531–540 of 559 posts
I'd like to hear from someone in China on why the government still pursues a zero-Covid policy. Is it just face-saving at this point?
If SH did carrys out Centre Party's policy like most of other cities does, this bizzare wouldn't happen in the first place, if weepy kid always get what it want, what about the slient most? SH's fault is not CN's fault. China has no face, we just have the biggest slient most, pardon my English if you may ;)
silent majority?
Based in Shanghai since 2014, I can share some details on why it feels so unbearable to be here right now. Firstly, the totalitarian government have never been good at communicating anything except propaganda. So on one hand we're inundated with "Go Shanghai!" and how brave volunteers distribute food, on the other hand, we're completely in the dark about what's going on. Goalposts are being moved daily, rumors prolif…
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> I will strongly reconsider staying here. It’s fascinating to me how tolerant some people are. After reading your comment (very informative thanks!), I would be well past “considering”. I’d be gone (with family in toe) as soon as humanly possible.
There are other factors at play. For one, I have a Chinese wife who has elderly parents (not in Shanghai), for now they fare well, but we might need to look after them sooner or later. Another factor is that I have a few years contract in a startup I care much about, sure we could do remote, but this would be a blow to them. I will try to solve these and see if we can move to Taiwan or somewhere else relatively close…
Or is this exaggeration from the western media and actually we are very far from a full scale invasion?
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There are other factors at play. For one, I have a Chinese wife who has elderly parents (not in Shanghai), for now they fare well, but we might need to look after them sooner or later. Another factor is that I have a few years contract in a startup I care much about, sure we could do remote, but this would be a blow to them. I will try to solve these and see if we can move to Taiwan or somewhere else relatively close…
Honest and naïve question, wouldn't you be afraid that the mainland Chinese government goes to war to take Taiwan back? Or is this exaggeration from the western media and actually we are very far from a full scale invasion?
I'm not a strategist, and trying to stay as far as I can from politics, but unlike Russian invasion of Ukraine, where other countries utter strongly-worded sentences while buying as much Russian gas as they can get a hold of, Chinese invasion of Taiwan will not end well for China. Taiwan plays a vital role in semis, electronics, communication equipment. Nobody is particularly dependent on anything unique to China, on the contrary, China imports a lot of resources and food. Once this is cut off or made prohibitively expensive, China's economy will tank and the following social unrest will be unacceptable for the CCP.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS#Containment > The World Health Organization declared severe acute respiratory syndrome contained on 5 July 2003. The containment was achieved through successful public health measures. In the following months, four SARS cases were reported in China between December 2003 and January 2004. > While SARS-CoV-1 probably persists as a potential zoonotic threat in its original animal reser…
This line is expected to become endemic. China may have to stomach the current variants. It's not that relevant, but the coronavirus family is always going to reappear as it stands. I hope they recognize when it's no longer the same virus or same threat. Scientists proved that even in the perfect quarantine of Antarctica, coronavirus can reappear after months. This and many other lessons don't seem to get much attent…
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> Like, we can say it's because of covid, but something seems a miss to me. I'm wondering about this as well - it's hard to imagine that this is not part of greater strategy so either all of this is intentional to increase pressure within Chinese society to the point of boiling for some reason - maybe to disrupt markets and world economy even more? Alternatively Omicron indeed surprised them and now when Russia is at…
My pet suspicion is that it is somehow related to the Ukraine disaster or crash of the housing bubble, though a mere distraction seems like a weak reason.
Also there's at least a lot of talk of divestment in China, what impact this might this have had, has it even happened at all ?
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It's true in terms of organisation and discipline I never believed they would be as successful as they were, but they did it. My wife's home town was locked down for a while due to having I think 8 cases of Delta, but after about 2 months the city was open again. The problem is they have bet the whole farm on that strategy, and Omicron is infectious enough that lockdowns even of the kind China has used so far may not…
>This has had the effect that a lot of Chinese people don't trust Covid vaccines, including Sinovac. As a result uptake has been abysmal. This does not seem to be supported by the data. China's vaccination rate is 88.95%, the 7th highest in the world. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/vaccines/international
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of course, but the hungrier you get the less you have to loose so you act with far more fierce effort accepting more and more extreme consequences. Honestly food issues will be spread all around the world in the near future: we are too much for the food quantity we can produce, it's just a matter of time. Probably the key most élites count on are a divided population between a mass of young kept a bit nourished and w…
> of course, but the hungrier you get the less you have to loose so you act with far more fierce effort accepting more and more extreme consequences. Definitely true. I just hope people aren't so tolerant of hardship that they miss their window of opportunity. With respect to food shortages in the rest of the world, I'm not too concerned. Many items are missing from grocery stores in my corner of the world, but basic…
To push such big change in such short period of time just pushing fossils prices does not suffice. To steer whole populations you need a hyper big sense of catastrophe, no matter much if real or invented/enlarged. Try just reading Klaus Schwab's "The Great Narrative" and Mark Carney's Value(s): Building a Better World for All. Of course they do not directly say they want a poor population but it's clearly implied.
Lockdowns themselves can be read as a way to forcibly reduce consumption while keeping people under fear so obedient to a certain extent. Especially since they sanitary effect is evidently proved to be essentially null... If resources are scarce States need to isolate themselves from peers to preserve their scarce reserves and grab others states resources, so wars are needed but against enemies that can't defend themselves to reduce natural resources usage keeping number of deaths high. Remember that after the French revolution we are effectively in an era where economy dominate on politics, so decisions are made on purely economic considerations.
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That's a matter of scale: all revolts you've cited was made by few and often repressed even with exterior help. A hunger revolt is at nearly-country scale, no one can stop it. And China have already an extreme food issue because to develop industries they have to sacrifice food production and there are not much fertile lands around so they need to mass import foods from distant places, so general hunger unrest are ve…
The ones I mentioned most certainly were not small scale. The taiping rebellion alone eventually had hundreds of thousands of troops by time time it essentially turned into a civil war. As for hunger, the last mass famine in China was during the Great Leap Forward. Let's also not forget the effects of the Cultural Revolution. I think you vastly overestimate the extent to which governments and populace form an "us ver…
As you rightly say society is complex, so we can't just simplify to us vs the enemy, not matter what, but humans needs are not that complex and human psychology is still essentially the same in millennia. The ancient "panem et circense" is still valid, just to cite one famous governing model still used today. The social ignorance and complexity is used by those who rule to grab and stay in power, but again with not really different principles than 1000 years ago, just means/tech/scale is changed.
Any dictatorship to remain in power need to satisfy enough his subjects and/or find enough justifications for those who aren't satisfied, that's why most dictatorship grow fast, giving back an apparent good/fast evolution then when resources start to be scarce they push toward war/blame opponent etc and again that's might last or not but in the end they fall. A new society rise on the ruins of the precedent. We are probably around one of those changes were wars can't work anymore alone. At those points populations rise, no matter how much united, they rise ad a big destructive force no one can resist.