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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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Elderly vaccination is behind general population, but not by an unreasonable about. It’s 80% about 60 and 65% above 80.
aka "Die for the line"