Shanghai Disney shuts: Visitors unable to leave without negative Covid test

That's why I wonder what China is trying to achieve here. Are they trying to get rid of any foreign dependence under the pretext of health concerns? Turkey's Erdogan did something like that with their stock exchange, i.e. pushing out foreign capital let Erdogan do economically ridiculous things without having international pushback.

The divestment of China has more reasons than just COVID:

- Wages in China have risen to a point where other countries have an advantage because unchecked capitalism always optimizes for "inefficiency", and labor costs are an immense factor for these extremely large operations

- Western sanctions against China have increased, to a point where Western customers cannot be sure they are not the next ones caught in the crossfire

- China itself has drifted away from their weird "communism plus capitalism with some personal liberty" hybrid under Xi Jinping, who has pretty much cleansed the party of everyone not lined up with his ideology over the last years, additionally large investors have been penalized by the Party in various degrees (e.g. Jack Ma). Foreign investors do not like the prospect of their investment being seized at will by the Party as well, and not everyone can afford the level of influence ultra-corporations like BASF or VW have on their local governments to protect them to some degree from such actions.

- China's internal economy is collapsing as well, adding further insecurity for foreign investors

- Many are scared of the possibility of China snacking themselves off a piece or the whole of Taiwan. The US have a long-standing commitment to defend Taiwan, so it is crystal clear that any such attempt would lead to a full-blown war with all associated costs. Unfortunately, as we've seen with Putin, individual idiocy of dictators can be enough to override common sense.

> Lockdown may be a temporary solution. The long-term solution is to maintain better hygiene (masks, washing hands) and get the vaccine without turning into political drama all over Twitter.

Agreed. The problem with China's COVID policy, however, is not antivaxxers on Twitter - it is that the Chinese vaccines are absolute trash compared to Western vaccines, but Xi Jinping can't really backtrack on his decision to only use domestic vaccines because that would imply he, the half-god, has made an error in judgement.

Most likely explanation: Population/unrest control. If you can randomly shut down parts of the country for the pretend reason of a plague, you can stop unrest from rising. Do shut down small areas randomly for maximum fear and effect.

Remember the Hong Kong protests?

2 reasons.

1) Because while they bought MRNA vaccines for themselves (top CCP officials) they want their own local made vaccines to appear good. In China when you have vaccines for kids and such, people who have money pay to use western versions of the vaccines, while those who can't afford use the free local ones. This is mainly due to the issues with fake vaccines in the past.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/world/asia/china-vaccines...

2) Xi and the CCP are trying to save face, they cannot admit to the number of cases, deaths, or that zero covid is hurting the economy and failing spectacularly. They have spent 3 years trying to convince the world they were right and that they are the success story while everyone else is a failure.

Internally they have the benefit of controlling 100% of the media so they can control the narrative. But videos and such leak out of China and those can't be scrubbed, they rely on the spreading of their own propaganda on Twitter and Youtube to discredit anyone who talks negatively about China. Any video that shows a door being welded shut with people inside, or a person being put in a box, or dogs being killed in the streets, this is all "western propaganda". It sucks that the CCP giving China a bad name when majority of people there just want to live their lives and are good people.

Xi's project was Xiongan New Area and its an epic failure. Essentially his baby, is slowly being swept under the rug and pretending it doesn't exist. Since 100% of the media in China is state owned and controlled, when things fail like this they just pretend its either going well or it never happened.