Trapped in lockdown, Shanghai residents turn to WeChat groups for food

"but the CCP lifted a billion people out of poverty!". Whilst this is the linchpin of the party's propaganda machine, it is a true statement.

I think you're missing the point about lockdowns. I will give you an interesting datapoint : this is the first time that Shanghai has come under lockdown. The majority of China did not have to go through any lockdown at all. When you lockdown earlier and for longer, paradoxically, you spend orders of magnitude less time in aggregate under lockdown. You're from the Netherlands, and I'm Canadian - we both spent much more time under lockdown than the average Chinese citizen. And their goverment isn't massively more capable than ours and is definitely capable of fucking up, it's just we chose a course of action that leads to more lockdowns and more COVID.

We do not come into contact with viral infections with a significant risk of death and that reinfect you in mere months every day. Actually, I struggle to think of any other virus with these.

> But it won't be a week or two of lockdown. The Netherlands had a major lockdown this christmas for Omikron, they took it too seriously as they wanted to wait for confirmation it was not going to overload the health system. After they lifted things, it came right up (though didn't overload the health system, as per experience from other countries).

It will be a week or two. The way the Netherlands locked down is ineffective, because they waited way too long. If you wait untill the health system is on the verge of collapsing every time, you will paradoxically have many more lockdowns.

If you lockdown cities, or even neighborhoods, as early as there are a few cases, the majority of the country will never even be locked down.

> With the contagiousness at the high level of Omikron, a lockdown will only be effective for its duration. We'll be in a lockdown nightmare.

That's simply not true. You get that impression because me and you both lived through very poorly designed lockdowns from the very beginning of the pandemic, which all ended up the same way. Omicron presents a more arduous version of the same problem - if you lockdown too late, you have to lockdown longer. If you lockdown too short, you will have to lockdown again. The difference with Omicron is that lockdowns have to be engaged earlier, that's all.

> they are too much to be repressed

As someone who very much supports individual rights and self-determinism... I think you're drastically underestimating the power and scope of the Chinese state's ability to "repress".

Given the choice between losing power and executing literally everyone in the city of Shanghai, I'm not at all confident that the CCP would choose the former. More realistically, one or two very visible examples of rebellion being dealt with very harshly would almost certainly be enough to quell any potential uprising in China.

I've worked with several people from China, and a handful from Shanghai itself. I've had extensive political discussions with a few of them who became my good friends, and based on that my perception is that the Chinese people as a whole are significantly different culturally from Americans or Europeans. By and large they seem to default to believing that those in power are acting in the interests of the community, that they are party to things that inform their decisions, that the people are powerless to stop those in power, and that even if that weren't the case... another group would rise to power anyhow that would be just as bad.

To put it another way - my cultural heritage is one of "Liberty or Death!". Theirs is "The proud nail draws the hammer".

Perhaps, but I talk more in strategical terms than tactical ones: surely China gov. can order a general massacre of Shanghai peoples and that might succeed in tactical terms. But they can't hide it. They have power but they have rivals and people, so the news of such event will travel far more than the Tian'anmen massacre. The bigger the initially repressed unrest the faster and spread the news will be. At that point dictators are already dead: they have lost their people faith and no new narrative to calm them can be easily forged.

That's why if the initial movement is large/fast/resolute/extreme enough at start they can materially repress them but they can't strategically do so, in that case their best option is a compromise and some head to blame, that might not solve the issue but make time, time usable to forge other truth and divert/disperse the rioters by their own choice.

The issue with "Liberty or Death!" is more in "generic people vs emerging new leaders", generic people might accept big sacrifice for big promises but for a short period of time. You can't tell a crowd "we will fight and loose for a decade, BUT thanks to that struggle in the next decade we will win" almost no one will follow. So you have to deceive the crowd pushing some "expendable" to the extreme to gain a position useful for others. That's why IMVHO no "revolution" was really done from the people but from the middle class witch use the mass of peoples to revolt against the élite in power. That's why I say that Marxist are not much more "for the people" than the nazi, they promise power but in Marxism power never goes down to the people while the vast and divided middle class is erased. That's the mechanism that kill the Mensheviks making the Bolsheviks rise. That's why the SA was killed by SS in nazi German etc. BUT there are situation when a flock stampede, in those moments no one can stop the riot. Some cowboys might mass shooting cows for our life but if cows are enough they'll run out of ammo before the end of the stampede, mass hunger is a thing that makes such event...

Another way to think about it: the average person has no context for oppressive/non-oppressive, at least relative to our standards. US children have freedom hammered into their heads the second they start in school. This obviously isn't really a thing there.

Rather, historically when things go off the rails in china, they go off the rails hard and they have a very long history of that to look back on, an order of magnitude more than the US's. From what I've seen, that's what's taught to them in history class. Conformism/capitulation => stability and safety whereas in the US conformism/capitulation => being a British subject/slave/native on a reservation/interned Japanese/and on and on.

Tl;dr: the differences in historical context are vast between the two countries