Make no doubt about it, there’s something seriously disturbing about the state of the recent Covid lockdowns taking place in Shanghai. Even for China.
Here is what the outbreak looks like, if we are to believe the numbers coming out of China. You’ll have to excuse me for being frank, but I simply don’t believe them. China has lied about nearly everything since the beginning of the pandemic, and they certainly don’t have the rest of the world’s best interest in mind now that they are allying with Russia economically.
Source: NY Times
Rather, I believe the numbers are likely being exaggerated one way or the other (just as I believe China does with their macroeconomic data), in order to meet the needs of whatever agenda the CCP is trying to push.
Here we are, two years into Covid, with ample time behind us to have studied the virus, developed vaccines, boosters and therapeutics and allowed for natural immunity to spread – and China is locking down the city of 26.3 million people at the first sign of a couple cases of Covid.
Photo: NBC News
The actions China has taken to implement this round of lockdowns have been dystopian and Orwellian, to say the least.
For example, according to the NY Times:
- all international flights to and from Shanghai have been halted
- many roads to the city’s two airports have also been closed
- the government performed P.C.R. tests on 25.67 million people
- the government has not allowed residents to go to grocery stores
- the government has put together tens of thousands of cots in two convention centers as quarantine centers – but they don’t have showering facilities
China is also, once again, sealing people in their homes. Videos on social media “show trapped residents howling and screaming from inside high-rise buildings at night,” The Independent wrote this week.
According to social media posts, the city is even using drones to try and calm the nerves of angry residents.
“Please comply [with] covid restrictions. Control your soul’s desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing,” this drone is reported to be saying.
There are a innumerable disturbing things about the dystopian way this alleged outbreak is being handled, but none more pressing is the question of why it is being handled the way it is.
It felt like, heading into the spring, the world was over the idea of Covid. Mask mandates and vaccine mandates were being lifted, businesses were starting to recover and we were heading into the warmth of summer with the attitude that we now knew the risks of Covid and that it was time for every person to take care of themselves.
So, why such a drastic overreaction by China? Why continue the country’s completely irrational and inane “Covid Zero” policy at this point?
It’s simply doesn’t make any sense – even for China. In fact, the country’s extremely dramatic and overzealous response feels so abnormal that it made me wonder yesterday whether China was simply using it as a tool for a state sponsored power grab that it had long planned.
I also wondered if the drastic measures – similar to the measures we saw at the beginning of Covid from China – were a sign that the country knows something about the virus that the rest of the world still doesn’t.
Certainly, nobody thinking reasonably believes such a drastic reaction to this virus, which has already wreaked its first round of global havoc but has settled down and become a way of life in places like Florida and the Nordic states where they’ve allowed herd immunity to run rampant, is warranted.
Yesterday, on Twitter, those were the only two alternate explanations I could conceive of for China’s actions.
But a third wild idea popped into my head yesterday afternoon that I wanted to also bring up.
What if China is purposely shutting down its country to wreak havoc on the global supply chain even further and to exert its power over the quality of lives of the western world?
I’ve talked about why I think China and Russia are going to be breaking off of the current monetary system and essentially starting a new economy.
I’ve written about how backing the ruble and potentially backing be digital Yuan with gold could be one way for these countries to exert their influence and stand alone on a global stage economically.
I’ve also warned about the pitfalls of the United States not having enough productive capacity and relying on importing from China too much. Don’t think China doesn’t understand the dynamics of this relationship, either.
What if China wants to not only exert its influence by backing its currency, but also by keeping its production means on a tighter leash: more for the benefit of its own people, and less for the benefits of Americans exporting dollars. How would China show the rest of the world in a passive, non-confrontational way, exactly just how much power they have over our quality of life?
At this point it appears that China isn’t reserving its productive capacity for its own citizens. After all, reports of food shortages and riots breaking out in Shanghai have been ubiquitous.
Photo: MarketWatch
But there’s a non-zero chance that this may be propaganda or collateral damage that the country has to let happen in order to make the rest of the world think that its people are suffering alongside of them, when they cauterize supply chains for products heading elsewhere in the world.
And if you immediately write off such game theory as conspiratorial and harebrained, you may be right. But you’re also likely underestimating the Chinese Communist Party.
No matter what the explanation, China is overshooting the mark with this latest round of lockdowns, even for “Covid Zero” standards.
Videos leaking onto social media appear worse and more dire than the ones during the original lockdowns of 2020.
Is it really going to be the long-term ongoing policy of the CCP to try and keep zero Covid cases in a country with 1.4 billion people? Even for an unreasonable unilateral dictatorship, that’s a bit much.
Photo: Reuters
If I had to bet it all today on why China is locking down the way that it is, I would take one of these three scenarios over actual implementation of the world’s most irrational health policy:
- The CCP is simply trying to usurp more power
- There’s something about Covid that China knows that the rest of the world still doesn’t know
- China is looking for an excuse to slow its production to put pressure on the Western world at a time when it is trying to separate further, economically, from the West
Either way, the more I see out of the country with every passing day, the more it becomes clear to me that something is rotten in the state of Shanghai’s latest Covid lockdowns.
via zerohedge
