The China Syndrome
Xi Jinping's quest for zero Covid has turned Shanghai - China's wealthiest city - into a 25,000,000-person prison. No one seems to know exactly why.
Shanghai’s Covid lockdown - now in its third week - has gone bad.
How bad?
We can’t be sure. Chinese censorship has reached levels woke bluechecks can only dream of. But posts and videos, like this one from last week, have leaked out. They paint a picture of a giant city under extraordinary pressure, its 25 million inhabitants locked in apartments and struggling to keep their refrigerators and pantries stocked.
Along with locking people in their homes, Chinese authorities have essentially closed the roads to almost all civilian vehicles, exempting only a few thousand employees of food delivery companies. The streets are even emptier than Times Square was in April 2020:
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Despite the pain it is causing, the lockdown is failing.
Shanghai reported 27,000 new infections today, the equivalent of about 350,000 in the United States. Three weeks ago, it had under 1,000 new cases a day.
Many of those newly infected people are being moved to crowded and dirty quarantine centers. Chinese authorities have not reported the exact number of people they are currently detaining, although it is at least several thousand. They have set up more than 60 quarantine centers in empty office buildings, apartments, and schools. Reuters spoke to a woman in one today:
The woman, who declined to be identified, said there were at least 200 people in the facility, including young children, sharing four toilets. There are no showers and they got just plain bread for breakfast, she said.
The lockdown is inflicting serious financial harm, too. Economists predict it will reduce China’s GDP by 4 percent - billions of dollars each day - for as long as it lasts, and reach outside China too.
Shanghai is the world’s largest port, a crucial part of supply chains worldwide. China is trying to allow the port to operate in an “isolation bubble,” but it is had limited success.
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What’s happening in Shanghai is Covid lockdown madness in its purest form, especially since the Chinese are claiming that nearly all the new cases are asymptomatic. And no one has offered any completely convincing explanation why.
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