58 ms·

Not a single car was sold in Shanghai last month

246 points by danso 4y ago

notorandit 4y ago
- perlgeek 4y ago
  There doesn't seem to be much public transportation happening in Shanghai either...
- usrn 4y ago
  People still use cars. In many of these foreign countries people often just buy them as a status symbol. That none were sold is an indication of a serious economic problem.
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    Is it? There was a ~30 day lockdown. China does strict lockdowns relative to the US or Europe. Car purchases could just be deferred a month, so there would be an economic impact, but the one-month blip wouldn't be indicative of any long-term problem.
    - usrn 4y ago
      It is indicative of a short term change. The short term changes here in the US resulted in other long term disruption and that's likely to happen in China as well.
      - alistairSH 4y ago
        Maybe. But, the article didn't even attempt to make that case. It was simply "lockdown led to no car sales" which on its own is pretty meaningless.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  No one is moving in Shanghai. They have locked people into their homes. It is not good at all. Not even a little bit.
- neither_color 4y ago
  Celebrating it being the result of a major rights violation where people haven't left their homes in a month, have inconsistent access to food and some are even going hungry isn't really a good look for the green cause, it's tone deaf and makes it sound rooted in misanthropy.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I mean no new cars on the road, discutable, but the situation is far from "good"; people are locked into their house. I mean the pragmatist in me says this is what they should have done everywhere and the corona would not have been an issue, but it's draconian and infringes on base liberties. Removing someone's freedom of movement is one of the primary legal punishments handed out, and people's freedoms of movement are being restricted without them having done anything wrong.
  - nradov 4y ago
    Even if we had done that everywhere, coronavirus would still have been an issue due to wild animal reservoirs. Eventually someone will catch the virus from a deer or bat or whatever and then the whole cycle restarts. Lockdowns have always been a pointless form of collective punishment.
  - bart_spoon 4y ago
    > I mean the pragmatist in me says this is what they should have done everywhere and the corona would not have been an issue Absolutely nothing about this is pragmatic. It's as un-pragmatic of a response as one could come up with.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  might want to crack open the linked article
- boredumb 4y ago
  When people wonder why some folks are skeptical of climate activism, remember there are people celebrating locking population centers in their homes and being barred from private transportation and then reflect a bit on why people who are generally against authoritarianism aren't gung-ho about taking environmental concerns to their logical state ran solutions.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    There are insane people on pretty much every side of every issue. That doesn't seem to justify blithely continuing to destroy the world.
  - 8note 4y ago
    That's mostly a feat coming from the right wing propaganda machine though. You have a history of environmental regulation you can look at, with say, DDT, CFCs, and acid rain
- natch 4y ago
  Have you experienced public transportation in Shanghai? Speaking about non lockdown times of course, to say they don’t have a shortage of riders would be understating the case severely.
barry-cotter 4y ago
Who could buy? Where could they buy from? There are people who’ve been in their apartments for over 40 days. The entire city has been locked in for over 30, barring some lucky people who’ve been allowed out for two hours a day in the past two weeks.
- kasey_junk 4y ago
  That’s the point of the article? It’s using car sales as a proxy for how tight the lockdown has been.
- discordance 4y ago
  Yes, it's clear why this has happened, but China is so important across many industries and this is one clear example data point. The interesting question (IMHO) is what are the ramifications from this for companies, jobs, the economy, both locally and internationally, across all industries.
  - greenglass 4y ago
    Not good it seems: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-economy-cools-sharply-april-lockdowns-bite-2022-05-16/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-economy-cools-sha...
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  That's literally the first line of the article ... "For evidence of just how tight Shanghai’s lockdown has been, consider this: not a single car was sold in the city last month. "
hamstrung 4y ago
https://archive.ph/SoUwd https://archive.ph/SoUwd
bo1024 4y ago
Is it known what variant(s) led to this outbreak and lockdown?
- libertine 4y ago
  They're Omicron subvariants, but I don't think that alone explains the phenomena. I think this is the result of bad policies and probably low vaccination rates/efficacy.
- izzydata 4y ago
  It seems like Omicron is way worse in China because their initial lockdown response had them living in a covid bubble while the rest of the world got infected. Unless they managed to never have another case forever this seemed like an inevitable outcome.
  - lnsru 4y ago
    I also heard, their vaccination program wasn’t that good as elsewhere. Everybody in my bubble in Germany got corona at least once. Everybody were vaccinated at least twice. All cases in all age groups were not worse than average cold.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      I was very cautious before the vaccines. But afterwards, it was mostly Covid theatre in the US: 1. Mask mandates - dumb - people who didn’t want to wear them weren’t wearing them properly and most were wearing completely ineffective cloth masks. I travelled a lot and you were allowed to take your mask off while eating on a plane. So what good was requiring a mask? 2. Vaccine mandates - everyone agrees that the vaccines don’t stop you from getting or spreading Covid. But it does help prevent severe cases. So if people decide not to get vaccinated, it’s on them. Raise their insurance rates and don’t give them extra sick time. I would have been in compliance with my company’s mandate if I had only gotten the one shot J&J 3/2021 even though six months later, everyone agreed that it wasn’t effective against the variants and you should get a booster. No one would be crazy enough to propose that you must get a shot every six months. I did so voluntarily. Yeah I caught Covid after vaccinations and boosters. It really was no worse than a cold.
s_dev 4y ago
That is interesting I would have thought it an absolute certainty at least a non zero number of cars were sold. Either recurring/rollover contracts or some guy making an advanced purchase for later in the year would be reasons to buy during a lockdown.
throwaway4good 4y ago
This is similar to what happened in Europe at height of our first lockdowns - give a few months and demand will be back with a catch-up.
- awillen 4y ago
  It's not about demand, though - it's about people being physically unable to leave and buy a car. It's not necessarily comparable to Europe because nowhere in Europe was pursuing the same zero COVID policy that China is, and it's tough to imagine that they'll ever achieve that on any kind of a long-term basis. Given that, who knows how long these restrictions will stay in place.
- masklinn 4y ago
  The situation in Shanghai is orders of magnitude more extreme than what happened in Europe. At the heights of lockdown, the European market dropped 76% YoY (from 1143046 cars in April 2019 to 270682 in 2020). Even in the most affected countries the market didn't bottom out so completely: * in the UK, sales went from 161k to 4.3k * in Italy, sales went from 175k to 4.3k * in Ireland, sales went from 8900 to 344 (nb: the Irish market seems extremely seasonal, with strong sales in January and July, middling sales in Feb and March dropping to nothing by June, and basically no sales from August to December, in 2020 the bottom dropped out in March but sales recovered almost normally by July) Shanghai has almost 4 times the population of Ireland, 40% the population of Italy or the UK.
dsizzle 4y ago
Weird proxy to illustrate the problem with lockdowns. On the one hand it's a huge city, so there's lots of people who could be buying cars, but on the other hand... it's a huge city, so you probably don't need a car?
- mattkrause 4y ago
  This data is already collected and aggregated (e.g., for issuing license plates), so it's probably more that it was handy than it's a perfect proxy.
  - dsizzle 4y ago
    I guess, but after seeing videos of people screaming from their balconies because they can't leave their homes even to get food https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/china/shanghai-residents-screaming-windows-covid-lockdown-b2055311.html https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/china/shanghai-residents-... it seems odd to focus on no one buying cars.
tboyd47 4y ago
Dave3of5 4y ago
> Almost all dealerships in the city were closed during the month Which is why no-one bought any cars wtf is this article ...
- cheschire 4y ago
  The article is talking about how extreme the lockdown is. As other commenters have pointed out, it's normal to expect some non-zero number of sales, so when there's an exact zero, it's very odd. As an example, notice how they said "almost all dealerships" and not "all dealerships". Non-zero numbers are normal. Absolute zero is a very strange signal.
  - Steltek 4y ago
    Maybe the data is wrong then? - It was not an exhaustive or comprehensive search - Reporting non-zero would drawn government scrutiny for how a car was sold during a strict lockdown - Industry group reporting zero is trying to draw alarm/attention to helping their industry
    - cheschire 4y ago
      You're highlighting why it's interesting. Perhaps some party leader felt this was a statistic worth bragging about to show their total control, not realizing it highlights how their data collection processes seem flawed to casual observation.
  - lettergram 4y ago
    Well, might not have been zero. Might just be the official records to ensure the state doesn’t crack down
    - boringg 4y ago
      I figure this is the real reason. Which dealership would be stupid enough to say they had sold a car in a month that they were officially lockdown. The retribution would be swift and harsh. Could also be zero because everyone obeyed the order.
captainmuon 4y ago
Does anybody know what the situation is in the rest of China? I hear there are a couple of strict lockdowns in other cities, and some districts of Beijing. China has in the past justified their harsh measures because the relative majority could live without Covid restrictions (and illness and deaths of course). It would be interesting to see what portion of the population is on lockdown, but it is hard to find good sources in English.
- loeg 4y ago
  I ordered from Xiamen, China in late April and it shipped basically on time (some time to actually build the item) 1.5 weeks later. So I don’t think there’s insane lockdowns there currently.
- whoevercares 4y ago
  Not much on “continuous lockdown”. Lockdown in China is “dynamic” and at this point a great portion of the population has been on a lockdown at once. Many smaller city are in lockdown sporadically every few weeks but they are not crowded. Most rural areas are not tightly managed either, lockdown is per village or even per household basis with no statistics. I think for China what matters are the big Tier1 cities. It’s enough to paralyze China if 2-3 of them implement full city wide lockdown. Core areas of Beijing has implemented daily test, not much in its suburbs though. So far Beijing is quite manageable still. Source: family in Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan and several other Tier 2/3 cities across China.
- zardinality 4y ago
  I could provide maybe another data point there. I lived at a village in a east province for some months and has just left. People are living their normal life, albeit ofc a slightest bit of concern to Corona. But people are more worried that they could not make money now and in near future than having the virus. They are not fearful of starving either, not like people living in the city, farms and fields are everywhere. In the worst time when the town has one or two cases, some are restricted from leaving the county and has to do corona test once for every a while. Some roads are blocked. That is all. But I have heard some worse cases recently, where the cases stays high. Agricultural population accounts for almost a third of the whole population in China. To quote an old proverb in Chinese: when there is small turbulance, stay in the city; when there is a big riot, live in your hood.
nradov 4y ago
There are rumors than President Xi has been using the coronavirus outbreak as a convenient excuse to knock the "Shanghai clique" down a few pegs. Supposedly he thought the local Shanghai leaders were getting a bit too popular, and insufficiently deferential to Beijing. He's terrified of seeing any alternative power centers develop.
- jeromegv 4y ago
  >There are rumors >Supposedly I'd rather prefer people to have an opinion and share it, instead of sharing rumours and "supposedly" theories without sourcing them.
  - nradov 4y ago
    Obviously I can't source something from inside President Xi's head. But that rumor seems consistent with the observed facts on the ground.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
- whoevercares 4y ago
  Current leader of Shanghai Li Qiang is Xi’s best buddy since 20 years ago.. quite the opposite the plan might be from someone else to take Shanghai back
  - Workaccount2 4y ago
    Et tu, Brute?
  - hindsightbias 4y ago
    Someone to throw under the bus maybe: https://thediplomat.com/2022/04/political-tensions-simmer-over-shanghais-covid-19-crisis/ https://thediplomat.com/2022/04/political-tensions-simmer-ov... This may be a recurring battle between urban/tech and rural factions, although there probably are many urban areas that are envious of Shanghai and may want it taken down a notch.
Leader2light 4y ago
yalogin 4y ago
I did not realize there is such a strict lockdown even now. Somehow missed that news cycle. However that makes me wonder if the other countries in the world like India and major parts of the US even test now. I mean unless it’s absolutely clear it’s covid they probably don’t test and go on with their lives.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  American media I think is completely done with Covid reporting, realizing that they have exhausted the public's appetite for it. It's hard to avoid the temptation to blame the news media for the pseudo-populist dysfunction of the American political system at the moment.
  - diogenescynic 4y ago
    They moved on to Ukraine and inflation.
    - cyberlurker 4y ago
      Are these not important issues? Although I will add inflation is exacerbated by belief in inflation, which can make over reporting a self-fulfilling prophecy. But there are other causes and I don't think it is over reported.
      - diogenescynic 4y ago
        >Are these not important issues? I didn't take any position at all and I wasn't judging. Just look at articles and what's covered more frequently on cable news. COVID is self-evidently lower priority at the moment to stock market volatility, inflation, Ukraine, abortion, mass shootings, etc. It's been 2+ years, people are burnt out of COVID--and I say this as someone who tested positive for it yesterday and is sitting in my spare bedroom to quarantine myself from my family.
- FunnyBadger 4y ago
raulgalera 4y ago
In Spain we had a very strict lockdown (not as strict as the Chinese but still) between March-May 2020 and still over 4k cars were sold that month. Which at the time I thought it was an extremely high number considering everything that was going on (link in Spanish): https://noticias.coches.com/noticias-motor/ventas-de-coches-abril-2020/387739 https://noticias.coches.com/noticias-motor/ventas-de-coches-...
- gonehome 4y ago
  I think the China lockdown situation is a magnitude more extreme (at least based on accounts from people in lockdown there on Twitter). People are not allowed outside of their units (only a couple per building to pick up deliveries). People testing positive are forced to centralized areas and some have to abandon pets (which then are either getting killed or starving and killing each other in the streets).
- manquer 4y ago
  Chinese lockdowns are more like martial law style curfews . You cannot go out for almost anything at all. There are no customers who can go to the dealership, no employees who can sell cars and manage dealerships. Non essential business are not allowed to run at all. This article title is written to imply that demand has fallen, that is not the case, it is operationally near impossible to make a purchase and take delivery. People still want /need cars and many can still afford to get them . The pent up demand (with losses due to changing economic conditions) will come back when things return to normal.
natch 4y ago
Author of article is apparently unaware of online sales of new cars in which no dealer is involved. Which very well could have been zero as well, but it should have been mentioned even if to clarify they do not exist in China, if that is indeed the case.
- kurthr 4y ago
  How would you take delivery of a car when in lockdown? Maybe if you're a big white (Tyvek suited enforcer) you could pick it up? Why after two weeks of being locked into your apartment would you decide to buy a car you couldn't pickup, sight unseen?
  - natch 4y ago
    Delivery != sale. If they are tabulating deliveries, they should use the word that matches their meaning, instead of a different word.
    - kurthr 4y ago
      Since I used both the words delivery and sale in different ways... I think that buy == sale and delivery == pick up. So when I ask, "Why after two weeks of being locked into your apartment would you decide to *buy* a car you couldn't *pick up*, sight unseen?", I do not mean that delivery didn't take place, I mean that purchase == sale == buy likely did not take place, because the buyer could neither go and look at the vehicle, nor would they be likely to electronically purchase a vehicle that they couldn't pick up while confined to their apartment. Does that make sense? Even if you're a member of the party who gets to wear a white suit and go out in public, you're unlikely to be able to take possession of a vehicle since that dealership is not open, because they can't leave their house. So it still doesn't make sense to purchase, which means there is unlikely to be a sale, electronic or no, even for those privileged to be able to pick one up.
      - natch 4y ago
        Last car I bought nine months ahead of the delivery date. On a web page. On an iPhone. Car before that, three months, same, web page/iPhone. There is a major car manufacturer with a factory in Shanghai that sells cars with this sales model. I don’t see why there would be zero sales. Zero deliveries does make sense.
spoonjim 4y ago
Pre-vaccines, China’s Zero COVID approached seemed wise and impressive. Now it is clear that they were just paranoiacs and now have a policy that doesn’t meet the moment.
- coolspot 4y ago
  Or creators of the virus know about some of its dangers more than the rest of the world.
  - anonymouswacker 4y ago
    Like most things made in China, COVID-19 was poorly engineered, just like their ham-fisted approach to combating it. Something about totalitarian regimes causes a race to the bottom in human rights, arts, and sciences.
  - spoonjim 4y ago
    Cui bono? If China engineered COVID, to what end?
- hcknwscommenter 4y ago
  Pre-vaccine and before effective treatments and putting aside the initial attempt to pretend it wasn't happening/hush it up in the very very early days/weeks, it was a wise and impressive response. What worked and was smart then is not working or smart now. Things change.
electrondood 4y ago
How exactly is "zero-COVID" supposed to end? It seems like China are committed to extreme measures like this in perpetuity any time there is a future outbreak, which will happen.
- chamucoman 4y ago
  The zero-Covid is just an excuse to manipulate the local (increasing wealth of citizens) and global (supply chain disruption) economic landscape. This should be obvious to anyone, but I guess is not, and some people still think this is about Covid.
  - winrid 4y ago
    Why would anyone want to do that? Who does it benefit?
  - tobltobs 4y ago
    Could you explain the obvious a bit more? They crash their own economy to do what?
  - wvenable 4y ago
    How does disrupting the supply chain help anyone?
    - pvarangot 4y ago
      I think it's like a government backed strike or lockdown. The CCP is getting tired of the US Government bullshit where independent states or the federal government crazily ban or allow Chinese products for whatever crazy bullshit reasons and they change it every couple of months. In the chemical industry it's pretty bad. Some stuff I know shops in China refuse to synthesize anymore because it's like they tool up and then they can't sell it anymore to anyone because some US agency bans its import. Of course if they also stop making phones everyone gets mad.
  - neither_color 4y ago
    I think that's giving them too much credit. Historically, this isn't the first time that they've enacted a long war of attrition against nature and lost. Consider their attempts to eliminate sparrows, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides.[9] Ecological imbalance is credited with exacerbating the Great Chinese Famine.[12][13] The Chinese government eventually resorted to importing 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to replenish their population.[14]
CalRobert 4y ago
I was hoping this was a story about walkable streets and great urban placemaking, terrible to see it's actually a sign of misery.
- jader201 4y ago
  Not everyone in the world lives in a city, and for some folks, cars are a necessity. Sure, for some folks in the city, moving towards a car-less world may be ideal, but it’s not practical for every single person on the planet.
  - soperj 4y ago
    > Not everyone in the world lives in a city, and for some folks, cars are a necessity. Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Cars have been around for a little over 100. It's not a necessity, it's nice to have.
    - klysm 4y ago
      Therefore anything invented since the very first humans existed is strictly not a necessity. Doesn’t seem like a particularly useful definition to me.
      - coldtea 4y ago
        >Therefore anything invented since the very first humans existed is strictly not a necessity. Obviously. >Doesn’t seem like a particularly useful definition to me. It's just the dictionary one. We can invent a laxer version...
  - sgillen 4y ago
    That doesn’t mean we can’t root for more walkable cities!
  - tormeh 4y ago
    The article is about Shanghai, which is known to be a city.
shp0ngle 4y ago
In other news, North Korea currently has a Covid problem.
- anonymouswacker 4y ago
  Presumably this will be used to disguise the ensuing mass starvation as Covid deaths.
sunjester 4y ago
Not even in the private sector?
ctoth 4y ago
Whenever I think about the situation in China it makes me wonder why the Chinese government is spending so much political capital to keep people from getting infected by such an incredibly transmissible disease. I had this idea that China was run by engineer types who were fairly rational. From the initial denial that there was any disease at all, to later saying it wasn't transmissible between humans, to the obvious lies about the initial death toll, to now attempting to lock down more than any other country, I'm very curious what officials in China know about this particular disease that they aren't sharing with the rest of the world.
- _fat_santa 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- rubyist5eva 4y ago
  Governments - and to a greater extend Dictatorships - are very rarely rational when it comes to saving face or keeping grip on whatever little power they've managed to grab for themselves.
- CogitoCogito 4y ago
  > I had this idea that China was run by engineer types who were fairly rational. Why did you have this idea?
  - lowkey_ 4y ago
    As someone who has studied East Asian history, it's commonly said that Mao's adversaries within the CCP were the "technocrats," and that the technocrats are the ones who took power after Mao's passing — and still hold power to this day. Here's a couple articles on China's technocrats: https://macropolo.org/analysis/return-technocrats-chinese-politics/ https://macropolo.org/analysis/return-technocrats-chinese-po... https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/04/chinas-overrated-technocrats-stem-engineering-xi-jinping/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/04/chinas-overrated-techno...
WalterBright 4y ago
The lockdowns in the US have been incredibly expensive. There's the massive increase in the national debt, high inflation with no end in sight, a couple years lost for students, etc. The national debt is so high now it's possible we've passed a tipping point where it will result in a collapse of the currency. And yet people get Covid anyway.
- maigret 4y ago
  Getting COVID today is way less dangerous than getting it two years ago.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    I'm not so sure. Perhaps the difference is the highly vulnerable people have already died.
    - flumpcakes 4y ago
      I think it would go to far to say all vulnerable people have died. Having the required two shots and a booster (mixed or otherwise) seems to not only reduce the likelihood of getting COVID but also reduces how severely you are affected if you do catch it.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        I didn't say all. What I'm saying is the overall death rate can decline while the risk for each individual remains the same, because there are fewer people in the high risk category.
manuelabeledo 4y ago
All car dealerships are closed, and the city is not issuing license plates at all, so of course no cars have been sold in the last month. This is a very odd take on a potential humanitarian crisis.
- throwaway_1928 4y ago
  The humanitarian crisis is caused by the communist dictatorship there. Chinese vaccines do not work, but the dictatorship insists on China made vaccines. The brutal lockdowns in Shanghai are their expertise and only a shadow of their recent accomplishments in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.
bsedlm 4y ago
I have no more trust in anything, anything at all, that I read about this kind of stuff on the internet (since the Ukraine stuff started). I will literally have to fly myself to Shanghai to believe this newsbit. Maybe it's really that bad, but I trust the news so little by now that I must consider, maybe this is news is also propaganda and Shanghai is doing just fine? At the same time, for me personally, this newsbit is not directly relevant in any way at all.
lithiums 4y ago
With such a mass population (1.4B), for most of people to get vaccinated is hard. for most of elders to get vaccinated is even harder. It's a choice of 1 million get killed or 0.5 million, either choice, people suffer. It's the difference of whom get suffered, people in big city or millions elders in country side with bad medical condition(low ICUs per capita). They choose to protect elders in country side, cause they believe they belong to a left government. So Shanghai suffer.
dmix 4y ago
I wanted to visit China this summer but I discovered you can't even buy tickets into China. I was planning on just avoiding Shanghai and hoping Bejing got better by August but I guess I'll have to keep waiting another long time to finally visit China.

246 points by danso 4y ago

perlgeek 4y ago
There doesn't seem to be much public transportation happening in Shanghai either...
usrn 4y ago
People still use cars. In many of these foreign countries people often just buy them as a status symbol. That none were sold is an indication of a serious economic problem.
- alistairSH 4y ago
  Is it? There was a ~30 day lockdown. China does strict lockdowns relative to the US or Europe. Car purchases could just be deferred a month, so there would be an economic impact, but the one-month blip wouldn't be indicative of any long-term problem.
  - usrn 4y ago
    It is indicative of a short term change. The short term changes here in the US resulted in other long term disruption and that's likely to happen in China as well.
    - alistairSH 4y ago
      Maybe. But, the article didn't even attempt to make that case. It was simply "lockdown led to no car sales" which on its own is pretty meaningless.
chrisco255 4y ago
No one is moving in Shanghai. They have locked people into their homes. It is not good at all. Not even a little bit.
neither_color 4y ago
Celebrating it being the result of a major rights violation where people haven't left their homes in a month, have inconsistent access to food and some are even going hungry isn't really a good look for the green cause, it's tone deaf and makes it sound rooted in misanthropy.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I mean no new cars on the road, discutable, but the situation is far from "good"; people are locked into their house. I mean the pragmatist in me says this is what they should have done everywhere and the corona would not have been an issue, but it's draconian and infringes on base liberties. Removing someone's freedom of movement is one of the primary legal punishments handed out, and people's freedoms of movement are being restricted without them having done anything wrong.
- nradov 4y ago
  Even if we had done that everywhere, coronavirus would still have been an issue due to wild animal reservoirs. Eventually someone will catch the virus from a deer or bat or whatever and then the whole cycle restarts. Lockdowns have always been a pointless form of collective punishment.
- bart_spoon 4y ago
  > I mean the pragmatist in me says this is what they should have done everywhere and the corona would not have been an issue Absolutely nothing about this is pragmatic. It's as un-pragmatic of a response as one could come up with.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
micromacrofoot 4y ago
might want to crack open the linked article
boredumb 4y ago
When people wonder why some folks are skeptical of climate activism, remember there are people celebrating locking population centers in their homes and being barred from private transportation and then reflect a bit on why people who are generally against authoritarianism aren't gung-ho about taking environmental concerns to their logical state ran solutions.
- thfuran 4y ago
  There are insane people on pretty much every side of every issue. That doesn't seem to justify blithely continuing to destroy the world.
- 8note 4y ago
  That's mostly a feat coming from the right wing propaganda machine though. You have a history of environmental regulation you can look at, with say, DDT, CFCs, and acid rain
natch 4y ago
Have you experienced public transportation in Shanghai? Speaking about non lockdown times of course, to say they don’t have a shortage of riders would be understating the case severely.

Who could buy? Where could they buy from? There are people who’ve been in their apartments for over 40 days. The entire city has been locked in for over 30, barring some lucky people who’ve been allowed out for two hours a day in the past two weeks.

kasey_junk 4y ago
That’s the point of the article? It’s using car sales as a proxy for how tight the lockdown has been.
discordance 4y ago
Yes, it's clear why this has happened, but China is so important across many industries and this is one clear example data point. The interesting question (IMHO) is what are the ramifications from this for companies, jobs, the economy, both locally and internationally, across all industries.
- greenglass 4y ago
  Not good it seems: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-economy-cools-sharply-april-lockdowns-bite-2022-05-16/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-economy-cools-sha...
Ensorceled 4y ago
That's literally the first line of the article ... "For evidence of just how tight Shanghai’s lockdown has been, consider this: not a single car was sold in the city last month. "

hamstrung 4y ago

https://archive.ph/SoUwd https://archive.ph/SoUwd

bo1024 4y ago

Is it known what variant(s) led to this outbreak and lockdown?

libertine 4y ago
They're Omicron subvariants, but I don't think that alone explains the phenomena. I think this is the result of bad policies and probably low vaccination rates/efficacy.
izzydata 4y ago
It seems like Omicron is way worse in China because their initial lockdown response had them living in a covid bubble while the rest of the world got infected. Unless they managed to never have another case forever this seemed like an inevitable outcome.
- lnsru 4y ago
  I also heard, their vaccination program wasn’t that good as elsewhere. Everybody in my bubble in Germany got corona at least once. Everybody were vaccinated at least twice. All cases in all age groups were not worse than average cold.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    I was very cautious before the vaccines. But afterwards, it was mostly Covid theatre in the US: 1. Mask mandates - dumb - people who didn’t want to wear them weren’t wearing them properly and most were wearing completely ineffective cloth masks. I travelled a lot and you were allowed to take your mask off while eating on a plane. So what good was requiring a mask? 2. Vaccine mandates - everyone agrees that the vaccines don’t stop you from getting or spreading Covid. But it does help prevent severe cases. So if people decide not to get vaccinated, it’s on them. Raise their insurance rates and don’t give them extra sick time. I would have been in compliance with my company’s mandate if I had only gotten the one shot J&J 3/2021 even though six months later, everyone agreed that it wasn’t effective against the variants and you should get a booster. No one would be crazy enough to propose that you must get a shot every six months. I did so voluntarily. Yeah I caught Covid after vaccinations and boosters. It really was no worse than a cold.

s_dev 4y ago

That is interesting I would have thought it an absolute certainty at least a non zero number of cars were sold. Either recurring/rollover contracts or some guy making an advanced purchase for later in the year would be reasons to buy during a lockdown.

throwaway4good 4y ago

This is similar to what happened in Europe at height of our first lockdowns - give a few months and demand will be back with a catch-up.

awillen 4y ago
It's not about demand, though - it's about people being physically unable to leave and buy a car. It's not necessarily comparable to Europe because nowhere in Europe was pursuing the same zero COVID policy that China is, and it's tough to imagine that they'll ever achieve that on any kind of a long-term basis. Given that, who knows how long these restrictions will stay in place.
masklinn 4y ago
The situation in Shanghai is orders of magnitude more extreme than what happened in Europe. At the heights of lockdown, the European market dropped 76% YoY (from 1143046 cars in April 2019 to 270682 in 2020). Even in the most affected countries the market didn't bottom out so completely: * in the UK, sales went from 161k to 4.3k * in Italy, sales went from 175k to 4.3k * in Ireland, sales went from 8900 to 344 (nb: the Irish market seems extremely seasonal, with strong sales in January and July, middling sales in Feb and March dropping to nothing by June, and basically no sales from August to December, in 2020 the bottom dropped out in March but sales recovered almost normally by July) Shanghai has almost 4 times the population of Ireland, 40% the population of Italy or the UK.

dsizzle 4y ago

Weird proxy to illustrate the problem with lockdowns. On the one hand it's a huge city, so there's lots of people who could be buying cars, but on the other hand... it's a huge city, so you probably don't need a car?

mattkrause 4y ago
This data is already collected and aggregated (e.g., for issuing license plates), so it's probably more that it was handy than it's a perfect proxy.
- dsizzle 4y ago
  I guess, but after seeing videos of people screaming from their balconies because they can't leave their homes even to get food https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/china/shanghai-residents-screaming-windows-covid-lockdown-b2055311.html https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/china/shanghai-residents-... it seems odd to focus on no one buying cars.

tboyd47 4y ago

Dave3of5 4y ago

> Almost all dealerships in the city were closed during the month Which is why no-one bought any cars wtf is this article ...

cheschire 4y ago
The article is talking about how extreme the lockdown is. As other commenters have pointed out, it's normal to expect some non-zero number of sales, so when there's an exact zero, it's very odd. As an example, notice how they said "almost all dealerships" and not "all dealerships". Non-zero numbers are normal. Absolute zero is a very strange signal.
- Steltek 4y ago
  Maybe the data is wrong then? - It was not an exhaustive or comprehensive search - Reporting non-zero would drawn government scrutiny for how a car was sold during a strict lockdown - Industry group reporting zero is trying to draw alarm/attention to helping their industry
  - cheschire 4y ago
    You're highlighting why it's interesting. Perhaps some party leader felt this was a statistic worth bragging about to show their total control, not realizing it highlights how their data collection processes seem flawed to casual observation.
- lettergram 4y ago
  Well, might not have been zero. Might just be the official records to ensure the state doesn’t crack down
  - boringg 4y ago
    I figure this is the real reason. Which dealership would be stupid enough to say they had sold a car in a month that they were officially lockdown. The retribution would be swift and harsh. Could also be zero because everyone obeyed the order.

captainmuon 4y ago

Does anybody know what the situation is in the rest of China? I hear there are a couple of strict lockdowns in other cities, and some districts of Beijing. China has in the past justified their harsh measures because the relative majority could live without Covid restrictions (and illness and deaths of course). It would be interesting to see what portion of the population is on lockdown, but it is hard to find good sources in English.

loeg 4y ago
I ordered from Xiamen, China in late April and it shipped basically on time (some time to actually build the item) 1.5 weeks later. So I don’t think there’s insane lockdowns there currently.
whoevercares 4y ago
Not much on “continuous lockdown”. Lockdown in China is “dynamic” and at this point a great portion of the population has been on a lockdown at once. Many smaller city are in lockdown sporadically every few weeks but they are not crowded. Most rural areas are not tightly managed either, lockdown is per village or even per household basis with no statistics. I think for China what matters are the big Tier1 cities. It’s enough to paralyze China if 2-3 of them implement full city wide lockdown. Core areas of Beijing has implemented daily test, not much in its suburbs though. So far Beijing is quite manageable still. Source: family in Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan and several other Tier 2/3 cities across China.
zardinality 4y ago
I could provide maybe another data point there. I lived at a village in a east province for some months and has just left. People are living their normal life, albeit ofc a slightest bit of concern to Corona. But people are more worried that they could not make money now and in near future than having the virus. They are not fearful of starving either, not like people living in the city, farms and fields are everywhere. In the worst time when the town has one or two cases, some are restricted from leaving the county and has to do corona test once for every a while. Some roads are blocked. That is all. But I have heard some worse cases recently, where the cases stays high. Agricultural population accounts for almost a third of the whole population in China. To quote an old proverb in Chinese: when there is small turbulance, stay in the city; when there is a big riot, live in your hood.

nradov 4y ago

There are rumors than President Xi has been using the coronavirus outbreak as a convenient excuse to knock the "Shanghai clique" down a few pegs. Supposedly he thought the local Shanghai leaders were getting a bit too popular, and insufficiently deferential to Beijing. He's terrified of seeing any alternative power centers develop.

jeromegv 4y ago
>There are rumors >Supposedly I'd rather prefer people to have an opinion and share it, instead of sharing rumours and "supposedly" theories without sourcing them.
- nradov 4y ago
  Obviously I can't source something from inside President Xi's head. But that rumor seems consistent with the observed facts on the ground.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
whoevercares 4y ago
Current leader of Shanghai Li Qiang is Xi’s best buddy since 20 years ago.. quite the opposite the plan might be from someone else to take Shanghai back
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  Et tu, Brute?
- hindsightbias 4y ago
  Someone to throw under the bus maybe: https://thediplomat.com/2022/04/political-tensions-simmer-over-shanghais-covid-19-crisis/ https://thediplomat.com/2022/04/political-tensions-simmer-ov... This may be a recurring battle between urban/tech and rural factions, although there probably are many urban areas that are envious of Shanghai and may want it taken down a notch.

Leader2light 4y ago

yalogin 4y ago

I did not realize there is such a strict lockdown even now. Somehow missed that news cycle. However that makes me wonder if the other countries in the world like India and major parts of the US even test now. I mean unless it’s absolutely clear it’s covid they probably don’t test and go on with their lives.

nerdponx 4y ago
American media I think is completely done with Covid reporting, realizing that they have exhausted the public's appetite for it. It's hard to avoid the temptation to blame the news media for the pseudo-populist dysfunction of the American political system at the moment.
- diogenescynic 4y ago
  They moved on to Ukraine and inflation.
  - cyberlurker 4y ago
    Are these not important issues? Although I will add inflation is exacerbated by belief in inflation, which can make over reporting a self-fulfilling prophecy. But there are other causes and I don't think it is over reported.
    - diogenescynic 4y ago
      >Are these not important issues? I didn't take any position at all and I wasn't judging. Just look at articles and what's covered more frequently on cable news. COVID is self-evidently lower priority at the moment to stock market volatility, inflation, Ukraine, abortion, mass shootings, etc. It's been 2+ years, people are burnt out of COVID--and I say this as someone who tested positive for it yesterday and is sitting in my spare bedroom to quarantine myself from my family.
FunnyBadger 4y ago

raulgalera 4y ago

In Spain we had a very strict lockdown (not as strict as the Chinese but still) between March-May 2020 and still over 4k cars were sold that month. Which at the time I thought it was an extremely high number considering everything that was going on (link in Spanish): https://noticias.coches.com/noticias-motor/ventas-de-coches-abril-2020/387739 https://noticias.coches.com/noticias-motor/ventas-de-coches-...

gonehome 4y ago
I think the China lockdown situation is a magnitude more extreme (at least based on accounts from people in lockdown there on Twitter). People are not allowed outside of their units (only a couple per building to pick up deliveries). People testing positive are forced to centralized areas and some have to abandon pets (which then are either getting killed or starving and killing each other in the streets).
manquer 4y ago
Chinese lockdowns are more like martial law style curfews . You cannot go out for almost anything at all. There are no customers who can go to the dealership, no employees who can sell cars and manage dealerships. Non essential business are not allowed to run at all. This article title is written to imply that demand has fallen, that is not the case, it is operationally near impossible to make a purchase and take delivery. People still want /need cars and many can still afford to get them . The pent up demand (with losses due to changing economic conditions) will come back when things return to normal.

natch 4y ago

Author of article is apparently unaware of online sales of new cars in which no dealer is involved. Which very well could have been zero as well, but it should have been mentioned even if to clarify they do not exist in China, if that is indeed the case.

kurthr 4y ago
How would you take delivery of a car when in lockdown? Maybe if you're a big white (Tyvek suited enforcer) you could pick it up? Why after two weeks of being locked into your apartment would you decide to buy a car you couldn't pickup, sight unseen?
- natch 4y ago
  Delivery != sale. If they are tabulating deliveries, they should use the word that matches their meaning, instead of a different word.
  - kurthr 4y ago
    Since I used both the words delivery and sale in different ways... I think that buy == sale and delivery == pick up. So when I ask, "Why after two weeks of being locked into your apartment would you decide to *buy* a car you couldn't *pick up*, sight unseen?", I do not mean that delivery didn't take place, I mean that purchase == sale == buy likely did not take place, because the buyer could neither go and look at the vehicle, nor would they be likely to electronically purchase a vehicle that they couldn't pick up while confined to their apartment. Does that make sense? Even if you're a member of the party who gets to wear a white suit and go out in public, you're unlikely to be able to take possession of a vehicle since that dealership is not open, because they can't leave their house. So it still doesn't make sense to purchase, which means there is unlikely to be a sale, electronic or no, even for those privileged to be able to pick one up.
    - natch 4y ago
      Last car I bought nine months ahead of the delivery date. On a web page. On an iPhone. Car before that, three months, same, web page/iPhone. There is a major car manufacturer with a factory in Shanghai that sells cars with this sales model. I don’t see why there would be zero sales. Zero deliveries does make sense.

spoonjim 4y ago

Pre-vaccines, China’s Zero COVID approached seemed wise and impressive. Now it is clear that they were just paranoiacs and now have a policy that doesn’t meet the moment.

coolspot 4y ago
Or creators of the virus know about some of its dangers more than the rest of the world.
- anonymouswacker 4y ago
  Like most things made in China, COVID-19 was poorly engineered, just like their ham-fisted approach to combating it. Something about totalitarian regimes causes a race to the bottom in human rights, arts, and sciences.
- spoonjim 4y ago
  Cui bono? If China engineered COVID, to what end?
hcknwscommenter 4y ago
Pre-vaccine and before effective treatments and putting aside the initial attempt to pretend it wasn't happening/hush it up in the very very early days/weeks, it was a wise and impressive response. What worked and was smart then is not working or smart now. Things change.

electrondood 4y ago

How exactly is "zero-COVID" supposed to end? It seems like China are committed to extreme measures like this in perpetuity any time there is a future outbreak, which will happen.

chamucoman 4y ago
The zero-Covid is just an excuse to manipulate the local (increasing wealth of citizens) and global (supply chain disruption) economic landscape. This should be obvious to anyone, but I guess is not, and some people still think this is about Covid.
- winrid 4y ago
  Why would anyone want to do that? Who does it benefit?
- tobltobs 4y ago
  Could you explain the obvious a bit more? They crash their own economy to do what?
- wvenable 4y ago
  How does disrupting the supply chain help anyone?
  - pvarangot 4y ago
    I think it's like a government backed strike or lockdown. The CCP is getting tired of the US Government bullshit where independent states or the federal government crazily ban or allow Chinese products for whatever crazy bullshit reasons and they change it every couple of months. In the chemical industry it's pretty bad. Some stuff I know shops in China refuse to synthesize anymore because it's like they tool up and then they can't sell it anymore to anyone because some US agency bans its import. Of course if they also stop making phones everyone gets mad.
- neither_color 4y ago
  I think that's giving them too much credit. Historically, this isn't the first time that they've enacted a long war of attrition against nature and lost. Consider their attempts to eliminate sparrows, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides.[9] Ecological imbalance is credited with exacerbating the Great Chinese Famine.[12][13] The Chinese government eventually resorted to importing 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to replenish their population.[14]

CalRobert 4y ago

I was hoping this was a story about walkable streets and great urban placemaking, terrible to see it's actually a sign of misery.

jader201 4y ago
Not everyone in the world lives in a city, and for some folks, cars are a necessity. Sure, for some folks in the city, moving towards a car-less world may be ideal, but it’s not practical for every single person on the planet.
- soperj 4y ago
  > Not everyone in the world lives in a city, and for some folks, cars are a necessity. Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Cars have been around for a little over 100. It's not a necessity, it's nice to have.
  - klysm 4y ago
    Therefore anything invented since the very first humans existed is strictly not a necessity. Doesn’t seem like a particularly useful definition to me.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      >Therefore anything invented since the very first humans existed is strictly not a necessity. Obviously. >Doesn’t seem like a particularly useful definition to me. It's just the dictionary one. We can invent a laxer version...
- sgillen 4y ago
  That doesn’t mean we can’t root for more walkable cities!
- tormeh 4y ago
  The article is about Shanghai, which is known to be a city.

shp0ngle 4y ago

In other news, North Korea currently has a Covid problem.

anonymouswacker 4y ago
Presumably this will be used to disguise the ensuing mass starvation as Covid deaths.

sunjester 4y ago

Not even in the private sector?

ctoth 4y ago

Whenever I think about the situation in China it makes me wonder why the Chinese government is spending so much political capital to keep people from getting infected by such an incredibly transmissible disease. I had this idea that China was run by engineer types who were fairly rational. From the initial denial that there was any disease at all, to later saying it wasn't transmissible between humans, to the obvious lies about the initial death toll, to now attempting to lock down more than any other country, I'm very curious what officials in China know about this particular disease that they aren't sharing with the rest of the world.

_fat_santa 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
rubyist5eva 4y ago
Governments - and to a greater extend Dictatorships - are very rarely rational when it comes to saving face or keeping grip on whatever little power they've managed to grab for themselves.
CogitoCogito 4y ago
> I had this idea that China was run by engineer types who were fairly rational. Why did you have this idea?
- lowkey_ 4y ago
  As someone who has studied East Asian history, it's commonly said that Mao's adversaries within the CCP were the "technocrats," and that the technocrats are the ones who took power after Mao's passing — and still hold power to this day. Here's a couple articles on China's technocrats: https://macropolo.org/analysis/return-technocrats-chinese-politics/ https://macropolo.org/analysis/return-technocrats-chinese-po... https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/04/chinas-overrated-technocrats-stem-engineering-xi-jinping/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/04/chinas-overrated-techno...

WalterBright 4y ago

The lockdowns in the US have been incredibly expensive. There's the massive increase in the national debt, high inflation with no end in sight, a couple years lost for students, etc. The national debt is so high now it's possible we've passed a tipping point where it will result in a collapse of the currency. And yet people get Covid anyway.

maigret 4y ago
Getting COVID today is way less dangerous than getting it two years ago.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  I'm not so sure. Perhaps the difference is the highly vulnerable people have already died.
  - flumpcakes 4y ago
    I think it would go to far to say all vulnerable people have died. Having the required two shots and a booster (mixed or otherwise) seems to not only reduce the likelihood of getting COVID but also reduces how severely you are affected if you do catch it.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      I didn't say all. What I'm saying is the overall death rate can decline while the risk for each individual remains the same, because there are fewer people in the high risk category.

manuelabeledo 4y ago

All car dealerships are closed, and the city is not issuing license plates at all, so of course no cars have been sold in the last month. This is a very odd take on a potential humanitarian crisis.

throwaway_1928 4y ago
The humanitarian crisis is caused by the communist dictatorship there. Chinese vaccines do not work, but the dictatorship insists on China made vaccines. The brutal lockdowns in Shanghai are their expertise and only a shadow of their recent accomplishments in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.

bsedlm 4y ago

I have no more trust in anything, anything at all, that I read about this kind of stuff on the internet (since the Ukraine stuff started). I will literally have to fly myself to Shanghai to believe this newsbit. Maybe it's really that bad, but I trust the news so little by now that I must consider, maybe this is news is also propaganda and Shanghai is doing just fine? At the same time, for me personally, this newsbit is not directly relevant in any way at all.

lithiums 4y ago

With such a mass population (1.4B), for most of people to get vaccinated is hard. for most of elders to get vaccinated is even harder. It's a choice of 1 million get killed or 0.5 million, either choice, people suffer. It's the difference of whom get suffered, people in big city or millions elders in country side with bad medical condition(low ICUs per capita). They choose to protect elders in country side, cause they believe they belong to a left government. So Shanghai suffer.

dmix 4y ago

I wanted to visit China this summer but I discovered you can't even buy tickets into China. I was planning on just avoiding Shanghai and hoping Bejing got better by August but I guess I'll have to keep waiting another long time to finally visit China.