Ooooo, if it was just the flights I’d say airport issues, but busses and trains too smells like COVID lockdown to me. I bet the government sprang it on everyone suddenly to avoid a stampede for the exits.
There’s been rumors all day on Twitter that there’s some sort of ongoing political upheaval, but nothing has been confirmed that I was able to see. China is really good at embargoing information, it seems.
I don’t understand china’s zero COVID policy. It literally makes zero sense any more when you look at how COVID is being managed in the rest of the developed world.
It’s all rumor mongering. For example, I think the no flights info was from the middle of the night in Beijing. Rumors are common every few years - Xi Jinping has suffered endless coups if you assume each rumor is true.
That’s the thing with autocracies, though. Stuff doesn’t have to make any kind of objective sense. It just has to make sense to a tiny number of very rich and powerful men whose interests may be different from what we understand. Also, they may live in a bubble of false information, fed to them by loyalists afraid to deliver bad news.
Somehow, this makes sense to Xi Jinping.
I think some are underestimating the whole situation here.
- Zero Covid policies made sense for some time, however, even if the situation is totally different now, Chinese bureaucracy is never known for being agile. It’s never easy to give up on something you have just been familiarized with for a couple of years.
- The number of people died from COVID is the ultimate moral high ground that Chinese government holds that it’s been brought up whenever they can to justify that everything they do is for the greater good of the Chinese people. The state news reminds people every day that 1 million people died from COVID in the United States. The China vs. World comparison has been there and keeps running since the day the government reports COVID truthfully in early 2020. Chinese people see the numbers every day since then, even if many like me don’t read it because the numbers don’t surprise any more. Whenever China starts to downplay the numbers that’s when I think things might change.
- Speaking of news, since COVID hits the propaganda engine has been running. Now it has been working towards the same direction for the whole time, and with most of the normal citizens either buy in on the propaganda or didn’t care to believe otherwise. What would happen if one day China just says let’s stop being this hardcore. Let’s start doing what we have been promoting against. They probably won’t risk it unless they plan this process carefully and slowly.
- Despite the major cities enjoy developed world class infrastructure and governance, the bigger half of China still falls into developing world standards, including Xinjiang, Tibet, etc. Numerous situations have shown China’s grips on these remote areas are not as effective and can be challenged. Its governance method often involves brute force and poor execution. Thanks to the current methods it seems the limited transportation has led to only minor disruptions (from COVID) in these areas. Would more relaxed policies change things?
- Lastly, people are still scarred and afraid. A lot of people expect the government to shoulder the pandemic for the people, like parents care for the children. This metaphor has existed culturally for hundreds of years. The start of the pandemic was already a breach of trust. In my opinion, Xi of course wants to declare the war against COVID is won and let’s move on, because the legitimacy of current Chinese government is built on bring prosperity to China while the economic downturn undermines that. That’s what he did during COVID on the war against “extreme poverty.” They just put some band-aid programs for the poorest areas in the country and declared victory, without caring how these programs would continue under more difficult budget situations. Authoritarian leaders are obsessed with winning. Would the leaders be afraid if a lot of people can perceive them as “weak on COVID?”
Is it just me or does the Chinese economy recently look like a train crash moving in slow motion? Most of our business here in Macau is from Chinese tourism, and COVID has come close to destroying our local economy. It’s looking like even if the tourists return, they won’t have as much money to spend as before.
It’s not just you. The World Bank is predicting that China’s economy will grow slower than the other East Asia economies for the first time in practically forever:
If anyone is curious: https://macaonews.org/economy/dismal-outlook-forecast-for-macao-economy-gdp-could-drop-by-29/
I would be happy to not live in quite so interesting times.
Yeah, sometimes it looks like Xi is thinking, “Hmm, I like Putin’s ideas, it’s the execution that sucks. When I go for Taiwan, I’m going to do it right!”
We already talking about this?
That seems rather dramatic, as it reads more as economic warfare than as response to any particular policy or action by Beijing. If it is as important as it might appear, I wonder what the counter from Beijing might be.
I think it’s in response to now old policies like Made in China 2025 and China’s increasing use of computing for military purposes. What I’ve read makes it sound like the same policy goals as Trump era tech restrictions, but more comprehensive/less loop holes.
Could well be. I can definitely see the logic in it, I’m just wondering what the response will be. And it must have been something of a bummer for the people working over there who had to resign, but I don’t know the details of all of that.
Things that make you go hmmm. Maybe it’s just because of the CCP congress going on. Maybe the numbers are pretty bad. Maybe it’s Maybeline.
Here’s a really good look at it:
Biden’s export controls are a different animal entirely. The goal is not to benefit American companies, but to hurt Chinese ones, for reasons of national security. An administration official recently confirmed this explicitly. The cares less about U.S. companies’ profits than the U.S.’ technological lead. In fact, the stocks of chipmakers like Nvidia and AMD already fell back in September, when it became apparent they’d be restricted from selling chips to China. But national security overrides the need for modestly higher profits for a few companies.
This is a return to the Cold War economic strategy, where the U.S. and its allies actively tried to limit exports of technology to the Soviet bloc.
I found this bit of history rather fascinating with regards to South Korea managing to sprint past Japan too:
In fact, hiring foreign engineers to build up domestic industry has a long and storied history. One of the most famous examples, detailed in the book How Asia Works, was how Korean companies hired retired Japanese engineers to move to Korea and teach companies like Hyundai and Samsung how to make cars and electronics. Japanese companies, which traditionally give out promotions and raises based only on seniority, used to force workers into retirement at 60 to avoid having them become too much of a financial and managerial burden; this left them with a number of good working years left and nothing much to do. Korea took advantage, and soon Korean companies were outcompeting their Japanese counterparts.