The Chinese government has constantly and relentlessly signalled that it is a threat, that the long term effects are unknowable, that long covid will devastate the population, that their healthcare system could not handle a zillion old people coming in with the sniffles (go to a public hospital in China and you'd see, the practice of medicine is radically different, and they are very stingy with a lot of drugs and practice radical treatments with strange rationales), and that a lot of old people would die. This is something that almost everyone I've met here believes, especially party members. Most people here have never seen a single study that says Omicron isn't a big deal. Most people here haven't seen any actual death rates--the media here plays along and gleefully parrots the inflated death stats from the US. There is a slight rationality to it--there will be a new strain, every year, for a long time most likely. Omicron might be easier to harder to bear. Right now the CDC here is promulgating a line saying another booster will get the lockdowns away. Even saying something like that is crazy.
Control is only half of it. The main people being controlled are nurses and local cadres and juweihui people, the local party committees. These people are almost entirely retirees, failures to launch, that sort of thing, comfortable with working for a McDonald's wage for a job that should have just been hanging out with old people and putting up new propaganda signs and arranging for gardeners and workers to fix up the neighborhood. The Standing Committee probably doesn't think covid will kill everyone. But it also knows there's a depression coming, known since the last year or so--probably better to lean into the hit and have an alternative explanation for why most college grads can't find jobs right now and why the real-estate-ponzi-scheme that underwrote the last 2 decades of growth is blowing up in people's faces. They can 'store up' demand and unleash it and get a countercyclical growth spurt in 2023. Maybe. If they're not stupid. Which, they may be stupid. The other side of the control is that it is a good way to weed out people who are loyal to their country, themselves, their locality, over the party line. Make them behave irrationally, or strangely, and you can quickly weed out the ones who wouldn't cut off their dick to please their boss.
The only light here is that Xi got his third term, and he's got 5 years to unfuck the country and bask in the glory. If he can't turn shit around fast, the narrative of the protector and father of the people bullshit that's so implicit in a paternalistic dictatorship falls apart.
Saw this posted recently, not the first time I've seen scuttlebutt like this, but it does line up with the statements from the CDC about vaccination. The Sinovac one may be safe--I don't know if the adenovirus vector vaccines are acceptable or not. I'm not getting the shot, though my wife here did. She hasn't dropped dead, though she does have a heart murmur that may or may not have had something to do with that. My doctor took the same vaccine and tested his blood, the antibody levels for the virus went down after about 6 weeks--and after the catastrophe that was SARS vaccine development, I'm willing to believe that they didn't want to make a killer shot and risk destroying the country, and made a borderline useless shot.
View attachment 3794244
Anyway, what do I know. This country is opaque and the people are retarded.
