Posted on 04/11/2022 1:45:02 PM PDT by Heartlander
At the end of the Cold War, the end-of-history theory was that every country in the world that desired prosperity and progress would necessarily have to embrace both economic liberty and political democracy. You cannot have one without the other, the theory went. It was inevitable.
The world waited for China to go the direction of Eastern Europe and so many other countries.
It did not happen. Despite liberalizing economic reforms, the CCP maintained hard-core political control for the decades following. Yet its economy grew and grew. This gave rise to a new theory: perhaps the most successful countries will foster economic liberalism while securing tight political control, thus dispensing with the inefficiencies of democracy.
China seemed to have it all going.
Now we have evidence of what’s wrong with a one-party state with a powerful chief executive. It works until it doesn’t. What stopped working in China could not have been expected years ago. The party believed it had solved the problem of pathogens via massive violations of human liberty.
Today, the people of Shanghai are suffering weeks of lockdowns, food shortage, and extreme quarantine of healthy people, all in the interest of eradicating a virus that the rest of the world has finally realized must become endemic. Even Fauci is admitting this now (following two years of urging more restrictions).
But in China? Children are being taken from parents, the pets of people with a positive test are being shot, people are screaming from skyscrapers, and food is rotting in warehouses even as people report to be starving. There are videos online of stores being ransacked. There is talk of revolution in the air.
Never forget: China was the birthplace of lockdowns. The head of the World Health Organization praised the early 2020 lockdowns in Wuhan. In one letter dated January 2020, the WHO congratulated China and urged the country to “enhance public health measures for containment of the current outbreak.” Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus further underscored the point with a tweet.
Neil Ferguson from the Imperial College did too. “It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realised we could.” And so China became a model for the world: Wuhan, Northern Italy, the US, the UK, and then all but a handful of the countries in the world followed the lockdown paradigm.
To this day, Xi Jinping surely basks in the warmth of this glowing praise. It put China’s policy prowess on display for the world. As I write, Yahoo reports concerning Shanghai:
China’s President Xi Jinping praised the country’s “tested” zero-Covid strategy on Friday, even as Shanghai authorities prepared nearly 130,000 beds for Covid-19 patients amid surging cases and mounting public anger.
We can only intuit what is happening here. For Xi Jinping, lockdowns were his greatest triumph. They seemed to work two years ago. He earned plaudits the world over, and the world followed his model. Perhaps this filled him and the CPC with a sense of incredible pride and confidence. They had done it correctly and the rest of the world copied the idea, without having practiced the article of lockdown as perfectly as China.
What has happened now is as predictable as the failure of “Zero Covid” in Australia and New Zealand. This virus is not the type that lends itself to eradication. It becomes manageable only through exposure and recovery. As Vinay Prasad has constantly reminds us, everyone will get Covid. And through that path, we finally move beyond the pandemic.
What does it mean for China? It means that cases are nowhere near stopping. They will spread to every city, every town, every countryside until vast numbers of 1.4 billion are exposed. This could mean rolling lockdowns for years to come, along with all the damage and political instability that they necessarily entail. This will surely have a profound impact on economic growth and possibly the credibility of the CCP itself.
The communist party has made a profound error. Most places in the world did. The US was not Shanghai-level terrible but this is a matter of degree because the theory was tried out here too. In political democracies, politicians and bureaucrats have mostly tried to soft land their gross errors while manufacturing excuses for reopening without apology. Many want everyone just to forget this whole disaster.
Will that happen in China? The trouble is the incredible centrality of lockdowns to China’s perceived achievements over the last two years. So long as there are powerful people in Beijing who genuinely believe that lockdown is the path forward – and no opposition party in place to take a different point of view – this will likely continue, raising fascinating questions about the political and economic future of this country.
The magic combination of political and economic freedom turned out not to be the end of history. But China-style dictatorship is not the end either, simply because it contains no operational mechanism for the correcting of egregious errors. What saved the US from lockdown terror was political pluralism and federalism; China has institutionalized neither. Thus does intellectual error lead to egregiously immoral outcomes.
Lockdowns are nowhere a solution to pathogenic spread, contrary to the assurances of the WHO or celebrity scientists in the UK or the US. When governments of the world tried to prove their competence by declaring war on cell biology, they finally met their match. No matter how powerful a state, there are forces of nature that will always outsmart it.
They were saying on The Warroom today that XI is punishing opposing political factions in Shanghai.
China economy = slave labor.
ROTFLMAO!!! They’re reaping what they planted. Anyone with a reasonably critical mind knows the Chicoms, in collusion with our own DemonRats, concocted and deliberately spread the Covid virus to disrupt the American economy and destroy the Trump administration. Now the criminal subhumans’ invention is eating them.
They're already trying to do it again here in the U.S.
The illusion that China is a world power destroyed by a virus. Sort of like the Martians in War of the Worlds.
Someone posted the same in a thread from this morning.
Slave Labor,
My First thought.
This lockdown is China-wide. Its just that the Shanghai was either too big to hide or leaked. Either way what you see in Shanghai is just part of the story.
Important to understand: this is not about covid, its about Chinese politics.
Xi Jinping is up for election by the top Party Elite. Since he is the current leader, he is infallible. Chinese culture the Leader or Emperor is always seen as infallible - any dissent is crushed and offenders killed.
The Leader’s proclamations and edicts are to be obeyed absolutely. Xi Jinping lately proclaimed that he was instituting a zero covid tolerance policy. This means that there cannot be any covid anywhere in China - city, town, village.
To satisfy his infallibleness, Party cadre must produce big numbers to prove him correct. Which ... gives rise to mandatory testing. People must wait in lines of hundreds - no matter the weather; when its their turn, a guy in a full bunny suit takes their info off their phone, swabs ... and its on to the next one, same procedure, same swab, etc until the swab is worn out. A cost saving measure.
When the person tests positive, they have to go to a ‘camp’ where they are confined to a cot in the same large room with maybe a hundred others awaiting their forces daily tests. Those are the lucky ones - others are taken to bare steel cages with no plumbing.
Those free of the disease are sent home where their doors are welded shut, or if wooden, have motion sensors installed. To ensure they do not get out razor wire is installed between floors. Outside, at night, towers turn search lights looking for escapees.
They get donated food which is somehow given to them, but often the food is stolen. The food they do get, they are told by the Party is contaminated, so the people throw it out. So they have to climb down the outside of their 60 story buildings to forage for any food they can find - even to stripping trees of their edible leaves, seeds or berries. The people all over China are starving, while the Party sits on huge food reserves.
The people have now seen the Leader is fallible, and they have said they will not tolerate it again. This is not about covid or health, its about numbers and politics, and the people see it.
Are they still taking and killing peoples cats and dogs if there’s Covid people in th home?
Thanks for this perspective, PIF. We don’t often know the truth of what goes on behind the Iron Great Wall.
There is more to this than COVID, or even Xi’s continuation.
For quite some time now China has practiced a form of strongly gov’t financed entrepreneurism combined with political repression mostly kept out of the economy, and endemic, but loosely controlled* corruption at every level of gov’t and business. This worked well, of course.
My brother’s Chinese ex-wife, for example, became moderately wealthy as the owner of a private Christian school in China.
*Every once in a while a really blatant offender or offenders would get executed as an example to not go too far beyond one’s position or be too visible — the melamine in baby formula scandal still reverberates in China.
However, as Western ideas keep seeping into the culture, largely through the Internet, the Party fears a loss of overall control, and has increasingly increased repression and control in all areas. As it turned out, my brother’s ex left at about the right time. And after they got divorced several years later, she, realizing the environment in China was changing, stayed here in the US, concluding she was better off here, than going back to what she’d been doing in China. (I don’t recall her exact words, but, it boiled down to “now I would just be another government school.”)
As gov’t repression and heavy-handed over-control increasingly works its way into China’s economy, its amazing productivity faces increasing problems. Not all of the “supply chain issues” are on our (US) end, nor, to date, due to COVID.
Watched tucker last night, dogs in the street being pummeled to death with shovels and bags of house cats curb side for disposal in front of every building and on top of this a video of the city at night and the screams of 25 million people locked in their apartment buildings with no food. This is frightening. know your enemy and those who agree with this and side with them
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