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China had a good run both in the media and with our elites for over 3 decades–because there was a ton of money to be made and as with all gold rushes the damage is ignored.

Our tech companies rely on the country, our consumer products often come from there, and our entertainment and sports industries have grown reliant on their patronage. It turns out that the bargain we made with the country had larger downsides than expected.

President Trump was the first president to fight back against the hollowing out of the American economy, but until COVID hit it was an uphill battle. COVID changed everything, though, although not for exactly the right reasons.

It is highly likely that COVID was engineered in a Chinese lab using CDC grant money, and that Anthony Fauci has been working semi-successfully to cover it up. Personally I don’t think China would have released it intentionally–look at the damage it has done to China itself. They were merely careless. The US itself has at times been quite sloppy with dangerous viruses, so it’s no surprise that China was even more careless.

But it isn’t China’s role in creating COVID and failing to warn the US and the world about it that has led to the US and other countries decoupling our economies, too slowly, from China’s. Just as we have mostly ignored genocide and slave labor in China, a few million deaths wouldn’t have gotten in the way of the big guys getting rich off cheap labor.

What’s killing China is its Zero COVID policy. It has made life hell for Chinese, and made life difficult for American companies who need the flow of goods from China to continue unabated.

Chairman Xi’s bizarre policies are tearing China apart, and for some reason he cannot seem to let them go. From stories of people getting welded into their own apartments to dystopian travel and quarantine policies Xi has crippled the economy and destabilized his regime.

It has gotten to the point that policemen in quarantine suits are pointing automatic weapons at citizens:

Americans who live in China tell harrowing stories:

On September 7, three days before the national Mid-Autumn holiday weekend, my husband and I received separate phone calls from the pandemic prevention office in the Shanghai district where we live. We were informed that we had become sub-contacts to a recently confirmed COVID-19 case and were required to be taken to a centralized quarantine facility.

Having lived through the excruciating two-month lockdown of the city, we have adapted to the new post-lockdown reality: lining up for PCR tests every two or three days, scanning venue codes posted outside every public location to facilitate contact tracing, showing a green health code on our smartphones to gain access to restaurants and other services. But to be informed of an imminent quarantine was a first, and as U.S. citizens living in China, the uncertainties of what awaited us exacerbated our anxieties.

The Shanghai lockdown ushered in a new level of heavy-handedness in the Chinese Communist Party’s upkeep of “zero COVID.” Lockdowns continue to be imposed nationwide. The calamities we witnessed in Shanghai – people scrambling for supplies, denied access to medical treatment – have been repeated throughout the country.

We think of China as where our modern technological marvels originate, and in some sense that is true. They are manufactured there, but with foreign intellectual capital. As modern technology has clashed with inefficient and frankly incompetent bureaucracies more scared of Beijing than their citizens, a nightmare has developed. It is a techno-dystopia.

In Chengdu, authorities barred people from exiting shaky buildings amid an earthquake. In Lhasa, tourists were stranded on the Tibetan plateau until they were confirmed to be COVID-19-free. In Guiyang, residents starved for days on end as authorities restricted deliveries in large areas of the city. In all three cases, local officials have made ad hoc apologies for their mishandling of the situations, but mishandling continues.

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My husband’s Chinese employer intervened on our behalf, negotiating for us to self-isolate at home. But just as we thought we were spared from the harshest treatment, our apartment building manager appeared at our door the next day with two bags of hazmat suits. She told us a van would pick us up at an unspecified time to quarantine in an unspecified location; when they arrived we were to put the suits on. It appeared that negotiations were off the table. My husband contacted his up-line manager, who assured him that we would not be taken anywhere.

The next day, the health code on our phones turned red.

Standardized throughout the country, the health code comes in three colors. Green is the color of acceptance; yellow or red would effectively limit a person’s freedom to access any public services even in case of emergency.

Arbitrary code assignment has been reported in multiple regions. In Minquan, a county with 700,000 residents in central Henan province, the anti-COVID-19 office decided to assign a yellow or red code not only to its entire population but also to anyone with a travel history to local coronavirus hotspots.

This kind of arbitrariness is not new in authoritarian China – growing up here, I experienced it firsthand – but the quest for “zero COVID” has amplified it. And there is no legal recourse for infringement upon individual rights when levied by the authorities itself.

Confined at home, I called the restaurant where we supposedly contracted risk of infection. A staffer picked up the phone, and like a wrongfully convicted victim who has found a jail mate, he told me the confirmed COVID-19 patient stopped at the restaurant on September 3 and placed an order to-go. The transaction happened at the entrance and lasted no more than a few minutes. The restaurant was contacted on the 7th like we were; all workers and customers who had been to the venue between September 3 and 6 were required to quarantine. Both the staffer and I remarked on the absurdity of the verdict, but there was nothing we could do.

As is often the case in China (and too often here as well), the privileged can get better treatment. But it is not the privileged who make society run. As the top of the economic pyramid they depend upon the base to remain elevated. And the base is collapsing under the weight of even greater than normal oppression.

Nobody at the top of Chinese politics is inclined to relent, at least partly because they have banked their legitimacy on containing COVID there, while the West was harder hit. Xi and his cronies scared their population about the virus even more than our own, presenting it as an existential threat, and any relaxation of the restrictions would confirm that they were hyping the virus to emphasize their competence at stopping its spread. They are in a bind.

The emphasis on politics has created practical problems. Beijing has refused to approve foreign vaccines, opting instead to provide only less effective homegrown ones to its 1.4 billion people. The government has pushed propaganda depicting the virus as having devastated Western countries, feeding widespread stigma and a fear of infections even among the young and healthy. It has silenced voices seeking to offer a different approach, labeling them traitors.

Still, the question is how long China’s calculus will remain in favor of the current approach. Youth unemployment is soaring, small businesses are collapsing and overseas companies are shifting their supply chains elsewhere. A sustained slowdown would undermine the promise of economic growth, long the central pillar of the party’s legitimacy.

…

“The social and economic cost will continue to increase. So I think ultimately they’re going to reach a point where the cost exceeds the benefits,” Dr. Huang said. But, he added, “it just might be farther off.”

For now, officials are sticking closely to the status quo, imposing the most extensive lockdowns in months to contain a series of new outbreaks.

China is facing enormous economic problems due to COVID, and that is in addition to the imbalances built into their economy. The Chinese economy has relied on a stimulated construction boom, and is facing a financial collapse that could make the 2008 crash in the West look tame. Nobody is certain how they can avoid the collapse.

It’s hard to see how China can sustain itself politically and economically under these conditions. As a key part of the world economy any collapse there would have devastating impacts across the world. Xi’s policies seem to make a collapse inevitable.

Decoupling our economy from China’s couldn’t happen fast enough. The US and Europe depend far too heavily on China. They have proven to be a very dangerous partner to have.

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