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Communist Chinese Dictator Xi Jinping Is in Grave Danger
If you have been following the news lately, you might be aware of the dire news out of mainland China, and its most vital city, Shanghai. Since early 2020, the Communist Chinese have had a “Zero Covid” policy on the mainland and in Hong Kong. This policy involves attempts to stamp out any outbreak of Covid infections, anywhere in the land, by instituting targeted lockdowns and mass testing, to find, isolate, and stop infections. If you believe the media, Communist China has been incredibly successful with this strategy, and they boast of their very low infection and death counts. They also boast of their home-grown vaccines (which have been shown to be relatively ineffective).
This year, that strategy has started to come apart. In Hong Kong, the entire multi-million population territory has been subject to lockdowns as their case numbers increase, due to the rapid spread of the Omicron virus. The Communist Party initially left it to local authorities to stop the spread, but began to intervene once it became apparent that interventions were failing, and deaths mounting. Those interventions have failed.
The situation in Shanghai is especially dire. The Communist Chinese are discovering what the rest of the world has been aware of for many months, that the Omicron variant spreads like wildfire, and cannot be stopped by any means known. It infects even those who have been “vaccinated and boosted”; the only saving grace being that symptoms are generally mild, and most everyone infected recovers. We are now hearing stories out of Shanghai, of residents locked into their multi-story apartment towers and forbidden to leave. We see press stories about people screaming from their apartment balconies that they are starving, unable to replenish their food supplies. Below is part of an article in the Epoch Times:
After four days of trying to order food online to no avail, a man of about age 30 from Shanghai’s Yangpu District called the police. The sealed-in resident wanted to know if he would get fed if he charged out of his residential compound and got arrested for breaking quarantine rules.
His food purchase placed through the local neighborhood committee six days earlier had never arrived, and the hunger was giving him stomach cramps, he said.
“The neighborhood committee told me to ‘endure,’ I have endured four days. All that’s edible is gone except for water,” he told the police in a call, the recording of which he later posted online. “Every evening, when I tune in to the news at 7 p.m., all is portrayed as peaceful and well and brimming with a sense of security. I don’t know about this security.”
But the police’s answer dashed any hopes for a food source. Even if he got arrested, they would just send him right back home, the officer said, noting that the police station couldn’t accommodate him either.
The man’s desperate attempt to fend off starvation represents a microcosm of the suffering experienced by many residents in Shanghai amid a lockdown that the communist regime has imposed, insisting that it’s the key to containing a surging Omicron outbreak. Residents in some districts have been sealed inside their homes for more than a month.
City authorities only started easing lockdowns on April 11, under mounting pressure. But the hardline policies have crippled the city’s economy and wreaked havoc. In the Chinese financial hub that’s home to 26 million people, feelings of hunger, frustration, and desperation are taking hold.
The Chinese Communist Party’s greatest fear has always been social unrest. Since the very beginning, the government has tightly controlled its people’s access to information; giving them leeway to make a living, travel about the country, and even study abroad, but heavily curtailing any dissent. The Chinese censors are well-known to be extremely active, up to and including taking down social media posts that contain “forbidden” words and concepts in real-time. All tyrants fear their own people, because they know that there are more of “the people” than the tyrants, and if the people reach a breaking point and turn on their government, they almost always win, regardless of casualties.
So the Covid situation, where Xi Jinping is so heavily invested in his Zero Covid strategy, has him and the CCP on a knife-edge. With his torturous lockdowns, the beginnings of starvation in a modern city, and information being spread on their own internal media, Mr. Xi is in the process of creating that which he fears most. The conditions imposed on the Chinese people cannot endure for long without uprisings. And the CCP knows how easy it is for a mob to turn deadly. That’s why they shut down demonstrations when they occur, and why they have forbidden any mention of 1989’s Tiananmen massacre.
Knowing that the spread of Omicron cannot be stopped once unleashed, I wonder how long it will take to spread to Beijing. Because it will. And then, what will Xi Jinping do? This information has spread as fast as the Omicron variant, and there is now no way for Xi to keep the world from knowing what is going on in his country. I hope that it is the Chinese/American Covid Virus that brings down the Communist regime in China. It will be a just punishment.
[originally posted at RushBabe49.com]
Published in Foreign Policy
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Run for the border, if he’s got a lick of brains.
I’ve got a question. Is the virus deadly and a significant danger to the world? Or is it more like the common cold or the flu?
If it’s not so very deadly, why is China locking everyone up, potentially to starve to death.
And is there a difference between how it affects Chinese and Europeans? Is it really deadly against the Chinese and mild to the Europeans?
Just saw an item in the local news informing me that the next wave will be even bigger, but won’t seem to be because people either won’t get tested or will test at home and not tell anyone if they get positive results. Journalists hardest hit, because whatever will they have to report? They’ll have to go out and find real news, and they don’t remember how.
Many more people have natural immunity with each wave. But they don’t need or profit from the vaccine so that basic fact must be suppressed.
But are people dropping like flies in China, or is China just being super careful and locking their citizens away to starve, or are they just faking it for some nefarious reason? Or are the videos from two years ago of people falling dead in the streets actually true, and the virus has hit China harder than anywhere else, perhaps because it was a bioweapon against the Chinese.
I mean here we are trying to get rid of the last of the masks, and in China they’re trying to break the welds in their front doors to go out and get food.
spoiler: everyone’s vaccines have been shown to be absolutely ineffective.
As alluded to in the other comments the “zero Covid” policy seems nonsensical. Why are the Chinese persisting when they see that everywhere else that the virus is survivable? Lockdowns are adverse economic events, so it doesn’t make sense that they would fear the unrestrained Omicron would depress production more than lockdowns. I don’t think the CCP cares about the number of citizen death other than its impact of social cohesion and economic productivity. What does the CCP know about the virus that we don’t? Would it affect their population more than most?
The panic must be maintained.
If the Chinese authorities were serious about saving lives, there are several remedies that are effective in treating Covid, especially in the early stages.
I thought the Chinese and Asians generally had better immunity to COVID since they have had exposure to other SARS viruses that always seem to originate in China. But, they’re not acting like it. Or maybe Xi is locking down the people simply because he can.
I don’t see how the Chinese people overcome their communist oppressors. It seems a very difficult thing to do when you have neither guns nor bullets (warning to Americans about the bullet shortage) .– nor food now, apparently. As long as Xi keeps his army and “law” enforcers fed. . . And communists notoriously care little for human life so starving masses of your (troublesome) population isn’t morally problematic to them.
Once freedom is lost it seems to take an outside force such as the United States to set things on a better course, and even then it’s often only marginally successful. And we have some pretty daunting challenges of our own at the moment.
I suspect Xi will die comfortably in his bed at a ripe old age, like most tyrants.
Yes, none of this makes sense. What are Chinese death rates that they would shut down Shanghai of all places? If the Chinese don’t care about the lives of their own population, why such draconian measures to save their lives? If the Chinese want to present a good and capable face to the world why are they reacting so crazily?
Come to think of it, were the Chinese really dropping like flies in early 2020? If so, why were there no videos of Americans, or even Italians, dropping dead in the streets? (But maybe I just missed them.) I had begun to doubt that the Chinese videos were real, but now it looks like the Chinese are doing it again.
Do the Chinese know something we don’t?
It’s been reported since before Russia’s “special operation” that Ukraine’s US-sponsored labs were targeting ethnic Russians for their research, the implication being that Russians were to be targeted with a genetic-ethnicity-specified biological weapon. Could this be what happened in Wuhan in 2019?
Furthermore, could Putin know something we don’t know?
I know. This is all preposterous.
Xi will be fine as long as he manages expectations properly. In Chinese culture, people are expected to follow their leader as long as the leader has the mandate of heaven. If the leader is perceived as having lost the mandate, then the people are obliged to replace that leader. Mao killed 50 million and did not lose the support of the people, so the bar is pretty low. I assume that the people of China, like elsewhere, are biased towards action by politicians being better than inaction. That is, deadly lockdowns are better than risking freedom. Note, American culture used to teach the opposite, now it is just us remnants that value inaction by government.
Yeah, it seems a little too complicated. I’m going to need a lot more evidence that these ethnically-targeted viruses are even possible. Although it’s impossible to discount any conspiracy “theory” these days. It seems they’re more often actual conspiracies than not lately.
Maybe the people of Shanghai were getting a little too uppity and Xi intends to replace them by starving them out. He has plenty of human resources to draw from.
Several factors at play here:
It will be fascinating to see if Xi’s government is capable of adjusting fire.
Like the men and the elephant, everyone has a piece of the puzzle. China desires world domination, and Xi firmly believes that it is within reach (Biden isn’t helping in that regard either, and Xi has the measure of the man). From the very beginning of the pandemic, the CCP embarked on their Zero Covid strategy, involving strict lockdowns, mass testing, and the third linchpin-lying about how many “cases” and deaths they had. That last one is huge, because the vast majority of the West believed the spurious statistics coming out of Communist China. China still has a totally inadequate and substandard medical system, and masses of hospitalizations and deaths would have quickly overwhelmed it, which is another good reason for their Zero Covid strategy. That would have been impossible to conceal, and we all are aware of the Asian desire to “save face”. So, at this late stage, China has the least amount of natural immunity from the virus, since it has been tamped down and not allowed to spread. Once the virus really gets a toehold in the non-immune Chinese population, I think it will be impossible for the Zero Covid strategy to work. Watch the news very carefully in the coming weeks.
Just this morning, there is an article in the Epoch Times on Shanghai.
Shanghai residents clash with police over neighborhood quarantine centers under construction.
This article by Niall Ferguson tries to explain a little bit of what is going on in China with the Wuhan Flu.
Actually, I think it’s the simplest answer but the least likely. The only complex thing would be ethnically targeted viruses. But this has been talked about since early 2020.
And you know the saying, by the time it is hypothesized that the government has something, it’s had it for twenty years.
Yes, an excerpt:
I don’t know why they didn’t go back to old habits: get the western vaccines, slap Chinese labels on them, and claim they were Chinese all along.
I was talking to my Chinese friend from college about Shanghai. He lives in the US, but the rest of his family and some of his good friends are still in China. We think what’s happening involves what everyone else has said in this post, but there’s also a power struggle as there always is in the CCP. The Shanghai Clique used this initial outbreak to see if they can test and destabilize Xi and his clique. Xi and his clique then decided to come down hard on Shanghai to squash any political rebellion. When the big guys fight, who else but the regular people suffer? Nothing new here, it’s just that China always takes things to the extreme.
I guess the Chinese version of “musical chairs” is not to take away a chair so much as pull one out from a sitting player and put someone else in it. Oh, and no music is involved.
Yeah, their 20th Congress Party is in October, so the political struggle started right on time with Shanghai. We all know Xi wants to stay forever (or at least for a third term), but as these things go, not everyone is happy about it. And Xi has tied himself so much with this zero-COVID policy.
I’m with you on this, none of it makes sense. But that is common to all Communist countries. They do a lot of things that are stupid because the absolute power they have has crippled their judgement and integrity. Perhaps they will strengthen ties with Russia as everyone is predicting due to the war and sanctions. Then they can both drag each other down into failure, with each contributing his worst attributes.
I was surprised to see Ferguson assert that this is unlikely to harm Xi’s position, but that is doubltess my own ignorance of Chinese thinking, and I also should have recalled how little Mao and Stalin were harmed by their genocidal policies.
How does discontent register? There is no Chinese outrage about the atrocities in Tibet or against the Uighurs. Media will not permit too many negative stories and will the Party members think of Xi’s willingness to starve and kill people to persist in a stupid policy as a sign of strength and toughness?
The economy is distorted. Xi is clearly counting on flag-waving support for his military buildup and saber-rattling to offset any criticism. The Party is so dug in it is hard to conceive of any serious opposition from outside the existing power structure.
Especially if they’re too weak from hunger to do anything.
A friend is wondering if they’ve released some other virus they’ve been working on. Their behaviors look similar to their release of the Wuhan virus. They knew what it was and what they had done. That’s why they reacted so wildly to it.
The idea that they might be in the throes of another human-made virus accident would make a lot of sense. Time will tell, I guess.
I agree, but it would be a rather strong presupposition to call each release an accident.
I can see why people believe it was intentional. They are probably right, but I don’t make something a fact of my own until I see some courtroom-level evidence. I was following this story pretty closely in the Wall Street Journal, and I thought at the time, and I still do, that it was an accident. Mostly because of how greatly the CCP overreacted. They obviously scared themselves. :-)
I liked the Chinese when I lived there. But the Han Chinese are disturbingly racist towards Tibetans and Uighurs. If the revolution comes in China, it won’t be because of concerns about ethnic minorities but because the Communist government has become so corrupt and incompetent that the average Han dude can’t stand it anymore.