With no vaccines to save them and very little exposure to Omicron, the Chinese have embarked upon an indefinite dystopia of masking, testing, mass surveillance and periodic lockdowns – all for nothing
It is safe to say their economy is in freefall. I buy dozens of different commodity chemicals and prices have dropped between 20-50% in the last 6 months. Vendors are also quite aggressively seeking volumes/shipments, and are pulling out all the stops to prevent order cancellations. This jives with their typical factory production model; which is continuous production no matter what
Any sort of data being released from official sources is BS; they are in deep deep trouble
We should in a sense be thankful to Xi Jinping. Many of us have been fretting about a world economically and technologically dominated by the Chinese in as little as a decade, and of course the inevitable invasion of Taiwan. Thanks to ZeroCovid, Taiwan (which is full of Covid) is safe, and we in the West can go back to committing economic and cultural suicide, as opposed to being taken over by another power.
Its actually rather amusing. SARS-2 will eventually overwhelm them; the virus has to win once, ZeroCovid has to win every day.
The Chinese reaction is super weird - it sort of shows how the world is being led by absolute idiots with absolutely no real plan about anything. If China stays on this zero covid path it will destroy itself. It already has huge financial and social problems - how far can a population be pushed before it has nothing to lose by retaliating?
Xi Jingping is being illogical about zero covid. Biden is being illogical about Ukraine. Zelensky and Putin are on a road to destruction because they can't find a way to stop. The EU leaders are being illogical about energy. At what point do the people of the world rise up and cast these fools aside?
I have had interesting conversations lately about why we should double down on Western liberalism and not succumb to the urge to mimic communist China. I have held to the belief that their totalitarian system will be its own undoing.
Liberalism has strong pluralistic roots which create checks and balances. To the extent we have disregarded these traditions, we sufferend covid. But that is nothing compared to what can happen when all power is centralised and controlled by authoritarian decision-makers. There is no limit to the bad decision making they can inflict on the people. Zero covid is just one example.
While showing an amazing propensity for copying what those in the West have imagined and/or created, the Chinese have shown that their critical thinking skills are practically non-existent. How else can one explain the idiotic devotion to communism?
Many people thought the same as you. Instead, it indeed seems we are watching a crazy side effect of total power centralization. Right now, if you are a political cadre in whichever city in some random province, your metric to be promoted (or even to politically survive) is to avoid outbreaks, or smash them as soon as they occur, and no longer economic performance of your region. That says it all.
We have had many years of warning that this is planned for the entire world. This is top down from those who believe they own the world. China's locked up tight society is the apparent darling of the World Economic Forum. Nearly all world leaders are partnered with the WEF. They are serious.
I had to double-check to see if this was somehow a post from last year...but no, China is still covid crazed. But maybe the leaders like it as they can control people much better.
Yet another glorious piece of analysis in these pages. So very grateful for your mind, Eugyppius,
"I often wonder if there isn’t something addictive about lockdowns, at least to the bureaucrats who get hold of these policies and implement them."
YES. As someone who has been subject to the rule of a person with the same rotten condition of soul, and the same insatiable lust for control & despair creation, which are evident in Xi and CCP Party leadership: yes, I can tell you that there IS something addictive about it for them. As one who escaped a microcosm within my own family involving too many similar dynamics, this has been my precise personal reason for so loudly and insistently warning that we MUST NOT give the Covid authoritarians of the West a SINGLE INCH. It's a terrifying slope into hell which becomes steeper and slipperier with every millimeter of descent. And the monsters become immeasurably stronger with every morsel we allow them to devour.
As a result, I became myopic about the true drivers which are likely behind the misery of the past 2.5 years (and your well-reasoned analyses and arguments have helped my gain perspective on that, Eugy), but I don't regret my myopia.
I'll keep making noise about it long after we finally extricate ourselves from this ugly era, too. It's the only way to prevent finding ourselves right back here again. In fact, if we do escape, we should count ourselves very lucky.
This will be an interesting story to keep following. The Chinese government has painted itself into a corner. Covid is not going away ever. I'm sure they realize that by now, but what can they do? Are they going to lose face by admitting they were wrong? I don't think so.
If today's East Asians are the descendants of a population that was decimated by a corona virus outbreak generations ago, I would expect cultural and/or genetic adaptations that now reduce the impact of corona viruses on their population.
It's why I was always very skeptical of the idea that South Korea or some other place with low death tolls had figured out the One Weird Trick to get this virus under control.
Just as indigenous Americans are intrinsically more vulnerable to this virus, east Asians are intrinsically less vulnerable to it.
Since I don't see it in the threads below: this is very similar to the old Four Pests campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign . I am just astounded to see history repeat itself with such faithfulness, so many decades later, after the world has changed so much.
China is the model of what they want for us. You better read the quote below, learn it, and prepare accordingly.
They promised us all death 2 years ago, and it never came, so any of you that are still afraid of death need to wake up right now and snap out of it, and take that tool (fear) away from these monsters.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago
Spoke to a Chinese co-worker the other day. I don’t know her very well but was curious to hear her opening up. She was mentioning how she missed China but wouldn’t want to be there now--“They’re crazy” she said, “about covid”. Testing whole buildings if just one case is found, all the lockdowns. I said well what happens if you refuse to test? She said you have a green or a red thing on your phone, they’ll turn it to red if you refuse. Then you can’t go anywhere! You can’t leave your building, for starters. She told me most people are brainwashed, even though ultimately they don’t like the system...and that China keeps them “too comfortable” to risk complaining. “You complain,” she said, “and you disappear. They get rid of you.”
This shit is real no matter how much I like to think it’s not.
Human rights NGOs like Amnesty have been silent on lockdowns and mandates. They are compromised and no longer deserve any funding or respect. https://open.substack.com/pub/yuribezmenov/p/how-to-control-your-souls-desire?r=12n5dp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
I deal with Chinese companies on a daily basis
It is safe to say their economy is in freefall. I buy dozens of different commodity chemicals and prices have dropped between 20-50% in the last 6 months. Vendors are also quite aggressively seeking volumes/shipments, and are pulling out all the stops to prevent order cancellations. This jives with their typical factory production model; which is continuous production no matter what
Any sort of data being released from official sources is BS; they are in deep deep trouble
We should in a sense be thankful to Xi Jinping. Many of us have been fretting about a world economically and technologically dominated by the Chinese in as little as a decade, and of course the inevitable invasion of Taiwan. Thanks to ZeroCovid, Taiwan (which is full of Covid) is safe, and we in the West can go back to committing economic and cultural suicide, as opposed to being taken over by another power.
Its actually rather amusing. SARS-2 will eventually overwhelm them; the virus has to win once, ZeroCovid has to win every day.
The Chinese reaction is super weird - it sort of shows how the world is being led by absolute idiots with absolutely no real plan about anything. If China stays on this zero covid path it will destroy itself. It already has huge financial and social problems - how far can a population be pushed before it has nothing to lose by retaliating?
Xi Jingping is being illogical about zero covid. Biden is being illogical about Ukraine. Zelensky and Putin are on a road to destruction because they can't find a way to stop. The EU leaders are being illogical about energy. At what point do the people of the world rise up and cast these fools aside?
I have had interesting conversations lately about why we should double down on Western liberalism and not succumb to the urge to mimic communist China. I have held to the belief that their totalitarian system will be its own undoing.
Liberalism has strong pluralistic roots which create checks and balances. To the extent we have disregarded these traditions, we sufferend covid. But that is nothing compared to what can happen when all power is centralised and controlled by authoritarian decision-makers. There is no limit to the bad decision making they can inflict on the people. Zero covid is just one example.
While showing an amazing propensity for copying what those in the West have imagined and/or created, the Chinese have shown that their critical thinking skills are practically non-existent. How else can one explain the idiotic devotion to communism?
Reminder that if we let the leftist vision of dealing with COVID in the USA prevail, this is what we would get.
I say this as someone who generally leans to the left and I have to say that I am largely alone among my peers for fearing this.
Many people thought the same as you. Instead, it indeed seems we are watching a crazy side effect of total power centralization. Right now, if you are a political cadre in whichever city in some random province, your metric to be promoted (or even to politically survive) is to avoid outbreaks, or smash them as soon as they occur, and no longer economic performance of your region. That says it all.
We have had many years of warning that this is planned for the entire world. This is top down from those who believe they own the world. China's locked up tight society is the apparent darling of the World Economic Forum. Nearly all world leaders are partnered with the WEF. They are serious.
I had to double-check to see if this was somehow a post from last year...but no, China is still covid crazed. But maybe the leaders like it as they can control people much better.
Yet another glorious piece of analysis in these pages. So very grateful for your mind, Eugyppius,
"I often wonder if there isn’t something addictive about lockdowns, at least to the bureaucrats who get hold of these policies and implement them."
YES. As someone who has been subject to the rule of a person with the same rotten condition of soul, and the same insatiable lust for control & despair creation, which are evident in Xi and CCP Party leadership: yes, I can tell you that there IS something addictive about it for them. As one who escaped a microcosm within my own family involving too many similar dynamics, this has been my precise personal reason for so loudly and insistently warning that we MUST NOT give the Covid authoritarians of the West a SINGLE INCH. It's a terrifying slope into hell which becomes steeper and slipperier with every millimeter of descent. And the monsters become immeasurably stronger with every morsel we allow them to devour.
As a result, I became myopic about the true drivers which are likely behind the misery of the past 2.5 years (and your well-reasoned analyses and arguments have helped my gain perspective on that, Eugy), but I don't regret my myopia.
I'll keep making noise about it long after we finally extricate ourselves from this ugly era, too. It's the only way to prevent finding ourselves right back here again. In fact, if we do escape, we should count ourselves very lucky.
This will be an interesting story to keep following. The Chinese government has painted itself into a corner. Covid is not going away ever. I'm sure they realize that by now, but what can they do? Are they going to lose face by admitting they were wrong? I don't think so.
How do vaccines save anyone. They are unsafe and ineffective.
>while benefiting from the strangely mild behaviour of SARS-2 in East Asia
It's not strange to me.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34171302/
If today's East Asians are the descendants of a population that was decimated by a corona virus outbreak generations ago, I would expect cultural and/or genetic adaptations that now reduce the impact of corona viruses on their population.
It's why I was always very skeptical of the idea that South Korea or some other place with low death tolls had figured out the One Weird Trick to get this virus under control.
Just as indigenous Americans are intrinsically more vulnerable to this virus, east Asians are intrinsically less vulnerable to it.
Since I don't see it in the threads below: this is very similar to the old Four Pests campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign . I am just astounded to see history repeat itself with such faithfulness, so many decades later, after the world has changed so much.
China is the model of what they want for us. You better read the quote below, learn it, and prepare accordingly.
They promised us all death 2 years ago, and it never came, so any of you that are still afraid of death need to wake up right now and snap out of it, and take that tool (fear) away from these monsters.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago
Spoke to a Chinese co-worker the other day. I don’t know her very well but was curious to hear her opening up. She was mentioning how she missed China but wouldn’t want to be there now--“They’re crazy” she said, “about covid”. Testing whole buildings if just one case is found, all the lockdowns. I said well what happens if you refuse to test? She said you have a green or a red thing on your phone, they’ll turn it to red if you refuse. Then you can’t go anywhere! You can’t leave your building, for starters. She told me most people are brainwashed, even though ultimately they don’t like the system...and that China keeps them “too comfortable” to risk complaining. “You complain,” she said, “and you disappear. They get rid of you.”
This shit is real no matter how much I like to think it’s not.