Exactly - they’re not constrained by the same four-ish year terms held in most democratic countries, and are able to play out twenty- and even fifty-year scenarios without too much domestic uncertainty.

That strategy manifests in that slow chipping away: they don’t need to do things all at once.

It also manifests in potentially bad management that keeps itself going such as the current administration’s braindead covid policies.

Braindead from an American perspective, it is also likely those policies have averted upwards of 4 million deaths.

Exactly. Tbh its constantly surprising why Americans view the CCPs zero-covid policy as a failure. Even the most pessimistic reports (based on actual facts, not tabloid-driven wishful thinking) acknowledges that China has avoided at least 2 million+ deaths through their zero covid policy. Is the right to life no longer a human right? Or have a lot of us so internalized anti-China propaganda that we're no longer able to think logically?

They've also saved themselves some of the long-term cost of long COVID, which is a fun mystery we've signed up for in the US. Also weren't they working with a less effective vaccine?

They haven't actually dealt with Covid yet. Their immunisation rates are low and the vaccines they've used are not the best. It's an ongoing process where they are still flattening the curve. They aren't back to normal.

And this happened yesterday: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-delays-release-eco... . The market opinion is that the financial data is very bad so they don't want to release it. And this is quite coupled to their ongoing Covid policies.

> Their immunisation rates are low

I'm not sure that is true in general, but it is unfortunately true for the elderly in China - precisely the population they want to protect. They've sort of screwed themselves by not vaxxing the elderly at high rates.

Which raises an interesting question. In China they could make elderly get vaccinated. They close entire large apartment buildings with one person'a exposure to covid, bring them food occasionally and organize security and testing for those people. Why not go through and get everyone vaccinated? They are already monitoring their lives closely with Orwellian surveillance, why not just add on required shots on top of all that hell? I haven't seen that China disputes the usefulness of covid vaccines.

So what gives?

Could the same deaths have been prevented by deploying better policies? Remember that millions of people we forcibly locked in their homes. They faced food shortages. They have their lives ruined because they couldn’t make a living. All of this because the CCP wants zero Covid rather than a rational policy of limiting the most at risk to the disease and allowing the population to get natural immunity from getting sick.

I do not think 4 million people+ died due to lockdowns in China.

Directly? No. By suicide and future complications due to having their life upended/destroyed yeah.

The CCP should have purchase novavax for the shot (they still should given China’s low jab rate) and allowed the majority of people to live their lives. Covid for the majority posses little risk.

Kinda hard to take this seriously when you’re using anti vaxxer slang(jab). If you didn’t mean it that way just giving you a heads up that it immediately clocked as an anti vaxx dog whistle.

I disagree that that is anti-vaxxer slang, I think it is just a Britishism. Indeed I believe their govt calls it a jab.

May be cultural differences then. In the US and Canada the anti vaxxers will pejoratively refer to the vaccine as “the jab” or taking it as “getting the jab”

All sorts of people have called getting a vaccine "getting the jab" for decades. It isn't some secret code for "I don't believe that vaccines are safe"

Huh, looks like it might be my little bubble. Went looking online and definitely see media references to “the jab” late 2021 and then it appears the anti vaxx crowd I first experienced with took it on as a sarcastic mocking of how the media used a synonym instead of calling it the vaccine.

Guess I’m one of todays 10,000

Yeah, I think jab has become accepted US shorthand for a shot and it's not pejorative. But your comment is shocking, you made a graceful acceptance that the word's definition had changed? Thank you.

The internet still holds surprises on occasion

4 million people died due to suicide due to lockdowns in China?

There will be a lot of longer term mental damage. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3182775/huma...

> Is the right to life no longer a human right?

That's not what "the right to life" means. There are lots of policy decisions which have tradeoffs that result in more or less life lost. For example, the government could require that all car engines have a maximum speed of 25 MPH. That would empirically reduce the # of lives lost in automobile accidents, but society has judged the tradeoff (in terms of convenience, transportation time/cost, etc.) to not be worth it -- and that tradeoff does not constitute "violating the right to life".

I think it's sour grapes. Unlike in the United States, most Canadians never caught COVID-19 before they were vaccinated (4% seropositivity rate in Nov 2021 at ~80% of eligible adults vaccinated.) Immunizing everyone before they were infected was always considered a realistic policy option, and it was pursued aggressively, until that goal was achieved. Not as good as fully containing it, of course (a popular minority position both in government and the public well into 2021) but that seemed increasingly impossible by late 2020, given our lacklustre response out the gate.

In America, I think at some point a certain sense of hopelessness set in. Such goals rapidly became unrealistic. People weren't complying with advice, many governments at various levels were paralyzed or head-in-sand, and most people became infected before they could be immunized, and so hundreds of thousands died unnecessarily.

And it didn't have to happen. Not as badly as it did, as shown by countries which did avoid the harm, to various degrees. And it happened in what should have been one of the countries best prepared to respond and minimize the impact on health. This is a very painful thing to accept. It's much easier, emotionally-socially, to assume it simply had to have happened the way it did and nothing could have been done about it.

> Is the right to life no longer a human right?

Ah yes, China, comes to the top of the list when I think of protectors of human life. One-child policies, welding people into their apartment buildings, corralling them into COSTCOs [1] like they're farm animals being loaded into a semi-truck. Such benevolence.

> Or have a lot of us so internalized anti-China propaganda that we're no longer able to think logically?

Nah, more likely you have been drinking the pro-China propaganda like a 7-11 Big Gulp.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Costco/comments/xgvlm6/video_of_peo...

The fact remains that if US policies were implemented in China, it would mean the tacit acceptance of killing 4-5 million people.

a) we don't know exactly what would happen if China implemented US policies. So that's not a fact, thats a hypothesis.

b) China lies all the time. That's a fact. May be 5 million died from covid there. who knows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation_by_Chi...

It's actually 50 million dead, not 5 million. And some experts even say, that possibly up to 200 million Chinese have died from covid so far. All those repeated lockdowns and city-wide mass tests are just being done for the 'lolz'.

P.S. I wore my tin-foil hat while posting the above. It's pretty similar to the one you're wearing.

It's not a fact, come on. Many countries that didn't choose to lock down their population did better. Actually, since vitamin D deficiency is a risk factor, it may have increased deaths and decreased the overall health of the population.

you gonna gamble millions of lives?

So between a country that implements extremely restrictive (some would say 'heartlessly' restrictive) policies in order to safeguard the lives of their vulnerable elderly population, and another country (the 'land of the free') which is so 'free' it allows 1 million+ of its citizens to die, and whose politicians have shown on multiple occasions that they care more about saving the country's economy than saving the lives of their citizens? Which would you say is a 'protector of Human life' as opposed to a 'protector of the economy'.

I would tell you to stop drinking the kool-aid, but it would be a waste of effort. Rational arguments won't work against emotion-driven beliefs and delusions (China - Those Evil Communists. 'West' - Lands of the Free and Birthplace of Freedom and All that is Good).

More likely it’s many people who are of the mindset that lockdowns did nothing/weren’t worth it, that’s prevalent in the US. If you think the activity is useless then it would look pretty bad given all the downsides of lockdowns

Probably pretty useless against Omicron. It did its job for Delta and predecessor variants.

I could make the same baseless argument that many people also died due to the over restrictive policies and draconian imprisonment tactics.

Of course 0-covid is only possible if it is maintained forever, because like it or not the rest of the world still has covid.

I'm not sure it's the best approach, but I would figure they would wait until circulating Covid strains were acceptably less harmful and then reopen.

That’s already happening and it was the more mild omicron strain causing the latest lockdowns and the resurgence.

Their lockdowns are politically motivated: saving face because they prematurely declared victory, and a need to avoid dependence on western vaccines due to the ineffectiveness of their own vaccines—the latter really just a roundabout way to save face.

If you understood Chinese culture, you’d know that saving face is pretty important and makes you do crazy things.

So in your version of reality, 2 million+ Chinese have died due to 'over restrictive policies and draconian imprisonment tactics' post covid-19.

Sweden did not enforce any lockdowns and managed to have a lower death rate than France which enforced many punitive measures on its population.

I therefore hardly think your reports are true, or right.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat...

Are you honestly comparing France's relatively lackadaisical lockdowns to that of China (where entire cities experienced total lockdowns, with households only being allowed to send out 1 person to get food)?

And using Covid deaths per million global stats:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

The data on the linked page above shows that China has a Per Capita covid death rate of 10.8 per million, while that of France is 2,115.56 deaths per million. Even if you were to take the side of the tin-foil hat conspiracists and multiply China's covid death rate by a factor of 10, France would still have a covid death rate that's 100 times (100 TIMES!) that of the Chinese.

The only Western country with a lower covid death rate is New Zealand, which has an astonishingly low covid death rate of 0.2 deaths per million - solely because for much of the duration of the pandemic, NZ literally shut itself off from the world, and only opened up a few months ago.

The remaining countries with low covid related death rates are poor African & Asian countries - either due to a nonexistent medical infrastructure that does not permit them to keep accurate infection/hospitalization/death records or because the vast majority of poor countries have a significantly young population with relatively robust immune systems.

The nearest relatively developed countries on that list are the UAE & Qatar, both with 236 and 238 covid related deaths per million respectively, with Japan having 250 covid deaths per million, and Singapore having 252 deaths per million.

Actually I live in Japan and Japan has implemented exactly 0 lockdowns. While policies have reduced the number of people walking about, there are still more people shoulder to shoulder on a daily basis than anywhere in the US.

Are they wearing masks?

I look around where I am and wonder why aren't more of us wearing masks?

If you are in the US, half the us thinks masks and taking care not to communicate deadly diseases to them in some evil attempt to control them. In my world, all my friends know it's real and masks help protect you, but they are just so tired of it. I'm tired of it, but I still wear one, don't eat at inside restaurants, etc. But most people stopped thinking of covid as that disease that can really hurt you, if you are unlucky enough. Half the time I'm tempted not to wear a mask - my wife gets frustrated at me, but I do wear one when out at the store etc.

Nitpick, but AFAIK China hasn't violated Taiwan's airspace. Taiwan says they'd treat it as an act of war if they did.

Taiwan has an Air Defense Identification Zone where they track aircraft and aircraft entering it are supposed to identify themselves. This extends over the Chinese mainland and it's this zone that everyone talks about China "violating". But it's Chinese airspace and ultimately they have the right to fly there without notifying Taiwan.

Chinese missile went directly over the island near the capital of Taiwan:

- https://japan-forward.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/JF-Grap...

Source:

- https://japan-forward.com/editorial-chinas-missile-tantrum-t...

not a nitpick at all, stating facts never is, regardless of the downvotes

> Taiwan's sovereign airspace

Well, only 13 countries recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country - such as the 10,000 people of the 21 square kilometer island Naura.

Also, Taiwan occupies Kinmen Island in the bay of Xiamen's harbor on the PRC mainland. The island is in the Xiamen harbor and is 10 km from the city of Xiamen. So any PRC planes flying around Xiamen are "violating Taiwan's sovereign airspace" (which almost no one recognizes as "sovereign" - one of the main parties on Taiwan acknowledges Taiwan and the mainland are all one country).

It's complicated. Even Taiwan doesn't recognize Taiwan (Republic of China) as a sovereign nation, separate and distinct from the Peoples Republic of China. There are Taiwanese political groups that do want that but they haven't gotten their way so far.

Either way, you probably meant that 13 nations have full and formal diplomatic relationships with Taiwan. Which, btw does not include the US, Japan or any EU nations.

It's not really that complicated. After WW2 the Communists drove the Republic of China govt out of mainland China. So mainland China is controlled by the communists and Taiwan by the remnants of the Republic of China government. Republic of China government still claims to be the rightful government of all of China (Taiwan included), same with the Communist government.

And the people of Taiwan don't want to communist Chinese mainland govt to come and kill all their leaders, imprison people and take away their freedom, like the folks in officially happy Hong Kong. Adding on to your comment, it's pretty obvious why anyone would want to stay out of China's control.

> progressively violating more and more of Taiwan's sovereign airspace

Just in terms of international law, the Chinese flights near Taiwan are provocative but don’t violate any laws. The U.S. and Russia still do this sort of thing all the time. An ADIZ is not sovereign airspace.

Launching so many missiles over a space of 36 hours that you entirely close airspace and waterways (and apparently over the island) is a little different from flying an airplane at the edge of controlled airspace.

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220805-chinese-missi...

That happened during the Pelosi trip in August, and the jingoists were angry it didn't go further. The likelihood of an effective air/sea embargo on Taiwan is more likely than an initial invasion.

International law is not a good example here because actually if you look at international law then Taiwan is part of China and formally it's considered as part of China by US, EU etc. Taiwan is not a state from perspective of international law so from this perspective it doesn't have sovereign airspace.

I thought China snubbed their noses at International rulings regarding the South China Sea? Now they get respect from same authorities? Can't have it both ways. Join world system or reject it.

https://www.cfr.org/councilofcouncils/global-memos/hague-tri...

>snubbed their noses

The PCA "rulings" aren't international law because UN (which PRC accept as international system) has no formal position on them / has not adopted any parts of the decision. Ergo, PRC's SCS position is consistent with international law - like the actual one at UN, not make believe US "rules based order" which was behind PCA lawfare campaign and the ongoing propaganda.

PRC is more firmly within bounds of the "world system", versus US who tries to enforce FONAPs despite not ratifying UNCLOS, and doesn't respect the kind of international law that it accused PRC of violating, see ITLOS ruling (an actual UN ruling) regarding UK/US military base on Chagos/Mauritius/Diego Garcia.

A lot of democracy has it both ways, why can't China?