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https://theconversation.com/chinas-covid-crisis-and-the-dilemma-facing-its-leaders-by-experts-who-have-monitored-it-since-the-wuhan-outbreak-182451>
"More than two years after a deadly strain of coronavirus was first identified
in the central city of Wuhan, China remains locked in a COVID crisis. Around
400 million people are currently thought to be living under some form of
lockdown across the country. One of China’s largest cities, Shanghai, has been
paralysed for the past month, with many of its residents hemmed in by hastily
erected metal fences. The capital, Beijing, is now striving to avoid a similar
fate.
The extraordinary story of China’s ongoing, and increasingly desperate,
struggle against COVID-19 combines hubris at its own early public health
successes with a failure to sufficiently vaccinate its elderly people, and is
fuelled by rising anti-Western sentiment over the last five years. The result
is that China now faces a dilemma: either the high numbers of deaths and
overwhelmed health services that would result from a rampant virus, or the
rapidly mounting social and economic costs of prolonged lockdowns and
stay-at-home orders nationwide.
But resolving China’s COVID dilemma and finding a route out of the pandemic is
complicated by the difficulties of challenging a “zero-COVID” strategy so
closely associated with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping. Xi is due to be
re-appointed for a controversial third term as General Secretary of the Chinese
Communist Party at its five-yearly Congress in the autumn. He will not want a
rampant virus and high death rates to tarnish his reputation and undermine his,
and the Party’s, claims that they have handled the pandemic better than other
countries.
How did China get to this point? And what can it do to resolve a crisis that
threatens not just the health and security of its people, but of the world’s
largest economy – and those of the many countries that rely on its vast supply
chains. At the University of Glasgow’s Scottish Centre for China Research, we
have been tracking the rollercoaster evolution of the Chinese government’s
COVID strategy, and the impacts of its containment measures, since news of the
virus first reached us in early 2020. Combining on-the-ground reports from
researchers with reviews of policy documents and social media outpourings, this
is our analysis of China’s COVID crisis – present, past and future."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
