https://www.clarin.com/mundo/cajas-chinas-batalla-xi-jinping-covid_0_6jkpZFLUIU.html

A first glance, very widespread in Western observation of the crisis that envelops Chinese power like a labyrinth, points out that the Asian giant has remained involved in its failed Covid Zero policy.

The ideal of becoming the only nation that would achieve the absolute disappearance of the disease through national discipline. Since this does not happen and the plague is still there as in almost all the world, the regime stubbornly accentuates the restrictions and isolations, aggravate the problem and its economic consequences.

This scenario is resolved with unexpected and surprising popular rebellions for the authoritarian mood of the Asian power, with images that even claim the resignation of President Xi Jinping and posters with his face under the title of dictator.

The Zero Covid policy has been a failure, but it is possible to suspect that success may not have been its sole aim. In all that architecture there are contradictions which should be more obvious.

It is objective that the disease and its extremist political treatment have left these people exhausted. But the Chinese autocracy doesn’t seem to have taken care in fighting it in the current phase with the efficiency it showed at the beginning of the pandemic.

There is a gap of inhabitants that lack of vaccinations or reinforcements. According to the official National Health Commission, there are 21 million people over the age of 60 who have not been immunized at all and another 21.5 million over the age of 80 who have not received the booster. In reality, little that cannot be resolved.

No foreign vaccines

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Another curiosity is that the People’s Republic, which grew as a power by absorbing and combining its knowledge with that of the West, has refused to use more effective vaccines compared to the local ones to treat the population.

There would be no demerit in applying the alternatives of Pfizer-Biontech or Moderna with messenger RNA among other possibilities along with your own if you really want to defeat such a threat.

Nor has there been in the daily use of Western chips, among other inputs, in their technological structures. there is there a strange vision of patriotismwhether that is what it is all about or whether we trust what we see to be what it really is.

An even more peculiar aggravating factor in this whole arrangement is that practically the government did not provide financial assistance to workers during closures due to illness and has recently started charging the cost of testing to the population.

In this sense, what happened in the Foxconn plant in Zengzhouhou is significant, notable because it produces more than half of the iPhones sold worldwide. The citadel of that factory It is home to 350,000 workers who generate approximately 500,000 devices per day.

With Christmas approaching and urgent increase productivitythe employee base has been expanded, but due to Covid, the venue has been transformed into a closed area with workers forced to live there, sharing large bedrooms without much clarity as to whether or not there are sick people among them.

The situation is even worse when one takes into account the fact that employers have reneged on promises of wage increases and productivity bonuses as well as pushing for unilateral contract changes. “We want our money,” people shouted in the rebellion there, according to dispatches from Bloomberg and Reuters. They had the mask well. They didn’t talk about the disease.

The pandemic exists and major outbreaks have appeared that the regime is dealing with total isolates that make people angry, but, as we can see, this popular displeasure is not due only to the disease and its consequences. Something broke.

In these hours, the regime that knows what it is about has said that, with few exceptions, it will not abandon this model of forced closures if cases of Covid should appear and has warned that it will intensify the repression against any attitude of resistance. It’s a call for strict discipline with the veneer of public health.

This need is multiplying, not surprisingly, at a time when the economy of the People’s Republic is facing a complex prospect of growth far from the needs of the Asian giant and with growing frustration among the new generations.

The World Bank’s latest forecast for China’s growth in 2022 is just 2.8%, the lowest in decades and far from the 8 percent level that the CCP saw as essential for low unemployment and social stability. In July, the official unemployment rate, which covers only urban areas, was 5.4%, but that of young people reached a record 19.9%.

World economy in crisis

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All this happens against the background of a slowdown in the global economy and in which China, together with the United States, is a central player, now compounded throughout the cycle by the unusual war launched by Russia against the Ukraine. Xi Jinping’s recent three-and-a-half-hour summit with Joe Biden in Bali highlights the gravity of the situation and the urgency of containing it.

The condescending reaction of the White House, which limited itself to pointing out that it was “observing” what is happening in the People’s Republic, avoiding the usual rhetoric on human rights violations in the Asian giant, it is an indicator of the extent of this dialogue, even if its results are not yet clear.

China suffers the global crisis with this social concern on its shoulders and knowing that it risks amplifying itself. No different from what is behind the rebellion in Iran, or from what led to the collapse of Beijing’s allied governments in Sri Lanka or Pakistan. That’s what happens when you move forward frustration in societies and tolerance dissolve.

But the People’s Republic adds a delicate peculiarity. This disruptive scenario challenges the implicit agreement that has governed the country for decades between the masses and authoritarian rule in exchange for a growing economy. Without the latter condition, the former is at risk.

The initiatives of common prosperity that Xi Jinping embraces to try to dissolve income concentration, they seek to alleviate that specter, but at this juncture it comes with the cost of diverting investment, which is crucial at times when expansion is needed. Jack Ma’s Empire Crisis speaks volumes about a strategy with more losses than gains.

This is also happening within a new structure of the decision-making system of the People’s Republic. The inauguration of this president for life in power has overthrown the conception of the Communist Party, bequeathed by Deng Xiao Ping, the great helmsman of transformation, as a collective leadership organization.

In the view of the current Chinese hierarch, the party was infected by corruption and weaknesses, lack of discipline and faith. A useless structure if there are thunderstorms. That was one of the big ones criticism and contempt which Xi professed his predecessor, Hu Jintao, whom he publicly bullied at the recent 20th Congress.

A sentiment that also extended to the implacable Jiang Zemin, who died with little glory this Wednesday.

Xi’s solution to these dilemmas was radical: the return to the one man rule. A risky decision with which, incidentally, he closed the debate within the PCCH which raised the need to expand the opening with greater flexibility, to ensure recovery.

The Chinese hierarch is convinced that the implosion of the Soviet Union is due to the fact that local communism has abandoned its traditions, its verticality, its heroes and its symbols. It is a more practical than ideological look. As well as the excessive and indiscriminate use of the Covid Zero device.

Dressed as Mao, the regent for life of the Central Empire tries to prevent the Chinese capitalist leap from ending up generating unstoppable pressure for political opening, especially if it doesn’t meet expectations.

The controversial point is that with these ways Xi ends up distorting the great transformation that made China what it is today, a leap that stuttering Russia dared to make on its own. when the ussr fell apart. But, like every step backwards, it is a sign of weakness and, I would also add, one of the Chinese leader’s many adversaries, of improvisation.
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