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Stephen McDonell

Stephen McDonell
@StephenMcDonell

Nov 25, 2022
8 tweets
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Anyone banking on #ZeroCovid being wound back in #China soon, allowing the Chinese economy to bounce back, restoring supply chain reliability here in the near future… don’t. It’s going to take a looong time for China to ease #ZeroCovid.

The government in #China doesn’t seem to know exactly how to escape from the #ZeroCovid corner it’s painted itself into. This will be a long, drawn-out, process of trial and error easing, restricting, easing, restricting.
The huge, renewed, vaccination drive which would be needed before opening #China up hasn’t even started. Approving more effective international vaccines would help. Preparing medical facilities for a big influx of #Covid patients would also have to happen.
Also the public messaging would need to change. An example: many people in #China are completely unaware that a vaccinated person can just stay at home for a week after contracting #Covid19.
Unfortunately the government has been a victim of its earlier pre-vaccine #Covid success and seems to have drunk its own Kool-aid. It needed to spend less time telling Chinese people how lucky they’ve been to be protected by the Party and more time finding a way out of the crisis
And consider that, in January, #China will be heading into its fourth year of the #Covid crisis. It started here before everywhere else and it’s continuing here long after everywhere else has found a way to move forward.
Of course other countries have their own serious #Covid health problems to deal with. I’m just talking about #China where strict stay at home lockdowns on 100s of millions of people is crushing livelihoods, having mental health impacts and threatening social stability.
Public confidence in the Chinese government’s capacity to manage the #Covid crisis is collapsing all over the country. Tibet and Xinjiang have been locked down for months. There are tensions in #Guangzhou, in #Chongqing and the upheaval at #Foxconn is a taste of what could come.
Stephen McDonell

Stephen McDonell

@StephenMcDonell
China Correspondent BBC, formerly Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 如果你也曾经穿过那道看不见的界限并且在没有颜色的街道上找不到可以停留的地方请你一定回来告诉我。P.K.14 baffling bozos since the beginning.
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