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My friends and coworkers in Shanghai have really hit a wall these last few days. Turns out that a diet of instant noodles is only funny for the first week or two until your body starts realizing it's not a temporary situation. These are pretty affluent people, too. I can't imagine what migrant workers and other vulnerable groups are going through. My in-law who spent a few years in a Chinese prison said that he was fed better in prison. I also suspect Covid is spreading to neighboring cities, because another relative (90 years old and completely unvaccinated) in Suzhou is now under lockdown. The rumor going around is that China is lobbying the WHO to drop the 'pandemic' status of Covid and/or 'rebrand' the next wave as something that is not Covid or Omicron and not as dangerous. Then China can declare that Covid is over, that China 'won,' and begin lifting policies.
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Apr 15, 2022 03:12
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Smeef posted:The rumor going around is that China is lobbying the WHO to drop the 'pandemic' status of Covid and/or 'rebrand' the next wave as something that is not Covid or Omicron and not as dangerous. Then China can declare that Covid is over, that China 'won,' and begin lifting policies. this is just so insanely pathetic
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Apr 15, 2022 05:58
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There seems to have been some pretty big protests in Pudong yesterday.
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Apr 15, 2022 06:42
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Come on China, get it together, please? 
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Apr 15, 2022 07:43
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/1514714956456992776 wow, amazing this happened, if only people before could have realized how utterly insane a “zero Covid” policy was. It’s too bad no one was able to predict this type of poo poo beyond insane lol
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Apr 15, 2022 09:10
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guess they should just let millions die
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Apr 15, 2022 09:22
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Mantis42 posted:guess they should just let millions die China is stuck because it can't let it rip without losing millions of people and seeing widespread discontent, but Shanghai is showing just how poorly their local planning is going in one of their most advanced cities. Shenzhen managed to keep it at bay but Shanghai really underestimated things and is going to struggle to keep it contained from the look of things. But also a lot of the problems are just not solvable overnight. Why are so many old people not vaccinated? Why are FFP2 masks not the norm? Why is the plumbing still so poo poo it spreads an airborne virus?
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Apr 15, 2022 11:21
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Smeef posted:My friends and coworkers in Shanghai have really hit a wall these last few days. Turns out that a diet of instant noodles is only funny for the first week or two until your body starts realizing it's not a temporary situation. These are pretty affluent people, too. I can't imagine what migrant workers and other vulnerable groups are going through. Not sure why they're surviving on instant noodles, there are ways of getting food. It's not optimal, but there's multiple sources. If they're seriously struggling PM me and I can put them in touch with people.
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Apr 15, 2022 12:55
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Filed under 'food for thought': https://twitter.com/RyanFedasiuk/status/1514615891534626824
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Apr 15, 2022 14:11
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Mantis42 posted:guess they should just let millions die that's what will happen if they continue utterly failing to feed their people and provide them with critical healthcare
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Apr 15, 2022 15:11
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:that's what will happen if they continue utterly failing to feed their people and provide them with critical healthcare I really don't want to sound like a shill for the regime because they are loving up monumentally, but we're nowhere near close to millions not having food or healthcare
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Apr 15, 2022 15:20
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Daduzi posted:I really don't want to sound like a shill for the regime because they are loving up monumentally, but we're nowhere near close to millions not having food or healthcare yet let's not forget that china does have a track record of not giving a gently caress about starving its own citizens in the name of progress
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Apr 15, 2022 15:22
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China isn't practicing zero covid to save lives, it's practicing zero covid because the early days of the pandemic were a crisis of legitimacy for the government that scared the hell out of it.
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Apr 15, 2022 16:05
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Mantis42 posted:guess they should just let millions die Did you mean to post this as a response to the above video? Obviously crafting a functional public health response that doesn't traumatize the population and isn't laser focused on a single performance metric while failing to do basic things like vaccinate the vulnerable populations would be more effective than whatever appears to be happening. MixMasterMalaria fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Apr 15, 2022 |
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Apr 15, 2022 16:10
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Morrow posted:China isn't practicing zero covid to save lives, it's practicing zero covid because the early days of the pandemic were a crisis of legitimacy for the government that scared the hell out of it. so they’re just saving lives by accident?
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Apr 15, 2022 16:18
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fart simpson posted:so they’re just saving lives by accident? I think that Xi Jinping cares as much about the individual lives and happiness of his citizens no more than Joe Biden does about his.
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Apr 15, 2022 16:39
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it's expending this effort because it overcommitted, early during the pandemic, to a series of what has proven to be unfortunate bets: that vaccines would take a long time to develop (they did not), that disease surveillance would be as effective as with SARS, which had rewarded massive-scale temperature monitoring (it was not), that there would not be the emergence of much more infectious variants (vs, say, the emergence of much deadlier variants), that vaccines would provide sterilizing immunity or at least sufficient reduction of infectiousness once delivered at population-scale (they did not), etc. not all of these were self-evidently wrong decisions at the time they were made, although of course much criticism can be levelled at institutional inflexibility afterwards (be it due to leadership dysfunction, bureaucratic inertia, or the deadly impact of scoring short-term political victories by deliberately entrenching a basically technocratic judgment as a patriotic conceit so that it becomes very, very difficult to backtrack later. Americans, for whom mask-wearing became a partisan decision at levels far more intense than in the rest of the Western democratic world, should be well aware of how this can backfire).
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Apr 15, 2022 19:51
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"this disease is not SARS and one should stop reacting as if it is" plays out in a lot of ways, even taking zero-covid as the accepted policy goal:
ronya fucked around with this message at 11:18 on Apr 16, 2022 |
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Apr 15, 2022 20:30
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A fascinating essay in the kinds of unexpected dysfunctions in organizing online deliveries: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/3qW86520C6Xt8g97_K9lMw Narrative by employees of an online delivery department of Fresh Hema supermarket 盒马鲜生 in Shanghai, which wound up organizing emergency committees of HR office ladies and programmers to do delivery as the lockdown set in quote:Fan Xiaojie asked three times: "Have your 48-hour nucleic acid results come out? Is the community all overcast? Has the permit issued by the Commerce Commission been issued?" quote:When Fan Xiaojie asked three consecutive questions in the group, Qiu Keli was the first to answer. After all, he was driving a car run by the president, and of course he had all three certificates. But he never expected that he almost didn't even come out of the gate of the community, and the guard asked three times, "What are you going out for? Are you going to buy food? Are you telling the truth?" quote:At the beginning of the establishment of the Volunteer Team, everyone had only one goal: try to increase the number of delivery orders, and send as many families as possible. He Yanjun expected that his SUV could hold up to 20 courier boys, but after two days of running, he realized that the account was not calculated like this. a lot of energy being mandated on political fictions here, not least of which expending precious logistical capacity on pseudoscientific medicine
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Apr 16, 2022 16:59
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They appear to still be maintaining the fiction of zero deaths from this now 300,000+ case outbreak, too.
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Apr 16, 2022 19:11
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https://twitter.com/wstv_lizzi/status/1515252449736630276 https://twitter.com/lingli_vienna/status/1515298431014735875 if I were to guess, probably for letting clusters through Smeef posted:The rumor going around is that China is lobbying the WHO to drop the 'pandemic' status of Covid and/or 'rebrand' the next wave as something that is not Covid or Omicron and not as dangerous. Then China can declare that Covid is over, that China 'won,' and begin lifting policies. https://twitter.com/teamlipei/status/1515274702742196226 quote:Let me offer a plan to fight the epidemic: Shanghai will immediately establish a Special Administrative Region (SAR), deepen reforms, and strengthen its status as a financial center, parallel to Hong Kong. At the same time, Shanghai and Hong Kong and Macau are both SARs, and the number of new crown cases is not included in mainland China, and mainland China has quickly achieved a social factual reset, everyone is happy. In other news, Xi'an (capital of Shaanxi, pop. 13m) has entered a not-lockdown after detecting 43 new cases over a two-week period. It exited its previous lockdown in January (previous international coverage). Interestingly its announced measures are really lax by Chinese standards. A graph from The Economist: 
ronya fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Apr 16, 2022 |
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Apr 16, 2022 19:26
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:yet Nah, trends in Shanghai at least are towards increasing access to food and healthcare, not less. Ultimately remember that though the regime is callous, they really don't want a hungry populace pushing against them. That might have been feasible in the 70s, but it isn't under the new pact.
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Apr 17, 2022 16:37
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I think we're officially at the Fall Guy part of this horrible cycle.
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Apr 17, 2022 20:02
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Shanghai’s lockdown protests reveal tensions over zero-Covid https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/17/shanghai-lockdown-desperation-rises-food-runs-low-china quote:At about noon last Tuesday, Yu Wenming, an 82-year-old man in Shanghai, called his local residential committee for help. “I’ve used up my medicines. Nor do I have anything to eat. I’m feeling awful,” Yu, who had tested positive for Covid, told the party secretary, Zhang Zhen. This is monstrous negligence. The time has come to abandon covid zero. Vaccinate your elderly and take care of your drat citizens. How can a communist nation abandon people in this way? How are u fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Apr 17, 2022 |
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Apr 17, 2022 20:57
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The craziest part of this to me is that there was a test involved of the capacity of extremely strict centralized autocracies with REALLY strong civil control mechanisms to utilize disease control methods, leading to the justifications of covid zero. at the very least, as a test case for the utility of containment, at these levels, by these mechanisms. But china goes about it with the standard autocratic frailties, with a process not governed by rational policy but rather by image frailty and an acute allergy to dissent and the free exchange of information. the motivations are wrong, the outcomes are ... well, they're this now. they cannot adapt on the right lines, they can only compensate according to a mandate which was originally about saving face.
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Apr 18, 2022 01:32
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Peng Ming-Min died last week. He was a long-time activist for democratic reform inside Taiwan, including pushing for Taiwanese democracy and the end to the ROC in the 1960s. For one of his writings his writings, the Declaration of Formosan Self-Salvation, he was put in jail on Green Island, where Chiang kept political dissidents.quote:A strong movement is rapidly sweeping across Taiwan. It is a self-salvation movement for the 12 million (the population at quote:Some people said that Chiang Kai-shek has become a naked emperor, and that we can wait for the end of his regime. In it, he was one of the first people to public talk about the 228 Incident where thousands were killed by the KMT after the war. After being moved to house arrest, he escaped Taiwan in 1970 and spent the next 20 years in exile in Sweden and the US. He came back in the 1990s, and was the first presidential candidate for the DPP in the 1996 election, where he lost to Lee Deng Hui of the KMT. He wasn't one of the founders of the DPP (as they got started in the 80s when he was in exile) but he was one of the ideological founders. I've read alot of his stuff and alot about him, and one thing that kinda sticks out: personally, everyone thought he was a tremendous rear end in a top hat. Brilliant, but everyone loving hated working with him. And you know, if I lost my arm in WW2 (not as a fighter, from a US bombing raid) and witnessed the Nagasaki atomic bomb, and was jailed by my government for wanting democracy, then I would be pissed too.
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Apr 18, 2022 06:36
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https://twitter.com/sehof/status/1515936340344717313quote:BEIJING, April 18 (Reuters) - China's supply chains must be stabilised amid COVID-19 outbreaks, with local governments helping key companies get back to work, the official Xinhua news agency quoted Vice Premier Liu He as saying. the 一断三不断 slogan dating back to Jan 2020 is making the official rounds again
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Apr 19, 2022 16:36
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Silver2195 posted:I'm not sure it takes that much imagination, since that's how a lot of Chinese government policies seem to work; there's a vague directive from the central government, and the most extreme implementation is by some local governments, often in rural areas. It's a systematic problem with the way the Chinese government is organized. I think there was a great post in this thread a few years ago about this process, but I can't find it. I finally found it! Cefte posted:When you say 'the Chinese government' like that, it sounds stupid, because you don't think of world leaders thinking up ways to stuff rice in the mouths of Hui. But (as I think has been raised already in this thread), that's not how this works. This post was was from 2012, by the way; the policy discussed was, in retrospect, an early warning sign of how bad things would get in Xinjiang. (The very next post is someone pointing out that the policy was almost certainly directed at Uyghurs, not Hui.)
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Apr 21, 2022 02:26
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I am struck by the parallels to Russian governance in the lack of specific top-down administrative instruction or rulemaking.
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Apr 21, 2022 03:24
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Discendo Vox posted:I am struck by the parallels to Russian governance in the lack of specific top-down administrative instruction or rulemaking. It’s a form of “working towards the Fuhrer,” I guess, and thus how a lot of authoritarian governments end up working. The people at the top have unlimited authority but can’t be bothered to formulate actual policies, just vibes, and people lower down the chain compete to be the most zealous in turning the vibes into policies, resulting in horrifyingly extreme policies. Edit: I think in the Chinese case, and probably other cases as well, this way of doing things is a feature rather than a bug for the people at the top, because 1) it lets them disavow unpopular policies without admitting fault, and 2) it lets them test out different versions of a general policy. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 04:17 on Apr 21, 2022 |
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Apr 21, 2022 04:08
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Silver2195 posted:It’s a form of “working towards the Fuhrer,” I guess, and thus how a lot of authoritarian governments end up working. The people at the top have unlimited authority but can’t be bothered to formulate actual policies, just vibes, and people lower down the chain compete to be the most zealous in turning the vibes into policies, resulting in horrifyingly extreme policies. Agreed fully, the ability to shift credit and blame up and down reflects the obscurity of policy control and the opacity of the state structure itself.
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Apr 21, 2022 04:47
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It also fundamentally reflects how these are absolutely huge countries that you can't really micromanage. If you want top down control, the implementation is going to look like that as it gets amplified by each rung on the ladder.
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Apr 21, 2022 04:56
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Morrow posted:It also fundamentally reflects how these are absolutely huge countries that you can't really micromanage. If you want top down control, the implementation is going to look like that as it gets amplified by each rung on the ladder. Reminder at this point that Han Feizi was writing about the impossibility of managing China through fiat over 2,000 years ago, and the place has got exponentially more complex since then.
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Apr 21, 2022 16:17
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How are these people so virulently racist towards people they have little to no contact with? https://mobile.twitter.com/TGTM_Official/status/1515960068725886978 Despera fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Apr 21, 2022 |
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Apr 21, 2022 21:53
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Discendo Vox posted:I am struck by the parallels to Russian governance in the lack of specific top-down administrative instruction or rulemaking. Daduzi posted:Reminder at this point that Han Feizi was writing about the impossibility of managing China through fiat over 2,000 years ago, and the place has got exponentially more complex since then. Cefte fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Apr 22, 2022 |
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Apr 22, 2022 01:23
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Despera posted:How are these people so virulently racist towards people they have little to no contact with? The internet makes you stupid
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Apr 22, 2022 01:35
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Despera posted:How are these people so virulently racist towards people they have little to no contact with? Chinese people are like people anywhere else. People are tribal by nature and it is easy to stir these kinds of feelings up provided you give them the right material. There will always be losers in any society who have accomplished nothing that they can feel good about so the only thing they have left to fall back on is their skin colour or culture. Racism in China is nothing new. Nor does moving into the West reduce racism among the diaspora. My parents and family still use racial slurs for different ethnic groups. That only toned down when my sister married a white guy and I am pretty sure my father came close to a meltdown but he mellowed out. Chinese people look down on other Chinese people too and discriminate against those from different regions just like how Canadians have stereotypes of people in Newfoundland or how Americans have the inbred white trash stereotypes of people in Kentucky or W. Virginia. In short people are trash.
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Apr 22, 2022 01:45
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Discendo Vox posted:I am struck by the parallels to Russian governance in the lack of specific top-down administrative instruction or rulemaking. Is it really the the lack of specific top-down administrative instruction or is it the top levels of government choosing not to be the face of policy when doing so could be inconvenient? It's a pretty common thing for authoritarian leadership to go very quiet on potentially controversial actions, leaving the lower levels of government to be the mouthpieces and scapegoats just in case something goes wrong. As an example, during much of the first year of COVID-19 you saw both Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin get super quiet to the point people were making up conspiracy theory nonsense to explain where they vanished to. A bunch of other autocrats similarly vanished from the public eye for presumably the same reason. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Apr 22, 2022 |
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Apr 22, 2022 04:26
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https://twitter.com/KnowS0mething/status/1517254705470218240 absolute psycho poo poo
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Apr 22, 2022 04:54
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Warbadger posted:Is it really the the lack of specific top-down administrative instruction or is it the top levels of government choosing not to be the face of policy when doing so could be inconvenient? It's a pretty common thing for authoritarian leadership to go very quiet on potentially controversial actions, leaving the lower levels of government to be the mouthpieces and scapegoats just in case something goes wrong. It's that as far as I can tell neither government has a structural apparatus that would provide or create an expectation of such communication. I'm familiar enough with Chinese regulatory rollouts that I know their systems are genuinely opaque and have systemic gaps in ways that, e.g., regulations.gov or federalregister.gov don't.
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Apr 22, 2022 05:01
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