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George Castro
International Analyst
To understand Chinese policy on Covid-19, one must consider 3 indicators fundamental: the People’s Republic had 5,235 deaths in the two years of the pandemic out of a population of 1,440 million inhabitants (in the USA the deaths from Covid amount to 1.2 million); and there the great Covid-19 crisis broke out on December 20, 2019, which immediately covered more than 400 million people with its epicenter in the province of Hubei, the city of Wuhan.
So it should be noted that more than 30% of the population over 70 is not vaccinated or wants to be vaccinated, and it recurs as has always happened to traditional medicine. Finally – thirdly – China has resorted to a strategy to fight against Covid born from the union of its extraordinary social cohesion of a Confucian / communist matrix, which has involved shutting down much of its economy and locking large sections of its population into their homes for monthswith a massive vaccination campaign that took place only in the second year of the pandemic because in the first year there was no vaccine of any kind to deal with the scourge.
As of December 15, 2009, the Chinese economy, the second largest in the world, was practically paralyzed for 45 days and during that period the product fell by 13.5% per annum.
This was the result of the drastic policy of the Beijing government which led to a mandatory quarantine that affected more than 400 million people (60 million in and around Wuhan city alone.)
It was a truly extraordinary exercise of self-discipline and collective action, which obviously had the full support and participation of the population, which allowed once again to verify the indisputable legitimacy of its political system.
China managed to bring the pandemic under control in its initial stages in just seven weeks and normalized the situation in Hubei/Wuhan on March 15; and all of this was done without vaccines because they didn’t exist.
The central datum of the global economy in the post-pandemic phase that took place in the second half of 2021 is the Asian boom, with China as the central axis.
The People’s Republic then recorded an annual expansion of 6.2%; and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries have grown double the global average since 2019.
Asian consumption was 23% of the world total in 2000, rose to 28% in 2017 and will reach 52% in 2040; and the middle class reached 23% of the global total in 2000, rose to 42% in 2017 and will reach 52% in 2040.
Within this trend, China is in a class of its own: middle class with income comparable to North Americans (US$35,000/US$45,000) reached 500 million people in 2021; and among this largely digitized middle class that speaks a kind of English, there are the 150 million overseas Chinese tourists who traveled to Asia, the United States and the European Union in the pre-pandemic phase; and the intra-Asia share of global trade rose to 60% last year, up from 35% a decade ago; and 59% of foreign direct investment (FDI) received by Asia with its 4.6 billion inhabitants, half of the world’s population, is intra-regional, and comes mainly from the People’s Republic.
This means that With the increase in global trade, the role of Asia, centered on China, is increasingly important. The Asian region today has a degree of productive integration, around the transnational productive system, higher than that of the European Union (EU); and in it the central role in terms of investments, connectivity and innovation is unequivocally in the hands of the People’s Republic, which in the last 10 years has become not only the second largest economy in the world, but also the main trading partner of 144 of the 192 countries represented at the United Nations.
In the last four weeks, large demonstrations have been unleashed in major Chinese cities to reject the forced quarantine and the consequent shutdown of the economy; and the Beijing government’s response was make these measures more flexible across the countryafter demonstrating that the “Omicron” variety of Covid-19 has lost much of its infectious character, accompanied by a virtual disappearance of lethality.
The strategic datum that emerges from the above is that in the People’s Republic there is a powerful public opinion composed of 1,100 million Internet users, making it the most digitized country in the world; and the dominant system of power, centered on the CCP, knows that its government is not bureaucratic, much less repressive, but is based exclusively on its identification with the interests, claims and demands of its population. In short, the Chinese political system is a constant exercise of realism and identification with popular demandsand that this is the basis of its extraordinary political legitimacy.
The judgment on the legitimacy of a system, the moment in which words die and theoretical justifications are useless, is when that power structure recognizes that the time has come for change.
Source: Clarin
