Just days after the Chinese Communist Party lifted Shanghai’s last Flu Manchu lockdown, they’re locking Shanghai down again.
China’s commercial hub of Shanghai will lock down millions of people for mass COVID-19 testing this weekend – just 10 days after lifting its gruelling two-month lockdown – unsettling residents and raising concerns about the business impact.
Racing to stop a wider outbreak after discovering a handful of community cases, including a cluster traced to a popular beauty salon, authorities have ordered PCR testing for all residents in 14 of Shanghai’s 16 districts over the weekend.
Five of the districts said residents would not be allowed to leave their homes while the testing was carried out. A notice issued by Changning district described the stay-home requirement as “closed management” of the community being sampled.
The latest scare triggered a rush to grocery stores and online platforms to stock up on food, as users of China’s Twitter-like Weibo expressed fear they could be locked down for longer, having only started going back to work after the last lockdown was lifted on June 1.
Some areas had remained sealed off or quickly returned to lockdown due to infections and their close contacts.
While the rest of the world has moved on from useless lockdown foolishness, China is still Stuck On Stupid, and their “Zero Covid” policy has as much chance to stop spread as tying a live chicken rump to buboes had at stopping bubonic plague.
You’ve got to hand it to Peter Zeihan, who said this was precisely the sort of stupidity China would keep pursuing when talking about Tianjin’s lockdown last month.
I’ve been telling my clients for quite some time that it was only a matter of issue as to how the American/Chinese relationship imploded. It could be Trump, could be Biden, could be energy, could be food, could be security, could be trade, could be ethics, could be genocide. It’s a long list, but it appears that Covid ultimately is the one that is winning out.
The Chinese vaccine does not work against Covid, and the Chinese have spent the last two years lambasting the world and lying in the propaganda that they are the only country that’s even remotely dealt well with Covid. And they’ve specifically parroted a lot of the crazy theories out there about the western vaccines, that they make you magnetic or they make you infertile or whatever else, so they can’t import the western vaccines at all they have to wait until they make their own MRNA formula, and there’s no way that’s going to happen in the next year or two, so lockdowns are the only public health policy they have and now the majority of the parts of china that matter are offline.
If you’re stuck in manufacturing in China this is the beginning of the end, if it’s not the end already, because as soon as you have an opening, Omicron comes back in and then you get a closing again because that is the only tool that the Chinese Communist Party has left.
At the beginning of the pandemic, many of us early on suggested that it was possible that Mao Tze Lung was an in-development bioweapon that escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Little did we know at the time that the country that would launch the most irrational policy in response to the weapon was China itself…
Tags: China, Communism, coronavirus, Foreign Policy, Peter Zeihan, Shanghai, video
Which could, maybe, be a sign that they know things about the virus that we do not…
Or, that the CCP really is that stupid.
Another take. Posobiec has mentioned in the past that tradition dictates that _if_ the CCP (and Xi) cannot demonstrate total control of the whuflu soon, then the failure to do so will reflect very poorly on Xi’s ongoing efforts towards a ‘coronation’ to a lifetime position as ruler of China, something Xi desperately desires by the end of this year.
If so, this could be a clue to China’s continued and puzzling (from the West’s standpoint) lockdowns of it’s people while the rest of the world had moved on. idk?
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Failure to control an epidemic is a classic way to lose the Mandate of Heaven. And everyone in China knows what that means.
It’ll end about the same way that the “One Child” policy did: In ruins, with the responsible parties all looking confused and innocent, while they try to pick up the pieces that are left.
The problem with big state bureaucracies like the Chinese isn’t that they exist in the first damn place, but that they are so vulnerable to being taken over by that one guy with the good ideas… That only look good there at the beginning. Once they get on the tracks and rolling, they’re unstoppable because of the mass of the bureaucratic machine implementing them. Big bureaucracy does not do nuance, nor is it amenable to minor course changes. Once it is set on a path, that path either ends in success or the whole thing crashing, because that is just the way these things go.
Massive state power always ends in disaster, because of this. Little bitty guys making little bitty decisions, who are able to modify things as the conditions change or the underlying assumptions are demonstrated to be wrong? They can deal, which is why an unplanned market economy always manages to outproduce a planned one. Bad ideas, insulated from feedback and consequence until the entire shoddy edifice collapses? They’ll kill your civilization deader than dead, given enough time.
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[…] smoke-and-mirrors economy, it’s possible that Shanghai’s problems are just temporary post-lockdown issues that will subside, assuming China doesn’t lock that city down again. (Don’t count on […]