A Big Fat Zero!

I am writing today from my locked down community in Shanghai.?Apparently someone tested positive in a near building and we are closed for two days, hopefully only two – but let’s see.

China awoke last weekend to a chorus of chanting protesters demanding healthcare and not lockdowns, vaccinations and not testing, a promised future that has been touted as the China Dream.?

Much of the recent outpouring of discontent in China is about the lack of control in one's life these days.

Covid zero has touched virtually everybody and in ways in which the government has not previously expanded their influence, particularly in regards to business activity, and social lives. In fact it has been quite the opposite for the nearly 20 years that I have lived in China, where the government has touted economic and business success as having been its greatest benefit to the people. Now, that has all been turned upside down.

For political leaders, with no greater priority than remaining in power, this is as big a challenge as they come. ??The demonstrators are asking the questions everyone in China is asking these days – why after three years of Covid is China not further along in the fight? ??

China has had three years to prepare for an eventual reopening, but instead of building more hospital intensive care units and emphasizing the need for vaccinations, it has poured enormous resources into mass testing, lockdown and isolation facilities.?Where is the healthcare in this approach??

For the past two weeks, virtually all of China is watching the World Cup. Every day the stadiums are full of 80,000 people. Chinese people wake up in the morning and have their coffee at Starbucks and ask, how is it that Qatar lives a normal life, people in the stadium, no masks, no testing and in China we cannot even go out to dinner?

The official argument from the government is that any reduction in Covid containment and policies will result in a significant increase in hospitalization and mortality, that the healthcare system will be overrun. Back with my friends at Starbucks, people ask - if that's true, then what has the government been doing for the last three years? Why are we not ready for this moment in history? Why is the healthcare system in such bad shape? If it cannot take care of the people, then it needs to be fixed. ?

What Is Next?

Test, quarantine, close; Chinese people have become frightened, no one wants to go shopping, supply chains are disrupted, business are losing money and there is no real healthcare - the policy as it is today is a total failure. Because it does not work as its namesake dictates, there is certainly not zero covid in China. Health care, treatment, hospitalization and mitigation of mortality as much as possible needs to be the focus.

But this is China, and politics is supreme. Having been here for nearly 20 years, I've never seen a time in China when the people were as disconnected from the political and governmental system as they are today.

After all, the people have nothing to do with the political decisions in the People’s Republic of China. Why should people care if they have no input? But what's happening now is the first time in my experience in China where the government seems to be exclusively ideologically focused as compared to pragmatically running the country.

Covid zero has impacted everybody's bank account. No matter if you are a billionaire or you are waiting tables in a restaurant, you have felt the financial impact of a political policy that has essentially turned the domestic economy comatose.

The difficulty in China is that the idea of doing the right thing for the country and the people is not always the best idea from political leadership. The concept of saving face is much more important than running the country properly. The China of 2022 is not the China of 1960. China today is a highly complicated society, it is a mature economy, with heavy industry, high-tech, service and rapidly becoming the largest consumer market place on the planet.

You can't oversee the Chinese population like everybody is just a peasant farmer. This is not North Korea. China has hundreds of millions of people with high-quality education, millions of business owners, who know what is really happening, who don't listen to media telling them about successful economic growth when their friends and colleagues voice that sales are down 35%.

The hitch for leadership in China today is that they have essentially put themselves into a corner of their own making.

In early 2020, the concept of locking down and constraining public movement was effective and based on the fact that at that time, nobody really knew what Covid was, how effectively it spread, what rate of infection and or mortality it had. Locking down was basically the only thing to do at that time.

However, the world has learned a lot in the last three years. There are millions of pages of reports and documents from every public health service, health ministry, doctors, medical journals and countless universities and medical colleges around the world that will tell you what Covid is all about. It's not some secret virus.

China has married itself to a political solution and not a healthcare solution. The danger in this is that there is really no way out. Is the plan in China to lock everybody up every three months? If that's the plan, good luck. There will be no economic growth and development. There will be a governmental commanded recession, if not depression, creating tremendous ?social, economic and business chaos. Chinese leadership pronounces that their main goal is to maintain stability.?If you damage everybody's business, eventually people are likely to get angry. Patience does not last forever.

The difficulty here is not that there is no solution, but rather that the government doesn't want to solve it. Because solving it would need a solution that ends up looking like what the West has done. Accepting the fact that there will be a certain amount of infection, hospitalization and mortality. After all, people die every year in China from viral infections. Just because we don't talk about it in China, doesn't mean it's not happening.?Most people in China don't know this is going on. The government likes to cover up the reality that might be unpleasant, such as healthcare challenges, air pollution, water pollution, food contamination, political discourse and disagreement, etc. In China everything is always perfect, until it is suddenly not.

Most countries and political leaders around the world, even in relatively authoritarian countries, for example Vietnam; long ago came to the conclusion that solving the problem was actually the best road forward, in terms of serving the people and also their political fortunes. Being the political figure at the head of government, that allows the country to restart, completely open, letting people live their lives and at the same time handing out vaccinations that will allow 99.9% of the people to continue on with their lives, is actually seen as a political victory. Doing the right thing and the people will love you. ?The holdup in China is that locking people up is seen by the government as the victory. ??

Some China social media platforms recently reported that 87% of people polled thought ?lockdowns were the best way of treating and mitigating the virus. I guess these people are unemployed and they have no place. But if you live in the real world, if you have a job, or run a business, or just want to get on with your life, locking yourself up is not really a good way to live.

China is on a collision course with its own policy. The question is how fast does collision occur and how big will the impact be.

There is no way that China can simply quarantine itself out of Covid. Covid is in China and it will continue to spread, no matter what anybody wants to do. The only way to manage it, which is frankly the same way China manages every other viral infection, is with the best possible vaccinations, health care, therapeutic medicines, and accepting the fact that there will be a certain rate of mortality. There are more than 100 different viral infections in almost every country of the world. This is the only way forward it to manage it, treat it and move on from it.

What the recent demonstrations in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and others cities suggest is that locking down cities on a mass scale like they have tried before is no longer really possible. This option has been taken off the table by the people.

This means China is going to have to find a way to deal with the virus.

Zero is a wonderful concept. I wish nobody would ever die of any diseases. But I did not invent the world and I only get to live in it for a certain amount of time. Time is of the essence. It's time to stop wasting time.

From a locked community in Shanghai.

Alexander Glos