"The three scenarios I floated for the potential reason China was “overshooting the mark” with its draconian lockdowns were:
1. The CCP may be trying to usurp more power
2. There may be something about Covid that China knows that the rest of the world still doesn’t know
3. China is looking for an excuse to slow its production to put pressure on the Western world at a time when it is trying to separate further, economically, from the West"
The writer of the article of course chooses #3 as the reason for the shutdowns. I'm choosing number 2.
Let's say this author is right. It is number three. China doesn't have to shut down entire cities to achieve this goal. The financial toll China is taking is not logical. With all these cities shut down, China isn't making money. Now, why would China injure themselves that way to prove to the West that we need them? China already hold ALL of the cards.
Additionally - people are not just being locked down. They are being bussed to isolation cities and forced out on the daily for tests. One day an entire fleet of busses will show up and take a whole building away! ALL OF THIS COSTS MONEY! The entire cities being built to isolate people.
I genuinely watch this every night and think - China is going to collapse. When the Ukraine thing happened and everyone was was like - China and Russia are going to team up. I just laughed because China is no position to team up on ANYTHING.
If you don't believe me..... just take a stroll through China's Real Estate situation. Our media isn't covering it, but property developers are defaulting left and right.
But.... it is funny what the brain will try to erase when it doesn't want to deal with reality. China knows something about that virus because it was made in their lab!
4. It was cover for changing over to military production, and this form of cover was chosen because so many people would otherwise be involved or would notice that someone would have blabbed.
ReplyDeleteI haven't said PACK YER RICE ITZ COMING in a while, have I? :-)
I don't understand why the CCP would allow their own people to commit suicide when they are already having an admitted population crisis thanks to the long term disaster of the one child policy. And if I'm to believe some of the Youtube videos about this topic, even the Chinese couples are in the same dilemma as the West where they can't really afford more children even if they wanted them.
ReplyDelete"I don't understand why the CCP would allow their own people to commit suicide"
ReplyDeleteCan you expand more please? I don't understand the question. Do you mean the people hanging themselves and jumping off of buildings?
I thought China was encouraging more children now. But it's been a while since I looked.
Everything in this case rolls back to economics and attitudes toward risk.
ReplyDeleteThe PRC had absurd amounts of capital it couldn't otherwise park inside its economy, so it went full-on risk oblivious, allowing real estate development well beyond what the PRC could expect would be usable in the near future.
Those rumors of "dead cities" aren't rumors.
Ever been to one? There's just enough functioning that you could live in one, but not very well, because comfort relative to services is a function of population.
That's why all of the people who say they're going to move out to the countryside never really do, they just move to a country town where they can get most of their comfortable services.
I'm no different: that's one reason I liked Geneva while I was there.
So there are millions of housing units available in the PRC, but since the development lacked the force of business taking up residence nearby, living in these places represents an even worse standard of living than the older cities.
And there were already established historical accounts of what could happen, such as the one country whose capital city moved, only for the old capital and the new capital to languish. City after city, town after town create "special enterprise zones" only to roll them back after they fail to make any difference.
Austin did this in the 1980s and the 1990s: how could anyone forget that ugly gray and glass building on Capital of Texas Highway (TX 360 Loop) up near the Galleria where the State of Texas thought they could house their future ambitions for chip and computer tech?
The MCC it was called, wasn't it? They built it swiftly and it was just as swiftly ignored.
A shitty little warehouse over off Metric or Braker worked out much better, even if you were surrounded by them ... and, actually, especially because you were surrounded by them.
Even Dell's cast-offs could make you a small fortune if you knew how to market them.
Whereas the MCC had a superlative view out across the Austin metro area which was also superlatively worth nothing to any of the startups they wanted to attract.
But back to the PRC: betting on all of those surplus millions to fill up the "dead cities" has turned out to be a failed bet, and what's happened instead is an upward drive on costs in the older cities.
Real estate developers are going broke in the PRC left and right because they built a product nobody really wanted, leveraged with financing that expected a huge windfall from what they believed were inevitable sales ... and the contagion of overpopulation is now back because the relief valve didn't work.
So the CCP elite are acting like the technocratic Bug Men they truly are.
How is this a surprise?
Maybe there's a Bug Man Institute of Technology in the PRC?
Oh, wait, that's in Atlanta. :-)