China is taking a Great Leap Backwards. Chen Chen/VCG/Getty Images
Shanghai is finally opening up after three months of coercive detention, although China has effectively been in a state of lockdown for two years. Horror stories abound: of employees who found their office doors chained shut during the working day, and were condemned to stay there for months, scrabbling around for food, like a scene from Lord of the Flies; of a woman who was walking a neighbour’s dog being snatched and taken to a quarantine hotel, where she was held in one room, with the dog, for ten weeks. Almost every day, PPE-clad health workers would barge into people’s homes, drench personal belongings in disinfectant and remove family members to detention camps.
The seemingly irrational, self-defeating Zero Covid strategies in recent months have destabilised economic growth, at huge and cruel expense to the Chinese people. Shanghai’s economy has lost around £135 billion due to the latest lockdown, with huge numbers of job losses and business failures. Yet perhaps more importantly, Zero Covid has managed to germinate the seeds of dissent that the Chinese Communist Party has spent decades carefully suppressing.
President Xi Jinping is keen to avoid any association with the grim realities of the Mao era, particularly as he tries to consolidate his position as the Great Helmsman of China for a historic third term. Yet we can’t ignore the obvious parallels between Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and the current Zero Covid era.
It is 60 years since the end of the grotesque Great Leap Forward experiment (1958-1962), when Mao attempted to rapidly industrialise China’s economy at huge human cost. Every village set up mini furnaces to reach absurd steel manufacturing targets under the pretext of rivalling the West. Furniture was chopped up to feed the fires and cooking utensils smelted into worthless ingots. Meanwhile, forced land collectivisation — involving the seizure of private farms, the torture and execution of landowners, and nonsensical agricultural techniques — led to catastrophic grain shortages and widespread famine.
Ordinary people were dragooned into this mass lunacy that produced nothing but suffering. Over those terrible four years, up to 45 million Chinese people died of starvation, or were simply beaten and worked to death. It is a sordid period in Chinese history, seldom talked about openly still. Partly as a result of such wanton destruction of its own population, China became a pariah state across the world.
This national tragedy afflicted all corners of the country and, to greater or lesser extent, affected every single Chinese family. Chinese people have learned to live with the shame, horror and sometimes the guilt of what went before. “(Ni) chi le ma?” is an everyday greeting, meaning “have you eaten yet?”, with resonances of the terrible consequences of famine. The common phrase “mei banfa” means “there is no other choice” — a fateful resignation to hardship and an ultimate expression of futility among a citizenry with no meaningful democratic accountability.
But the state too has been shaped by historical experience. President Xi’s father Xi Zhongxun was purged in 1962 and demoted to a lowly position at Mao’s command. Xi himself was publicly denounced at the age of nine and sent to live in a cave in a remote region of Shaanxi Province, where he worked the land for many years. Of course, that’s not to excuse Xi’s authoritarian tendencies as the product of a dysfunctional parent or being mistreated as a child, but his instinct is to avoid inflaming memories of the bad old days. It’s odd then that, much like Mao, Xi appears to be sabotaging the Chinese economy in pursuit of ideological Zero Covid goals.
The Mao-era “Four Pests” campaign during the Great Leap Forward was targeted at the extermination of mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows. For a country striving to increase its agricultural productivity, these pests were blighting crops, eating the seeds, and destroying the stores. Peasants were compelled to stand in their villages banging pots and pans, blowing whistles, or shaking rattles in order to make so much noise that the sparrows could not rest. The birds had to stay on the wing until they died of exhaustion and fell to the ground. Over the course of the campaign, one billion sparrows were killed.
With hindsight — or perhaps a bit more forethought — the Chinese authorities might have realised that destroying the sparrows would leave fewer birds to eat other pests. The destruction of one immediate nuisance — the sparrow population — simply gave insects the opportunity to thrive. With nothing to keep the insect population in check, the number of locusts increased massively, and crop yields collapsed. Famine ensued. This farce was not a conscious act of self-destruction, but merely a set of idiotic targets set by apparatchiks ignorant of, or unconcerned by, the knock-on effects of their instructions.
Today, China has been equally ruthless in its attempt to eradicate Covid. It is chasing an impossible dream of Zero Covid but cannot back down for fear of shattering public faith in the Party’s infallibility. However, politicians are oblivious to the unintended consequences of their actions. An assault on civil liberties has been the Party’s only consistent tactic for two years, confining what they believe to be a compliant population to barracks — literally in some cases. The noise of stranded families standing at their windows, banging pots and pans to express their anger and disquiet was an ironic flashback to a failed zero-sparrow policy of 60 years ago. As before, pests are not tolerated.
Locking innocent people up certainly looks like Chairman Mao-style totalitarianism. In Shanghai, with a population of 25 million, the authorities confined almost every single person in their apartment for three months. The state’s mouthpiece, China Daily, excused the draconian lockdown measures by pointing out that “China could face 1.55 million COVID-19 deaths if it abandons the current dynamic zero-COVID policy”. As far as the Party is concerned, the revival of the memory of millions of deaths during the Great Leap Forward could not be countenanced today. As a result, China’s Covid response has been driven by an absolute insistence that rising fatality statistics must be avoided at all costs.
Official statistics should be taken with a pinch of salt, but at the moment the authorities claim that there have been fewer than 5,000 deaths in China since January 2020. (India, with a comparable population has recorded 100 times as many, for instance.) Yet how many tragedies lie behind those locked doors of residential compounds? Like starlings, people in high-rise buildings haven’t been allowed to touch the ground for months and many have surely collapsed with exhaustion.
Watching thousands of residents of Beijing or Shanghai immediately leave the city after being released from lockdown says a lot about their fear that the government can shut down their lives again. Maybe, just maybe, the Party doesn’t work in their interests. Middle-class residents have been shocked by the destruction of livelihoods in some of the most modern cities of the world. A mood of unease has flowered, posing a rare challenge to the Party’s authority. For a country that relies on harmonious social stability, this is a growing problem for the president.
Admittedly, at present, things are positive as lockdowns wind down and people flock to the streets to drink and chat, but also to complain, to criticise and to conspire. The repopulation of the streets shows that life is being restored in Chinese cities as the people start to rebuild, but the sense of resentment and anger is not something that can be dispelled easily. Already we have seen student protests at a number of Beijing universities. Will Xi avoid the temptation to clamp down on dissenting voices, critical opinions, and seething anger in the hope that the population go back to their everyday lives and try to forget what has just happened?
Xi will do whatever it takes to maintain his authority. But rather than emulate Mao’s crackdown on dissent during the Great Leap Forward, it is likely he’ll simply ramp up the state machine of high-tech surveillance. It won’t look as brutal as the vicious state control of the past although it is destined to be even more insidious. Whether people accept it, after what they have been through, is an open question.
Austin Williams is the author of “China’s Urban Revolution” and director of the Future Cities Project. He is course leader at Kingston School of Art.
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SubscribeThank you for the interesting read.
You ask whether the Chinese will forget. The question I would pose is whether *we* will forget. What happened in China inspired the west and we went though only a slightly watered down approach. The dogma we were asked to believe was the same, though (Suppress, suppress!! That is the ONLY way – who can forget the Sturgeon-Sridhar duo, the epitome of toxic femininity) along with the rhetoric employed (you, granny killer! If we don’t do this, countless will die). Who can forget the drone chasing and the curtain twitchers? Who would have EVER thought we would allow anything like that to happen? Are we *really* in a position to criticize China?
(Btw, what are their Covid rates these days?)
“Who would have EVER thought we would allow anything like that to happen?”.
Precisely, the most appalling outbreak out national hysteria and panic I have ever witnessed, in short a national disgrace, and for what? An average age of a UK Covid death at 83, whilst Life Expectancy is 81!
Fortunately China’s record on virtually everything is far worse, but frankly that is of little comfort, given ‘our’ own truly pathetic performance.
Without disagreeing with your central point, your life expectancy analysis is flawed. The life expectancy of a UK male who has reached the age of 83 is 90 and for a female 91. So Covid did significantly shorten the lives of its typical victims.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandlifeexpectancies/articles/lifeexpectancycalculator/2019-06-07
I agree those are the figures but in my personal experience most octogenarians are, to use a technical term, fairly knackered! Unstable, deaf, doddery, and in some cases incoherent and incontinent. I know that there are some ageless ‘supermen & women’ out there, but very few. Most of the ‘Octo Cohort’ need care of some sort.
Also, and I trust I’m being too brutal about this, why having reached 83 does does one think one ‘deserves’ another 7 years? I don’t, having plundered the planet on an industrial scale for all those years, I am quite content to ‘roll over’, particularly if it gives the ‘young’ a better chance. I hope you feel the same, and if not, why not?
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Tut tut, what a vulgar fellow you are.Perhaps you should return to Twitter or whatever it is called?
Incidentally I’ve long passed the 80 furlong.
Om my 80th birthday, in Brisbane, I assure that my friends and I, aged up to the late ’90s, are not knackered or doddery. And we objected to Covid-19 policy. We’ve lived through many things and know how to cope, we rejected the idea that others should suffer to prptect the aged, and opposed the excessive reaction of Australian governments, which in left-wing Victoria was far worse than in the UK.
Excellent, may I assume that the climate in Brisbane is somewhat more benign than the UK?
Charming.
This is a funny conversation but I can’t seem to insert a smiley icon in. :Đ
If you let the right people know where you live I’m sure it could be sorted out…..
“I am quite content to ‘roll over’, particularly if it gives the ‘young’ a better chance. I hope you feel the same, and if not, why not?”
Be careful what you wish for…
Perhaps I am misunderstanding something but the life expectancy of 81 years is for a person born today. If you were born in 1941 your life expectancy would have been considerably less at that point. It would seem most 81 year olds today are already very much in denial of their statistical birthright.
And then your point seems to be (or rather the ons point) that despite the fact an 81 year old was born with a lower expectancy, (one that they have already far exceeded) they should still be expected to live longer than the average child born today with considerably more advantage in knowledge of healthy living, well being, medical care and so on?
If you put 1 year old male in that calculator you get 88 year life expectancy. If you put 81 in there you get an 89 year life expectancy! So a person born in 1941 will have a longer life than a person born today?
None of that makes much sense to me. Unless everything we have learned about health and medical advances in the last 80 odd years is bs. Which is certainly possible when you look at the covid response farce.
I am uncertain of what statistical jiggery pokery lies behind that ONS calculator but they have certainly pulled a few fast ones during this pandemic.
But perhaps I am missing something?
Brilliant! Thank you
The explanation for the difference is that the remaining life expectancy of the 81 year old today is conditional on already having lived to age 81. In other words, it’s *not* the life expectancy of everyone born in 1941. A not insignificant fraction of people born in 1941 have already died before the age of 81.
By contrast, life expectancy for someone born today is a weighted average of (estimated) chances of dying at the age of 1, 2, 3, etc. all the way up to living a very long life of 100+ years. So that’s a full distribution of mortality risk by age. And while, for example, relatively few people die in childhood, each one of them pulls down the average life expectancy quite a bit because they’ve lived so many fewer years relative to a life expectancy of ~90 years.
Possible, but it’s rather tough to be definitive since it seems that people (of any age) who died of COVID were generally in worse health than the average person of that age.
In other words – while it’s difficult to quantify – I’d take the under for “like expectancy of 83 year old who died of COVID” vs. “life expectancy of 83 year olds as a group”.
Absolutely. Let us hold our politicians to account for falling for this authoritarian, utopian con. For example, Layla Moran MP, in a bid for the Lib Dem leadership in August 2020, wrote:
“With the number of new infections in England remaining stubbornly high and with the risk of a second wave ever-present, pursuing a Zero-Covid strategy in England will provide clarity and reassurance to the UK public, reduce the risk of a second wave, and save lives.”
https://www.libdemvoice.org/layla-moran-protecting-lives-and-providing-reassurance-through-the-crossparty-coronavirus-inquiry-65658.html
It is all too human to make mistakes, to be misled, and to believe that one can control the uncontrollable. We need to forgive but we must never let them forget what their naivety, credulity, and fear led them to do to themselves and the rest of us and we must never, ever let them do it again.
I find it ironic that the only person held to account for the totally excessive use of lockdowns in this country has been Boris Johnson – a man who was clearly instinctively against the measures from the start.
That’s not to let him off the hook of course. He’s the top man, went along with it, and his office should abide by the rules they made.
Let us not pretend, however, that all this was imposed purely by Boris and Conservative cabinet. All this had massive support in the media, NHS, in civic society and the population at large, pushing Boris into these restrictions.
I sometimes feel this endless anger over Partygate is because people know the restrictions they themselves clamoured for were totally excessive, and they want to take it out on someone.
I was actually rather pleased to hear of ‘Partygate’, because although it was obviously a cynical abuse of power, it told me that those ‘on the bridge’ knew full well that this COVID nonsense was the greatest scam since the Resurrection, which was very reassuring.
However let us never forget the ‘usual culprits’ who orchestrated this catastrophe, the BBC and copious other Media hysterics, the Ferguson’s & Whitty’s and countless other spurious ‘experts’ and off course the deified NHS itself, stoking the furnace for all it was worth. Under such circumstances it was hardly surprising that Boris capitulated, where Mrs T would probably have pushed back……..hard.
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Once the Covid images came out of Italy, Boris was on a hiding to nothing if he didn’t lockdown. Every death would have been laid at his door by a baying media pack and raging experts more interested in stroking their own vast egos than employing practical common sense.
Perhaps at the very very start, but it took him almost 18 months to let us out of house arrests.
Thank goodness for party-gate. We should celebrate every year both in remembrance and to celebrate getting (but not winning) our freedom back.
Yes I agree those scenes from Bergamo obviously “broke” him poor chap.
As ‘we’ used to say, he just wasn’t made of the right ‘stuff’, and the rest is History, as they say.
Rather more likely that his own experience of Covid, via Intensive Care, influenced subsequent decision-making. Nothing to do with “right stuff”, which is a pretty banal comment.
Really? All right backbone then or more politely moral courage, something that seems to be totally absent from the ‘youth’ of today.
“Totally absent”. Really? Such generalisations are unworthy of this forum, but i doubt it’ll stop you.
Who are you to dictate what is worthy of this forum, or are you just another of those angry
young men who was never potty trained?
I’m rather older than that, and don’t wish to waste my precious time scanning through posts which would be more apt on a forum such as Twitter. Please just think before posting. Some of your longer posts are worth reading.
This is all a bit contrived isn’t it? I think I spy an angry, chippy, Jock, or am I wrong.
Amusingly I have just used that Twitter’ jibe myself to one Christopher Eaton Esq, on this site, without, I must confess, a clue what it means!
Why are you being so curt to A.Almaric? It seems a bit gratuitous.
Well he did just indulge in a bit of casual racism for an ad hominem attack. You think that’s acceptable in this forum?
When those pictures came out, showing doctors treating people based on their underlying conditions (a la Arnaud’s Logan’s Run type criteria), I went to the ‘market’ and bought breathing aides for my wife, not anywhere near her eighties but with serious underlying conditions, just in case she bumped into someone like Dr Almaric.
Please begin your posts on any subject with “As an atheist, I think…” It helps orient the reader.
I’m not, I prefer agnosticism myself, what about you? Irish Catholic?
Gosh you really like to judge people by their origins eh?
Don’t worry, we have the same BS over here across the pond. Trump was blamed for the economic disaster that ensued after the lockdowns. Now Biden crows about the rebound. It’s beyond comedy at this point and there is virtually no difference between the state run medias. The difference is we still have a choice, but they are working hard on removing that option.
I started to write a comment about the failings of Jeremy Hunt as Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and sometime self-promoting political plotter but once I’d exhausted my vast vocabulary of cuss words and insults, I still didn’t feel like I’d done justice to my feelings on the matter.
I found the confirmation that Boris et al never actually believed the lockdown fear mongering refreshing.
Slugger Moran does seem to be a bit punch-drunk.
The Lib Dems, probably the most inaptly named political party of all time, being neither liberal (in any meaningful sense) nor particularly fond of democracy. Not especially surprisingly, therefore, that they took to covid authoritarianism like orange ducks to water. The little people, after all, need constantly to be told what to do by the great and the good (and the smug).
Moran is my local MP, by the way :(.
It’s easy to forget that health services were under severe threat when full lockdowns were imposed. It was only by releasing infected hospital patients into care homes that a crisis, like we saw in Italy, with people unable to get treatment, was avoided. Lack of beds, underfunding and mismanagement over the preceding 10 years, coupled with poor health and obesity in the general population contributed to this pressure. With hindsight, some of the measures like excessive testing of UK travellers did unnecessary damage, but it’s too easy to dismiss the fear in the unvaccinated population, and the majority support for lockdown that existed.
Actually, I was told by the father of one of the medics at our local hospital that the staff watched Netflix during Spring 2020 because no one was turning up for treatment. Perhaps my understanding of the word ‘crisis’ is not the same as that of the powers-that-be!
Certainly the fear of the “unvaccinated population” should not be dismissed; rather we should ask, what and who caused them to be so scared? Precisely the same fearful and fear-mongering politicians, journalists and other so-called thought-leaders who were panicked and manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party, and people interested in vaccinating the unvaccinated population, into ramping up levels of fear and winning mass support for authoritarian “lockdown” policies never previously attempted, or even envisioned in any pandemic planning documentation, outside of communist China. The Diamond Princess should have demonstrated the limited level of threat posed to the vast majority of people, but for some reason it did not.
And it isn’t true that it was necessary to decant unwell elderly people into care homes. The nightingale hospitals were barely used. Again, a panic measure taken by an incompetent, blinkered, and cowardly political and administrative elite that did far more harm than good.
Coming to the realisation that we have been tricked and mugged, and that our trust has been misplaced, is never easy. It hurts our pride, wounds our egos, and leaves us feeling very vulnerable, upset, and even angry. But it is a process that many people including those in positions of authority are now starting to go through, and the sooner more people do that the better it is going to be for everyone in the long term.
It’s the unvaccinated who should be afraid of the vaccinated, shurely?
We were told the same garbage in the States, yet it turned out to be only 1 hospital in NYC that got overrun. Every hospital I went to look at personally was completely empty during the “hysteria”. Nurses went online and post videos to cry foul. It comes down to which media source you watch, I guess.
The total number of NHS hospital beds in England has more than halved over the past 30 years, from around 299,000 in 1987/88 to 141,000 in 2019/20, while the number of patients treated has increased significantly. The UK has fewer acute beds relative to its population than most comparable health systems.
That’s no excuse for the utter havoc caused, and you know it.
The ‘reckoning’ has yet to begin, but when it does, you will know why.
Italy has the overload issue every flu season.
I wonder why? I’m deeply shocked that the fountainhead of the Renaissance should perform so poorly.
Socialized medicine, of course.
Not to mention that at the height of our lockdowns, there were calls on social media for the “army on the streets”, “rulebreakers to be shot on sight” etc.
Yet the “mostly peaceful” protesters (who actually burned down entire city streets and police stations) were allowed to “demonstrate” without masks.
BLM chaps I presume?
Very interesting article. I wondered whether there was a limit to what Chinese citizens are willing to tolerate in the name of the zero covid policy.
But what can the Chinese do if they are dissatisfied with Xi and the current leadership? They certainly can’t vote those people out. If small numbers of people demonstrate they will almost certainly be brutally suppressed. It would take large demonstrations across the nation to have any effect.
The Chinese people might be angry but I’m not convinced they can effect political change.
An interesting is somewhat timid appraisal of the barbarism that is forever China. No mention of the cannibalism* that was rife during the ‘Great Leap Forward’ for example.
Astonishingly many in the West still look to this Oriental nightmare as a source of hope and inspiration, despite the evidence before their very eyes.
(* Female babies were predominantly the food of choice, as I recall.)
‘Astonishingly many in the West still look to this Oriental nightmare as a source of hope and inspiration’. Including, it seems, Jeremy Hunt, who is on record as supporting China’s Covid strategy. Yet some seem to think he’s a suitable candidate for leadership of the Conservative Party; far better to send him off to end his days in that remote cave in Shaanxi Province.
Yes. And then when he grows up, he’ll come back and rule over us for ever with his benignant hand ….
Sadly he’s not the only by a very long shot!
The Chinese people will accept whatever suffering their leaders mete out on them, just as they have for millenia. If it isn’t a Manchu dynast, nationalist or an illiterate warlord, it’s a communist. The end result is always negative, just to varying degrees.
I met a South African girl here recently who was recruited by a Chinese theme park in Shanghai to dance African dance. She left after 3 years as she never had a day off and worked 14 hours a day. When I asked her how do the Chinese people think about those sort of things she answered: “They don’t know any better. For them it’s normal not to question”.
Don’t get me wrong asking this, but has China succesfully managed to ‘domesticate’ human beings, something we are still not used to in the West (but what we are heading for if we are not careful) , and if so, if people do not know any better, or like in the West, if most people want it like we’ve seen with the COVID narrative, is there another way or is this what we as humanity are heading for? Being locked up as animals simply because we have given up our free will or have evolved in such a way we don’t even know anymore what that is? I would be interested to hear from an insight Chinese person as we still put our western glasses on anything to do with China.
The answer is yes, they have “domesticated” their population. When you have 1.3 billion humans to deal with, something else has to happen in order for them all to exist.
Interesting thoughts. As a corollary to that, CRT and those proselytising a “post truth” era are seeking to undermine the capacity of educated human beings to think in such a way that allows them to dissent from the norm, at least publicly. Some of our most celebrated academics are either in thrall to these theories or afraid of arguing against them. The result – unless we’re very careful – will indeed be a compliant population. I very much doubt that said academics see themselves in the role of “useful idiots”, but that’s precisely where they stand.
There are 100 million CPC members. They all have locked in investment in the corrupt machine. Younger members pay up to older members for privileges they will acquire as they get promoted. It’s a perpetual motion pyramid scheme. You cannot leave the game. It would take mass protests totaling more than 100m people at any point in time to have enough countervailing force against this monstrous machine to bring down the regime. No way the CPC would allow even 1m people to get together to make wave. Hong Kong was crushed for obvious reasons.
In the West, we have allowed leftist indoctrination fester in our public school systems and increasingly bloated public services for the last 30-40 years. The effect has started to show with ghastly authoritarian policies being foisted on free society. Deliberate destruction of free thought, free speech and free market has been astoundingly fast. Cultural programs and movements funded by CPC offshoots and sleeper organizations are aimed at sowing hate and polarization in our open societies used to having our guard down in public debate. Now, if you disagree with the Left you will be marked by media and targeted by the very public institutions set up to protect your individual rights. It’s no wonder we lurked straight into uncompromising Maoist positions in response to the pandemic.
We must conduct a thorough review of our governance systems before we head too far down the Marxist road. How to limit government and collectivization by default to reverse the current slippage towards Fascism.
I read somewhere that – the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then how do we get on the good road? I guess the answer would be to to not have any intentions that pretend to be good since the actual purpose of your doing good might be questionable. Just mind your own business and take some personal responsibility for your actions.
In light of above perhaps we already know the outcome of zero covid policy which tried to suggest that it was for the good of the people, was actually a sinister, ignorant & a disastrous way of dealing with humans. Any policy that tries to suppress people and lie to them why it’s good for them is likely to backfire with unintended consequences. It may not happen today but the karma is set in motion.
I guess government in the UK should concentrate on learning its own lesson that generally people are not 1) stupid, 2) forgiving to lies 3) weak – physically or mentally so don’t treat them with such disdain. The final straw for us is the government having covid parties and lying about them. Besides such careless governance, the consequences of careless lockdowns are shortages everywhere & raised costs of living and the marginalised suffering (yet again) . So in order to extend the life of a small minority of vulnerable and elderly you have made everyone’s life miserable (again).
If we can’t learn our own lessons, how can we expect it from others. All we can do is prepare ourselves for further uncertainty, upheaval & turmoil.
The only “good” road is the road that Jesus paved. The world has always been a mad place. Always. Without this hope, we are doomed to continue down the road to hell.
“Just mind your own business and take some personal responsibility for your actions.”
This is the most intelligent, relevant, and timely comment I have ever read on this or any other comment section anywhere. I salute your wisdom sir!
I’ve actually worked in China a little bit. I don’t know the author’s actual experience in country, but only a Westerner could believe that China’s COVID policies will “nurture revolutionary seeds.” The Chinese endured decades of starvation-level repression under Mao and did not revolt. A few months of being locked in your house is nothing by comparison
His chronicle of the repeated totalitarian disasters that the Chinese have endured since Mao misses a deeper reality. The Chinese were a prosperous monarchy for centuries while the West was still relearning how to make steel, glass, a concrete after the collapse of Rome. In the West, prosperity is associated with a weaker state and stronger personal liberties; in the East, the opposite. Look at how obedient even individualistic Westerners were for our own pseudo-lockdowns… the Chinese are vastly more culturally compliant.
Xi’s COVID repression will cause some short term grumbling and backlash, but longer term it feeds not a revolutionary narrative, but a statist one: “your continued sacrificed has protected your nation from the worst of this horrible disease. With your strength, we will continue to recenter the world map in its rightful place: China.” They call themselves The Middle Kingdom for a reason. It’s not just a euphemism.
““(Ni) chi le ma?” is an everyday greeting, meaning “have you eaten yet?”, with resonances of the terrible consequences of famine”
Interesting! I would have thought any reference to the Famine (or Cultural Revolution, or Tianaman Square, or the One-child Policy) would be seriously dangerous.
The Cultural Revolution only killed 2million (nothing by Communist standards) but the cultural and educational catastrophes it encouraged did truly terrible damage. And the Communist Party still has not recognised or apologised for these crimes.
The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were not the same thing. The former lasted from 1958 – 1961 and killed up to 35 million people, mostly from starvation. The latter ran from 1966 to Mao’s death in 1976, the deaths being mostly various forms of “execution”.
Versus the c.45m that perished as a result of the ‘Great Leap Forward’, 1.5m seems like a veritable bargain. But it isn’t the potential death rate. China may truthfully, and don’t look to the CCP for any of that nonsense, have achieved or surpassed that number anyway. The real reason that it is intent on maintaining the ‘Zero Covid’ policy is because it has enabled the mass surveillance of the population. There’s a story that a convicted on-the-run murderer handed himself in simply because he could not get food or move around as anyone who tries to do that will frequently have to show their licence to do so via an app on their phone which shows green (for non-infected), and yellow (for risky) and red (for definitely) not ok. No app, no movement, no food and the chance of being lifted by a squad of goons and incarcerated for ‘quarantine’ reasons. If you have never watched ‘Person of Interest’, do so. That will give you a flavour of what has happened.
Thanks so much for this insight. I believe you nailed it!
I’d check the source and details of that story if I was you. I follow Chinese media pretty closely and have seen several similar stories but with significant differences. I think I remember at least three that all went along the same lines. A man disappeared shortly after his wife or business partner turned up dead. He was found sometimes decades later after the authorities doing Covid checks discovered he didn’t have legitimate ID.
That’s the level of control the government has, and it’s nothing new. The Chinese have had resident permits and travel passes since at least the Han dynasty (that’s pre-medieval). It’s for several reasons of course, controlling crime is one but the main reason stays the same, feeding the people. You have to know exactly how many people there are and where they are to make sure they get enough food.
I’m sure there have been people who’ve starved to death in Shanghai, it’s a massive place and I’m sure the local government workers who were responsible for those people will be punished because of it
Like the Russians, the Chinese are a people accustomed to submission and obeying whatever orders come down from on high. “Kill the sparrows!” The Western elites like what they are seeing in modern seeing in modern autocratic government and are guiding us in that direction by means of bureaucratic regulation and propagandizing media.Now and then there is a hitch, like State Farm apologizing for sending pro-homosexual books and messaging to young school children, but these are only speed bumps soon in the rearview mirror of the juggernaut. The left has infinite patience and guile.
Meanwhile, “I am literally a communist” proudly says Ash Sarkar and her fellow useful idiots
“Have you eaten yet?” is a common greating in Malaysia. Not sure that it has anything to do with the Great Leap Forward.
If I’m Sorry I haven’t a Clue is anything to go by, ‘You’ll have had your tea?’ was a well-known Scottish expression even before La Sturgeon’s Great Leap Forward
Glad someone else spotted this. It absolutely doesn’t. I don’t think the chap understands China as well as he thinks. (Imagine a Chinese observer writing ‘British people will often say “it can’t be helped” when confronted with hardship, a heartbreaking reminder of the fatalism and lack of hope that comes when the governing party gets changed every few years so nothing ever gets done’).
Worst was the inevitable reference to sparrows. Obviously it won’t have helped, but tens of millions didn’t starve because banging pots and pans killed sparrows. Blame the usual Communist suspects – enforced collectivisation, villages eating through what had been kept in granaries on the basis that yields were booming because of course collective farms meant no-one would ever be hungry again, minimal work being done because no-one had anything to gain by working, and bad news being kept hidden from anyone who might have been in a position to fix things when SHTF (because they’d have just shot the messenger instead for revisionist tendencies).
We copied the terrorist tactics of the CCP. Terrorise and brainwash the population into submission and obedience. The media gleefully went along with it shouting for harsher and longer lockdowns. I know people to this day who are still so frightened, they barely venture out of their front door.
“he’ll simply ramp up the state machine of high-tech surveillance.” …”Whether people accept it (…) is an open question” : the former will impedes the latter.
Xi is in big trouble. The Shanghainese will be picking up their AR-15s and putting an end to the CCP any minute now.
Let’s hope so, it can’t come soon enough for the poor s*ds.
And for anyone still harbouring any thoughts that the masking up had anything to do with protecting us take a look at Stephen Petty’s presentation on Odysee. His company tests and assesses PPE for a wide range of applications for industries in the US.
What an utterly dismal, lame article – talk about sitting on the fence, even when writing a piece purportedly criticising these obviously insane policies he stili finds time for:
‘Official statistics should be taken with a pinch of salt, but at the moment the authorities claim that there have been fewer than 5,000 deaths in China since January 2020. (India, with a comparable population has recorded 100 times as many, for instance.) ‘
why? why bother??? after everything else you’ve said, why offer this paltry ‘maybe it has been effective after all’ rubbish.
If anyone relies on information coming from the CCP, they might as well have a dialogue with a squirrel the next time they are sitting on a park bench.
Well quite. Or any statistics involving India covid deaths. Why the olive branch to lockdown policy?
So what do you think the real numbers are ? If you think you can’t get any reliable information out of China then why believe any statement about what’s going on in China, pro or anti CCP ?
You might also want to consider the effect that compiling and publicly disseminating bogus statistic will have on government action, any action. Of course they could be running two sets of books, one for internal use and one for the public. Then everyone in the party or medical field would absolutely know they were being lied to even if the fraud didn’t leak.
You may not like the CCP, you don’t have to, but you will have a hard time proving that they are stupid. CCP members are no more immune to Covid than anyone else, and there is no rational reason to lie to your doctor.
BTW for what it’s worth I’m writing this from China right now and I have lived here for more than 10 years
Why the leaf blowers in the article’s photo? We (and supposedly Chinese scientists) know that coronavirus particles disperse quickly in the open air. Whatever chemicals they are blowing around outside would also disperse quickly… seems like another example ridiculous hygiene theater, probably meant to make it look like useful things are somehow being done.
Doesn’t the sight fill you with confidence that the government is efficiently protecting the people?
““(Ni) chi le ma?” is an everyday greeting, meaning “have you eaten yet?”, with resonances of the terrible consequences of famine.”
What a coincidence – they have the same greeting in Thailand and Vietnam.
Where has Christopher Eaton’s intemperate comment gone? Surely you are not going to allow him/her to hide his/her shame?
As a Chinese reading this, the article is littered with odd inaccuracies that left me questioning the merits of his bigger arguments.
For example, the author claimed that “have you eaten yet is an everyday Chinese greeting with resonances of the terrible consequences of famine.” Yet a simple google search reveals that the origin of “have you eaten yet” has nothing to do with the Great Leap Forward.
The United States has better hospitals and less population than China, but because of its ‘COVID coexistence’ strategy, the country already had more than one million COVID deaths.
If the Chinese government has the same COVID strategy as the US, then we can assume that there will be at least one million COVID deaths in China.
I, for one, is willing to tolerate the inconvenience of lockdowns rather than seeing one million deaths.
Ian, regarding your last point: what do you propose as a logical end point for lockdowns? I don’t see one as long as the CCP leadership remains committed to pursuit of “zero COVID”.
So it’s not a question of COVID deaths vs. the “inconvenience” of lockdowns. It’s enduring the hugely negative humanitarian and economic effects of unpredictable snap lockdowns while the ultimate outcome will be that, over time, SARS-CoV-2 eventually infects almost everyone in China (just as elsewhere in the world).