Comment: This article is a month old, but it summarizes the state-of-play with 'handling the Covid pandemic' in China, whose government has 'fallen into lockstep' with the West since June this year. For most, this development is 'obvious' because they believe China has been the fount of all things draconian since January 2020.
But in fact, life there returned to normal in the summer of 2020. We wrote at the time that this was likely due to Chinese authorities initially going on 'full bioterror alert' when they discovered that SARS-CoV-2 was man-made, but then dialling back the panic when they realized how benign it was.
But a year later, that has all changed. Now the Chinese government has adopted the fundamentally anti-scientific 'Zero Covid policy' of some Western countries, to the point of tamping down its economic output to 'save lives'. The narratives the CCP is telling its people are now practically identical to those of the Western Order. All have fallen into confluence...
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Jab 'em, stab 'em, poke 'em and prod 'em. China's Covid-19 'countermeasures' are now in 'totalitarian harmony' with Western ones
Jab 'em, stab 'em, poke 'em and prod 'em. China's Covid-19 'countermeasures' are now in 'totalitarian harmony' with Western ones
In May, the southern city of Guangzhou saw China's first Covid-19 outbreak caused by that variant, which scientists say is more easily transmitted than other strains of the virus, and may cause more severe illness.
Comment: It doesn't.
While most recent outbreaks were quickly confined to the region where they started, that has not been the case with the new outbreak that originated last month in Nanjing in eastern China. Though the numbers of new infections are low, state-run media have called the outbreak China's most serious since the early days of the pandemic because of the number of provinces affected. China reported 328 local cases in July, nearly equal to the number of cases reported in the previous five months, and cases have been confirmed in at least two dozen cities.
Comment: Indeed, that last narrative is also exactly what Western governments are using.
In response to Zhang Wenhong's tepid call for 'totalitarianism-lite', state media is doubling down on the country's official Zero Covid policy. Bloomberg reports: Right! So Western leaders aren't strict enough on their people because they are too weak in the face of pushback from citizens and their queer concerns for 'individual rights'.
Another non-sensical Global Times editorial on August 1st concluded: So they're spinning this as a 'geopolitical win'. Which it most certainly is not. It's 'geopolitical capture', if anything. China is fully under the thumb of who or whatever is controlling this global operation.
This month, the Chinese government has reported that it's unhappy to see that just two-thirds of its population is 'fully vaccinated'... while at the same time it too is changing its definition of 'fully vaccinated' to intoduce 'booster shots'.
Meanwhile, 'Chinese ports choke over zero tolerance Covid-19 policy', and 'China's factory inflation hits 13-year high as materials costs soar'...