Huangpu Jiangfeng No one is a man clearing the hard landing and the whole country to lay down the system,
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| An elderly woman was admitted to the fever clinic of a hospital in Beijing. (December 11, 2022) |
Editor's note: This is an opinion piece written by Jiang Feng for Voice of America. This guest commentary does not reflect the views of Voice of America. Reprinters please indicate that they are from Voice of America or VOA.
Contrary to the jubilation and liveliness after countries around the world announced the end of the epidemic, the week after China lifted the zero-clearing control has fallen into chaos and silence. Especially in Beijing, this depression and tension seem more like Wuhan at the beginning of the outbreak than at any point in the past three years. The infection rate of the new crown among citizens has risen sharply. Hospitals and pharmacies are suffering. For the first time in three years, there are only a few shopping malls and restaurants that are open without restrictions. The employment rate of enterprises and institutions has shrunk sharply. "recovery" call for the resumption of production.
What's really going on behind the chaos in Beijing? This is a question that everyone is curious and concerned about.
This chaos has been going on for a month. After the CCP concluded the "Twentieth National Congress" and the "First Plenary Session" of the "Twentieth National Congress", Xi Jinping passed the so-called "Twenty Points" at the new Politburo Standing Committee presided over on November 10, trying to The dynamic clearing policy that has been strictly controlled over the past three years has been fine-tuned to save the economic downturn, improve international outlook, and prepare for the so-called gradual and orderly deregulation of control. But that's where the chaos begins.
In the ensuing month, the public saw successively that the closures in Shijiazhuang, Zhengzhou, and Guangzhou fluctuated. On November 23, there was a collective conflict at the Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou. Beginning on the 1st, citizens from many places including Beijing, Chongqing, Wuhan, and Chengdu rushed out of the closed residential quarters, and college students from all over the country spontaneously held mourning rallies on campus. The "blank paper revolution", an "almost revolution", has been suppressed on the spot, but it has continued to this day, and has erupted one after another in universities and medical schools around the world. Under tremendous political pressure, the three-year dynamic zeroing policy came to an abrupt end.
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| Patients and their families waiting for treatment at a children's hospital in Beijing. (December 14, 2022) |
However, after the unblocking, the Chinese people are ushering in the biggest wave of epidemics since the outbreak of the new crown. Before the "blank paper revolution", the number of infected people in various places had quietly increased, and finally broke out in the first week of December. When people shared their positive reactions openly and boldly on social media for the first time in three years, they were surprised to find that the street cadres and neighborhood committee social workers who had been ubiquitous for the past three years disappeared overnight, and the cold medicine sold in pharmacies The ambulances and ICUs are quickly full, and it seems that the government is not prepared for the unblocking. Dynamic zeroing is bringing another wave of shocks beyond the epidemic in the form of a hard landing.
This is what is happening in China right now, a horrible and absurd situation. After people rose up to overthrow the zero-clearing control, what they saw was a system that had been lying flat for three years. In the past three years, all the resources of this system have been invested in the control of ordinary people and the construction of large-scale concentration camps, and not many resources have been used to improve the public health system. Although all the controls are based on the pretext of worrying about running out of medical care, three years have been wasted in vain. No efforts have been made to expand hospitals, recruit professional medical care, increase first-aid equipment, reform and improve the first-aid system, introduce and produce effective vaccines and drugs, and focus on guarantees. Medical treatment for the elderly, children, patients, etc.
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| Empty shelves at a pharmacy in Beijing. (December 13, 2022) |
The reason is that during the implementation of the three-year clearing policy of strict control over the people, the entire bureaucratic system in China seems to have been cleared: under the epidemic prevention system of "responsibility for guarding the soil" and the "Fengqiao model", the entire bureaucratic system Resources are all given priority to "clearing society". Party and government officials have lost the flexibility they have gradually developed since the reform and opening up, and they have also lost the rationality and independence of traditional Confucian bureaucrats. Rigid groups. This means that the entire bureaucratic system in China has been laid down spiritually, and has entered the post-totalitarianism of the Brezhlev era in advance.
The irony is that in the past three years, China's propaganda machine seems to have noticed this atmosphere of laying down in the system. Although this laying down mainly refers to cadres' sabotage, procrastination and passive coping, they may never be aware of the clearing and Lying flat is but two sides of the same coin. It is precisely those bureaucratic cadres who appear to be the most active, absolutely loyal, and insist on strict clean-up are the lying-down clan. Their political careers have been spent waiting for the highest instructions, and they do nothing, and they dare not do anything, and then sit back and watch. The outbreak of social crisis, and even revolution. Historically, on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the general state of mind of the Soviet Communist Party officials was surprisingly similar to this, which was called "no one is a man" by Chinese leaders more than ten years ago.
In this sense, a system in which the whole country is cleared is exactly a system in which the whole country is laid flat. When even the slightest shake occurred at the highest level of this system, a dynamic clearing system known as the "new national system" fell apart within a month, bringing about a revolution that was almost a blank sheet of paper. After the revolution, the people gave up the city and streets, turning Beijing into an empty city, continuing the revolution in another unconscious way. What Beijing can do is to urgently appeal for "willing to resume work and production" and to postpone the holding of the "Central Economic Work Conference".
It has to be said that this may be a preview of future Chinese politics. A political situation similar to the end of 1961-early 1962 is even more dangerous because of the lack of a competitor like Liu Shaoqi in the party. A deeper political crisis is accelerating. revealed.
