I lived in Shanghai for 5 years and have many friends and business connects there. I would never, ever want to be seen as carrying water for the CCP--the day they abolished term limits for Xi was the day I started planning my exit.
I've been following this situation for almost a month now and in one sense it's every bit as bad as it looks. An inadequate and inhumane policy being enforced by an out of touch, or perhaps even uncaring, government. Especially galling to me as an American who's seen what we went through in Covid with my country is the claim of "zero Covid deaths" in Shanghai during the last few months.
That said, as far as I can tell it's a very unevenly distributed disaster. If you have Covid and got sent to a quarantine center, yeah you're probably SOL. But on the other hand, my friends who are quarantined and didn't get it are just bored to death, drinking and gaming and working from home, just treading water until this "ends."
Shanghai is nothing if not a big city. 26 million is a LOT of people. Your experience of life, even in the best of times, varies greatly by neighborhood, industry, income level, and more. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, definitely don't buy the CCP propaganda, but equally don't take the (truly grim) videos all over social media as representative of the whole situation. This crisis is unfolding on a bell curve. That's a lesson anyone, in any country, can take away from this, to better consider and critique their own government's response to future disasters.
> But on the other hand, my friends who are quarantined and didn't get it are just bored to death, drinking and gaming and working from home, just treading water until this "ends."
From what I've been hearing, the big problem for lots of people stuck under lockdown is simply getting groceries/food deliveries at all. The government isn't letting delivery people work, and the military response to distributing food isn't filling the gap (maybe if you are lucky, you'll get some pork and bai cai form the gov at your door). So that would suck, if true. I also rather guess experiences differ between richer districts and poorer ones.
> That said, as far as I can tell it's a very unevenly distributed disaster.
I think this is one of the big issues with covid overall, especially how we discuss it over the internet. It is very possible that there is a person where everyone they know around them got covid as well as another person may only know one or two people who got it and only had mild cases. There's an extremely disproportionate distribution when it comes to things like viruses but I think our natural tendency is to believe things are more uniform.
Also, I am highly confused by China's zero coivd policy. Just by the nature of how viruses work, that seems impossible. Even zero deaths. I understand the want to minimize (especially in an area with high population densities), but zero is an impossible number.
Thank you for your take on this. My reaction is that you are of course right that this is not affecting everyone equally. Certainly the CCP is not starving out all 26 million people in Shanghai. But I think this is the exact fear most of us have of authoritarian governments, that minority voices get silenced or worse and that justice is not equally distributed.
> Your experience of life, even in the best of times, varies greatly by neighborhood, industry, income level, and more. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, definitely don't buy the CCP propaganda, but equally don't take the (truly grim) videos all over social media as representative of the whole situation. This crisis is unfolding on a bell curve.
In general, isn't this true everywhere? For example, drive by shootings don't happen everywhere. Or even with Covid in the USA, the non-white underserved had more deaths and more hospitalizations. This was mentioned, by always in passing.
I'm not sure about Western governments, but at least in the USA, the media is very good at using emotions to sway perceptions of the actual underlying data / statistics.
Many calamities are unevenly distributed, so I would suppose Covid and lockdowns are just the same. (Even natural disasters- some homes are flooded, some homes are not…) the problem is in aggregate how much loss and suffering is acceptable. Especially in a case like this, arguably man made.
Shanghai has always been a mixed pot. I have seen people selling live turtles for food at the door of a skyscraper in the business quarter.
Gave off major cyberpunk/Blade Runner vibes.
The issue is the indefinite timeline and the shutdown of grocery deliveries. You can get food now via wechat more easily, but it's been a huge amount of uncertainty the past 14 days.
According to this BBC video report, more Shanghai residents are venting their anger and frustration by posting videos on social media. Such videos are normally censored by China's 'Great Firewall'.
The BBC website states: "...the sheer volume of the clips has made it difficult for censors to keep up. Many are also being passed around in private group chats, which has made them harder to catch."
I know this is a nit, but that is a misrepresentation of what the Great Firewall is (to keep things out of the country) vs. the internal censorship regime that domestic internet services are supposed to provide. In this case, it is the internal censorship apparatus that cannot keep up, not the great firewall failing from letting information in or out of the country.
Can anyone explain how an automated filtering/censorship system can't "keep up" with this, technically? Even with a tiny delay, it seems to me the problematic videos or posts could be taken down easily. It's not like every Chinese citizen is posting terabytes of data daily...
...the Chinese seem to ignore the global play here: as Covid is endemic in the rest of the world and variants will keep emerging just like they do for common cold (it's basically just a new addition to the bundle of viruses that give the "common cold", but unfortunately with higher mortality since humans haven't been exposed to it), they'll have to isolate themselves from the rest of the world FOREVER! How about all the people who need to travel internationally often?
Let's stop this nonsense and come back to thinking solutions and measures in the "open international borders" context we enjoyed before. A new minor virus shouldn't make us change our ways!
We must protect human lives at all costs, even at the cost of human lives.
Jokes aside, what we really want to know is that - what are the human lives lost lockdown v.s. no lockdown, maybe also factor in the possible economic downturns. The government did a not-so-good job convincing people that doing a lockdown is indeed better than the alternative - "We ran the numbers, it seems like doing a lockdown at this stage is beneficial" sounds better than doing a lockdown just for the sake of it.
And: limiting information to people doesn't help boost confidence.
Because it's been working, both from an economics and health perspective, and the locals seem to be in support of it, except for in Shanghai
Here's a well known person in Shenzhen discussing it. Obviously be aware that any source in China can't speak too directly against the government, especially the central government. However I feel rather confident that this thread is a pretty good representation of her actual opinion having read a lot of her tweets on the topic.
Authoritarian regimes benefit from cultivating fear of death and disease in their people, it makes them more manageable... Similar to not allowing regular people to own guns etc. etc.
Once you become willing to die, to let others die if needed, and to kill, for freedom or other purposes, you're no longer an "easy to manage sheep" ;)
I think at this point it's sheer stubbornness and to save face for the administration.
I personally believe that Zero Covid was a great strategy right out the gate but it's no longer appropriate since this is clearly a global pandemic... but maybe Xi is afraid of looking wrong in retrospect.
I find it fairly amusing that people who believe in the "lableak-hypothesis" seem to usually also be in the camp of people who don't think the virus is too bad. If the virus really came from the lab, then presumably the Chinese know more about its (long term) effects than the rest of us. And looking at the fact, that they have this zero COVID policy, that should absolutely terrify anyone believing in the aforementioned hypothesis.
The standard rumor is that the Chinese vaccines do not work as well, either at slowing down the spread or at reducing the severity of the effects, as western vaccines (whether Pfizer, Moderna, J&J, or Oxford/AstraZeneca). So, the feared effects of having most people get it are worse than here.
Also, in the US, the CDC estimates that for every 10 people who get it who were confirmed/counted, there were 32 who were not counted. Since many states have had >20% of their population confirmed, that suggests that >85% of many US states have already had Covid-19, vaccinated or not. The ratio of "immunologically naive" in China is probably much higher.
Not saying that makes it a sensible or even moral policy, just that's the most likely scenario as to why they are doing it.
- lower natural immunity rates because zero COVID had been successful
- lower vaccination rates
- vaccine drives prioritized the young and healthy (the idea being they can handle side effects so this seemed like the best way to achieve herd immunity)
- the newer strains are super infectious and would overwhelm the healthcare system
They don't have a good way out now. They should have used the time they got last year to buy MRNA vaccines, but they did not.
The central government has likely given up on zero COVID but are sticking with those policies for now to "flatten the curve" while this wave takes its course.
I've been trying to understand CCP's reasoning for these draconian measures. Even if you haven't seen the Twitter videos showing bags of live cats and dogs being being beaten to death with sticks, the children separated from their parents, the alarms on the doors, the economic numbers, you can tell that this does't make any sense.
Some theories:
- Strip people of absolutely all rights, make them feel helpless. Later gradually restore some rights so that they feel like they've gained freedoms, but not all.
- Keep very low COVID numbers on paper, say the west is unsafe and ban travel, preventing the outflow of money from China to the west.
- Crush the economy and nationalize private companies even further than they are now. Perhaps even nationalize foreign companies that operate in China (see Russia).
The problem is that the reasoning at the top isn't anything near what the drones implementing said policy at the bottom are doing.
There's like a hundred layers of people between Xi and the dudes beating dogs. It's like a game of telephone where some medical experts speculate about animal reservoirs, and somebody in the mayor's circle hears about it, and next thing you know they're giving covid tests to chickens. It's the same incentive problem as the Great Leap Forward in the 50s, failure is punished, so if there's even a hint that letting some cats go free will come back to bite you, why take that risk?
In some ways China's decision making is actually quite decentralized, in that the sheer mass of bureaucrats making decisions and carrying out actions is incredibly high. The center passes out a generalized order like "lockdown and limit covid spread" and leaves the implementation details to the next level. By the time it gets to your apartment community you're stuck with some uncle/auntie who spent their school years heckling teachers during the cultural revolution trying to make public health decisions.
TL;DR when China does something stupid and illogical it's not always because there's a nefarious plan. The system is just broken and causing suffering for no reason.
The urge to exert authority that the author speaks of in the beginning is disturbing. Having seen how they do it in China first hand, I am horrified to imagine the fate that awaits Taiwan if China ever takes over. The pent up (falsely based, imho) anger amongst PRC people toward Taiwan and its friendly people is difficult to overstate. If this (Shanghai) is how they treat their own locals, imagine how they will treat estranged “citizens” who have dared to think they have lived under a better system for all these years.
While China's approach is heavy-handed it also has saved a lot of lives, even assuming some fudging of the data their death rate is the lowest of any large country. Countries like Japan and Thailand have managed to avert nearly as much death as China with very different approaches so there's a good argument that there are good alternatives. Countries like Sweden, England, or especially the US have done so much worse that they probably shouldn't be trying to give anyone any advice on the topic.
The only real measure of success is "customer satisfaction", and I'd dare to say that the majority of the people of Sweden, UK and US are quite satisfied and some would have preferred even less measures to be taken...
The CCP is very well known for reporting numbers that make them look good, independent figures don't exist because the CCP wants to control their image. So it's pretty much impossible to trust any statistics on this stuff in China.
Covid is endemic now and it was probably obvious from close to the beginning that it would become so. Even if vaccines curb spread a bit and reduce deaths a lot, vaccinated people still get and transmit it.
We should focus on iterating vaccines faster, probably making cocktail-mRNA-vaccines with multiple strains and formulas updated every ~6 months, and helping all countries get access to the best vaccines, like open-source mRNA-vaccine tech and all the others that showed promising (compensate patent holders a couple billions etc.)
We're so incredibly dogmatic in our thinking with this, just like it took >1 year to figure out that most of the time ventilators don't help (those that can be helped can so with only oxygen), we still have this lingering belief that COVID isn't here to stay.
We should accept death as part of life and just iterate faster on things...
One of my family member is living Shanghai who has not taken any vaccine yet due to contraindications. Not to mention that there are millions of elders living in China who are not suitable for taking vaccine.
I am very concerned if an authoritative gov aiming for "zero-covid" would push and mandate every citizen to be vaccinated. But I saw all these comments bashing gov on "why lockdown", "why not just take vax", "why not herd immunity" without deeping into questions - which is not much different from "Let them eat cake”.
Why? What is CCP covering up? Supply chain crisis? Financial crisis because of sanctions of Russia? What benefits could their totalitarian regime gets from this inhuman policy?
Given the other stories posted on this site (universally claiming lockdowns were pointless and no medical reason for them), makes me question whether these stories are representative.
Plenty of studies showed lockdowns worked. The long term impact on COVID in vaccinated vs unvaccinated populations has eroded how deadly people perceive COVID. Estimates vary especially around secondary effects like hospitals being overcrowded, but cumulatively lockdowns in the US saved in the low millions of lives.
“The study found that from March through August 2020, implementing widespread lockdowns and other mitigation in the United States potentially saved more lives (866,350 to 1,711,150) than the number of lives potentially lost (57,922 to 245,055) that were attributable to the economic downturn.”
However, don’t take my or anyone else’s word for it. The research is publicly available if you go looking.
[+] [-] jaqalopes|3 years ago|reply
I've been following this situation for almost a month now and in one sense it's every bit as bad as it looks. An inadequate and inhumane policy being enforced by an out of touch, or perhaps even uncaring, government. Especially galling to me as an American who's seen what we went through in Covid with my country is the claim of "zero Covid deaths" in Shanghai during the last few months.
That said, as far as I can tell it's a very unevenly distributed disaster. If you have Covid and got sent to a quarantine center, yeah you're probably SOL. But on the other hand, my friends who are quarantined and didn't get it are just bored to death, drinking and gaming and working from home, just treading water until this "ends."
Shanghai is nothing if not a big city. 26 million is a LOT of people. Your experience of life, even in the best of times, varies greatly by neighborhood, industry, income level, and more. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, definitely don't buy the CCP propaganda, but equally don't take the (truly grim) videos all over social media as representative of the whole situation. This crisis is unfolding on a bell curve. That's a lesson anyone, in any country, can take away from this, to better consider and critique their own government's response to future disasters.
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|3 years ago|reply
From what I've been hearing, the big problem for lots of people stuck under lockdown is simply getting groceries/food deliveries at all. The government isn't letting delivery people work, and the military response to distributing food isn't filling the gap (maybe if you are lucky, you'll get some pork and bai cai form the gov at your door). So that would suck, if true. I also rather guess experiences differ between richer districts and poorer ones.
[+] [-] godelski|3 years ago|reply
I think this is one of the big issues with covid overall, especially how we discuss it over the internet. It is very possible that there is a person where everyone they know around them got covid as well as another person may only know one or two people who got it and only had mild cases. There's an extremely disproportionate distribution when it comes to things like viruses but I think our natural tendency is to believe things are more uniform.
Also, I am highly confused by China's zero coivd policy. Just by the nature of how viruses work, that seems impossible. Even zero deaths. I understand the want to minimize (especially in an area with high population densities), but zero is an impossible number.
[+] [-] dougmwne|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|3 years ago|reply
In general, isn't this true everywhere? For example, drive by shootings don't happen everywhere. Or even with Covid in the USA, the non-white underserved had more deaths and more hospitalizations. This was mentioned, by always in passing.
I'm not sure about Western governments, but at least in the USA, the media is very good at using emotions to sway perceptions of the actual underlying data / statistics.
[+] [-] SamoyedFurFluff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dqpb|3 years ago|reply
The inevitable result of centralized control.
[+] [-] ccbccccbbcccbb|3 years ago|reply
Perhaps even actively malicious, with "perhaps" converging to "definitely".
[+] [-] ricardobayes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user_named|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nradov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] open-source-ux|3 years ago|reply
The BBC website states: "...the sheer volume of the clips has made it difficult for censors to keep up. Many are also being passed around in private group chats, which has made them harder to catch."
Shanghai lockdown: How angry netizens test China's 'Great Firewall' (video): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-china-61102809
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_omegist|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] memish|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] catchclose8919|3 years ago|reply
Let's stop this nonsense and come back to thinking solutions and measures in the "open international borders" context we enjoyed before. A new minor virus shouldn't make us change our ways!
[+] [-] gyf304|3 years ago|reply
Jokes aside, what we really want to know is that - what are the human lives lost lockdown v.s. no lockdown, maybe also factor in the possible economic downturns. The government did a not-so-good job convincing people that doing a lockdown is indeed better than the alternative - "We ran the numbers, it seems like doing a lockdown at this stage is beneficial" sounds better than doing a lockdown just for the sake of it.
And: limiting information to people doesn't help boost confidence.
[+] [-] memish|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dougmwne|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gpm|3 years ago|reply
Here's a well known person in Shenzhen discussing it. Obviously be aware that any source in China can't speak too directly against the government, especially the central government. However I feel rather confident that this thread is a pretty good representation of her actual opinion having read a lot of her tweets on the topic.
https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/151481834568977614...
[+] [-] diebeforei485|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dictateawayyyee|3 years ago|reply
* Can't admit the original plan isn't working without appearing weak.
* Operating on information corrupted by "compounding optimism" from every level of subordinates.
* Repercussions for bad outcomes are unlikely.
[+] [-] catchclose8919|3 years ago|reply
Once you become willing to die, to let others die if needed, and to kill, for freedom or other purposes, you're no longer an "easy to manage sheep" ;)
[+] [-] munk-a|3 years ago|reply
I personally believe that Zero Covid was a great strategy right out the gate but it's no longer appropriate since this is clearly a global pandemic... but maybe Xi is afraid of looking wrong in retrospect.
[+] [-] beefman|3 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30962199
[+] [-] sva_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rossdavidh|3 years ago|reply
Also, in the US, the CDC estimates that for every 10 people who get it who were confirmed/counted, there were 32 who were not counted. Since many states have had >20% of their population confirmed, that suggests that >85% of many US states have already had Covid-19, vaccinated or not. The ratio of "immunologically naive" in China is probably much higher.
Not saying that makes it a sensible or even moral policy, just that's the most likely scenario as to why they are doing it.
[+] [-] ComradePhil|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahmedalsudani|3 years ago|reply
- lower vaccination rates
- vaccine drives prioritized the young and healthy (the idea being they can handle side effects so this seemed like the best way to achieve herd immunity)
- the newer strains are super infectious and would overwhelm the healthcare system
They don't have a good way out now. They should have used the time they got last year to buy MRNA vaccines, but they did not.
The central government has likely given up on zero COVID but are sticking with those policies for now to "flatten the curve" while this wave takes its course.
[+] [-] jacktribe|3 years ago|reply
Some theories:
- Strip people of absolutely all rights, make them feel helpless. Later gradually restore some rights so that they feel like they've gained freedoms, but not all.
- Keep very low COVID numbers on paper, say the west is unsafe and ban travel, preventing the outflow of money from China to the west.
- Crush the economy and nationalize private companies even further than they are now. Perhaps even nationalize foreign companies that operate in China (see Russia).
[+] [-] LambdaTrain|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wonnage|3 years ago|reply
There's like a hundred layers of people between Xi and the dudes beating dogs. It's like a game of telephone where some medical experts speculate about animal reservoirs, and somebody in the mayor's circle hears about it, and next thing you know they're giving covid tests to chickens. It's the same incentive problem as the Great Leap Forward in the 50s, failure is punished, so if there's even a hint that letting some cats go free will come back to bite you, why take that risk?
In some ways China's decision making is actually quite decentralized, in that the sheer mass of bureaucrats making decisions and carrying out actions is incredibly high. The center passes out a generalized order like "lockdown and limit covid spread" and leaves the implementation details to the next level. By the time it gets to your apartment community you're stuck with some uncle/auntie who spent their school years heckling teachers during the cultural revolution trying to make public health decisions.
TL;DR when China does something stupid and illogical it's not always because there's a nefarious plan. The system is just broken and causing suffering for no reason.
[+] [-] natch|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://twitter.com/search?q=realsexycyborg&src=typed_query
[+] [-] hedgehog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] catchclose8919|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dig1t|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sydthrowaway|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] catchclose8919|3 years ago|reply
We should focus on iterating vaccines faster, probably making cocktail-mRNA-vaccines with multiple strains and formulas updated every ~6 months, and helping all countries get access to the best vaccines, like open-source mRNA-vaccine tech and all the others that showed promising (compensate patent holders a couple billions etc.)
We're so incredibly dogmatic in our thinking with this, just like it took >1 year to figure out that most of the time ventilators don't help (those that can be helped can so with only oxygen), we still have this lingering belief that COVID isn't here to stay.
We should accept death as part of life and just iterate faster on things...
[+] [-] LambdaTrain|3 years ago|reply
I am very concerned if an authoritative gov aiming for "zero-covid" would push and mandate every citizen to be vaccinated. But I saw all these comments bashing gov on "why lockdown", "why not just take vax", "why not herd immunity" without deeping into questions - which is not much different from "Let them eat cake”.
[+] [-] t0bia_s|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] partido3619463|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|3 years ago|reply
“The study found that from March through August 2020, implementing widespread lockdowns and other mitigation in the United States potentially saved more lives (866,350 to 1,711,150) than the number of lives potentially lost (57,922 to 245,055) that were attributable to the economic downturn.”
However, don’t take my or anyone else’s word for it. The research is publicly available if you go looking.
[+] [-] watwut|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] TheGigaChad|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] truthwhisperer|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] rjbwork|3 years ago|reply