Internal contradictions? Contradictions with the outside world? I sort of completely missed the boat on the how and why of this but it has piqued my interest.
Poor economic growth means not being able to improve the living standards of the Chinese citizens. Yes, saving lives are important, but what is the point if China’s economy slumps and threatens to reverse the policies that helped eradicated poverty?
I feel like it’s worth pointing out that change the language a little and that’s not far off something we would hear from our capitalist masters.
Because it was always the case that lockdowns cause economic slowdown and damage to established supply chains. The point was supposed to not let the virus have a chance to mutate into what it is now and sort of put things on pause, but we fucked it up and now zero covid is de facto non viable because people do in fact need to work for things to be produced and we can't pause the entire world for three years because we're still recovering from the half-assed lockdowns that didn't last long enough nor were they strict enough to help with covid but did fuck up economic status quo
The point was for the government to manage the emergency and wait for the virus to die down but instead they prioritized the health of corporations
Also more and more peoples got tired and agitated because of lock down, that led to low morale and more non compliance. With the spread this fast, the govt doesn’t have much choice. Sure they could slow the spread, but with the rate of the spread, I think that half ass solution gonna bring more pain than just speed run it while building more emergency capacity and train more nurses
Yes exactly, people who ask why they didn't try to manage the opening rather than let-it-rip don't realise how quickly it spread even with lockdowns. Where I was living in Hangzhou, in the weeks leading up to the opening up, I could hear about a new place being locked down nearly daily, and cases were still continuously rising during this period.
Firstly, China did achieve zero covid with the original strain but the rest of the world kept fucking up and the new strains are way too transmissible for it to work.
Secondly, it used that time to build up hospitals and medical staff which was lacking to better deal with covid.
Thirdly, most people are vaccinated now, lessening the impact of the virus.
These are the official reasons.
IMO, tied with the first, is another point: China is in a global competition with the Western world. It cannot allow itself to fall behind which would happen if it continued with zero covid.
It is the wrong decision as far as lives are concerned. More people will die and get permanently sick as a result of giving up zero covid.
The decision was also very sudden. In the national congress just months before, there was no indication of such measures coming. People had some idea a few weeks before, but it still really came out of nowhere. The protests had nothing to do with it, imo, but clearly something changed.
It’s weird.
Anyways, it’s not going to make me stop supporting China or anything. It just lays bare the stage at which we live currently. We live in a capitalist world. And socialist-led states have to abide by the rules of the game.
Hopefully that changes in the coming decades.
Till then, wear a good mask, practice social distancing, and get vaccinated.
It is the wrong decision as far as lives are concerned. More people will die and get permanently sick as a result of giving up zero covid.
I agree with everything else you've said but I think the calculation here is more complex. Now that the West has come around to China being their greatest enemy, it is necessary to weigh the lives lost due to opening up from Zero COVID against the potential lives lost from permanently falling behind the West and being subject to color revolution or war.
I’m not even convinced this move will improve the Chinese economy, which was already doing far better than the west throughout zero covid. As commies in amerikkka learned long ago, people can’t work when they’re sick, and having tens of millions of people disabled from long covid will needlessly drag down the entire economy, and also just generally increase people’s overall misery. That being said, long live China!
Yeah, I'm sure that is a part of their calculation. But I just personally am not able to do that sort of calculations. I cannot justify these kinds of decisions where you purposefully let some people die for the sake of the "greater good".
If it helps, think about russia. You know shock therapy? If china loses enough power and america cna get it they will do that there. Anothter century of humiliation for the most populous nation on earth. That does make thr contrast a little more stark
It didn't really came out of nowhere
Even before lifting all restrictions the international quarantine times had already been reduced from 4 weeks to 2, to 1 or something like that
Yeah there were revisions before, but, imo, a much better way to handle it would be to annouce in December that they are getting rid of covid zero and then provide a six month transition plan or something.
It's pretty much impossible to provide an overall 6 month transition plan in China given how different the provinces are in terms of resources etc. Anyhow, people who are talking about a transition period don't realise how infectious the current strain was. The only way to manage the spread was to continue to use lockdowns (and this was already failing). But the only way to have lockdowns be localised and not use it as a blunt weapon is to also continue to pour resources into testing etc. Cities were already running out of money to do testing and some were requiring citizens to pay for their own (mandatory) tests.
Elderly vaccination is behind general population, but not by an unreasonable about. It’s 80% about 60 and 65% above 80.
China is in a global competition with the Western world. It cannot allow itself to fall behind which would happen if it continued with zero covid.
aka "Die for the line"
Because two years of lockdown policies genuinely is psychologically taxing and a significant enough portion of their people turned out in the streets to protest.
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone unless you're unaware that China's health care infrastructure is actually incredibly fragile and that preventing it from being rapidly overwhelmed was the real reason for the Zero COVID policy. Unfortunately you can't do that forever especially if your governmental legitimacy is based upon continuous rapid economic growth and Zero COVID strangles that growth.
Their entire economy is dependent on exports. With zero Covid and omicron it was getting really difficult for their economy to function. There’s not direct pressure from the US but our economies our intertwined regardless of what our government and their government says. The other day the prime minister of Australia said he wants to normalize trade with China. Basically all of the west’s rhetoric about China is bullshit. We need each other.
Covid zero was never going to be permanent and before they dropped it completely they were slowly easing restrictions. I guess they got nervous with the protests and wanted to rip off the bandaid instead of letting it slow burn through the population
Ostensibly, China's main goal with continued lockdowns after widespread vaccination, and unlike all the misinformation, China has one of the highest basic vaccination rates in the world and their vaccines are indeed effective at lowering deaths, would be either waiting out other effective treatments to lower the death rates even more or waiting out for long Covid symptoms to manifest and hopefully be solved in the rest of the world to spare their people from long-term disability.
More and more those goals seem far away, long Covid isn't being taken seriously anywhere and it be could multiple years if not even longer for that to be resolved better and new treatments also seem to be along the same lines, they just aren't coming like we would hope. The good news for China at least is that they have multiple years lagging behind if long Covid does build up enough in a population to massively cripple an economy, meaning that they will (hopefully) be able to implement policies that would address this and apply the brakes before their own economy falls to shambles.
So anyway China is stuck with two options. Open up for the frustrated population, who like every other human society on the world isn't really looking at this rationally enough and are getting increasingly more pissed at the lockdowns especially as you struggle with supplies more and more, or keep them locked down and noncompliance becomes more and more common and the economy just keeps suffering.
Now to be clear, I see no reason for why China would undergo the "ok then, just let it rip option" but it might be what they thought the population was wanting, or perhaps some of the lockdown opposing officials finally got their input. I really do not know.
Presumably because this is hell and god is punishing us for masturbating because I can't come up with any reasonable explanation.
Every time you wank, a new variant comes out. When you look at porn, it's given a name.
I can only speculate that it was pressure and inaction from the US and other pro-covid nations that got them to abandon it.
I guess they were too optimistic in thinking the rest of the world would follow pandemic procedures. Maybe they were thinking the world was going to shut down for a whle until the virus died off, and then they could reopen. Unfortunately, most western countries are run by insane eugenists who never wanted to work together to do a proper lockdown. So looks like they decided that being reinfected by pro-covid countries was going to happen either way, so they gave up.
I am under the impression that even after abandoning covid zero they still have tighter covid controlls than we do.
This kinda explains it, basically it was all planned: https://therealnews.com/a-look-back-on-three-years-of-chinas-anti-covid-19-fight
