Some of these are stupid (and one of them isnât even real) but there were costs to Chinaâs harsh lockdowns - politically, culturally, and in terms of their public health. The lockdowns actually were draconian.
US Americans and folks in other countries that likewise did not have real lockdowns have no concept of what an actual quarantine looks like. While you experienced the profound trauma of not being able to go out for brunch and having to wear a mask in the grocery store, many Chinese citizens endured real restrictions on their freedom. They were literally locked in their apartments for indeterminate periods of time, unable to seek medical care for non-covid related illnesses or emergencies, in many cases while experiencing real food and goods shortages that could only sometimes be compensated for by organizing oneâs entire apartment building to place a wholesale order and hoping the order would make it through. If you passed someone in the street who later tested positive for Covid, that might result in you being forcibly quarantined. If a friend or relative was locked down and you werenât locked down with them, you were not able to help them. Did these policies reduce deaths from Covid in the first two years of the pandemic? Yes. By most accounts Chinese people felt pretty patriotic about the early pandemic outcomes despite the pretty extreme hardships some of the populace experienced during lockdowns.
By the spring of â22, when this article was published, China was struggling to contain outbreaks. In late March both Shanghai and Shenzen (among other cities) went into lockdown. Food shortages, protests, and deaths associated with lack of access to medical care followed (particularly of the elderly). Throughout the summer more cities experienced outbreaks and harsh restrictions. The main strategy was testing, surveillance, and quarantine, and it was already cracking at the seams. By the fall serious protests had erupted and the populace was feeling decidedly less patriotic about the zero covid policy. In September thousands of Foxconn employees who had been protesting inadequate food and medical care during their lockdown on campus decided to escape en masse, trying to return home on foot. By November 23rd China reported its highest daily cases since 2019, and the next day 10 people perished in a fire in a building under lockdown, and the discontent really began to show. The government responded by tightening restrictions. Foxconn employees locked down at the iPhone plant in Zhenzou (imagine being locked down at your place of work) again protested inadequate pay, harsh restrictions, and insufficient medical and nutritional support.
By December the government had realized its policies were not only not working as well as had been hoped; they were stoking civil unrest. But they had no real strategy for extricating themselves from the situation. In December of â22 they significantly loosened restrictions, but they also let up on testing and failed to coordinate this change with any kind of real national vaccination campaign. They immediately experienced a massive surge in cases, and pretty much everyone agrees that the numbers we have for this surge are an undercount; a new policy implemented in mid-December of â22 meant that deaths were only attributed to Covid if they were directly caused by pneumonia and respiratory failure (covid is a multi-systemic disease with serious vascular effects and it acts on the body in a lot of ways - thereâs more than one way to die from exposure to this disease). Close to 250 million people might have contracted Covid in the first 20 days of December - as many as 37 million in a single day. By the end of December the government announced it would no longer even report daily figures. By January of â23 it was clear that both cases and deaths were being seriously undercounted and misrepresented, and the extent of the January surge is kind of hard to understate. So many people got covid and died during this time because China mishandled its lockdowns and didnât have a workable a plan for them to end. By late January even the Chinese public health authorities admitted that as much as 80% of the populace had been infected. Doctors were being âencouragedâ not to cite Covid-19 on death certificates. Another big surge built from May into June, as evidenced by a rise in pulmonary deaths.
That said, China did pretty effectively reduce the spread of covid - they really did have a lower death count (even if we consider the deliberate undercounts and misrepresentation if data), but there were significant costs, and a lot of people probably died or suffered longterm health complications unnecessarily because they failed to come up with a smart exit strategy.
I am not comparing this strategy with the absolute cock-up US government and health authorities made of this pandemic. But there were costs. I weigh certain costs much more heavily than others (and in this way Iâm not really in agreement with much of the Guardian piece); the slowed pace of manufacturing in China is a lot less important to me than people being turned away from hospitals or dying sealed in their apartments, for instance. That said, when I hear US Americans complain about how difficult the lockdowns were and how glad you are that itâs âall overâ I wish you would get some perspective.
A lot of you went through a brief period of like, getting really into bread and scrolling too much or watching reality TV you usually wouldnât. You were legally able to go for walks, shop for yourself, visit and care for your friends and family, see people in person. Nobody forcibly locked you in your apartment for being sick or coming into contact with someone who was (I do know some college students who had bad dorm experiences, but even these pale in comparison to what many Chinese citizens experienced). I am not denying that this time was genuinely difficult for a lot of people - many of us were afraid, lost loved ones, lost work, struggled to make ends meet, experienced genuine hardship, but I witnessed so much entitlement around âpersonal freedomsâ in the first few years of the pandemic that clearly just represented a desire to do whatever you want, regardless of the harm you might cause. That attitude has persisted - maybe worsened.
There are costs to the kind of centralized projects and polices that China implements, even when there are benefits, and most of you would very obviously be unwilling to pay them. There are also costs associated with Chinaâs genuinely impressive energy transition and their willingness to improve and upgrade or transform their infrastructure. All sorts of living beings (human and inhuman) and landscapes have been harmed in the pursuit of that progress. Sometimes you get something out of that equation - other times you should be pushing for more. If you spend any time at all informing yourself about Chinaâs engineer-led government and its projects you will learn that sometimes they lose sight of the costs while focused on the outcomes. If you spend any time informing yourself about our lawyer-led government you realize that red tape can be really selectively and aggressively placed. Trade-offs are real.
A lot of âleftistsâ here in the US show up arm in arm with the conservative NIMBY contingent to stop the kinds of projects we need because they donât understand the distinctions between gentrification and maintenance and development, or theyâre unwilling to accept that in general, thereâs usually a trade-off. Theyâre not going to get their designer outcome, and theyâre unwilling to work towards one that either reduces harm or does more good than harm, so instead we get nothing, or something worse. Most of you canât even bother to wear a mask at the doctorâs office anymore, because youâre not even willing to pay in mild inconveniences to access more safety and long-term health benefits not just for yourself but for your entire community. You wonât unionize because you have to pay in effort and union dues for better worker protections. Some of you wonât even vote because youâre unwilling to pay in blows to your sense of moral superiority to keep the worst kinds of fascists out of office.
Like yes, I hate the the misleading rhetorical strategies used by a lot of media to discredit progress happening elsewhere in the world, but I also think a lot of US Americans - including those of us on the left - are generally pathetically divorced from the reality that our material outcomes are attached to costs, and that itâs actually really important to know what these costs are. If you donât know the cost of the thing youâre arguing for, you cannot effectively argue against its critics. If you arenât willing to pay in time or effort or trade-offs to get where you want to go, you will spend your entire life complaining about being stuck or left behind. Itâs a consumer mentality I really wish people would abandon - especially people who pretend to care about our collective future.
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