China’s ‘Zero Covid’ Mess Proves Autocracy Hurts Everyone
By Li Yuan, April 13, 2022, NY Times
Long before the “zero Covid” policy, China had a “zero sparrow” policy.
In the spring of 1958, the Chinese government mobilized the entire
nation to exterminate sparrows, which Mao declared pests that
destroyed crops. All over China, people banged on pots and pans,
lit firecrackers and waved flags to prevent the birds from landing
so they would fall and die from exhaustion. By one estimation,
nearly two billion sparrows were killed nationwide within months.
The near extinction of sparrows led to insect infestations, which
ruined crops and contributed to the Great Famine, which starved
tens of millions of Chinese to death in the next three years.
The fear in China now is that the “zero Covid” policy has become
another Mao-style political campaign that is based on the will
of one person, the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping — and that
it could end up hurting everyone.
Just as Mao and his lieutenants ignored the opposition to
their anti-sparrow policy from scientists and technocrats,
Beijing has ignored experts’ advice that China abandon its
costly strategy and learn to coexist with the coronavirus,
especially a milder, if more infectious, variant.
Instead, Beijing insists on following the same playbook from
2020 that relies on mass testing, quarantine and lockdowns.
The approach has put hundreds of millions of lives on pause,
sent tens of thousands to makeshift quarantine camps and
deprived many non-Covid patients of medical treatments.
“They’re not countering the pandemic. They’re creating
disasters,” Ye Qing, a law scholar who is known by his pen name,
Xiao Han, wrote in an online article that was swiftly deleted.
Mr. Xi is keen to stick to the strategy because he is seeking
a third term at an important Communist Party congress later
this year. He wants to use China’s success in containing the
virus to prove that its top-down governance model is superior
to that of liberal democracies.
“This disease has been politicized,” Zhu Weiping, an official
in Shanghai’s disease control apparatus, told a person who
complained about the city’s response to the outbreak. In a
recorded phone conversation, the official said she had advised
the government to let people with no or mild symptoms quarantine
at home and focus on vaccination drives. But no one listened,
she said.
“You’re driven crazy by this?” she asked the caller.
“Professional institutions like us are going crazy, too.”
The recording was shared widely before it was censored.
As the Omicron variant spreads, about 373 million people in
45 Chinese cities were under either full or partial lockdowns
as of Monday, according to estimates by economists at the
investment bank Nomura. These cities account for 26% of
China’s population and 40 percent of its economic output,
they wrote; they warned that the risk of recession was rising
as local governments competed to ratchet up virus-containment
measures.
Beijing is now urging local governments to strike a balance
between pandemic control and economic production. But everyone
in the bureaucratic system knows where the priority lies.
In the city of Jixi in China’s northernmost province,
Heilongjiang, 18 officials, including township leaders, law
enforcement chiefs as well as directors of a hospital and a
funeral home, were disciplined or reprimanded recently for
neglecting their duties and responsibilities in pandemic
control. Some cadres “weren’t stressed out enough,” the
announcement said.
In Shanghai, China’s largest and most affluent city, at least
8 midlevel officials were removed or suspended from their
positions after the city’s poorly executed lockdowns caused
chaos, tragedies and severe food shortages.
After the city locked down its 25 million residents and
grounded most delivery services in early April, many people
encountered problems sourcing food, regardless of their
socioeconomic status. Some set alarms for the different
restocking times of grocery delivery apps that start as
early as 6 a.m.
In the past few days, a hot topic in WeChat groups has been
whether sprouted potatoes were safe to eat, a few Shanghai
residents told me. Neighbors resorted to a barter system to
exchange, say, a cabbage for a bottle of soy sauce. Coca-Cola
is hard currency.
After nearly two weeks under lockdown, Dai Xin, a restaurant
owner, is running out of food to provide for her household of 4.
Now she slices ginger paper thin, pickles vegetables so they
won’t spoil and eats 2 meals a day instead of 3.
Even the moneyed class is facing food supply shortages. The
head of a big retailer told me last week that she got many
requests from Shanghai-based chief executives. But there was
little she could do under lockdown rules, the executive said,
who spoke on the condition of anonymity given the political
sensitivities.
Wang Lixiong, the author of the apocalyptic novel “China Tidal
Wave,” which ended with a great famine in the aftermath of a
nuclear winter, believes that a man-made crisis like the one in
Shanghai is inevitable under China’s authoritarian system. In
recent years, he said in an interview, the risk increased after
Beijing clamped down on nearly every aspect of civil society.
After moving into a friend’s vacant apartment in Shanghai
last winter, he stocked up on rice, noodles, canned food and
whiskey to sustain him for a few months in case of a crisis.
But many residents in the luxury apartment complex, with units
valued at more than $3 million, weren’t as prepared when the
lockdown started. He saw his neighbors, who dashed around in
designer suits a month ago, venture into the complex’s lush
garden to dig up bamboo shoots for a meal.
The worst nightmare for many Shanghai residents is testing
positive and being sent to centralized quarantine facilities.
The conditions of some facilities are so appalling that they’re
called “refugee camps” and “concentration camps” on social media.
Many people shared packing lists and tips for quarantine.
Take earplugs and eye masks because it’s usually a giant place
like the convention center and the lights are on day and night;
pack lots of disposable underwear because there’s no shower
facility; and carry large amounts of toilet paper. Some quarantine
camps were so poorly prepared that people had to fight for food,
water and bedding.
The many despairing posts about Shanghai sent residents in
other parts of China into a hoarding craze last weekend. In
Beijing, supermarkets were packed, and some grocery apps ran
out stock.
A growing number of people are questioning whether the draconian
and costly strategy is necessary. On Tuesday, the Shanghai health
authority reported more than 200,000 infection cases since March 1,
with nine in serious condition and no deaths. Officials haven’t
addressed reports of mass infections and deaths at elder-care hospitals.
Even some supporters of the “zero Covid” policy have voiced their doubts. When Shanghai carried out citywide Covid tests on April 4,
Lang Xianping, an economist, said on his verified Weibo account that
it demonstrated “the power of China.” On Monday, he said his mother
had passed away after Covid restrictions delayed treatment for her
kidney condition. “I hope tragedies like this won’t happen again,”
he wrote.
The policy still enjoys strong public support. Many people on
social media said Shanghai wasn’t strict enough in its lockdowns
and quarantines. A venture capitalist posted on WeChat that he
would not invest in start-up founders who didn’t back the policy.
This is not surprising. With limited access to information and
no tools to hold the authority accountable, the vast majority of
Chinese generally support whatever the government decides.
In the past two years, they followed Beijing’s cue and attacked
critics of its pandemic policy. They rallied around Beijing,
which increasingly applied the social suppression mechanism in
Xinjiang to the rest of the country in the name of pandemic
control. Now, many of them are suffering from the consequences,
but, in contrast to Wuhan, there are no more citizen journalists
or large volunteer groups to help them.
“When repressions didn’t touch them, most Chinese ignored them,” Lawrence Li, a business consultant in Shanghai, said in an
interview. “We believe that it’s just to sacrifice minority
interests in favor of the collective.”
Like many people, he said what was happening in Shanghai echoed
the anti-sparrow campaign. “History repeats itself again and
again,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/business/china-covid-zero-shanghai.html
China’s ‘Zero Covid’ Mess Proves Autocracy Hurts Everyone
By Li Yuan, April 13, 2022, NY Times
Long before the “zero Covid” policy, China had a “zero sparrow” policy.
In the spring of 1958, the Chinese government mobilized the entire
nation to exterminate sparrows, which Mao declared pests that
destroyed crops. All over China, people banged on pots and pans,
lit firecrackers and waved flags to prevent the birds from landing
so they would fall and die from exhaustion. By one estimation,
nearly two billion sparrows were killed nationwide within months.
The near extinction of sparrows led to insect infestations, which
ruined crops and contributed to the Great Famine, which starved
tens of millions of Chinese to death in the next three years.
The fear in China now is that the “zero Covid” policy has become
another Mao-style political campaign that is based on the will
of one person, the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping — and that
it could end up hurting everyone.
Just as Mao and his lieutenants ignored the opposition to
their anti-sparrow policy from scientists and technocrats,
Beijing has ignored experts’ advice that China abandon its
costly strategy and learn to coexist with the coronavirus,
especially a milder, if more infectious, variant.
Instead, Beijing insists on following the same playbook from
2020 that relies on mass testing, quarantine and lockdowns.
The approach has put hundreds of millions of lives on pause,
sent tens of thousands to makeshift quarantine camps and
deprived many non-Covid patients of medical treatments.
“They’re not countering the pandemic. They’re creating
disasters,” Ye Qing, a law scholar who is known by his pen name,
Xiao Han, wrote in an online article that was swiftly deleted.
Mr. Xi is keen to stick to the strategy because he is seeking
a third term at an important Communist Party congress later
this year. He wants to use China’s success in containing the
virus to prove that its top-down governance model is superior
to that of liberal democracies.
“This disease has been politicized,” Zhu Weiping, an official
in Shanghai’s disease control apparatus, told a person who
complained about the city’s response to the outbreak. In a
recorded phone conversation, the official said she had advised
the government to let people with no or mild symptoms quarantine
at home and focus on vaccination drives. But no one listened,
she said.
“You’re driven crazy by this?” she asked the caller.
“Professional institutions like us are going crazy, too.”
The recording was shared widely before it was censored.
As the Omicron variant spreads, about 373 million people in
45 Chinese cities were under either full or partial lockdowns
as of Monday, according to estimates by economists at the
investment bank Nomura. These cities account for 26% of
China’s population and 40 percent of its economic output,
they wrote; they warned that the risk of recession was rising
as local governments competed to ratchet up virus-containment
measures.
Beijing is now urging local governments to strike a balance
between pandemic control and economic production. But everyone
in the bureaucratic system knows where the priority lies.
In the city of Jixi in China’s northernmost province,
Heilongjiang, 18 officials, including township leaders, law
enforcement chiefs as well as directors of a hospital and a
funeral home, were disciplined or reprimanded recently for
neglecting their duties and responsibilities in pandemic
control. Some cadres “weren’t stressed out enough,” the
announcement said.
In Shanghai, China’s largest and most affluent city, at least
8 midlevel officials were removed or suspended from their
positions after the city’s poorly executed lockdowns caused
chaos, tragedies and severe food shortages.
After the city locked down its 25 million residents and
grounded most delivery services in early April, many people
encountered problems sourcing food, regardless of their
socioeconomic status. Some set alarms for the different
restocking times of grocery delivery apps that start as
early as 6 a.m.
In the past few days, a hot topic in WeChat groups has been
whether sprouted potatoes were safe to eat, a few Shanghai
residents told me. Neighbors resorted to a barter system to
exchange, say, a cabbage for a bottle of soy sauce. Coca-Cola
is hard currency.
After nearly two weeks under lockdown, Dai Xin, a restaurant
owner, is running out of food to provide for her household of 4.
Now she slices ginger paper thin, pickles vegetables so they
won’t spoil and eats 2 meals a day instead of 3.
Even the moneyed class is facing food supply shortages. The
head of a big retailer told me last week that she got many
requests from Shanghai-based chief executives. But there was
little she could do under lockdown rules, the executive said,
who spoke on the condition of anonymity given the political
sensitivities.
Wang Lixiong, the author of the apocalyptic novel “China Tidal
Wave,” which ended with a great famine in the aftermath of a
nuclear winter, believes that a man-made crisis like the one in
Shanghai is inevitable under China’s authoritarian system. In
recent years, he said in an interview, the risk increased after
Beijing clamped down on nearly every aspect of civil society.
After moving into a friend’s vacant apartment in Shanghai
last winter, he stocked up on rice, noodles, canned food and
whiskey to sustain him for a few months in case of a crisis.
But many residents in the luxury apartment complex, with units
valued at more than $3 million, weren’t as prepared when the
lockdown started. He saw his neighbors, who dashed around in
designer suits a month ago, venture into the complex’s lush
garden to dig up bamboo shoots for a meal.
The worst nightmare for many Shanghai residents is testing
positive and being sent to centralized quarantine facilities.
The conditions of some facilities are so appalling that they’re
called “refugee camps” and “concentration camps” on social media.
Many people shared packing lists and tips for quarantine.
Take earplugs and eye masks because it’s usually a giant place
like the convention center and the lights are on day and night;
pack lots of disposable underwear because there’s no shower
facility; and carry large amounts of toilet paper. Some quarantine
camps were so poorly prepared that people had to fight for food,
water and bedding.
The many despairing posts about Shanghai sent residents in
other parts of China into a hoarding craze last weekend. In
Beijing, supermarkets were packed, and some grocery apps ran
out stock.
A growing number of people are questioning whether the draconian
and costly strategy is necessary. On Tuesday, the Shanghai health
authority reported more than 200,000 infection cases since March 1,
with nine in serious condition and no deaths. Officials haven’t
addressed reports of mass infections and deaths at elder-care hospitals.
Even some supporters of the “zero Covid” policy have voiced their doubts. When Shanghai carried out citywide Covid tests on April 4,
Lang Xianping, an economist, said on his verified Weibo account that
it demonstrated “the power of China.” On Monday, he said his mother
had passed away after Covid restrictions delayed treatment for her
kidney condition. “I hope tragedies like this won’t happen again,”
he wrote.
The policy still enjoys strong public support. Many people on
social media said Shanghai wasn’t strict enough in its lockdowns
and quarantines. A venture capitalist posted on WeChat that he
would not invest in start-up founders who didn’t back the policy.
This is not surprising. With limited access to information and
no tools to hold the authority accountable, the vast majority of
Chinese generally support whatever the government decides.
In the past two years, they followed Beijing’s cue and attacked
critics of its pandemic policy. They rallied around Beijing,
which increasingly applied the social suppression mechanism in
Xinjiang to the rest of the country in the name of pandemic
control. Now, many of them are suffering from the consequences,
but, in contrast to Wuhan, there are no more citizen journalists
or large volunteer groups to help them.
“When repressions didn’t touch them, most Chinese ignored them,” Lawrence Li, a business consultant in Shanghai, said in an
interview. “We believe that it’s just to sacrifice minority
interests in favor of the collective.”
Like many people, he said what was happening in Shanghai echoed
the anti-sparrow campaign. “History repeats itself again and
again,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/business/china-covid-zero-shanghai.html
David P. wrote:continue to fly all over the US.
China’s ‘Zero Covid’ Mess Proves Autocracy Hurts Everyonehttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/business/china-covid-zero-shanghai.html
By Li Yuan, April 13, 2022, NY Times
[....]
“Long before the “zero Covid” policy, China had a “zero sparrow” policy.
In the spring of 1958, the Chinese government mobilized the entire
nation to exterminate sparrows, which Mao declared pests that
destroyed crops. All over China, people banged on pots and pans,
lit firecrackers and waved flags to prevent the birds from landing
so they would fall and die from exhaustion. By one estimation,
nearly two billion sparrows were killed nationwide within months.
The near extinction of sparrows led to insect infestations, which
ruined crops and contributed to the Great Famine, which starved
tens of millions of Chinese to death in the next three years. “
Well, over 1 million Americans have been killed by the pandemic. That would be equivalent to how many sparrows? The infections and dearhs continue to climb, with no end in sight. If this continues, Americans may face near extinction while sparrows
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