(note: while WSWS (trot site) uses CCP instead of CPC, they generally have good takes on China and support China against US imperialism)
(note: to clarify, this article is in support of Zero-COVID and sees the lifting of the policy as a grave mistake)
(note: i do not necessarily support all the shit wsws says i am not a fucking trot)
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If leftist westerners trusted the CPC to institute zero covid, then they should also reasonably trust the CPC to wind it down and/or adjust it. China held out as long as they could, but it’s clear they did not win this fight in the global economy.
The US is now taking steps to re-establish productive forces in its own country. Holding out longer would mean disaster for China on a longer timescale.
I’m unsurprised that a Trotskyist website is upset that a communist party is adapting to material conditions. Their ideology is very fixated on orthodoxy.
the article literally demands global revolution and global zero-covid before China is allowed to adjust their policy. utopian insanity and presumptuous demands
:wojak-nooo: nooooo you have to do global revolution now noooooooo
:pika-pickaxe:
Oh yeah, violent global revolutions are totally good for preventing the spread of disease. Forcing the breakdown of any type of quarantine enforcement and flooding the medical system with casualties will surely help us stop covid.
there is a reason trotskyists tend to eat shit everytime they get a turn at the wheel.
I am continually surprised how inflexible and petulant adherents of that tendency often are.
Utopian society is when we don't fill the world with pestilence and constant natural disasters to serve the global capitalist markets.
Utopian is when you demand the entire world reverse course, go back in time 2 years, enact a competent pandemic response when there’s no political will to do so whatsoever. Failing that you demand the one competent country hobble itself forever
Trot left anti-communist going against the internal policies of Actually Existing Socialism, demanding policies where you have no say in the continued tradition of western chauvinists
anti-communism is when you say countries that still grew and thrives during the pandemic shouldn't cripple their population for global capital markets.
The people and party who led those successful policies are still in charge and are the ones controlling policy. Do you support them or not?
Do you understand governing a modern nation and complex economy takes a delicate, dialectical process of weighing several contradictory forces? A dogmatic or ultra stance is often at odds with reality and will cause disasters. The CPC is walking a fine line and dodging contradictions and mitigating them, I trust they know what they are doing here.
"Oh, we're so crippled. China's actually finished due to zero COVID. ""the economy"" can't take it."
-Liberals in China, liberals on this site
then they should also reasonably trust the CPC to wind it down and/or adjust it.
no, look at new zealand and how those liberal got it kinda right for so long and then fucked it up so severely by ending measures too soon. there's nothing magical about being AES or run at least partially by ideological marxists that makes you immune to fucking up like that, especially when you have to participate in a global capitalist economy.
i hope i'm wrong but china might be doing a bunch of social murder here. not that i could do anything about it one way or the other. it's less wEsTeRn CrItIcIsM oF cHinA and more watching somebody i respected and admired about to fuck up the thing they were doing better than everybody else for approximately no reason.
It's sad but inevitable. China simply can't carry on zero covid when the entire rest of the world has given it up. It's untenable, makes tourism to China impossible, and means any Chinese wanting to leave and come back have to go through a ridiculous procedure. Daily life is annoying, having to get covid tests every other day just to ride the metro and enter restaurants, it's poorly implemented where different regions have totally different apps and procedures, and feels unfair when the entire rest of the world has nothing like this. China won, but the world failed. If everybody did what China did, covid would be gone, but they didn't and the CPC has to adjust to the conditions of the world at large or risk losing their mandate amongst average Chinese folks. I can only hope the slow repealing of zero covid is done well, that the elderly are vaccinated in much higher numbers than they are now, and that the medical system is ready for an influx. I really don't know what else the CPC is expected to do; they've done the utmost for almost three years, but that cannot be the permanent state of affairs.
feels unfair when the entire rest of the world has nothing like this
I guess the Chinese people will have to reconsider when their grandpa's in the ICU and their whole family is sick because their kid brought home a case from school. I hope that they will protest this change of policy from prioritizing human life over profit to prioritizing profit over human life before millions are permanently disabled from Long COVID.
Here in Canada, we are facing a "triple-threat" from COVID, the Flu, and RSV. Shelves are being stripped clean of medicine and people's kids are in the hospital from RSV. I personally know someone whose kid is in the hospital from contracting COVID and RSV simultaneously.
I really hope that the Chinese government will reconsider. I have family in China, and I really don't want my grandpa to die from COVID just after fighting cancer and winning.
why are you assuming the Chinese government will throw open the plague gates the same way America and Canada has?
“Wind down zero covid” does not mean doing nothing like most countries in the imperial core have resulted to.
I assumed wrongly that it would be a complete pro-COVID policy. I am reassured that the new COVID policy in China is not comparable to the pro-COVID policies of the West.
It is very easy to understand why you would feel that way. The West’s approach to covid has been truly been “pro-Covid” and it is horrifying.
Not really. Even now if the west wanted thet could do a 4 weeks close down and covid wold be done. Either way you need a 4 week closedown to fix things.
The difference is psycological. In that if you se a slow increase in death rates youe are not as shoked as when there is a sudden death glut. Wich is what moved western hoverments to action in 2020. The corpse cart going down the street looks really bad. Even if you are in a neoliberal hellhole.
There's some logic to states just trying to power through the annual COVID+flu season with the increased incidence of symptomatic RSV. Unfortunately this was always inevitable once SARS-COV-2 wasn't contained immediately and countries tried half-assed "rolling lockdowns" in totally uncoordinated and ineffectual manners. I think most immunologists would have expected this? I'm only in a tangentially related field and I figured the cold & flu season closest to COVID restrictions ending in different places would be worse than the initial and more recent COVID waves, Delta excluded. People around other people are constantly exposed to relatively harmless pathogens, and occasionally to pathogens their immune system doesn't already know or which are significantly different from the versions they encountered but still close enough to trigger that outdated memory to try to fight it. That constant exposure has been pretty consistent throughout human history, eg telecommunications and mass extended quarantine/isolation is pretty rare historically.
Eventually a lot of people were going to return to the more traditional modes and frequencies of person-to-person interaction, just with their immune systems being less primed. Children and the aged would be at-risk subsequent to mass, extended isolation. The aged were already by far the most at-risk of death or debilitating symptoms of COVID so they were just super screwed.
I don't imagine there will be a real rollback of rescinding COVID restrictions anywhere. Maybe some cities will try, I'm sure people wearing masks is here to stay in plenty of urban areas and probably more of SE Asia. CPC tried, valiantly, and they did save a ton of lives during that initial outbreak. They could have rest on their laurels then and done basically nothing about Omicron, but they kept trying. At the end of the day though, a majority of people are healthy enough to be comfortable taking their chances. The odds they will be personally affected are pretty low. And they have the elbow room to be more cautious/isolate periodically when they know they'll be interacting with at-risk family in the near future. Everyone without that latitude is worse off.
The hypothesis of that flu season is worse bc of lack of what you describing doesn't really hold up. Most of the western world wasn't wasn't under stringent covid procedures last flu season. I think a more likely hypothesis is that on a population level immune systems were weakened by mass COVID infection we have seen with omicron/whatever the new hotness is.
They're not lifting the policy entirely, they just testing and see how much they could open before their medical system overwhelm. They also feel like they have enough ammunition and reinforce their medical system to test this. Zero covid can't be forever, they already give a threshold to open up, now they going to test. If it not going well then they gonna revert it back
Yeah, people here are overreacting. Most likely they'll try to relax zero-Covid in a bunch of cities, realize it's a bad idea, and resume zero-Covid. Keep in mind that domestic frustration over zero-Covid is growing. Contrary to what some people here might think, most Chinese people aren't exactly happy living in zero-Covid. They have the patience to be inconvenienced for the sake of public health, but that patience isn't going to last forever. The relaxing of zero-Covid is as much an appeasement to the Chinese public as it is to resume economic growth at a cost of public health. I think the party's gambling on the relaxation being detrimental enough that the people will want to resume zero-Covid and the party can tell zero-Covid skeptics "well, we tried, but this sucks, so it's back to zero-Covid." I don't know if the risk is worth it or not.
Typical of Western leftists, when they see a socialist country make compromises, instead of understanding why those compromises had to exist in the first place (failure of German socialists to seize state power, failure of Western governments to properly contain Covid), they choose to exclusively blame the socialist country for not being pure enough.
Typical of Western leftists, when they see a socialist country make compromises, instead of understanding why those compromises had to exist in the first place (failure of German socialists to seize state power, failure of Western governments to properly contain Covid), they choose to exclusively blame the socialist country for not being pure enough.
It's tiring and annoying.
Westerner playing zero sum game, treating it like a sport will be their down fall. Let's them learn their lesson
Like, there are footage of Chinese people flipping over police cars and trashing Covid testing sites because they're tired of zero-Covid. Regardless of whether they are being paid off by the CIA to stir up shit or not, the patience is wearing thin. The CPC needs to compromise before the frayed patience over zero-Covid becomes another crack for the West to exploit.
The west gonna exploit either way. It's the damn if you do, damn if you don't situation. The CPC shouldn't give two shite about what western media think and serve their population. Winter is coming, and another potential covid surge is gonna happen in the west, let's them cripple whatever rest of their work force
The amount of pro-covid comments here is absolutely disgusting. Enjoy your :covid-cool:
Holly shit! I looked it up to find the rest of the lyrics and the wikipedia article was practically rewriten to hide that it is about the quotidianity of the plague. You yanks have really good censorship im amazed.
They also chang the gogle results to filter out the original lyrics.
Time to insatll yandex browser i guess.
This triple-demic shit is just the start. Anyone saying this is the right thing to do, because it's inevitable, is still not grasping how badly we are fucking humanity right now. Life expectancies world wide are going to take a significant nosedive by the end of the decade.
that is all true and also China is having to adapt to the reality that the rest of the world allowed Covid to become endemic.
The global capitalist class has spent three years furious that China and Vietnam did not fully bend to their will and allow disease to run rampant. It has enraged them so much they are even starting to build factories again in their own countries.
Relaxing measures from zero covid does not mean China will have the same policies as America.
Relaxing measures from zero covid does not mean China will have the same policies as America.
I will trust that the Chinese government, which has shown unparalleled competence in handling the COVID-19 pandemic (and bioterrorist pressure from the USA) for 3 years, will be able to orchestrate a planned step-down from an ideal eradication policy to a lesser policy for practical reasons (the survival of the Chinese state against American imperialism).
I apologize for going on the offense about this given you have family there.
The onslaught of Sinophobia on the western internet leads me to a default position of assuming negative intent.
I hope the best for China and that your family there remains in good health.
It's all good. I was panicked by the news, and your comments have given me reassurance.
I’m glad to hear it! I’m sorry that reassurance came in such a harsh form at first.
:deng-salute:
rest of the world allowed Covid to become endemic.
It's not endemic they just decided to start using the word despite the definition
I'm aware. It can, and likely will, get much worse. :pika-cousin-suffering:
Yeah. I have been deliberately ignoring this bc manmade horrors beyond my comprehension. In addition to mass death and suffering in China this is also going to lead to vast, horrible reprecussions as China's economy is disrupted by mass death and suffering, so this will have planetary reprecussions.
I hope that they're willing to about-face and clamp down again when it quickly becomes clear that going off zero-covid will just make things worse.
So far, the CPC has made it very clear they are responding to the wishes of their people. They held onto zero-covid this long because of that, I trust them to implement this as well as they can and adapt as needed.
What's China supposed to do? Zero COVID forever? The rest of the world fucked up their COVID responses so hard that it's now impossible for COVID to be eradicated. The CPC and the Chinese people have done their best and will continue to do their best to cope with the situation, but it's not reasonable to expect any country to enforce Zero COVID in perpetuity.
The rest of the world fucked up their COVID responses so hard that it’s now impossible for COVID to be eradicated.
I argue with this notion. While I do not think that COVID can be eradicated right now (with the capitalist pro-COVID governments in the West), I find it a defeatist notion that COVID will be with us until the end of time. Smallpox was eradicated, polio was eradicated, etc... A COVID eradication effort would require efforts from all governments (China cannot do this alone and it is impossible to expect them to carry the whole world in this regard), but it would nevertheless still be possible.
ie: While a national COVID eradication policy is not sustainable (ex: China's just-removed COVID policy), an international policy is very much possible and has precedent.
Might COVID be eradicated at some point in the future? Sure, I can be optimistic enough to believe that. But there's zero chance of COVID being eradicated in the foreseeable future because there's nothing that will compel the West to behave rationally and pursue an eradication policy.
But there’s zero chance of COVID being eradicated in the foreseeable future because there’s nothing that will compel the West to behave rationally and pursue an eradication policy.
I do not contest this notion. The pro-COVID West really is trying to damn all of humanity.
The problem is that it's not even a problem with Western governments, it's a problem at the grassroots level with Westerners just refusing to do simple things like wear masks. I hope that the first cracker tourist to walk around China without a mask after COVID gets the shit kicked out of him.
The thing is... a lot of people followed directions when western governments mandated things. They only stopped when the government stopped (Biden saying masks off if vaccinated July 4th 2021). Like yeah, western people are all individualism brain rotted, but the government is absolutely a huge part of the problem.
Yes, both are problems. That said, I live somewhere where white people are maybe 1% of the population and the government is still very much mandating (but not enforcing) masks. Most of the unmasked people I see walking around are white Westerners, and of those unmasked white Westerners, the vast majority were men.
Might COVID be eradicated at some point in the future?
No. 10-30% of the population is set to be weeded out of the gene pool (myself included)
Yes 0 covid forever. Jost because evryone else is suicidal you dont have to be.
Zero COVID is working very well. No need to assume it's a huge cost.
This drip-filled pot of mental discharge should have been posted to the dunk tank, if at all.
If your sole criteria for moving to a country is covid, then I know someone you should visit :kim-drip:
Oh boy 39 upvotes and 134 comments. I wonder what my report logs gonna look like
Full article text:
In the past week, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government has initiated a dangerous shift in policy away from the Zero-COVID elimination strategy which has been in place across China since the beginning of the pandemic.
The clearest evidence for this change is last Friday’s issuance of 20 measures by the National Health Commission (NHC) which curtail every aspect of the Zero-COVID policy, under conditions in which daily new cases have risen over tenfold since late October. According to Our World In Data, China’s seven-day average of daily new cases now stands at 15,897 and is on pace to reach an all-time high in the next week. Daily new COVID cases in China [Photo by Our World In Data / CC BY 4.0]
The 20 measures include a reduction of mass testing protocols, restrictions on the ability of localities to issue lockdowns, a shortening of quarantine times for close contacts of people infected with COVID-19, a loosening of travel restrictions to and within China, the ending of contact tracing for secondary contacts, and more.
Despite a weeks-long surge of cases in Guangzhou, officials there have refrained from implementing a citywide lockdown, and growing waves in other large cities throughout the country have not prompted lockdowns for the first time since the initial lockdown of Wuhan began on January 23, 2020.
Also included in the 20 measures were pledges to accelerate vaccination programs, build health care infrastructure and stockpile medicines, clearly in anticipation of a nationwide surge of COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations. On Thursday, leading NHC official Guo Yanhong announced that the country will build more hospitals that specialize in treating moderate and severe COVID patients, while ensuring that intensive care units comprise 10 percent of all hospital beds.
The 20 measures were announced one day after Chinese President Xi Jinping held a meeting on the pandemic with his new Politburo Standing Committee, the first since the conclusion of the CCP’s 20th Congress on October 23.
At that Congress, Xi presented the fallacy of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” distorting the reality that the restoration of capitalism has produced a vast growth in social inequality and class tensions within China. In early 2020, fearing social revolution amid a spiraling public health crisis, the CCP first implemented Zero-COVID in order to prevent the collapse of the country’s health care system and maintain national stability.
Despite the immense significance of China’s Zero-COVID policy, which for over two years has saved millions of lives and proven that elimination is possible, the nationalist basis of this policy has always rendered it unviable in the long term. Just as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is a nationalist delusion, maintaining Zero-COVID in a single country is impossible. By lifting this policy, Chinese society now directly confronts “COVID with imperialist characteristics.”
For more than two years, US imperialism has exerted unrelenting pressure on China to lift its Zero-COVID policy, as part of its broader efforts to militarily encircle and subjugate the country. Countless columns have been published denouncing China’s public health policies for their impact on corporate profits, demanding they be scrapped no matter what the cost in human lives.
Over the past year, China has been repeatedly bombarded by the highly infectious and immune-resistant Omicron variant, which evolved in late 2021 due to the unhindered spread of the virus outside the country. Last spring, the Omicron BA.2 subvariant caused China’s largest surge of infections to date, centered in Shanghai. After this surge was successfully suppressed, itself a triumph of public health, smaller waves have affected different parts of the country on a near-continuous basis, straining testing capacity in many cities.
Efforts to maintain Zero-COVID have become increasingly costly, with the World Bank predicting in late September that China’s GDP growth will shrink by over 5 percent this year.
It appears that a tipping point was reached when Apple threatened to shift production away from China after a major COVID-19 outbreak at the notorious Foxconn sweatshop in Zhengzhou, the world’s largest iPhone factory, severely disrupted production ahead of the peak holiday shopping season. By lifting Zero-COVID, the CCP clearly seeks to reintegrate with the world economy and fully restore capitalist production, symbolized by Xi’s maskless participation in the G20 summit this week.
The full implications of the lifting of Zero-COVID will emerge in the coming weeks and months. It is clear that the CCP has not yet adopted the mass infection “herd immunity” policy which has been universally embraced in the West, and their current policy could now be described as the most stringent mitigationist strategy possible.
However, the objective laws of viral transmission are relentless and the situation could quickly spiral out of control. Any shift away from a Zero-COVID elimination strategy carries with it the potential for a monumental catastrophe. In this regard, the experiences in New Zealand and Hong Kong over the past year are most illustrative of the coming dangers.
In Hong Kong, which is densely populated and comparable to the conditions in most major Chinese cities, the lifting of Zero-COVID last February rapidly caused a surge of infections which led to the highest per capita daily death toll seen anywhere in the world since the start of the pandemic. Due to relatively low vaccination rates among the elderly, in the span of three months Hong Kong went from only 213 deaths to 9,346, a cumulative per capita death toll roughly half that of the United States, where over 1.1 million Americans have been killed by COVID-19. [Photo by Our World In Data / CC BY 4.0]
In New Zealand, repeated waves of infection have inundated hospitals and given the country one of the highest per capita death rates in the world throughout much of this year. Since November 2021, the country’s death toll has climbed from only 31 to 2,154.
Ominously, conditions in China are closer to Hong Kong than New Zealand. In Shanghai, only 71 percent of people aged 60 and older have had two doses of vaccine and only 46 percent have received a third booster dose, and comparable figures exist in many other cities. Most of the Chinese population has been vaccinated with the CoronaVac vaccine, which has been shown to be less effective than the mRNA vaccines at preventing hospitalization and death.
If the situation in mainland China does spiral out of control, it would be a world-historic tragedy. China is home to 1.4 billion people, one-sixth of the world’s population. A study published in May found that if Omicron were allowed to spread freely in China, in just six months there would likely be 112 million symptomatic cases, 5.1 million hospital admissions, 2.7 million ICU admissions and 1.6 million deaths. The real-world outcomes could be far worse than those predicted by this model, particularly given the evolution of even more infectious and immune-resistant variants over the past six months.
Beyond the acute crisis during the initial surge, Chinese society would also be confronted with the long-term ramifications of chronic post-viral illness. In the United States alone, official figures indicate that at least 20 million Americans are now suffering from long-term sequelae known as Long COVID, which can cause a wide range of symptoms affecting nearly every organ in the body. Up to 4 million Americans are so profoundly disabled by Long COVID that they have entirely left the workforce.
Extrapolated for the Chinese population, if the “herd immunity” strategy pursued in the West is eventually adopted, upwards of 85 million Chinese people could end up suffering from Long COVID, including over 15 million completely disabled by the virus.
By lifting Zero-COVID, China will face growing pressures to fully embrace the dystopian “forever COVID” policy pioneered in the United States and adopted by nearly every world government, in which unending waves of infection will repeatedly reinfect ever-growing sections of the population for the foreseeable future. A recent study found that each reinfection with COVID-19 compounds one’s risk of death, hospitalization and Long COVID.
Whatever pragmatic economic and political considerations are driving the CCP to lift Zero-COVID, the crisis they confront will in no way be resolved and could become far worse.
Depending on how quickly the virus spreads and begins to overwhelm hospital systems, it is possible that the CCP will reverse course and attempt to restore the Zero-COVID policy. However, in the absence of a globally coordinated strategy, this will become increasingly difficult.
The lifting of Zero-COVID is a political question which confronts the entire world’s population. Allowing the virus to spread in this immunologically naive population could provide it with over 1 billion new hosts in which it could further mutate and spawn new variants. This reactionary policy change in China thus poses the need for workers internationally to renew their struggle against the policies of their own governments and to unify across national boundaries.
As the World Socialist Web Site has continuously stressed, the only way forward to stop the pandemic is for the international working class to take matters into its own hands and fight for a Zero-COVID global elimination strategy. This entails the simultaneous deployment of every public health measure available, as well as the modernization of infrastructure to ensure that every public space is free of harmful viruses and bacteria. The fight for this program is indissolubly connected to the fight for world socialism, based on the prioritization of human needs above private profit.
i can't believe they're actually lifting zero-covid over fucking iphones
can't wait for my grandpa to die from covid so that some motherfuckers can get their hands on the iphone 14 asap
They are lifting zero-Covid because it’s not possible to exist in isolation forever and the rest of the world will never achieve zero-covid. There’s no choice here at all, it has to be lifted eventually
Despite the immense significance of China’s Zero-COVID policy, which for over two years has saved millions of lives and proven that elimination is possible, the nationalist basis of this policy has always rendered it unviable in the long term.
The fuck does this even mean lmao
It means that a Zero-COVID policy for China only is unsustainable because even if COVID is eradicated within Chinese borders, travelers will endlessly import COVID from other countries into China.
It's so fucking bleak because it mirrors nationalist communism; always under attack from reactionary elements outside your country and doomed to fail.
Old world is dying, new world struggles to be born. If you wanted to know what "the time of monsters" looks like, it's... it's this. :cool-zone:
They want China to carry on with Zero-COVID, but they stress that it's highly important for the whole world to implement Zero-COVID.
As the World Socialist Web Site has continuously stressed, the only way forward to stop the pandemic is for the international working class to take matters into its own hands and fight for a Zero-COVID global elimination strategy.
Yeah so that’s never going to happen in the next few decades so they just want China to sit in economic isolation and slowly withdraw and have their economic gains lost?
So the Chinese government should collapse the economy instantly by getting everyone sick and thus unable to work?
To answer your question with a more relevant question, should China continue in economic lockdown and isolation forever? Is this sustainable? (No it is not)
There isn’t even a choice here, it’s a foregone conclusion when the world failed to contain the virus, the CCP hand is forced by material reality
the more I deal with chauvinist trot shit, the more I understand Stalin’s political purges
At that Congress, Xi presented the fallacy of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” distorting the reality that the restoration of capitalism has produced a vast growth in social inequality and class tensions within China. In early 2020, fearing social revolution amid a spiraling public health crisis, the CCP first implemented Zero-COVID in order to prevent the collapse of the country’s health care system and maintain national stability.
Stopped reading here. What liberal hogwash
