Day L10: Making Up Rules As They Go
As the lockdown ground on, the news indicated some sort of "scientific" system that the authorities developed to manage and report covid cases. Spending hours trying to analyze the 'science' in how these lockdown systems were being put together was pointless. Given that I am a math and science teacher I at least had to try and decode this. There wasn't much else to do in lockdown anyway.
But what I quickly found out is the whole thing is rubbish. If there was any logic to this covid case reporting system, it wouldn't be long until it was suspended or modified in some way to a new and different set of rules. Everything was opaque and being changed when they saw fit.
So it begs the question: why even have a case reporting system? If only to pacify the population and give them false hope that the government is somehow managing something that was mismanaged from the start.
Back to what was on everyone's minds however: food. One prominent theory emerged on the chat groups about why the food supply and logistics was in such a chaotic mess:
The Shanghai government was not prepared and did not want to lock down the whole city [or parts of it] at all, but the top-down decision [from Beijing] on March 28 made it impossible not to lock down. The top-down decision also gave Shanghai no time to better prepare logistics and supplies in the governance structure.
This would kind of make sense, and it illustrated what we all know: there are factions within the Chinese communist party, and in this case the Beijing faction with Xi Jinping at the helm was clearly winning the power struggle.
The initial smaller-scale lockdowns in March were known as 'grid screening', which was yet another example of a failed system for covid case management. That was later abandoned simply because they were already a month behind the curve. The virus had been ripping through the population as early as the beginning of February. If they had any hope of wanting to continue the grand policy of zero covid, then a full scale lockdown was the only way.
And of course, during the lockdown they came up with another new system as shown here below:
Beijing, meanwhile, took over. They reverted to what they said they wouldn't do anymore: citywide lockdowns and mass testing. There was a CNN article that stated the obvious: the zero-covid policy is a source of political legitimacy for Beijing while President Xi pursues a third term this fall. The emperor himself even said in a speech in Jan 2021 that "judging from how this pandemic is being handled by different leaderships and political systems, we can clearly see who has done better." The irony is not lost. The article in CNN went on to say the following:
With the political stakes so high, the tremendous cost associated with the [zero-covid] policy becomes a secondary concern, and zero-covid becomes a by-all-means and at-all-cost approach. Unless the top leadership changes its zero-covid mentality, the policy is here to stay. In the words of a nationalist blogger, "China should prepare to live with zero-covid for at least ten years"
So that's the long-term game. Borders closed for 10 years or more. Not that CNN has dictated the course of my life plans, but by citing that Chinese blogger article it merely confirmed what we all long suspected. This allows us to plan accordingly. In the short term, we just need to get a clearer picture on how and when this lockdown could end.
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