I can’t understand it. Look at what Covid is doing right now. It’s fucking awful. Why couldn’t they just stay with Zero-COVID till everyone got vaccinated? Why haven’t they vaccinated everyone by now? It’s so frustrating. Who the fuck cares if someone assholes protested with blank paper? Just…why?
Unfortunately despite all of the Chinese leaderships efforts, there's a number of problems they have to contend with.
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Many elderly Chinese hate modern medicine, they're anti vaccines but in a different way than anti vaxxers in the west are, more focused on traditional Chinese medicine even the stuff that gets disproven. That being said China's actual vaccination rate is really really good compared to many other countries. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations the main problem is that the elderly won't get vaccinated and people are refusing second / third shots.
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Unfortunately just like every other country, the Chinese people are not immune to brainworms. The lockdowns are stressful and they just want to be done with it, people's lives be damned. The CPC is not dictatorial, they do respond to the people's wants.
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Covid just isn't going anywhere. Other nations have repeatedly shown that they have no desire to ever prevent spread and the increased transmission of newer variants means the lockdowns that are already growing unpopular needs to be even more intense to actually function.
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It's strangling the economy. Doing it for a few years with the lighter lockdowns was feasible but like point 3, it's never ending. China can't handle it on their own and the stricter lockdowns need to be the greater the impact on the nation. Xi and the CPC are popular because their policies brought huge wealth increases into China improving the QOL for millions and millions of people and that's stagnating.
China showed over and over that getting rid of Covid could have been done, and the world just didn't give a fuck. And unfortunately, the window has long since passed, they just can't do it on their own.
Powdered endangered species, the ones you always hear about. Those must be effective, otherwise the government wouldn't be trying to stop them.
And based on conversations with Chinese friends of mine, most of the buyers of rare animal parts know it doesn't work. They're doing it to demonstrate their wealth and show off to their peers. In a world with Viagra and Cialis, why would anyone bother with ground up rhino horn?
The really sad part is how much of Chinese medicine either doesn't work or is actively harmful. And it costs ¥¥¥¥¥¥¥.
CPC recently banned the sale of Pangolin animal products, that's a start...
To add to this, using that website's data you can see a point worth noting. Roughly 10-15 percent of their people are more vaccinated (relative to population) than the US and have been for a lot longer. They've vaccinated earlier and perhaps better than almost any country with a much much much higher total amount of people to take to do so. They've maintained the attempt to defeat covid entirely for a lot longer with a lot less help than most other countries as well.
Whatever the rest of the equation is, it is incredibly hard for anyone in good faith to fault their efforts or results so far. Here's hoping they're able to use a lot of the systems and structures they put in place to deal with the spread and vaccination much better than any of us did to also deal with the outbreaks and illness once they open up and it becomes normalized, much like we completely fucked the ball (I think that's the phrase) on and unfortunately normalized for the world.
Here's hoping they keep those systems and structures in place in case this incredibly shitty gamble of it "becoming like the flu" continues to not pan out so hot and we start listening to actual scientists, instead of talking heads, again.
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Vaccine hesitancy is somewhat high from what I understand, talking to colleagues and relatives in mainland China, and colleagues in the US with family in China.
I'm sure they'll make a better effort at contact-tracing and reduction of risk through less restrictive measures than most countries. In general Zero COVID is not sustainable, it could be if everyone were on the same page but the entirety of the rest of the world has more or less given up. At the end of the day it is a market economy, just with slightly different features than most market economies.
Vaccines are pretty good at reducing severe symptoms, but they're not great for long term immunity and counterproductive in the long term - unless they invest heavily in booster shots, but the population is already skeptical of the existing series...
We already basically know that immune imprinting risks apply to SARS-COV-2 infections (expected, it's a coronavirus) thanks to a well done Italian study where subjects with memory B cells for a couple of endemic seasonal alphacoronaviruses (NL63 and 229E) had worse COVID-19 outcomes controlling for other factors - so it's reasonably likely that a vaccine series which creates spike protein subunit antibodies for previous versions of SARS-COV-2 will probably hamper immune responses to future mutated versions.
Where does the hesitancy come from there? Is it still reactionary conspiracy theories or is there a different narrative?
It's mostly elderly who lived through the cultural revolution. They had their lives messed with for what appears to be, in their minds, no reason so they still doubt the government. These people are also not health literate and alternative medicine is still popular. There's also a long history of faulty products and lack of oversight when it comes to medicine in China. The quality of medicine in China has improved over the last 20 years, but if you're 70 it might not be enough to overcome any skepticism
It’s mostly elderly who lived through the cultural revolution. They had their lives messed with for what appears to be, in their minds, no reason so they still doubt the government.
cringe
US 7-day average infections: ~68,000
China 7-day average infections: ~7,000
Taking population differences into consideration, the USA is doing about 30x worse than China right now just based on infections. China’s line is also currently going down while the USA’s is going up. What am I missing? Like, yes, they might be chilling out a little regarding zero covid but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to raw-dog it like the USA.
I need to see some sources that are not just some dude from the CIA pulling numbers out of his ass.
Well, there it is. In this article at least the Chinese CDC is acting like the American CDC. They’re basically saying that covid is mild now so let ‘er rip. I do hope that they change their minds if things really do get out of control.
Oh okay only 650,000 people will die unnecessarily this winter, nbd.
:covid-cool:
Before: what's wrong with China where they're sticking with zero covid while the rest of the world moved on a year ago?
Now: why did China end zero covid? It's going to kill millions of unvaccinated people!
Can't win.
It's disgusting that all the reporting in the West is downright gleeful at the deaths of Chinese people and levying accusations it has no actual evidence of but I think there's a few things to consider here:
First the task of vaccinating everyone in China would be an absurd feat. Even just producing 1.4 billion vaccines in the necessary time frame for them all to be effective would be impressive. It would be a massive logistical feat to do this.
Second, China can't/won't stay closed forever. The Chinese bourgeoisie certainly wouldn't want it to and there is a question of the masses. It comes down to the fact that the rest of the world has decided to open up now and China is too integrated into the global economy to not follow suit. They aren't willing to endure what autarky would cause.
Finally I think a lot of people in spaces like this overlook the CPC's revisionism. Whether this is because of a serious commitment to Denigism and Xi thought - or an overcorrection in an effort to combat Western imperialism and misinformation varies, but the party is fundamentally a collaborationist party. They are not acting solely in the interest of the workers. Instead they are attempting to balance the interest of the Chinese masses, the Chinese bourgeoisie, and international finance capital to increase the productive forces of the country. Mao's China had massive vaccination campaigns in a more rural, less educated, and more superstitious China than today's and they were very effective, but the party has sacrificed the kind of community and radical patriotism that produced that in favor of the development of productive forces and all of the alienation that brings. They are maybe more of a functional state than anything in the West, but they do not have the ability to fully mobilize the masses in the way that was necessary to defeat this disease. I think the question of whether any lone communist party in any given country could have done it is legitimate, but the CPC is not even that.
Mao’s China had massive vaccination campaigns in a more rural, less educated, and more superstitious China than today’s and they were very effective, but the party has sacrificed the kind of community and radical patriotism that produced that in favor of the development of productive forces and all of the alienation that brings.
I think you're kidding yourself if you believe 1970s era China would have done better than modern China. Barefoot doctors aren't enough to stop Covid from spreading.
I'm not sure how Mao's China would have done against this particular disease, but it should be obvious that the technical skill or equipment of medical providers had very little to do with how dangerous this disease has been. Countries with very good doctors and hospitals like the US and the UK were ravaged by it not because of their doctors, but because the masses could not be mobilized (or demobilized in a sense) to prevent the spread of disease and were in fact very easily compelled to fall in line with the bourgeoisie who did not care about the disease either through stupidity and misinformation or selfishness and greed. China in the 60s would have undoubtedly struggled to produce vaccines, masks, and to treat the worst cases, but reaching the masses and leading them in correct action in regards to other diseases is exactly what they did and there's little reason to suspect they couldn't have done it for this one either.
Countries with very good doctors and hospitals like the US and the UK were ravaged by it not because of their doctors, but because the masses could not be mobilized (or demobilized in a sense) to prevent the spread of disease and were in fact very easily compelled to fall in line with the bourgeoisie who did not care about the disease either through stupidity and misinformation or selfishness and greed.
You're confusing necessary conditions with sufficient conditions. It's necessary to have healthcare facilities on par with your standard Western countries in order to effectively combat Covid, but as we can clearly see, it's obviously not a sufficient one.
but reaching the masses and leading them in correct action in regards to other diseases is exactly what they did and there’s little reason to suspect they couldn’t have done it for this one either.
We're talking about a time period where the average person didn't even have a b/w TV. How would "reaching the masses" even look like besides people reading about it in a newspaper? Communist cadre aren't a hivemind that instantaneously pick up whatever command Mao had in Beijing. The main difference between Covid and smallpox or TB is that Covid is an active infectious disease, so the time lag is actually critical. Compare that to today with contact tracing and being able to quickly propagate news. I think you vastly underestimate how behind Mao's China was techwise and why Deng had to do what he did.
You can blame capitalists, protestors, or the west but Zero Covid was never going to be permanent especially with omicron. Even before they relaxed restrictions, they couldn’t get rid of it. None of us have gone through an almost 2.5 year zero Covid and I think the mental toll is legit especially when citizens see the rest of the world carrying on pre pandemic. It’s also unrealistic for users to think the rest of the world could do something as well as zero Covid. The only thing is China should be faulted on is getting their elderly population vaccinated at a higher rate and accept western vaccines as well.
Everything China has done should be applauded and their worst will never be like rest of the world’s worst.
Also “3 years of zero covid” is 2 and half years of safely living your life like normal interspersed with occasional periods of lockdown. Instead of 2 and a half years of living your life like normal interspersed with occasional covid infections.
Yeah, that sounds like way worse suffering than having loved ones die and being permanently disabled. For sure.
I’m just surprised they didn’t hold on a little longer for the nasal vaccines to be widely deployed. I guess I’m perhaps placing too much optimism in them as a way out of this.
Yeah they’ve been approved - no idea of how widespread the roll out has been though (which is obviously no small task!).
Yeah I was expecting them to wait for after the winter. I think they became too nervous with protests popping up and didn’t want to make things worse. Protesting worse I guess.
but Zero Covid was never going to be permanent especially with omicron.
if rest-of-the-world did zero covid, omicron wouldn't exist
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It's strangling their rate of economic growth on top of their last decade-long boom seemingly ending.
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Their people are fed up with lockdown measures and have started protesting them publicly. After three unrelenting years that takes a heavy psychological toll.
It’s strangling their rate of economic growth on top of their last decade-long boom seemingly ending.
Oh yes growing at a rate faster than all those countries that let covid rip are is definitely a failure of zero covid. Oh what’s that all those other countries are entering a recession (have been in a recession for a year)?
The fact remains the people are pissed at all the lockdowns, they take a toll both economic and pyschological.
Also the virus isn't going anywhere, it's impossible to stamp it out fully, we can thank most of the rest of the world for that. If I were a young citizen of China I'd be pissed too, why should they suffer lockdowns for the rest of their lives when the rest of the world has given up on eradicating the disease?
I would easily rather have occasional lockdowns to prevent spread for the rest of my life than get covid over and over for the rest of my life. In a heartbeat.
While I acknowledge that these people think the lockdowns suck the fact is they simply do not understand how bad the alternative is. I truly believe this is a classic case of “People in socialist countries not comprehending how evil and cruel life under capitalism can be because it seems so bad that it couldn’t possibly be true”
Edit: Than not then
Like, what, is it supposed to be a hard choice between “you can safely go to the club but only 10 months out of the year” or “you can go to the club at any time but you’ll likely catch a deadly disease”? That’s the easiest fucking choice of all time.
I also know people that got it 2+ times and they’re all fine
Cool. I know people who got it 1 time and fucking died. And more people who can still barely go up stairs months later.
Ok, I also knew people that died in car crashes, should we ban all cars immediately overnight?
:rocz-yes:
That’s not the relevant comparison though. People die in car crashes which is why we require licenses, ban driving under the influence of drugs, have speed limits, require seat belts, revoke licenses from dangerous drivers, etc.
I’d say the pandemic version of that would be contact tracing, and isolated lockdowns to prevent spread, along with masks and vaccines.
Sure, sounds reasonable. The point is city-wide lockdowns forever with no end in sight are just not a reasonable policy IMO.
K, the discussion shouldn’t be about doing away with zero-covid then and more about the specific decision criteria for determining where and when to lock down. I never said they were perfect.
It’s a nasty virus but some people here pretend like it’s the fucking ebola.
No it’s not ebola, it’s far more dangerous than Ebola because it’s far more infectious. How are you comparing a virus that’s killed tens of millions to one that’s killed thousands at most and say the thousands is the worse one?
Skin cancer also kills more people than ebola, should we ban people going out into the sun?
Eradicating Covid is not happening, all countries are gonna have to find ways to live with it. I trust China will be able to find ways to minimize excess deaths, I can't imagine them having it as bad as the US.
When did I say we needed to stop anything that kills more people than Ebola? You know that’s a dumb as fuck comparison
So on what basis should countries be hyperfocused on Covid then? There are plenty of things that kill more people than Covid.
There are plenty of things that kill more people than Covid
There are not. And the fact that you think there are shows how you misunderstand the seriousness of this virus. There are two things that cause more deaths than Covid, heart disease and cancer. And we spend a lot of time and money trying to bring those numbers down, and their solutions are much much more difficult than covid.
The next cause after covid is car accidents, and as we already agreed we have put restrictions in place that are of similar severity as China’s lockdowns to bring those numbers down.
The solution for most of those heart disease deaths is leading a healthier lifestyle yet I don't see people here calling for a decades long mandatory enforced diet and fitness campaign.
Also I really doubt Covid is gonna remain one of the leading causes of death for years, deaths are down this year.
Also I really doubt Covid is gonna remain one of the leading causes of death for years.
Why not? Every time you catch it it weakens your immune system. There’s nothing to say a disease can’t be a leading cause of death every year for centuries. See: Smallpox.
Because the facts are that we're getting less deaths this year worldwide, so unless you have a theory that there's a whole bunch of unaccounted for Covid deaths I'll just take that at face value.
Yeah it’s not gonna stay AS high as it was, because the most vulnerable people already died from it. But the flu is cause of death #9, and there’s no reason at all to believe covid deaths will ever be as low as the flu.
And to be clear, I think the amount of flu deaths we allow to happen is also unacceptable. We should have random screening tests for flu during flu season, masks in crowded areas, and mandatory flu vaccines. A large portion of flu deaths could be prevented if we took relatively small steps as a society.
And to be clear, I think the amount of flu deaths we allow to happen is also unacceptable. We should have random screening tests for flu during flu season, masks in crowded areas, and mandatory flu vaccines. A large portion of flu deaths could be prevented if we took relatively small steps as a society.
Sure, that sounds reasonable. What's not reasonable is IMO lockdowns for diseases that we have no chance of eradicating anymore. Everything else should be utilized.
I think it depends on how wide the lockdown and how high the spread. I would absolutely want a lockdown of my whole city if 20% of my city currently actively had the flu. If the coworker who sits next to me tests positive for flu, I should be home for a few days to make sure I don’t have it. And importantly, I should not have a choice in that. Those rules go more severely for covid.
Yes. They didn't though, whether we like it or not. Material conditions changed, Covid is here to stay unfortunately.
Also tbh it was unreasonable to expect from the whole world to contain Covid given the state of development of the world, especially the Global South.
The West has absolutely no excuse, however most African nations didn't even stand a chance in the first place given their position.
maybe the people should stop being wrong
oh no lockdowns how terrible!!!!
Yes, it is kinda terrible. There are people with mental health issues that don't tolerate being locked down well, there are people with jobs that depend on free movement (delivery jobs etc), there are people requiring regular medical attention and care that lockdowns make way harder to obtain.
Stop pretending that the only people against lockdowns are young extroverted people that want to party or whatever.
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Because unlike western countries which tell protesting citizens to stuff it using riot police, the CPC sees the demands for easing restrictions as a legitimate form of democratic praxis that they have to respect. Xi himself has an old quote basically saying that, if the people of China want something that the higher ups in the CPC know is a bad idea, then it's their job to give it to them anyway because to do otherwise would be to stop being the people's party.
This might be damning with faint praise, but China has a better vaccination rate than the US.
Why haven’t they vaccinated everyone by now?
1.4 billion people. Also China did export a ton of Covid medication, not seldom to countries of the "global south". With deals that were better for the receiving countries than some that were offered by the West.
No good deed goes unpunished. That said, they could've done more in terms of boosters, but they did keep the vast majority of their productive capacities up. This is quite impressive.
I do agree with others though, that the Covid strains with shorter incubation period on one hand and more ability to infect before the viral load is high enough to be picked up on tests made the strategy more costly and less effective (but still much more effective than in the west). Lets also remember that the amount of cases in China are low and they learned a lot in how to deal with people that are infected and have heavy symptoms. The percentage of people in hospitals dying dropped a lot and that also changes the situation somewhat.
What others did point out too is that they did vaccinate and if you look at risk groups or people with lower income they don't have to shy away from comparisons with precarious people even in some OECD countries.
wumaos
50 centers
General anti-CPC sentiment
I might as well be browsing :reddit-logo:
Oh yeah it's a boo post for sure and that's what makes it so fun to deliver. What I said is true and this reopening is the turning point. China will not "implode" but also will not overtake the United States economically for decades if ever. The extended lockdown didn't help but won't do nearly as much damage long term as what the depression of 23 is going to do to the entire planet. Which China is now scrambling to prepare for with this reopening which will cost a lot of lives to get their production kick started again.
It's a joy to watch the next generation realize they got bamboozled just like I did once. Go communism with Chinese characteristics woohoo! If they try harder I'm sure they'll show us real good.
It’s a joy to watch the next generation realize they got bamboozled just like I did once.
:brainworms:
China will achieve socialism by 2050, and at that point fully 1/5th of the world's population will be living in the new high water mark of human achievement and freedom. At about that time, the western labor aristocracy will be fully proletarianized, and aside from the top strata of their society Europe and the Anglosphere will be experiencing precisely the conditions of exploitation that they have benefited from hoisting upon most of the rest of the world for hundreds of years.
I guess we'll find out, it's always good to have something to look forward to
I mean I’m getting anarchist vibes from your comment but you said you got bamboozled by China before? I just don’t know what your solution to covid is.
There isn't one besides just taking a beating and hoping they come up with a better vaccine.
Go watch Rising Sun from 1993 and then take a look at Japan's current economy. Getting caught up in the growth hoopla of industrializing Asian nations assuming they will grow forever at the same high rate as when they were picking up the low hanging fruit then watching them slowly plateau out into blah economies has been a thing for a while.
Marx's theory of the falling rate of profit applies to good communists as well unfortunately.
Yeah sitting there in stasis forever is definitely a strategy. If the CCP's prolonged existence wins us concessions I'll be far from mad. I'm just not seeing any kind of utopia worth lauding unless they somehow convince the rest of the planet to do the same. Which it will, eventually but I probably won't be around to see it.
In the end I think praising or envying China is just taking the exit too early when humanity has much further to go yet. State of ascendancy for decades and all that yes until just around right about now. Give it a few years and tell me how they look then, probably not much better or worse than anyone else. From here on out it's just empty arguing on who thinks what will happen so I really am stopping here.
The move to relax covid restrictions is shrouded in western propaganda. Say if it is a disaster, people are getting horribly sick at alarming rates.... China has the ability to just resume restrictions. The framing weve been getting is "china will now all die because they turned on the covid switch and it can never be turned off"
Yeah I get it, you think parabola of progress keeps going up and this is just a short waffle, and I think parabola of progress flattening out and this is the inflection point. Lots of progress yes! Nothing lasts forever. Who's right? Future will tell! Bye bye.
Do you expect people to take you seriously? You're posting on the same site I am how big can the difference be
i'm not the one kicking up a bunch of arguments and then acting like a childish redditor about them :shrug-outta-hecks:
Yeah but you're the one on here showing up to talk to the one who did that a day later as if you're timely or he's interested so again I'd say the leap is not a big one
We already determined nobody's taking me seriously what do I have left to prove
All of you sucks and your cynical ze/hir tag. Stop being a douche and alienating yourself from the few people on this earth who want good things to happen.
Good things are beyond the geographic and ideological boundaries we currently know
Except it already has? If you look at non-financialized GDP, China outstripped the U.S. back in 2017 and has only gotten larger, with better manufacturing capabilities and shipping industry, COVID policies or no. They just aren't going to seek a nuclear or any war exchange because why stop and change things when you are already winning? The biggest concern for them atm is making deals with third world countries to offload excess construction bids as their local economic demands slows and facilitate resource extraction, which they are still committing to a far more ethical game plan than any other world power (which is why they remain popular most in under-developed countries), and making sure the U.S. doesn't interfere militarily to disrupt those processes or make it prohibitively expensive. Perhaps it will come to a head eventually, but if it does, the U.S. is far more vulnerable than it appears because it has been cost-cutting labor and down on recruitment for the last three decades. The tech is there but there is no one to man it.
I get that dooming is fun, but seriously, have some actual perspective.
Wumao Dang, they got 50 Chinese cents for every pro-government post on Weibo back in the day.
Eh, China gives me a lot of hope, not so much because of how it is now, but because of where it seems likely to continue going in the future.
As to opening up. I think the idea seems worse to USians because we had no lockdowns, no contact tracing, no nothing for the most part. A big chunk of the country was wide open after a couple of months. My understanding, is that in China they are loosening protocols as opposed to completely eliminating them. The recent outbreak they had nationwide was less then basically every outbreak in the major US city i used to live in.
I think the impossibility if maintaining Zero Covid is mostly due the horrific response of the rest of the world. Zero Covid would work if there was a possibility if covid ending, but the US has insured it will. So i don't view this as a rude awakening.
No, they eliminated them. No more travel restrictions, no more health codes. Basically covid is running rampant and everyone is getting sick now. I heard 50% of Wuhan has it at this very moment.
Why haven’t they vaccinated everyone by now?
People didn't want to and it wasn't mandatory nation wide, maybe just one province I think.
The new variant was making outbreaks into tens of thousands of cases instead of hundreds. Probably not possible to stop that. :sadness:
