forums, microblogs and other social networking platforms. They influence normal users by disguising themselves as ordinary Internet users or consumers and by posting, replying and spreading blog posts.
It is a sort of funny conclusion to end up at — the US wants to have a war with China, but is stopped by the Geneva convention.
I thought they didn’t have as effective vaccines as we’ve got in the west (on top of the general, uh, hands-off approach western counties tend to take around public health). Different facts on the ground, different policies, right?
But suffice it to say, things are far more complicated than that.
And the real reason the US wants to avoid war with China, and vice versa. Is because we are talking about two nuclear states with competent second strike capability. This is the same reason why the cold war never went hot. Nobody wants to see the outcome. Millions dead, civilization set back a century or so etc.
I just do not understand why he did not “declare that China won against COVID and how CCP is great”.
(If there is a problem with vaccination rates, the CCP has tools to make that happen. Yes Sinovax vaccine is not very effective but with 3 doses it will cut death rates by 90% or so.)
So the question here is really why Xi decided to keep zero-COVID. Maybe he is not so smart? Or maybe there is a big insider power war going on?
What many of us do not want to admit, is that our leaders have taken advantage of the crisis for their own benefit. I think most western media is reluctant to report on what is happening in China, because it would start uncomfortable conversations at home.
Seeing the Chinese government so nakedly use what's left of the pandemic to oppress their population is very problematic to our pandemic narrative. People might start to ask if perhaps their governments too have been doing that too.
The official narrative in the west has been that anything the government does to us in the name of protecting us from COVID is always correct and anyone who criticizes it is an evil "anti-vax" lunatic.
There has been ample reporting about China in the western media and none of your conspiracy related thought process is translating to anything that's happening in the West. If anything its promoting the narrative that the Western response to the pandemic was highly successful.
I never said that our media does not criticize China. Of course they do. But they tiptoe around criticizing China in a way which could expose our own hypocracy.
Western media has been pushing the narrative that any level of force by the government is justified, because the pandemic is such an existential threat. They are reluctant to report that the Chinese government is then using excessive force, because it would make people question whether our government over-reacted as well.
The other part is that western media doesn't have many sources inside China that can properly report with confidence what is happening without losing their asset.
In the US, stay at home suggestions are over. Industry shutdowns are over. Mask mandates are over. They've been over for a long time. The scaremongering of "what if these temporary conditions become permanent" has now been demonstrated as fallacious. Our society has basically made it through, thanks to the natural evolution of the virus combined with the technology of vaccine development (plus a lot of people who aren't with us any more). Go watch a World Cup game at a bar, lick a subway pole, move on to another simulation of protest - whatever you want.
Bureaucratically, local healthcare systems seem to still have mask requirements, Covid testing policies, the Doctor Who -esque custom of squirting goop on your hand as a greeting, etc. Will these ever disappear? Mask requirements might even make sense independent of Covid, given that most healthcare settings are high concentrations of people with half of them sick and the other half immunocompromised. But in general, all of these latent results are certainly not more of a problem than the longstanding administrative bureaucracy that grinds doctors and nurses into overworked dust. (I say this even taking into account the effect of masks on the hearing impaired, which needs to be addressed).
People in positions of power will always act for their own selfish interests - one of the very first things the federal government did was give away six trillion dollars to prevent the stonk market from reflecting reality. But that everpresent banal observation doesn't invalidate that there was also a legitimate response to a real problem. We can debate how effective facets of the response are, the accountability of our leaders, etc, but implying that the whole "narrative" is primarily bureaucratic self interest is just nonsense.
Xi has been notably against vaccine mandates, even going so far as to reprimand a city that started asking for vaccine proof. I suspect that he himself is probably unvaccinated (afraid of needles, maybe?)
Plus, it gives a great excuse to track tracking everyone’s movements at all times.
What is the point of having all that propaganda apparatus if you can even do that?
There is a rumor there are a lot of officials which still wait for approval from Hu Jintao and his group to do anything. But that rumor is from person who was not in China for 5 years.
Hahahaha, that's a good one. Yeah, welding shut apartment buildings with COVID positive inhabitants was the perfect approach to dealing with a strong lung infection for sure!
Is there any evidence this is about masks versus gatherings?
> the Geneva convention has a clause against going to war with a nation stricken by a pandemic
The U.S. would go to war with China if it invaded Taiwan, conventions or not. (I also believe the relevant text is with respect to medical personnel, not a general prohibition on armed conflict.)
Attack the Chinese mainland, perhaps not, at least not without plausible deniability. Sink Chinese ships in waters the international community considers international or Taiwanese and Beijing Chinese, absolutely.
Were China to retaliate by hitting an American ship, then yes, we would likely go to limited war against its port and missile facilities.
“Limited” as in not seeking unconditional surrender. As long as the U.S. doesn’t threaten the CCP’s existence, limiting its aims to thwarting Xi’s policy goals, i.e. taking Taiwan, it’s irrational for Beijing to escalate to nuclear Armageddon. But Xi is a dictator, and dictators do not make for rational states, so who knows.
What is clear: a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would meet with an American and allied military response. And the decisions around what that response looks like (or if it happens) would give zero weight to whether China says it’s in a pandemic.
I agree but I don’t think that is grounded in rational thought. Lol. Xi still has to go through a bunch of hurdles to get what he wants. He is not a real dictator.
Your idea of limited war is interesting. First attack on just a few objects in a limited scope. Then branch off onto other targets. Then full out war! There is no real limit in war.
Taiwan isn't worth ending the world over.
Zero nuclear is failed policy. It’s lead to war in Ukraine and encourages appeasement with China. We need more flexible doctrine. I’m not sure what it is, but it can’t be no war at all ever with a belligerent nuclear power at all costs. (Conventional only, no sinking capital ships and no strikes on core territory or any civilians would strike me as reasonable, but that also plays to American strengths.)
That’s not the null. Null would be engagement as usual. Nuclear war can occur in both the null and zero nuclear policy states.
From a game theory perspective, being willing to end the world over Taiwan is ironically the best way to prevent the world from ending. Deterrence works.
If at all costs, you include hundreds of millions of corpses, no, absolutely not. It's not worth it. It's not remotely worth it, and it's insane (In the colloquial, 'madman with his finger on the button' way) to consider it. Burning down the village does not save the village.
> From a game theory perspective, being willing to end the world over Taiwan is ironically the best way to prevent the world from ending. Deterrence works.
That's a bait and switch. The only reason nuclear weapons can be tolerated is because they prevent war between empires. When your doctrine explicitly expects them to fail to do that, it puts the lie to the sole reason for why civilization-ending nuclear arsenals should be allowed to exist.
You can draw red lines that can't be crossed like 'an attack against our territory will be responded to dispropritionately', but you can't take a red sharpie to the entire map of the world. Nobody will actually believe you when you do.
Nobody is saying we should nuke China if they invade Taiwan. Just that our risk tolerance to Beijing escalating conventional engagement to all-out nuclear war cannot be zero.
We must be ready to sink Chinese ships and potentially hit port and missile facilities with conventional arms. Refusing to do so is the sort of appeasement that virtually guarantees a future, far deadlier conflict. That engagement risks nuclear escalation is an important consideration, but not a decisive one.
> puts the lie to the sole reason for why civilization-ending nuclear arsenals should be allowed to exist
We agree. This has been a lie for some time. Nukes are terrible. Between rationale regimes, they seem to reduce large-scale conflict. With dictators, the calculus shifts.
Were getting rid of them an option, I’d take it. Presently, the world is going in the opposite direction, with the normalisation of tactical nukes a likelihood in our lifetimes.
> you can't take a red sharpie to the entire map of the world
Nobody has done that. Taiwan has de facto American security guarantees. If China invades Mongnolia the world will be angry, but nobody will go to war.
disagree only with last two
I don't think most Chinese care that much about state surveilance with WeChat already in their phone anyway, but first two money making scams are definitely spot on, which is why they are also often mentioned. It was not different in west with testing centres and vaccination business, especially VDL exchanging private messages with Pfizer CEO how to defraud EU citizens for billions of euros on useless vaccines almost nobody healthy wanted voluntarily (unless they fell for nonsense that it somehow stop/lower transmission rate fake news).
A very handy about face!
This account reports these events from China: https://twitter.com/vivianwubeijing/status/15969485319184302...
This is the closest to the literal use of this phrase we've had in over a century.
"It was not immediately clear whether the protests reached a meaningful scale in a country of 1.4 billion people, or whether a wide demographic participated"
I've seen pro government social media commentators say that the second half of the Foxconn worker statement was not reported by western media, but I won't pretend I know one way or the other.
Given that just yesterday a Japanese person tried to lecture me about how snorkels might have been banned in swimming pools because someone probably died and that they are probably dangerous, I'd say east Asians anxiety level is different from ours.
EDIT: funny to see people to get so upset. But anyone who has spent Covid in east Asia knows that they have had an extremely different approach to the Europeans all over the board and that in a lot of countries over there people are still deeply fearful of Covid. And while Taiwan has been bashing China's approach they still wear their masks everywhere and still have a somewhat lax but existent quarantine procedure.
You cannot have a serious conversation about a topic based on the information provided solely from one side no matter how much you distrust the other.
Makes perfect sense. My brother used to SCUBA dive, and he’s Norwegian, like me, which is Northern European which includes Sweden, so we can draw a lot of conclusions about COVID response validity based on this, with regard to race.
It’s entirely possible that Xi’s ideology-induced blindness in combination with being surrounded by yes-men make him an incredibly stupid leader in these circumstances.
I think it's easier to gain this information via hacking and data theft or paying insiders for documents than actually reversing the vaccine.
People in China are still posted about that.
In any case there are multiple paths available and so far they seem stuck on the failing one. It's strange.
You know how some old people believe all sorts of conspiracy theories about the government? Because their government was actually evil during their lifetime, it becomes much harder for them to believe that this one time the government really does want to give them medicine for their own good.
I have relatives in Bulgaria, a country with full access to all western vaccines thanks to EU but is among the least vaccinated countries in the world and among the top deaths of COVID-19 per capita.
I was shocked when I visited Bulgaria once travel become possible. Everyone knew someone dead but they also were telling stories about this one person who went to get a vaccine and their veins turned blue and died shaking. People in villages were tellings tories how Bill Gates will monitor them or that the virus and the younger ones were saying that the vaccines are a sham and the governments orchestrated it to reduce the population(Bulgaria is also a top country in population decline, the government and EU are actually trying very hard to increase the population).
When people want to believe things, they believe things.
The CCP may not be the Kiwanis Club but they're not the Legion of Doom either. It's not a democracy but they still need some degree of popular support, and letting everyone's grandparents die is not a great way to engender it.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1279024/china-coronaviru... vaccination-rate/
I don’t think this paper is a great source for that idea - the ratio of people with one infection (440,000) to people with three or more infections (1,000) is so different that I wonder if demographics or behavioral characteristics differ between the groups.
Empirically, their conclusion can’t really be true or each COVID-wave would be worse than the preceding one
I need to read the full paper when I have more time, but it does not seem to be dealing with symptoms? And the sequelae seem most troubling since those could take a long time to manifest.
(I’m ignoring whether the paper is correct in the first place.)
“The evidence shows that reinfection further increases risks of death, hospitalization and sequelae in multiple organ systems in the acute and postacute phase.”
Lets say that infection #1 puts the risk of outcome A at 40%
Infection #2 puts the risk of outcome A at 60%
Infection #3 puts the risk of outcome A at 70%
Each infection increases the risk of outcome A, but it isn't an increasing rate.
---
This would be very different from
Infection #1 having a risk of outcome A at 10%
Infection #2 having a risk of outcome A at 30%
Infection #3 having a risk of outcome A at 70%
---
The first case that I described matches Figure 5: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02051-3/figures/5
Note the difference in the rate of increase between the infections.
Yes, multiple infections increases the risk. However, each subsequent infection has a lower rate of increase of the chance.
As you mentioned their own vaccine is not very effective but they have also approved no foreign vaccines yet [2]
They have far too few ICU beds to manage the surge if restrictions are dropped to, say, average EU levels [3]
They seem to be trapped
[1] https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202211/22/WS637c2416a3104917... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/25/china-covid-... [3] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/icu-beds-...
You're still here justifying current deaths from starvation, fires, suicides with potential future deaths to covid. If an individual thinks like this they're a sociopath, but if governments do it they are "trapped".
Trapped meaning the available choices are limited to things the CCP don’t seem to want; unrest, use of foreign vaccines, or massive deaths etc.
Again for the avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting what they should do or how they should do it.
There are three reasons they probably don't do this:
1) Their vaccines don't provide high enough protection to prevent overwhelming the healthcare system.
2) They have fostered mRNA conspiracy theories and pushing an mRNA vaccine would be a huge embarrassment to the communist party.
3) Beating the US by a wide margin on Covid deaths is a point of pride.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-18/only-half... [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2021/11/11/stunnin...
Sorry about the low quality source links. I'll try harder to find CDC links in the future.
China borders 14 countries. If there’s “no COVID” it’s because it’s being suppressed, with or without Beijing’s knowledge.
It won’t be only COVID-19 popping when that artificial suppression ends. RSV, influenza, etc.
To date NZ has suffered just 2,212 covid deaths (just 0.0004% of population).
What evidence is there that the lockdowns in China are effective at doing anything at all?
What evidence is there that COVID hasn’t already passed through the population like it has in every other country?
What evidence is there that the “people who will die if the lockdowns are stopped” didn’t perish long ago?
The main evidence appears to be the existence of the zero-COVID program itself. Surely a country wouldn’t pursue such a damaging policy unless it was effective, right?
What we do know: post-omicron variants of the virus are extremely transmissible and defeated all other attempts at zero COVID.
A big driver of the problem however is that a regime built on controlling the population will almost always default to controlling the population as the answer to its problems.
For those >= 80 years old, Only 65.7% had two shots and 40% had booster [1]. This is very low compared to, for example, Singapore. [2] (>90% three shots for >= 60 y.o. group)
[1] https://www.caixin.com/2022-11-16/101965816.html (paywall, the data is in preview tho) [2] https://www.moh.gov.sg/covid-19/vaccination/statistics
It’s probably easier that way to spin the situation as “your fault for not taking it”.
It’s of course compounded by the reportedly lower efficacy of Chinese vaccines compared to mRNA vaccines.
These two factors combine for a predicted high mortality rate among the most vulnerable group can be expected.
I'm pretty certain that that is not true. There is no study I've seen that correlates (either positive or negative) susceptibility to COVID with general health.
* Here is a collection of threads describing all the possible negative influences COVID has on the cardiovascular system, the brain, kidneys and the autoimmune system. https://twitter.com/laurieallee/status/1521178772023652352
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/long-covid-even-m...
hence no point of zero policy. Emperor has no cloth.
Now it is known that reinfections incurs additional risk for long term disability, it makes sense to take measures to reduce the risk of infection.
They expect repeated exposures to mean the west is weakened with lots of people unable to participate in the economy, while their population won't have that issue.
The USSR showed us that enforcing lies on your own people eventually leads to bizarre, irrational behavior from the government when it tries to operate within a fake framework of lies.
Mass infections in Western countries is already an identifiable factor in reduced labour force participation - millions of people not working because of long covid, or need to take care of people not working. Add in the long term (maybe permanent?) cognitive impact, letting Covid run free is a objectively a bad idea. The problem for China is that the entire world has done this, and there are increasing problems with being an outlier - economic, psychological, political. PRC will have to cave, and let it go, but they were not wrong to do covid zero - we all should've done this, together
I do not understand this argument. It seems to me like you're saying that zero-COVID is better in the long term, but now worse for China in the short term as they are the only ones clinging on to it.
If we all had done zero-COVID together, then now the entire world would still be in some form of lockdown - can you explain how that would be better than the situation we are in now?
Example: in The Netherlands, the last Omikron wave basically was a small bump with very little hospitalizations...how would a zero-COVID lockdown like China has now have been better?
They know Sinovac won't cut it so this is them buying time until they can get their homegrown mRNA vaccine out to the public. I'm guessing they had problems at the clinical trial stage or are struggling to get vials produced in the quantities they need.
But honestly, if I were XJP worried about losing face I'd cancel all restrictions and sell it as China's success since they were able to wait out more dangerous variants and now they can let it spread with harmless Omicron. But that time passed though now with protests it will show him as weak listening to protesters, which could give ideas also to other people who might think protests will work.
Though losing face reason is minor, the real reason for COVID zero are health codes and total control over population. Sure, even before you could make one's life difficult without WeChat/Alipay access, but now you can legally imprison anyone not having health code and you can track all their movements and put them under home imprisonments, so very efficient way against protesters, well at least it was until now.
Let's not forget these widespread protests are still completely negligible compared to Chinese population, even if just 1% of Chinese protested that would make like 14M people and total number of protesting people right now will be closer to 140K, so basically nobody participates in these protests, so unless people will get courage and start protesting en masse nothing will really change, certainly nothing about CCP role, the very best scenario is lifting meaningless COVID restrictions and even that's way too optimistic.
Edit: my comment can come of as aggressive, but I'm genuinely curious, didn't mean to attack you
The first few matches were broadcast uncensored which caused a ruckus on Weibo leading to the current state of censorship. That's how the story goes, at least.
Can you make similar screenshots of the latest match?
The fact that China Insights in the video claimed that the media blurred the audience outside the live broadcast (which again was backed up by video evidence) is a testament to the high quality and factual accuracy of their reporting.
I would not trust anything they say, even if they claim to show evidence, because there is a very high probability that they are deliberately misrepresenting the evidence (for example, deliberately mistranslating documents, knowingly putting false captions on photos, etc.). A lot of false rumors about China that make their way into English-language media trace back to Falun Gong and their various outlets (such as the rumor that spread on Twitter several weeks ago that there was a military coup underway in China).
reuploaded a random example clip: https://files.catbox.moe/vx9q03.mp4
There's like a thousand cameras in the stadium, and I have no idea if they show things like replays of individual fans cinematic reactions for dramatic purposes (they do that in my country), but that might be a cultural difference more than anything else.
Definitely doesn't look like they're avoiding crowds per se, or blurring.
Are you saying the crowd shots are still being shown in China? Yes or no? How do you know?
You can also check it at [1] or download the app and see it yourself.
1. Figure out a working vaccine of their own (or maybe just license and rebrand a western one)
2. Become increasingly authoritarian - like a high-tech North Korea
Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore had the exact same problem with vaccine hesitancy among the elderly. It's a cultural thing.
Basing that off vaccination status would be far more palatable and would be far less disruptive.
Their motivation is to prevent an outbreak. (Which is perhaps impossible long term).
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-bank-protest-stopp...
Anyone who doesn't think that western vaxpass systems could be coopted for similar ends is horrifyingly naive.
Three doses of Sinovac are actually marginally more protective for >80-year-olds (97.9% vs 97.5% effectiveness at preventing death), though the difference is probably not statically significant.
0. Study in The Lancet Infectious Diseases: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(22)00345-0
Source: https://covid-19.nchc.org.tw/dt_002-csse_covid_19_daily_repo...
First of all, mainland China's numbers are similar to those of Taiwan. As of March 2022, 82% of people aged 70-79 in China had two shots, while 51% of people aged 80 and up had two shots.[0] These numbers have probably come up a bit since then.
Second of all, Taiwan has a similar curve of vaccination rate vs. age. In Europe and the US, vaccination rate generally rises with age. In mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, it's the opposite, and quite dramatically so.
0. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306112/china-elderly-po...
I don’t know how this data can be torn apart but it seems plausible.
https://drpanda.substack.com/p/whats-causing-all-these-exces...
The Chinese government has resisted importing Western mRNA vaccines [3], and their own mRNA efforts are not yet up to speed [4].
[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/the-sin...
[3] https://www.voanews.com/a/china-s-bet-on-homegrown-mrna-vacc...
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/effectiveness-dur...
"Two doses of inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) are 90% effective or more against paralytic polio; three doses are 99% to 100% effective."
Old people (i.e. those who saw the benefit of polio vaccinations and the horrors of non-vaccination) should be more inclined to vaccinate.
Younger people, many of whom have never seen the value of vaccination in their lifetimes, might be more inclined to distrust vaccinations.
We used the oral polio vaccine that has attenuated (aka ""live"") virus. A few years ago we switched to use only the injectable polio vaccine that has inactivated (aka "dead") virus.
For Covid-19, we use a mix of vaccines. Inactivated virus, vector virus and mrna. It was somewhat random, and each member of my family got a different mix. (I got AstraZeneca , AstraZeneca, Moderna.)
Reading only the description, a mrna vaccine looks safer than an attenuated virus vaccine. Anyway, all of them have been testen in clinical trials to ensure they are safe and effective. And anyway, the WHO is trying to use the polio attenuated virus vaccine as few as possible because there are some problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#Schedule
They lived through the cultural revolution, the famines, the civil war and so on. Maybe they figure they'd rather take their chances with covid.
People who have lived from before the revolution to today have seen a complete transformation of society. They don't connect the current government with the Cultural Revolution, because the people who took over after the Cultural Revolution (like Deng Xiaoping) had themselves been persecuted during it. They tend to see the history of China during their lifetimes as one with many struggles and hardships, but ultimately of success.
Vaccine hesitancy has much more to do with traditional medical beliefs, which is why Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore have faced the exact same problems with convincing elderly people to get vaccinated (there's also the fact that all these places did a vastly better job than the US or Europe of protecting their populations throughout most of the pandemic, meaning that old people didn't feel the same urgent fear that they might get CoVID any day).
The older generation in China went through the Cultural Revolution and distrusts the government.
In my experience, people in China nowadays do not associate the post-Mao government with the Cultural Revolution, particularly since the people who took over in its aftermath had themselves been persecuted. Deng Xiaoping was purged during the Cultural Revolution. Xi Jinping's father was purged and imprisoned. Even Xi Jinping himself was affected, in that he was "sent down to the countryside." There's a broad rejection of the Cultural Revolution in China, but that isn't the same as a rejection of the Party or government.
I have no idea how likely or realistic that is, but seems like an option too.
If they had done complete lockdown during 1st wave or during Delta wave it was one thing (which they already did at that time and majority of world). But after 2 years it is something else.
There literally is a world cup happening half around the world, with maskless people and stadiums filled to the brim.
I have read online they are doing this nonsense due to various factions within CCP fighting with each other. This 'zero-covid' stuff as far as I know first started in Shanghai, which I heard the Shanghai CCP faction was fighting against the Xi faction. (Just some rumour I read on internet, no idea if it is true.)
Among the unvaccinated (of which there still exist a shocking amount), it absolutely is harmful. Even amongst the triple or quadruple vaccinated, it can be dangerous. My s/o's sense of smell was impacted for months, we were out of work for two weeks - but a friend of ours for six months and she's still not at the performance mentally that she was prior to catching that virus. There's estimations that anything between 5 to 50% of cases end up as "long covid" [1] - and in a country like the US, which has had about 98 out of 331 million people infected with COVID, even going for the lower end with 10% still means almost ten million people whose productivity will be seriously impacted for a long time.
Add on top of that that many people of labor intensive jobs moved on during the pandemic to better employment conditions... and you see the problems like we do in Germany: public transport has gone utterly downhill to outright collapsed in some regions because so many people catch COVID, RSV or other bugs and there aren't enough staff left to replace them, the medical system is ablaze because the workers are burnt out after three years of pandemic with the last two years having to listen to politicians that "the virus isn't bad" while they see in their daily work that the politicians are lying. The death toll was immense as well - for healthcare workers it's one thing if an old person dies of cancer or of old age because that's how life tends to end, but so many young and healthy people died as well.
Yes, COVID is by far less deadly now than it was in the beginning, thanks to vaccines, medication and treatment knowledge. Nevertheless: When hundreds of thousands of people, especially in industries that make close contact with random people necessary such as healthcare, hospitality and public transport, get sick for weeks, the economy still suffers.
Or, to use a pun I'd hoped to be able to avoid, but the opportunity is too good: How can we move on from the pandemic when public transport literally [1] doesn't move? How are people supposed to go to work when entire train grid cells are not working because the signalling controllers all have COVID?
[1] https://www.hessenschau.de/wirtschaft/corona-und-stellenabba...
One of my friends, a nurse that we frequently hang out with will always let us know when she's gotten sick and recently been in proximity. She's been sick with covid more than a handful of times this year and she's now sworn off any more shots. Especially since she gets sicker every time she catches covid. I don't know anyone that's planning on taking more shots at this point.
Just lucky? Maybe, but there should be enough statistical data to find out the efficacy of the Covid shots versus baseline by demographic - I be really curious to find out how much marginal gain there is in for those who are young and healthy, you have to also slice up the data by variant - because I suspect it wasn't worth all the coercion around taking it. And that I think will have political ramifications in Western democracies terms of the amount of societal, political and workplace pressure that was brought on to enforce vaccine mandates (outside of hospitals and the military, If you sign up for those two, you signed up to a be human guinea pig imo).
As for China, when I came back from Xinjiang in 2018 I described the surveillance and constant social control to anybody that would listen, especially when meeting relatives in the wealthy coastal cities in China. Basically, nobody believed me, or just shrugged their shoulders, some even endorsed it because "Uighurs are thieves and bad elements and need a heavy hand". To this day, I have relatives who believe this latter point.
Well now the shoe is on the other foot, zero-Covid is basically just rolling that kind of "Grid management" control to the whole country. It was first used in Tibet to quell the monk immolations (anybody even remember that?), and then in Xinjiang and now its nation wide. Back then it was all in the name of "combating terrorism and splittism" now it's "disease control".
The fundamental principle is and has always been - just how much individual power should be ceded to the state in the name of the good of the group - and if it is ceded, what clauses and guarantees are there that such measures are temporary? These last years in the West, a lot of has been ceded but people can protest and disobey, there are ways to live outside of the system if need be, or at least take a break from it - in China that is extremely hard.
At this point they are basically face saving "pot committed" to zero COVID.
In a face saving culture you can't just come out tomorrow that zero COVID was a strategy that makes no sense when you went "all in".
Ultimately, people would probably lose more faith in the party if they did a zero COVID 180.
Surely we are over reacting to the few protests we see online. The vast majority of people in China are just going to go along with this.
For a long time, a combination of lockdowns and mass vaccination to keep the virus at bay at home and hope that the West would follow suit out of its own interests - which did work reasonably well for a long time in China, but collapsed with Omicron as Sinovac and the other domestic vaccines were/are ineffective against it and its sub-lines and they had gone all-in way too early in the pandemic by claiming that their domestic vaccine was good and no Western experimental technology needed. Additionally, Western governments lost the popular support for COVID containment measures after the second or third waves (begin of 2021) thanks to Russia-backed misinformation campaigns, which led to a ton of deaths and the development and spread of Omicron.
The problem is, their original exit strategy doesn't work any more, but the CCP can't change course without Xi Jinping "losing face" - they made him effectively a half-god, he can't admit to mistakes, even improvements (since that would mean the old course was not perfect).
> Could they feasibly claim to have eradicated covid?
Again, until Omicron appeared, I would say so, yes - and factually, there was at least one line of influenza that was eradicated as a side effect of the anti-COVID measures, and RSV was also kicked down hard (although it came back with a vengeance the last months as there currently is no vaccine). Even taking into account that the COVID numbers were fudged in China on all levels out of political motivations, it is clear that the general idea of border closing and strict isolation for positive people worked (e.g. New Zealand).
Is it Russian misinformation causing Chinese people to rebel against containment measures?
From about April 2020 - April 2022, there were only isolated outbreaks, caused by imported cases, which were quickly contained. The vast majority of people in China could live relatively normally, as long as they didn't have to travel internationally. Most people didn't experience any lockdowns during this period.
A couple of things have happened that have made things more difficult. The rest of the world has decided to "live with CoVID," and China has reduced border quarantine times to make international travel easier, so there are much larger numbers of imported cases in China than before. Omicron spreads faster, and since most Chinese people (particularly young people) are vaccinated, they have fewer symptoms, meaning outbreaks are not identified as quickly. Finally, the government has tried to take a lighter touch, which means they have let outbreaks grow to larger sizes before imposing lockdowns.
A few weeks ago, after the Party Congress ended, the government announced 20 new measures aimed at loosening CoVID restrictions. When the latest outbreak began, local governments did not react nearly as aggressively as they previously would have. That meant that the outbreak has spread much more widely than any previous outbreak (even the original one in Wuhan). Some cities have responded by reversing some of the 20 measures, leaving people confused about what the policy is.
One major issue is that while China's overall vaccination rate is quite high, the vaccination rate among the elderly is quite low. For whatever reason, it has been very difficult to convince old people in mainland China (but also culturally similar places, like Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore) to get vaccinated. If China allows the virus to spread widely, a lot of old people will be at risk.
The problem isn't what vaccines they're using. The problem is that many old people don't want to get vaccinated, period.
The reason the best numbers come out of Hong Kong is because Hong Kong uses both Sinovac and Biontech/Pfizer, and had an Omicron outbreak earlier this year.
Pre-Omicron, there were plenty of studies of Chinese vaccines (there are several of them, using different technologies) conducted in other countries. In fact, all the phase-3 studies were conducted outside of China, because you can't determine real-world efficacy of a vaccine if the virus isn't spreading in society. The various Chinese vaccines generally had similar efficacy as the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine.
However in this case a badly managed change in their Covid strategy doesn't collapse the country or cost the CCP their control over China, but it could cause a bit of a power struggle within the party as factions jostle for position and attempt to shift blame and some higher-ranking politicians will probably lose their position or go to jail for reasons. If you're one of those people, you probably want some kind of plan.
Seriously? What's your definition of "dictatorship"? Let's take Wikipedia's one for example:
> A dictatorship is a form of government which is characterized by a leader or a group of leaders which holds governmental powers with few to no limitations on them.
Can you sincerely say that it doesn't apply?
It’s the way of the internet, people think they smell blood in the water, get all riled up and lose sight of the actual topic
Authoritarian. China has been authoritarian for a long time. It only recently became a dictatorship, which is an inherently unstable form of government.
I said in another comment that I don’t wanna get into a debate on the subtleties of what is/isn’t a dictatorship, but THIS is an odd place to draw the line.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/27/twitter...
That said, I'm not sure I agree with the assertion that because Twitter fired that team their bot-busting capability instantly dropped from 500k/day to zero/day. The code they wrote and the work they did still exists.
https://p11.tv/digital-overlay-advertising-at-real-madrid-ho...
The best one of sports overlays is from The Running Man:
What I don't quite understand is why they couldn't just create some joint venture with a Western pharma company and then supply a rebranded version of the mRNA vaccines to their population. I would think they have the propaganda tools at hand to make such a move palatable even to the more nationalist citizenry? Surely this would be preferable to the costly shutdowns.
Probably I'm also unaware of the constraints the Chinese leadership is operating under. I tend to think they have the power to make anything happen with their unlimited propaganda and censorship tools, but perhaps that is not the case and selling a foreign vaccine domestically is harder than I thought.
I get the impression that Western companies have become a bit wary of those "joint ventures," following incidents like the ARM / Softbank / ARM China saga.
Moderna specifically refused to share their mRNA IP with China: https://archive.ph/hxWuT
At the start of all this, around 2020, there was a media campaign against mRNA vaccine in China's propaganda, mostly emphasizing its side effects. It fit the nationalistic narrative that "our covid response is superior". The fear mongering worked and now many people are afraid of the side effects of the mRNA vaccine. Not quite easy to walk that back now.
Also people burned to death in an apartment complex with the doors welded shut due to lockdown.
It varies though. I watch a lot of Chinese city walking videos and for example in Beijing lots of people (inexplicably given the above) wear masks, whereas in smaller cities like Guiyang almost nobody is.
What Chinese leadership knows is that masks are nigh-on worthless for Omicron (I've seen numbers as low as 30% efficacy for N95 and basically no efficacy for cloth and surgical vs omicron) and that the only way to control it (without high prior infection rates and/or better vaccines - neither of which they have) is physical separation.
Another issue is that Omicron isn't actually much less severe than previous strains on its own - it's just that in most areas there are effective vaccines and basically everyone has gotten covid before, so it's effectively less severe. But at the same time, it's way more transmissible than previous variants (like ~10x so). So China's put itself in a bad situation. If it lets loose, Covid goes wild and their healthcare system is crushed because there's basically no immunity against the world's most transmissible virus. Everyone will get it pretty much at the exact same time and 10-20m people will die with little to no healthcare within the span of a month or so. Or they keep locking down in perpetuity until something changes (they get a better vaccine? they do a controlled burn? the virus gets a lot weaker? revolution?).
You can still see that crowds are not being spaced out from normal angles of the match, they would still know that restrictions aren't in place for those abroad.
It s easy for you to say it s not apocalyptic when people all around you got it and survived, it s harder when your whole country is filled with cops in hazmat suit spraying every square centimeter with smelly chemicals...
It should work in China though, shouldn't it? Having a large announcement how the great Chinese scientists have discovered the anti-covid-thingy that you just take for 7 days after you've been vaccinated and it makes it much less dangerous etc etc. It allows the government to change their policy without admitting errors ("we no longer need to be zero covid now that we have this new invention") and it also gives people an out that keeps their worldview (that was formed by propaganda) intact but transitions them back to something more normal. Like in a war when some behaviors got enforced and normalized ("no lights in the dark, the bombers will see it") that become unnecessary once the war is over.
Couldn't the scared ones be shown that viruses tend to get more contagious and less dangerous over time?
Over time more and more people join the vocal minority.
Having been a part of the vocal minority myself, I feel deeply sorry for the Chinese people who see through it and want it to end. I literally could not continue living like that for 3 years.
I am rather sceptical of this being evidence of censorship. Maybe, I could be swayed if it can be shown this is a clear break from tradition of showing crowds that started since the recent protests in china.