Here is a very quick analysis of the 10 New Rules:
- No arbitrary and temporary lockdowns at residential area, community or street level in any way. — The central government is admitting that local authorities are locking down people without any proper procedures, except that the central government had given green lights all along. This is illegal as many residents had complained online, but there was no way for people to challenge them legally.
- No more mandatory PCR tests, no more health code. — There also had been no laws or any clear line of commands on these restrictions on people’s basic freedom of movements. The execution has been done by local government and many abuses had been documented, especially for people’s access to medical facilities.
- No more quarantine for COVID positive and close contacts. — This drastic disruption of people’s lives created many tragedies, with pets being brutally killed when the owners were quarantined, properties destroyed when the belongings inside the residence were disinfected, parents and children separated that created tremendous anxieties (and some children death). And as usual, victims had no way to complain or seek justice, except posting their stories on social media.
- End lockdown of high risk areas as fast as possible (if no new cases in 5 days). — This is to quickly end ongoing lockdowns.
- Make sure all pharmacies run normal, no restrictions on purchase of non-prescription drugs for fever and flu. — So often, to make sure COVID patients could not escape detection by using medicine to hide fever, local government restricted sales of medicines to treat fever and cold symptoms. Many families lack basic medicine to deal with the sudden flood of COVID transmission.
- Mobilize the elderlies to get vaccine shots. — Chinese government allowed conspiracy theories against vaccine to spread on social media, as a result, many old people dodged vaccination.
- Strengthen the community level classifications of basic health situation of the families. — This might be helpful, if indeed there is medical coordination to give help to the most needed. But as we saw with the food supply during lockdown, there is no guarantee that it will help in any real sense.
- No more restrictions on movement of residents, no more restrictions on factory, shops and services. — Apple is shifting production out of China due to the difficulty of maintaining production in its Zhengzhou Foxconn factory. It is just one example of the huge disruption created by the COVID-zero policy on business. In our Newsletter 95, we translated a Taiwanese businessman’s assessment of the situation in China. At last, the government finally started to worry about the economy, and desperately wants it to start again.
- Strictly forbid blocking the fire exits, building doors and gates of residential areas. — This is obviously a lesson learned from the Urumqi fire, described in newsletter 105.
- All schools that are not hit by COVID need to return to normal activities. — This is a bit late, many universities have allowed students to return home. Primary and secondary schools are open for school children to go back though. Three years of disruption on schools had a toll on the well being of the children.
Based on the 10 New rules, I guess that the reason Mr. Xi changed his mind on COVID-zero policy is the economy. China’s export data for the month of October fell by 0.3% compared to a year ago. This is exceptional because analysts have expected a 4.3% increase instead. Does it mean that, as the Taiwanese businessman described, production is moving out of China en mass? We don’t know, but Mr. Xi must have the data.
Mr. Xi always emphasizes that he wants to beat the COVID at all cost. But the cost is only borne by ordinary citizens. As the country erupted in protest against his policy, perhaps he is also looking for a way out. We wondered in this newsletter many times what was his exit plan. It seems he had none. He wanted to use his control power over the 1.4 billion of his subjects to show the superiority of the system, but he can not indefinitely lockdown millions of people. Perhaps even he realized that Omicron is impossible to be contained, no matter what costs the people are forced to suffer.
So, just like that, COVID-zero policy is gone. Now the real pandemic starts.
Overnight, many people reported that they had fever. Many tested themselves and declared that they had COVID. It is shocking how explosive the spread of COVID became.
Twitter Message 1: Omicron is sweeping through China at lightning speed. Wuhan University Hospital now advises people not to get tested with few exceptions - the positive rate of PCR tests there has reached 50%.
Twitter Message 2: this video, taken in a hospital in Beijing, is circulating on Wechat right now. You can see how jam packed the hospital is. Many people explained that this is how hospital in Beijing looked like before COVID. Others argued no, people are waiting in line for 6 hours for fevers, this is not normal.
Twitter Message 3: a small city called Dazhou had no medicine for fever, they had to go to the hospital to get IV fluid drip, but it is also a big fight to get the IV drip. So the residents are very resentful of those who wanted to end the COVID-Zero policy. The squeeze on medical resources just started.
Twitter Message 4: A story of a man in Beijing. He got low fever and a little discomfort in the throat. He tested himself and he was negative. He tried to treat himself but later found that he could not swallow. Then he started coughing, and he could not breathe easily. He got scared. He went to a hospital, got PCR test, negative. The hospital refused to treat him. He went on to other hospitals, same story. Hospitals were all too busy to take care of him, because he is not a COVID patient. In the end he got IV fluid drip in a small private clinic. He said, if you got fever but no COVID, no one will treat you.
Twitter Message 5: Pharmaceutical company employee disclosed that all medicines for cold and fever are sold out, even with very high price. And people are willing to buy expired pills. Meanwhile. the Chinese medicine Lianhua Qingwen is still available for sale, as it is totally useless.
Many people asked: three years of preparation! Why there is not plan for providing adequate basic medicine?
In China propaganda against COVID, there was only two ways: the Chinese way, absolute control to eradicate the virus, or the wrong way, the ‘lying down’/doing nothing of the rest of the world. So it was only natural for them to ignore what the rest of the world learned after the first COVID wave. They believed their own propaganda too much.
One Twitter user summarized the utter lack of responsibility of the government (rough translation):
Three years has been totally wasted
They did not increase medical resources, nor trained medical staff to handle the COVID, nor taught the mass to take care of themselves.
WSJ has a report (alt) on how Xi Jinping gave in to end the COVID-Zero policy: “Letter From Apple Supplier Foxconn’s Founder Prodded China to Ease Zero-COVID Rules “.
Mr. Gou sent the letter a little more than a month ago as Foxconn’s factory in the city of Zhengzhou was rocked by turmoil over COVID restrictions. (This was the first Foxconn exodus.)
After Mr. Gou sent the letter, the government’s tone on COVID began to change. On Nov. 3, an article in the Health Times, a newspaper run by the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily, described the symptoms of COVID as often short-lived and mild. The description was a departure from previous government narratives that emphasized the severity of the disease and the potential long-term health implications.
Also :
Other companies have suffered production problems in China this year, including memory-chip maker Samsung Electronics Co. , German auto maker Volkswagen AG and a textile company that supplies Nike Inc. and Adidas AG
This was when foreign media were speculating that China would end the COVID-Zero policy, as we described in our newsletter 102. Many think that around Mr. Xi, there are factions fighting over whether to stop the COVID-zero policy or not. It is very likely that the recent protests from worker and citizens have helped pushing the government to issue the 10 New Rules
Now that the COVID-Zero is over, Chinese social media is talking about many local governments are flying chartered planes to go overseas to get orders from importers in Europe and the USA. They are travelling with their relatives and children, also in time for a “well deserved” holiday. So, yes, officials need their vacations overseas and China still wants to be the factory of the world.
China has often praised its system for controlling the spread of the virus effectively, citing the total number of deaths due to COVID in the USA often to justify the harsh policy. So how many people died in China due to COVID?
According to Chinese government, the number is 5,235.
However, someone wrote a post on Weibo about death for 2021 and 2022 in the Statistics Yearbook published by National Health Commission. He said that while death due to other diseases had been similar to the numbers in 2019, death due to heart disease has increased by 19.8%, death due to cerebrovascular disease has increased by 16.4%. He said that means excessive deaths of 700,000 in total for the two years.
I tried to verify his claims, but I could not find the table in his Weibo post on Chinese internet. And quickly the post was deleted, as if it never existed. The owner of the Weibo account has 41,000 followers and his last remaining Weibo post is Dec 6th. The deleted Weibo post was posted on Dec 8th. So, he has not updated his Weibo post.
As usual, in China, one never knows what to believe. If what he said was demonstrably false, it should not be difficult for the government to debunk it. But, I guess deleting the post is just so much easier.
How a Twitter account with a cat avatar took on Beijing
His Twitter name is a self-mockery of his own accent: people from his home province cannot differentiate the pronunciations of “Li” – his surname – and “ni”, meaning “You.”
And his Twitter handle @whyyoutouzhele is a dig at Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian’s comments last year that foreign reporters should “touzhele,” or “chuckle to themselves,” for being able to live safely in China during the pandemic. The phrase has since been used widely on Chinese social media in a sarcastic way to criticize zero-Covid.
But Li is extremely proud of his Twitter avatar – a doodle of his tabby cat.
“The cat is now known to the Chinese diaspora around the world. But at the same time, it has also become the most dangerous cat on the Chinese internet,” he said.
As mentioned in the previous Newsletter, one Chinese is doing a hunger strike outside Apple Park, in Cupertino; he announced that he will end the hunger strike on Monday 12 morning.