China is facing what is arguably the worst government crisis since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. Even the Tiananmen uprising in 1989 didn’t affect as many other people as the Covid lockdowns.
Previous crises were political and social. This is political and biological, softly visual and not hidden behind red doors. Open for government policy, the brutal enforcement of unbearable regulations through “white-clad” fitness staff (who dress from head to toe in white rabbit suits), and the general collapse of infrastructure to aid the foundations of survival in the most foreign and filthy-rich China. City: This is all an unprecedented disaster. As venerable as they are, Secretary General Xi’s “theories” do not cure COVID.
Unfortunately, rather than forcing the government to make the maximum apparent adjustment to the visual realities of the situation, the reaction is more likely to be the Party’s sense of siege.
The world has been horrified through the photographs broadcast through Shanghai’s hooked and complicated population: other people jumping from skyscrapers to death to escape confinement. Babies separated from their parents and transported to quarantine centers in mass shopping carts. fitness cops in front of their kids. People open their windows to shout in unison: “We are hungry!Who knew this could happen in Shanghai, one of the richest cities in the world?It’s been about 60 years since a handful of other people went hungry in Shanghai.
With the lockdowns, Xi Jinping, a lifelong leader obsessed with himself and deifying himself, is obviously looking to control the COVID he claimed in 2020. Even in the face of foreign accusations that China has been irresponsible in failing to disclose the emergence of the virus in its early stages, the government continues to hide early mutation knowledge that may also help mitigate the global effect and might even have inadvertently released the virus. But China’s competitive mobilization in tracking, testing, and tracing has given great credibility to the Chinese inside and outside the doorsteps of China and the outside world.
Now that belief has dramatically replaced, while established politics faces more recent and more rapidly spreading variants, and the Party is unable to replace the course. The Party is locked in its own political demands and propaganda. the videos and testimonies undermine Xi’s core messages: the Party’s infallibility and the overall focus on people’s well-being.
Now the level is set for a distraction from stirring the dog: some kind of national mass movement, claims of external aggression, anything that might give the Chinese the idea that foreigners oppose them and that they will have to retreat and isolate themselves. It is remarkable and darkly comical that China reports very few “locally transmitted” cases: less than 1,000 per 25,000 cases, with the other 24,000, it is said, being transported through unclean foreigners or their mail or cargo. This message, like the claim that the virus was secretly created by the United States in Ukraine and implanted in Wuhan, is too much for the gullible to bemoan.
Shanghai is the maximum representation of blockaded cities, but lately a part of China’s population is locked up, only about 90% of the most populous cities and most of its coastal topways are closed. Given a very low mortality rate and a higher case rate Not only patience but the tightening of serious measures is almost incomprehensible.
On the one hand, they are decimating the economy. Controls are much more widespread than in the first quarter of 2020, when China reported that GDP contracted by 6. 8%. Truck transport in Shanghai in April was 15% of the 2019 level. Ships are covered in front of all major Chinese ports. Many container carriers skip the port of Shanghai, but bulk carriers and tankers who are unlucky enough to call at Shanghai face long delays, as many dockers do not work. Exports have all but ceased and metal generators along the East Coast are not working. Planting in the northeast is delayed.
During this time, YouTube has the right to:
· Police and fitness staff beat and drag other people even when other people claim they have tested negative
· Recordings of Chinese fitness staff telling citizens to go to the hospital
· Widespread and vocal skepticism about case reporting.
· Disastrous food logistics, reports from other people claiming not to have eaten for 4 or five days.
· Breakdowns in the collection
· Deaths from non-Covid illnesses, as hospitals refuse to settle for patients
· Total deprivation for the poorest migrant populations, many of whom do not have the resources to buy food online or pay rent, given the closure of offices.
· Dystopian scenes of robots and drones trumpeting propaganda messages on the city’s empty streets
These measures, which now affect most of the Chinese economy, look like the biggest colossal misstep a national government has made in decades, given the mismatch between the stated goal, apparent tactics, and visual results.
With its increasing centralization of power, China has locked itself in a cycle of authoritarian commentary (much like Russia’s). Bad news is received with anger and hidden from leaders. Authorized central government groups parachute in and confront local leaders. reviled those guilty of implementing policies.
This is not the first example of the negative effects of Xi Jinping’s recentralization of authority, a sharp reversal of Deng’s emphasis on collective decision-making. Another recent example is the self-induced energy crisis. China has huge coal reserves and consumes four billion tons. a year, but ran out of coal. Misguided but competitive efforts by the targeted economy to restrict inflation by intervening in pricing and environmental application in the energy price chain, from mining to end users
What does this mean for China’s reform trajectory?China has achieved only one leadership transition in the reform era that has followed institutionalized rules, from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao. Hu was criticized as weak as Xi went up, crushed political competitors and took singular from the upper organs of force. But to the extent that the history of government structures inherited from China has classes for the present, it is useful to reflect on the sensible words of the poet of the second century BC. C. Jia Yi. 论) pointed out that there was a big difference between taking the force and using it sensibly.