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One thing that I observe about how China deals with COVID: leadership assumes that they have perfect control over perfect people. Therefore they try these type

• karpierz 4y ago
  I doubt their model is that people are perfect. I think their model assumes that if they set strong enough incentives, the human-error will only be a second order effect and can be safely ignored. I don't know how well they've estimated the political price for some of these incentives, and whether they have the political capital to expend to maintain this lockdown for much longer.
  • Salgat 4y ago
    Their model is that you are assumed to be right, and when you're not, you save face by still acting like you're right. They're in too deep and they can't admit their policy is wrong since it admits that the west's approach is superior.
• Victerius 4y ago
  I like to use an analogy where every country is represented by a couple of people in a bar. China is the group who plans their consumptions two months in advance and sticks to its plan. America is the group that gets into a brawl in one moment, and in the next, builds a functional rocket in the parking lot.
  • linspace 4y ago
    I have an easier to understand analogy: China is the country that will try to solve an integral using Gaussian quadrature while USA will use some kind of Monte Carlo.
• readthenotes1 4y ago
  "For all its failures, democracy at least has taught us to incorporate the human imperfection into the process and the decisions." <Sarcasm>which is why all democracies defeated COVID with the three-week lockdown in which no one left home unless they had to and took proper precautions to ensure that they did not dare transmit any disease to anyone else</sarcasm> No, I would say that modern democracies and enshrine human imperfections into the process in order to further the will to power that exists in those seeking office.
  • consumer451 4y ago
    I think about these issues a lot in my spare time. I am curious if you have any favorite modifications/alternatives to democracies.
  • roenxi 4y ago
    It is difficult to name a country that has "defeated" COVID. This video is from one of the best responses if you believe the lies the Chinese government pumps out about their COVID case counts. The situation today remains the same as the situation in March 2020 - anyone who doesn't die quickly of other causes is going to get COVID. The only surprise the entire way through the pandemic is they managed to rush a vaccine into mass production in ~12 months rather than a couple of years (very much a record!). Even with that good news the damage from the lockdowns may not have been worth it, the world is re-emerging into a rather unstable environment with a lot of nervous people that looks ripe for WWIII. It is debatable whether the government interventions were actually a good idea, we don't have the full picture of what the costs were. I'd still rather have seen them pushing out honest, current information and then letting individuals make decisions for better or worse.
    • wasmitnetzen 4y ago
      > then letting individuals make decisions for better or worse That sounds a lot like anarchy to me. I believe we invented laws (and religion before that) exactly because individuals can't be trusted to make informed decisions in certain cases.
• rapsey 4y ago
  This is communism in a nutshell. The government decides the people are forced to follow. Even if it results in millions dead.
  • jnsaff2 4y ago
    More like totalitarianism, that all well known communist systems have also been more or less totalitarian is something to think about tho.
    • throwawaytucker 4y ago
      This is not an accident. In 1888 (long before any socialist or communist country existed to validate the theory), the American socialist Benjamin tucker predicted that the Marxist form of socialism and it's derivates would necessarily lead to totalitarianism, with some eerily prescient predictions born out by the experiences in Venezuela, Cuba, china, USSR, etc. If anyone claims that state socialism will have any other outcome (assuming they believe in science the process of prediction and confirmation) then it's on them to explicitly explain what, exactly, in their proposed implementation diverges from Tucker's model that would make their vision of state socialism turn out differently.
      • jseban 4y ago
        Yeah it's ridiculous that people keep using this no true scotsman fallacy argument about communism, even after 100 years of large scale experiments that all lead to the same outcome, with enormous loss and suffering.
  • sofixa 4y ago
    And absolute monarchism, and classic dictatorship, fascism, etc. Communism isn't the only ideology which usually ends up totalitarian.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• jollybean 4y ago
  I think the opposite: that China is a powder keg ready to go off at any moment - and the leaders know it very well and are generally pretty afraid of things blowing up. There are a lot of protests in China we don't hear about. Something about Chinese (in China) ... leads me to think they go big on memes. They revolt unlike anything we know of. Do you remember the video form Feb 2020 in Wuhan? The madness, hospitals flooded? Imagine all over China. As long as the economy is steaming forward, people will look the other way. But as soon as that starts to slow down, then I think it's going to get hot. Edit, for my naysayers: "The number of workers' strikes rose to a record level in 2015. The China Labor Bulletin mentioned 2,509 strikes and protests by workers and employees in China." That's just labour disputes and doesn't include disputes concerning appropriated land, safety issues with products - i.e. the kinds of things where there's some tolerance for dissent. [1] And note that it's increasing every year. Especially due to the power of Social Media, if China didn't have censorship the CCP would be out within months. They are well aware of this. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protest_and_dissent_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protest_and_dissent_in_China
  • cturner 4y ago
    Revolutions use angry young men as fuel. China's young men population is proportionally small. Further, due to the legacy of the four-grandparent-policy and Confucian respect-for-elders tradition, the young that exist have high family responsibilities. Perhaps there will be something new in China - something that comes from the same place as revolution but without the testosterone.
    • dehrmann 4y ago
      > China's young men population is proportionally small But their population of young women is even smaller.
• alephnan 4y ago
  > They assume that people will execute their orders perfectly, even under extreme hardship China has also taken 1 billion people out of poverty in just 3 decades. > For all its failures, democracy at least has taught us to incorporate the human imperfection into the process and the decisions. Since we’re talking counter evidence: - Singapore is a benevolent dictatorship - Japan’s schooling system prepares its citizens to be model minorities, and most of the orderliness or Japan is because of cultural reasons. Additionally, people are expected to not make mistakes. America does have other ways it recognizes and adapts to human flaws: by embracing the free market. Adam Smith’s wealth of nations mentioned it not out of altruism, but selfishness that everyone thrives. It’s not entirely attributable to democracy. In fact, many are arguing to remove the electoral college. A popular vote would be more Democratic in the Ancient Greek sense no? But our founder fathers designed America against that, to prevent tyranny of the masses. > For all its failures, democracy at least has taught us to incorporate the human imperfection into the process and the decisions. This is not uniquely America or contemporary. Any great past civilization accounted for this if it lasted for a long time.
  • native_samples 4y ago
    "China" didn't do that. The Chinese people did that after Deng Xiaoping got into a position where he could stop the government actively destroying all progress in the country. And whilst I used to be impressed by this "lifted a billion people" take, the reality is that lots of countries industrialized, modernized and huge numbers of people left behind agrarian poverty. This isn't unique or special and in fact when ranked against other countries like Taiwan, Korea, Japan - let alone countries like the USA or UK - China has turned in one of the worst performances. China still has widespread poverty and in many ways is still a developing country, 80 years after Europe utterly destroyed itself in WW2 and Japan had two of its major cities leveled by atomic bombs. There's really nothing impressive about China beyond the sheer number of people the government has managed to hold back. If your foot is constantly on the brake of a very large vehicle, lifting your foot even half way will cause a lot of mass to start moving. That doesn't mean you get credit for it.
    • alephnan 4y ago
• paganel 4y ago
  > I am curious when China will adjust their model/plan for COVID to consider the vast amount of counter-evidence that is accumulating. Probably it will take at least one year and a half - two years, at least that's how long it took the Western authorities to somehow change their discourse. Some people around the Western parts of the world still believe in mask mandates, to say nothing of the vaccine mandates if you want to visit their country (Greece, for example). Thankfully all this China situation will have eased up the censorship reflex present in some Western media/social platforms, now it's again cool and super ok to complain about the lockdowns and to call them authoritarian because it's the evil Chinese that are implementing them. When us, the West, were doing them it was "for democracy" and for the greater good (for "the demos"). When the streets of NYC or London were empty because of lockdowns it was a civic thing, when the streets of Shanghai are empty (as The Economist was decrying in one of the its latest issues) is because the Chinese authorities want the worst for their people.
  • jollybean 4y ago
    Where is this 'vast amount of evidence' anyhow? So far they've had to have ugly lockdowns in a few cities, but it's a tiny fraction of the overall population. If it goes on for a long while - this will be a problem, but if they got away with it by having lockdowns - even late into the game - I wouldn't call it a failure. That said, we really don't know what a lot of the numbers are.
    • udev 4y ago
      Here in Canada some provinces did use lock-downs (even with curfews) and some didn't, and comparisons made between them show that lock-down was one of the least effective measures. I am sure similar data exists for US states, EU countries, etc.
  • pjc50 4y ago
    The UK has chosen about 400 deaths a day instead as a level that the media are comfortable with.
  • 9935c101ab17a66 4y ago
• mardifoufs 4y ago
  >One thing that I observe about how China deals with COVID: leadership assumes that they have perfect control over perfect people. This is absolutely not unique to China. How many times have we heard "if only everyone did this or that, the measures would have worked!" coming from official authorities here in the west? I know it happened a lot where I live, and It honestly surprised me how almost every measure was based on that crappy assumption.
• powerapple 4y ago
  At least the current evidences (excluding Shanghai) has shown that the virus can be contained. Yes, there are cases, but cities have managed to contain it and people are normally back to normal after two weeks semi-lockdown. Of course, with Shanghai keeps having new cases, things may change. The government is pushing for old people to get vaccination. Old generation in China are not getting vaccinations because they worry it may have side effects. As far as I have heard, the government is pushing it by linking some money (old people get some government money for special occasions) with the vaccination. Overall, the country will have to accept the fact that the virus will spread, especially if they want to open borders. The current strategy is to contain it as much as you can. Once it open up, it will have a peak similar to Hong Kong, maybe hundred of thousands of old people will die.
  • native_samples 4y ago
    Yes if you ignore all the times when it doesn't work, then lockdown works. It's an irrelevant tautology with no intellectual or scientific merit. There is no Shanghai exception for lockdown as a scientific policy, just like there is no Swedish exception. To decide if a policy advertised as based on universal biology is working you need to evaluate all the evidence, and cases where it doesn't work either disprove the theory or require refinement. As nobody can come up with a plausible refinement that means it's disproven.
    • powerapple 4y ago
      Agree and disagree. Lockdown can work until it does not work. Science can evaluate the speed of spread, does not dictate what's happening. My city had a short lockdown a few month ago, Shenzhen and Guangzhou just finished lockdown. It is fair to say 9/10 worked. It is more difficult to contain Omicron, science can say that. Also virus won't spread when no one is moving, science can also say that. It is just a trade off in the end.
      • progrus 4y ago
        Unfortunately for some, whatever “science says” will be ignored next time.
• sph 4y ago
  > leadership assumes that they have perfect control over perfect people Only androids that are physically unable to empathise would make such an assumption. That's literally the definition of android from Philip K. Dick, and the basis of cyberpunk stories like Blade Runner. In this case the androids are the Communist Party of China and are trying to contain a virus with no knowledge or understanding how tens of millions of citizens would react to being locked in their tiny homes risking starvation.
• Thorrez 4y ago
  > If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. Federalist No. 51, James Madison
• tinus_hn 4y ago
  I presume you weren’t around when most of the posters here were clamoring for the same measures that are now failing in Shanghai? ‘Just 15 days to stop the spread!’ ‘The lockdowns should be stricter, look at how well it works in China!’ ‘If you are against lockdowns, you’re killing grandma and you should be locked up!’