Shanghai's New Lockdowns are causing UNREST in CHINA

Grace Jackson, our expert on China, discusses how the new lockdowns in Shanghai, China are starting to cause a fatigued country to push back against Chinese leadership's zero C**** policy.

(Ep. 1330)

background from American Prospect

China is suffering its worst coronavirus outbreak of the entire pandemic. Despite brutal lockdowns that have seriously disrupted the food supply in Shanghai and caused a huge pileup of ships outside the city’s port, the virus is still spreading rapidly in the city.

It seems that a combination of bad luck and poor decisions, especially a failure to vaccinate its elderly, has left the Chinese government with a choice between a tsunami of death and massive social unrest—and it might end up getting both.

The main problem, as I covered previously, is that the omicron variant is so incredibly infectious (arguably the most contagious virus in human history) that it has crushed Zero COVID systems around the world. New Zealand, Australia, and Taiwan simply couldn’t stay ahead of new infections, and so cases have exploded in each. Now, it’s China’s turn.

Compounding this problem is the bizarre fact that China has left a huge proportion of its seniors unvaccinated. Where the aforementioned countries worked hard to vaccinate their populations as quickly as they could, especially older residents, only something like 80 percent of Chinese folks over 60 have gotten two shots, and just 55 percent have had a booster. Much worse, only about half of people over 80 have gotten two shots, and just 20 percent have been boosted.

This is a truly weird situation, and thus far one can do little but speculate on potential reasons for it. “I don’t think anyone outside of the inner circle of the Chinese regime can speak to that definitively,” Philip Ivanhoe, chair of the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department at Georgetown University, told the Prospect. “As someone who studies traditional Chinese thought and spends considerable time in China, it is something deeply at odds with widely accepted ideas about the status of elderly people,” he said.

Yet, some plausible explanations are apparent. The first is China’s decision to vaccinate people in high-risk jobs first, as part of its Zero COVID strategy. “I would note that the government, like many governments, was careful to vaccinate members of the military as a priority. The additional people they did vaccinate constitute the working population,” Ivanhoe said. As an emergency measure in this context, it makes some sense to focus on the people most likely to spread the virus rather than those most at risk of dying from it, since the whole point is to prevent infections entirely. Seniors were only included in the vaccine push as of March last year.

Second, China’s great success in preventing infection up until now ironically also limited research on its domestic vaccines, because with so few infections, it was hard to get data on effectiveness. “The vaccines developed in China were only tested in some developing countries outside of China because of the low prevalence of COVID-19 in China,” George Liu, China health program director at La Trobe University, told the Australian publication ABC. Procrastinating on the elderly, Ivanhoe said, “may well have had to do with possible effects of their vaccine … or a worry that there would be such effects.”

from Ryan Cooper

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