Reply to Can a China expert explain why xi didn’t let covid burn through the population?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]They did the same things as other countries in very early 2020, except to an extreme degree because of the powers of the authoritarian government. So while other countries were instituting stay at home orders apart from the most essential of essential shopping, China was locking people into their homes. They thought that an outbreak tracking and isolation system would work, kind of like how we track rare measles outbreaks in the US. When someone tests positive for measles here, we can trace back their movements and then ask people who were in those places at those times to get tested. That’s what China was able to do after the initial lockdowns and their people lived fairly normal lives in summer/fall of 2020, while places like Australia and Western Europe, and parts of the US, were still under restrictions.

Then the variants started and Covid became more transmissible. And the new variants started to get around the vaccines especially in terms of transmission. China developed their own vaccines which aren’t as protective against the variants, whereas most developed countries were using the vaccines we have in the US + the AstraZeneca vaccine. And at some point, most countries decided that with the vaccines being widely available, the cost-benefit of more shutdowns and restrictions wasn’t worth it. They were harmful to the economy and to the political parties in power when restrictions became politically unpopular.

But there is no such cost-benefit in China where there is only one party and you have no individual freedom. There is the belief throughout society that the government can solve all problems, and so for the government to “change course” abruptly would be seen as a sign of weakness. So the only alternative was to double down on lockdowns and restrictions. Otherwise your political opponents within the CCP see you as weak.

And now, China has a population with VERY little exposure to Covid, who has had less effective vaccines, and where the elderly are skeptical of the vaccines and have a lower than average uptake rate of vaccines and especially boosters. So they’re stuck. If they ease up on the restrictions, people are going to get sick, end up in the hospital, and die. It’s like us and other countries at the end of 2020-beginning of 2021. If they keep the restrictions, the political unrest grows and it’s bad for their economy and tourism. Korea, Japan, Thailand, all have essentially no travel restrictions. Hong Kong is easing up a little and going to testing and monitoring for overseas arrivals. But China is still requiring the quarantine in a government facility. People can’t visit and their own citizens can’t leave without extending their trip another 10 days MINIMUM when they get back to China. [/quote]

Western governments were very clear that they were locking down to flatten the curve. Once we had vaccines, there was no reason for any restrictions. Even locking down is a misnomer- here it mostly meant eating outside at restaurants and public school children being denied an education. Chinese people have literally starved to death because of lockdowns.  [/quote]

They had hundreds of consecutive days of restrictions in parts of Australia extending into mid-2021. They weren’t at the level of April 2020 style lockdowns but they were FAR more restricted than we were or almost any other Western country. You’re right that in MOST places the heavy restrictions stopped when the vaccines were widely available - but not everywhere. [/quote]

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