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“Why aren’t China’s Covid lockdown measures working?” asks Tom Whipple, Science editor of the Times:
The original R rate of the Wuhan strain was 3, meaning that each infected person passed it to three others. Estimating the R of Omicron is near-impossible — but we know it is vastly harder to contain. It has evolved to spread more effectively and infect more easily.
In the rest of the world, its spread, as well as the Delta variants, has given us “hybrid immunity”. People have been infected after being vaccinated, and the population has a soup of varied antibodies working against infection and serious illness.
In China, they have less a soup of antibodies than a single distilled flavour — from averagely-effective vaccines designed to repel a virus that no longer exists. Omicron has plenty of virgin territory to conquer.
Despite some of the debates we are having today, at a very basic level and on their own terms, lockdowns clearly work. China is proof of that; if people can’t meet each other they can’t infect each other.
But restricting people’s lives entirely is impossible. Eventually both the virus and human nature find ways to circumvent restrictions. Only a country with the state apparatus of China could have hoped to have maintained rolling lockdowns so strict, for so long, that it could persist with zero Covid.
Why is President Xi doing it? Western scientists are increasingly bemused. One answer is vaccination — the country isn’t where it needs to be. Although overall more than 90 per cent of the 1.4 billion Chinese have received two doses and a third booster shot, the rates tail off among the elderly. According to the latest statistics, only 40 per cent of the over-80s have been fully vaccinated. But this just leads to another question: why not?
Some Chinese speculate that the older population, especially, have been reluctant to get boosted and lulled into a false sense of security by strict measures and state propaganda that lauds the country’s lower cases and death rates compared to the West. Distrust in vaccine safety, inevitably, also plays a part.
But another reason China is still focused on prevention, not treatment, could be the lack of intensive care beds — less than four for every 100,000 people, according to the National Health Commission in Beijing, which means a large-scale Covid outbreak could have disastrous consequences. In Britain, the figure at the start of the pandemic was 7.3 critical care beds per 100,000 people, less than half the average in other European nations (15.9).
In its pursuit of zero Covid, China was not blessed by geography, it was instead blessed with a powerful state and fewer qualms regarding civil liberties. What is baffling to outside observers is that the same state that is so effective at imposing extremely severe restrictions on its people is so ineffective at getting all of them vaccinated, or providing enough hospital beds.
Don’t fixate on Mr Whipple’s use of the word “blessed” in “blessed with a powerful state and fewer qualms regarding civil liberties”; he clearly means it ironically. Alongside many others, he is finally beginning to understand. A pity it comes so late, but better late than never. One day it may no longer baffle him that a society that runs on lies cannot get science right, and that a society that runs on force cannot get anything right.
“The irony of Xi’s Ahab Quest is that Taiwan has never been a part of China. ‘China’ today is a recapitulation of the old Qing Empire (which, to add irony to irony, was not Chinese but Manchurian). Tibet, East Turkestan, Mongolia, and Manchuria are in no historical sense remotely ‘Chinese’. Ditto for Taiwan, in which Qing officialdom evinced only desultory interest until 1854, when American Commodore Matthew C. Perry, fresh from his gunboat-treaty journey to Japan, showed interest of his own.”
– Jason Morgan, Spectator. Morgan says a Chinese attempted conquest of Taiwan, and war with neighbours, such as Japan, and the US, is inevitable.
I think the headline is self-explanatory. A new US report delivers what looks like a devastating verdict. (It was from a Republican committee; I am unclear what the Democrats might have said.) For me, the refusal of the Beijing regime to allow independent inspections and its bullying of anyone who raised questions, triggers my suspicions. Science writer Matt Ridley has come to the same conclusion, although he is far more qualified to write about it than someone like me. He co-authored a book on the topic.
It is not clear what, if anything, the West can now do other than the following:
Cease all funding of gain-of-function or similar experiments carried out in China. No Western individuals or organisations should be allowed to fund experiments of this nature in China. So it means people such as Dr Fauci would, under my rule, be treated as criminals for having any financial or other involvement with such research.
Where such experiments are conducted in places such as the US, they must be disclosed from the start, and subject to regular review and full reports given to the authorities, including media. There was a recent report that such work was being done in Boston, where the virus has a high fatality rate, although there has been pushback on this story here. Can someone explain to me what is the possible purpose of this? (If it is to defend against viruses, this should be made clear from the start.)
Restrict Chinese government/business (usually front organisations anyway) access to Western medical and scientific research as much as possible (I realise that in an online world, there are limits), particularly around technologies that can be weaponised.
Continue to demand answers about the sources of the pandemic, and make a willingness to be open about this a condition of more open relations going forward. Make it clear that unleashing a virus, even by accident, and doing nothing much to warn neighbours in good time or be open about investigating it, is a hostile act. I would like to hear the likes of Sunak, Biden, Macron, Scholz and the rest make these points, regularly. If not, they need to be asked why they aren’t raising it. And for good measure, the World Economic Forum head honcho Klaus Schwab needs to be regularly asked about this, and about whether any WEF members are funding such research. Let’s at least use the whole ESG agenda for some good and demand that no ESG-linked finance should touch gain-of-function research unless for a clearly-stated and checkable benefit, in full public view.
I don’t think sanctions are of much use here. Ironically, China’s zero-covid policy, which appears without end, is a form of self-harm that is more damaging than any amount of sanctions activity. President Xi has been re-elected by the Chinese Communist Party, and presumably hopes to be in post until he dies, or is too infirm to do the job. That is punishment enough for those who want to prop up this regime. It is, alas, miserable for the hundreds of millions of Chinese people who, through little fault of their own, live under this tyranny.
“He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount” – Chinese proverb.
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China’s decision-makers face a quandary after maintaining an open-ended “zero Covid” policy with doomsday predictions of the alternative, said Huang. “What if they eased controls and nothing significant happened? Then people would question why Beijing imposed such harsh measures for so long.”
– Philip Sherwell, in a (paywalled) piece for the Sunday Times called “Millions under lockdown to stop Covid spoiling Xi Jinping’s party congress”.
Meanwhile, in an interview broadcast on Sunday, President Biden declared that the pandemic was over. Then someone noticed that would mean that the “Covid emergency” justification for his student loan payoff was also over, along with the justification for mask mandates. So the White House undeclared the president’s declaration:
A day later, an administration official told CNN that the President’s comments do not mark a change in policy toward the administration’s handling of the virus, and there are no plans to lift the Public Health Emergency, which has been in place since January 2020 and is currently extended through October 13.
I am not sure why “the administration” trumps “the president”, unless it is to give him practice in getting Trumped.
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
– Blue Remembered Hills by A.E. Housman, from the collection A Shropshire Lad, published in 1896.
We do blue hills so much better in 2022:
This is savage and just from the Spectator:
There’s a rich irony in HSBC now refusing to collect data on its customers, given its involvement in abetting the Chinese government’s crackdown on Hong Kong. HSBC not only publicly backed the draconian National Security Law but also froze the bank accounts of prominent pro-democracy activists in exile at the behest of Beijing, something that obviously involved keeping tabs on the troublemakers. Its chief executive, Noel Quinn bleated that ‘I can’t cherry-pick which laws to follow’; given the law claimed universal jurisdiction, it doesn’t exactly suggest pro Hong Kong democrats in London are safe with the bank, non-binary or not.
Read the whole thing, as they say at Instapundit. I noticed, for example, that every time I fly into or out of a major airport such as Heathrow, Geneva or Gatwick, the jetway bridge has a big fat HSBC logo on it. And on the inside, there are lots of HSBC messages about “sustainability”, about how we are all in “one world”, and all the other bland cant of modern corporate messaging.(None of that vulgar stuff about creating wealth and making a profit. Goodness me, no.) It is rather like the kind of “lounge” or “Muzak” music one gets in elevators and hotel lounges. After a while one tunes it out.
I wonder how long this situation can persist. HSBC now has Chinese Communist Party folk sitting on its China subsidiary. (HSBC denies these folk have any influence. If so, what are they doing? Drinking tea?)
Given the various frictions and problems between the West and China, I don’t see this as sustainable in a sense rather different from how the Greens use that word. Anyone doing business with HSBC must start to wonder if it really is an autonomous commercial enterprise. Rather, a large part of it would appear to be little more than a Beijing front organisation. HSBC is listed on the London Stock Exchange and its HQ is in London. At some point, if there was, for example, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and sanctions and all the rest had to be imposed, that would put HSBC in an invidious position. The UK may even insist that HSBC spins off its mainland China business if it wanted to retain its UK banking licence.
BBC Archive: Chinese troops fire on protesters in Tiananmen Square
First broadcast 4 June 1989.
Chinese troops opened fire on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on Saturday evening. The collection of students and labourers had been occupying the site for several weeks. Despite the outbreak of “unremitting gunfire”, the protesters refused to leave. The BBC’s Kate Adie reports from the scene.
Also watch this interview with a soldier of the People’s Liberation Army from ABC News (Australia). That interview is from 2019. I doubt if it could be made in 2022.
2019 was also the last time that the massacre was commemorated by a public ceremony in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park. This year, as it was in 2020 and 2021, the park has been blocked off by police and anyone lingering there threatened with prosecution. The reason given for forbidding the demonstration was coronavirus. I have a premonition that in Hong Kong the Covid-19 pandemic will go on forever.
A drone appears when people start singing from balconies in protest at the lack of supplies after being forcibly locked in their homes.
“Please comply with covid restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing.”
And for extra added dystopian flavour…
“Heartbreak as Hong Kong pet owners give up hamsters for Covid cull”, reports France-24:
Time was running out for Pudding.
The hamster, a new addition to the Hau family, was to be given up to Hong Kong authorities for culling after rodents in a pet shop tested positive for coronavirus — leaving Pudding’s 10-year-old owner wailing in grief.
“I don’t want to, I don’t want to,” the boy cried, his head buried in his hands as he crouched next to Pudding’s pink cage, according to a video shown to AFP by his father.
But the older Hau, who would only provide his last name, said he was worried about his elderly family members who live in the same household.
“I have no choice — the government made it sound so serious,” he told AFP, shortly before entering a government-run animal management centre to submit Pudding.
I am not certain, but I think the video of the little boy crying next to his hamster’s pink cage might be this one, which is being widely shared online.
Given that I am not a vegetarian, I suppose I cannot make too much of a fuss about animals being killed, but I had a hamster once of which I was fond. That little boy will remember his pet being taken away for the rest of his life. I could understand if there were any serious evidence that the cull would achieve anything for humans. None has been provided. Evidence is not really the point here: The People’s Republic of China has a Zero Covid policy. Nothing is to be allowed to stand in the way of progress towards this perfect state. In fact, now that the PRC has dropped the pretence of “One country, two systems” with regard to Hong Kong, it might even be desirable from China’s point of view that the people of Hong Kong should be made aware of what their new masters think of such Western-influenced bourgeois sentimentality. Let the children weep and know themselves powerless.
Of course Communist China has form on this. During the Cultural Revolution,
Even China’s feline population suffered as Red Guards tried to eliminate what they claimed was a symbol of “bourgeois decadence”. “Walking through the streets of the capital at the end of August [1966], people saw dead cats lying by the roadside with their front paws tied together,” writes Dikötter.
Nor was that the first of Mao’s grand animal-killing schemes. In the disastrous Four Pests campaign of 1958-62 he sought to kill all the sparrows in China.
Sparrows were suspected of consuming approximately four pounds of grain per sparrow per year. Sparrow nests were destroyed, eggs were broken, and chicks were killed. Millions of people organized into groups, and hit noisy pots and pans to prevent sparrows from resting in their nests, with the goal of causing them to drop dead from exhaustion.In addition to these tactics, citizens also simply shot the birds down from the sky. The campaign depleted the sparrow population, pushing it to near extinction.
The result was predictable: with the sparrows who ate the insects gone, the numbers of insects exploded. It was a contributing factor to the Great Chinese Famine. Warnings from ornithologists (or anyone else) that this might happen counted for little against a government that had mobilised the people to march towards a public health goal that could be defined in one sentence.
“Emails exchanged between them after a conference call on 1 February 2020, and only now forced into the public domain by Republicans in the US Congress, show that they not only thought the virus might have leaked from a lab, but they also went much further in private. They thought the genome sequence of the new virus showed a strong likelihood of having been deliberately manipulated or accidentally mutated in the lab. Yet later they drafted an article for a scientific journal arguing that the suggestion not just of a manipulated virus, but even of an accidental spill, could be confidently dismissed and was a crackpot conspiracy theory.”
– Matt Ridley
In recent years much of the narrative is that China is rising, the US and the West as a whole are declining, and that there is not a lot we can do to arrest that switch, even if it would be desirable to do so, blah-blah-blah. Liberal democracy is on the retreat, authortarianism is the new hotness, so get ready for Social Credit, compulsory school Mandarin lessons and the rest of it. Now it is true that we seem to be well capable of gutting defences of liberty on our own without Chinese influence anyway, but it does nevertheless matter, in my view, if China’s rise continues in the way it has. Well, it is possible that things aren’t going to be quite so straightforward:
Check out this article from US think tanker Thomas J. Duesterberg, in the Wall Street Journal. As it is paywalled, I am going to publish a few paragraphs:
In December real-estate developers China Evergrande and Kaisa joined several other overleveraged firms in bankruptcy, exposing hundreds of billions in yuan- and dollar-denominated debt to default. Real estate represents around 30% of the Chinese economy, nearly twice the levels that led to the financial crisis of 2008-09 in the U.S., Spain and England.
I have been covering the Evergrande saga in my day job. Let’s just say that anyone who remembers the Japanese real estate meltdown will recognise the danger signs.
The real-estate industry has been key to keeping annual growth above 6%. Yet a debt bubble has inflated by 20% annually between 2014 and 2018. Originally intended to accommodate rapid urbanization for the industrial economy, the urban property market is now overbuilt. Some 90% of urban households own their own properties and enough vacant units are available to accommodate 10 years of urban immigrants. Sales and prices have tumbled this year, and overleveraged builders and creditors are suffering the consequences.
It seems the Dr Evil bloke at the helm is not as smart as he’s made out.
Mr. Xi is privileging the less productive and less innovative components of the Chinese economy while enhancing control, limiting financing and punishing entrepreneurial leaders in many leading industries. This isn’t a recipe for maintaining strong economic growth. Despite the frequent assertions that China is catching up or moving ahead of the West in technology industries, it has a long way to go to achieve the self-sufficiency and global leadership it seeks. U.S. sanctions on advanced semiconductors, for instance, have gutted Huawei’s ability to make its own 5G phones. China’s semiconductor industry is 10 years behind world leaders, according to a recent German study.
In short, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that China’s economy is systematically weakening and that Mr. Xi’s new priorities offer little hope for a quick turnaround. The U.S. and its allies could further compound Mr. Xi’s challenges by vigorous enforcement of trade laws, limiting Chinese access to technology and financing from the West, and imposing sanctions against China’s brutal human-rights abuses in Xinjiang and in countries in the developing world that it is trying to exploit through its Belt and Road Initiative. A good example of such exploitation is the atrocious mining conditions for key battery components cobalt and lithium in Africa and South America.
A major slowdown or acute financial crisis in China would certainly have a negative impact on the global economy. But U.S. and allied policy makers do have tools that could both influence the direction of the Chinese economy and help repair some of the accumulated damage to their economies from Chinese mercantilism. A first step is to undermine the narrative of a relentless, unstoppable economic advance under Mr. Xi’s leadership.
That of course would mean efforts to counter China’s thefts of Western IP, and for Western governments to limit Chinese access to Western finance and tech. That isn’t easy. Of course, a big slowdown/recession in China will hit the West, given the web of capital and trade relations. And for what it is worth, I still think the world is far better off with a prosperous China than the horrors of Mao in the 50s and 60s. But it is plain that China’s current behaviour (Hong Kong, South China Sea incursions, treatment of various groups, IP thefts, clashes with India, etc) mean that the regime in Beijing needs a very big kick. Maybe we will see this happen in the next year or so.
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