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Supposedly 248 million people are already infected: China's corona chaos is also Xi Jinping's failure

2022-12-25T05:19:22.070Z


Supposedly 248 million people are already infected: China's corona chaos is also Xi Jinping's failure Created: 2022-12-25 06:12 By: Christiane Kuehl Covid-19 patients on stretchers in the emergency room of a clinic in Chongqing: China's health system is threatened with overload after the end of the zero-Covid policy. Head of State Xi is responsible for this. © Noel Celis/afp Xi Jinping hailed


Supposedly 248 million people are already infected: China's corona chaos is also Xi Jinping's failure

Created: 2022-12-25 06:12

By: Christiane Kuehl

Covid-19 patients on stretchers in the emergency room of a clinic in Chongqing: China's health system is threatened with overload after the end of the zero-Covid policy.

Head of State Xi is responsible for this.

© Noel Celis/afp

Xi Jinping hailed himself as the architect of the zero-Covid policy.

But now every Chinese should take care of themselves.

Now 248 million are said to be infected.

Head of State Xi is also responsible for this.

Beijing/Munich – How quickly a year of triumph can turn into a year of horror: less than two months ago, China's head of state and party leader Xi Jinping had himself endowed with the greatest wealth of power since the "Great Chairman" Mao Zedong - and celebrate as the architect of the “dynamic zero Covid policy”.

On November 10, Xi publicly called for the last time to "resolutely" stick to it until further notice.

But given the highly contagious omicron variant, “zero Covid” proved an untenable illusion.

Pictures of overcrowded hospitals and crematoria go around the world.

Nobody believes China's Covid statistics anymore.

Instead, unconfirmed horror numbers are making the rounds in the country: According to internal estimates by the National Health Commission, around 248 million Chinese were infected with Covid-19 in the first three weeks of December.

On Tuesday alone, 37 million people are said to have been infected.

In the province of Sichuan – which, with 81 million people, has about as many inhabitants as Germany – more than half of the people are said to be infected, in Beijing with 21 million over two thirds.

However, the figures picked up by several news agencies and the British

Financial Times

have not yet been verified.

The official statistics speak of around 62,000 infected people at the same time.

The discrepancy shows how much the government has lost control of the virus and information sovereignty.

Almost overnight, the government ended “zero Covid” without a well thought-out exit plan and left the people to their fate.

Xi is responsible for this.

However, it is still unclear whether Xi Jinping will fall to his feet from the chaos he has unleashed himself.

Nothing has been heard from the strong man since the end of his zero-Covid strategy.

At his meeting with Russian Putin confidante and deputy head of the National Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, he did not mention Covid at all.

Meanwhile, the party is doing everything it can to maintain control of the narrative.

Scientists are suddenly saying that the omicron is no worse than a cold or flu.

"Current events are a blow to Xi," commented the British magazine

Economist recently

.

The propaganda slogans the communists used to call on citizens to take responsibility did not fit Xi's vision of fighting the pandemic as "an opportunity to extend the Party's reach to every village and neighborhood and to mobilize the masses in a great collective effort."

Xi is silent on the corona chaos

Xi's invisibility is all the more remarkable since the party declared him "supreme commander" in the fight against Corona in 2020.

The strong leadership of the Communist Party is necessary to defeat the invisible enemy Covid-19, the state media declaimed.

They described the pandemic chaos in Europe and the USA as proof of the decadence and decline of the democratic West.

"We should put people and life first," Xi urged in a video message to the UN General Assembly in September 2020.

The propaganda repeatedly emphasized that China, unlike the West, protects every single life.

How does that fit with the sudden reversal?

Are these human lives suddenly irrelevant?

Or did Xi and the party simply capitulate to the force of the omicron wall?

There are reports that the end of zero-Covid has been in preparation behind the scenes for months.

Experts must have been clear that Omikron can only be pushed back halfway with overly tough lockdowns like in Shanghai in the spring.

Despite the lockdowns in many cities across the country, the virus kept surfacing somewhere.

Not every observer therefore sees the end of "zero Covid" as a reaction to the nationwide protests against the constant lockdowns and mass tests.

In Shanghai, young demonstrators even shouted "Down with Xi Jinping".

China: Xi, CCP plunge headlong into easing

But why the government rushed so headlong into a complete opening remains a mystery.

The ubiquitous PCR testing stations, previously declared essential for survival, were dismantled in no time.

Surprisingly quickly, the CP dropped control instruments that critics had feared would test permanent surveillance of the people.

Thus, just a few days after the end of "zero-Covid", the main Corona app for tracking every movement of every citizen was deactivated.

The four state-owned telecom companies announced they would also delete user data associated with the app.

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Meanwhile, Beijing is insisting on other decisions, even if they obviously harm people.

For example, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier offered more far-reaching German help in a telephone call to Xi Jinping on Monday.

Steinmeier was quoted as saying

that a very high three-digit million number of doses of the German Biontech vaccine could be delivered to China immediately

.

So far, however, Beijing has rejected the offer. 

China: Biontech delivery only for Germans

And so a package of the Biontech vaccine delivered to China this week may only be vaccinated on the approximately 20,000 Germans in the People's Republic.

The German embassy in Beijing announced on Tuesday: "This offer applies to all German nationals living in mainland China and their German family members.

Family members with other nationalities cannot be included.” Chinese by marriage are therefore not allowed to be vaccinated with Biontech.

The offer does not apply to children under the age of twelve.

The embassy and several consulates general want to start vaccinating soon.

For the Chinese themselves, nine domestically developed Covid vaccines have been approved for use - a decision made during the Chinese dominance frenzy phase.

None of the local vaccines have yet been updated for Omicron.

Also, too few people are vaccinated three times.

This is considered the minimum dose for China's vaccines to prevent severe courses.

There is also no herd immunity in China due to the “zero Covid policy”.

A model from the University of Hong Kong, for example, expects almost a million deaths in extreme cases.

Ultimately, Xi caused this drama himself. 

In China, the party-state does not admit mistakes – especially not under Xi

A public admission of political mistakes is difficult to imagine in Xi's China.

Instead, Beijing is adjusting the statistics to show the lowest possible number of cases and fatalities.

This makes them so unreliable that it is no longer worth even mentioning them.

Authorities stopped counting asymptomatic cases last week, the overwhelming majority of new infections to date.

Then on Tuesday, the National Health Commission said only deaths from pneumonia and respiratory failure in patients infected with Covid-19 are also classified as Covid deaths.

As a result, there have only been seven reported deaths since the end of zero-Covid on December 7th.

China's head of state and party leader: This is how Xi Jinping rose to become the most powerful man in the world

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Can such a fogging strategy be sustained?

People see the videos, talk to acquaintances whose parents, uncles or friends have died of Covid.

Outside a crematorium in Beijing's eastern Tongzhou district, a Reuters source counted about 40 hearses lining up in front of the crowded parking lot.

According to Reuters, the London-based health data company Airfinity estimates that more than 5,000 people are currently dying with or from Covid-19 in China every day.

At least behind closed doors, people are likely to strongly doubt the official narrative.

This is also reflected in the fact that many simply stay at home, in a kind of self-lockdown.

China: Omicron wave expected to peak in capital in January

In the state newspaper

Global Times

, respiratory expert Wang Guangfa predicted a sharp increase in severe cases in Beijing in the coming weeks.

"We must act quickly and prepare fever clinics and resources for emergency and critical treatment," said Wang, who works at Beijing University First Hospital.

Wang expects the capital's omicron tsunami to peak in late January, according to the report.

But then the wave will probably really roll through the country: millions of Chinese are preparing to travel from the big cities to their home villages for the Chinese New Year at the end of January.

How much people blame Xi personally for the debacle is unknown.

Even what the party discusses internally does not get out.

But one thing is clear: Xi has spent the past few years concentrating all power in his hands.

Through a network of party commissions, Xi governs in all political fields.

"As a result, we have the situation that Xi has to take responsibility for everything himself," recently stated Nis Grünberg from the Merics Institute for China Studies and author of a study on the subject.

"Today, you have to assume that something will only happen if it is initiated from above." Conversely, this also means that every failure can be blamed on Xi alone.

Source: merkur

All news articles on 2022-12-25

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