What is the CCP’s exit strategy? Could they feasibly claim to have eradicated covid?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.