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?
My guess is that they actually ran out of money and realized they didn’t have the funds to continue with the same measures with omicron’s infection rate. Local governments have been fiscally strained for more than a year, especially with the massive slowdown of the real estate sector which previously has been the bulk of local government income (long story short China doesn’t have property tax so a big way local governments have been raising capital for building/running infrastructure projects and attracting industries is selling use rights of public land to commercial and residential real estate projects. Now that the real estate sector has stalled it brings a lot of fiscal problems — on top of that you have the constant PCR testing which didn’t look like it was ever going to stop with omicron spreading). Plus the central government has been loosening its fiscal and monetary policy for a year now, but with the aggressive rates raising from the US they’ve got a pretty limited room for maneuver in terms of how much funds they can raise through debt or QE. Plus Xi got bigger plans for the next ten years — he basically wants to uproot China’s economy from real estate (“houses are to live in, not to speculate on”), and he needs a stable real estate market to achieve so big a pivot, otherwise it’s gonna cause too much of a financial crisis given how deeply leveraged and in debt the real estate companies are right now (yeah the government could technically write those debts off but China is the least mmt country on this planet).
So I think they ran out of money to do the same measures in face of a winter surge of omicron that was going to happen.
Their vaccine rate is 90% last time I heard, but most of the unvaccinated among the elderly, particularly the rural elderly. I’m not sure it’s vaccine hesitancy — I think many seniors in China just don’t have a lot going on in their lives outside their own extended families and neighborly communities (unlike say younger people using internet or having networks of friends through school or workplace). Hence it’s probably harder to reach them in a way.
Lastly, no, the paper holders didnt do shit. No one cared about them and only cia wants it to look like it’s Xi caving to some brainwormed Gucci wearing lib holding a white paper in a video on xiaohongshu