I’m wondering if we will see the sudden disappearance or house arrest of Chairman Xi, who must have made some enemies in his quest to gather absolute power in stages, since reaching the top job in 2012. I believe it was around the autumn of 2016 when he was given a “core leadership” affirmation by the politburo, which is basically the recognition of a dictatorship.
There would be some within top ruling circles who would see this kind of attack as both risky to their own interests and a step too far, even for a thug regime like the PRC.
The lockdown, which has seemed almost like economic suicide to many, may have been ordered to make it more difficult for agents to spread the infection, if that is in fact part of the overall attack strategy.
Since that strategy might have been organized around principles of inserting the virus into places where leading citizens might contract it, our governments (without bothering to let us in on their secret) were basically trying to keep it away from themselves and their cohorts.
Maybe they intercepted enough intel by mid-February to realize what had happened. My reason for believing this is that even libertarian minded government officials in some cases have gone along and walked the walk, talked the talk of social isolation and a very concerted approval and enforcement of measures that I am sure run counter to their political philosophy in general.
Then there’s the case of our Canadian prime minister, he has clearly been spooked to the point where he has remained in complete quarantine in his isolated Ottawa residence and only emerges once a day to give a briefing (about nothing most of the time).
This will probably ripple through our populations now and end up being mostly a cull of the sick and elderly, but perhaps there were or are plans to release a different or stronger virus — which is why we need absolute quarantine for China relative to our countries, keep their planes out of our airports and only accept their goods in the most sterile and human-interaction-free port facilities. I would be quite happy to see an end to trade with them until Xi is gone anyway, knowing the Donald, that might already have been communicated to Beijing.