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What is the Covid-19 Exit Strategy of 'Zero Covid' countries such as Hong Kong?

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Cdd89

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What’s bizarre is that China has gone from one from of Covid extremism to the other. Even with censorship, the Chinese population will know that the rest of the world isn’t going through this, and surmise that the government withheld effective vaccines in pursuit of indefinite restrictions.

I think Jinping may be feeling very vulnerable and wish to find a way to distract the population and shore up his support. Depressingly I predict he may gamble on the answer being war with Taiwan (which probably deserves a revival of the pre-Ukraine thread in General Discussion).
 
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DustyBin

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What’s bizarre is that China has gone from one from of Covid extremism to the other. Even with censorship, the Chinese population will know that the rest of the world isn’t going through this, and surmise that the government withheld effective vaccines in pursuit of indefinite restrictions.

I think Jinping may be feeling very vulnerable and wish to find a way to distract the population and shore up his support. Depressingly I predict he may gamble on the answer being war with Taiwan (which probably deserves a revival of the pre-Ukraine thread in General Discussion).

I think it's feasible he could create some kind of "crisis", but a full scale war will take considerable - and very obvious - preparation. It's a war he's extremely unlike to win, and I'm not sure he's desperate enough to take that sort of gamble.

This probably deserves it's own thread (revival) though as you say.
 

yorkie

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Can we please stick to the topic; anyone is free to create a new thread if they wish.
 

Cdd89

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It appears that, from January, hotel quarantine for international arrivals is going in the bin as well:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...antine-for-overseas-travelers-from-next-month
China plans to cut quarantine requirements for overseas travelers in January, according to people familiar with the matter, as the country dismantles the last vestiges of its Covid Zero policy.
Officials are considering a “0+3” policy, where the requirement to spend time in a quarantine hotel or isolation facility would be scrapped, and arrivals into the country instead subject to three days of monitoring, one of the people said, asking not to be identified as the discussions are not public.

In terms of commentary, I think a comparison to the UK is interesting. We continued hotel quarantine sporadically until the end of 2021 (despite heavy vaccination and allegedly not pursuing Zero Covid), whereas China are abandoning it as soon as they dropped Zero Covid and despite a far worse epidemiological situation.

England, and Scotland and Wales even moreso, were therefore more extreme than China in this respect.
 

adc82140

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I have received a fascinating email from a resident of China we've known for years. She normally sends us a Christmas newsy email. This time it's all about Covid. The government there have handled it so badly: she has effectively been brainwashed by zero Covid for so long she's in a blind panic about the sudden turnaround in policy. She just can't understand what's changed, and doesn't appreciate that China has been the outlier for a year now. It's not her fault, it's the messaging she's been exposed to. She has recently tested positive for Covid. She genuinely thinks she's about to die, despite having no symptoms. I would love to respond outlining the real facts about Covid and how the Western world has learnt to live with it as just another coronavirus, but I fear an email with content like that would never pass the Great Firewall of China.
 

43066

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I have received a fascinating email from a resident of China we've known for years. She normally sends us a Christmas newsy email. This time it's all about Covid. The government there have handled it so badly: she has effectively been brainwashed by zero Covid for so long she's in a blind panic about the sudden turnaround in policy. She just can't understand what's changed, and doesn't appreciate that China has been the outlier for a year now. It's not her fault, it's the messaging she's been exposed to. She has recently tested positive for Covid. She genuinely thinks she's about to die, despite having no symptoms. I would love to respond outlining the real facts about Covid and how the Western world has learnt to live with it as just another coronavirus, but I fear an email with content like that would never pass the Great Firewall of China.

I mean my first instinct on reading that is to feel frustration that people can’t think critically about the situation, but I suppose that’s easy to say when you’re not living in an oppressive, evil dictatorship which censors the news you’re exposed to.
 

Cdd89

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I think a genuine problem for China is terrified people turning up at hospitals (and therefore overwhelming them). It’s hard to do the U-turn at sufficient speed.
 
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DustyBin

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I mean my first instinct on reading that is to feel frustration that people can’t think critically about the situation, but I suppose that’s easy to say when you’re not living in an oppressive, evil dictatorship which censors the news you’re exposed to.

Very true. People living in the UK don’t have that excuse however… ;)
 

westv

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I mean my first instinct on reading that is to feel frustration that people can’t think critically about the situation, but I suppose that’s easy to say when you’re not living in an oppressive, evil dictatorship which censors the news you’re exposed to.
Exactly the same in Russia, I expect, with the war in Ukraine.
 

M-Train

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I would love to respond outlining the real facts about Covid and how the Western world has learnt to live with it as just another coronavirus, but I fear an email with content like that would never pass the Great Firewall of China.
PRC censors, by necessity, may have a nontrivial understanding of English, due to its prevalence all around the world, so directly confronting the GFW like that may not do much; but OTOH non-Mandarin tongues like Cantonese, the main language of Hong Kong and the province next door (Guangdong), do well and truly confound them: they have had quite limited success in shutting down Cantonese comments on their side of the Great Firewall that raise eyebrows at the sudden u-turn in Covid policy, and at one point (though that was a couple years back) the drastic step of banning the entire language from domestic Tiktok was taken!
 
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johnnychips

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PRC censors, by necessity, may have a nontrivial understanding of English, due to its prevalence all around the world; but OTOH non-Mandarin tongues like Cantonese, the main language of Hong Kong and the province next door (Guangdong), do well and truly confound them: they have had quite limited success in shutting down Cantonese comments on their side of the Great Firewall that raise eyebrows at the sudden u-turn in Covid policy, and at one point (though that was a couple years back) the drastic step of banning the entire language from domestic Tiktok was taken!
My friend’s Chinese wife came from Qingdao in the north, and she found it really difficult to understand Cantonese when she visited Guangzhou in the south. Of course the written language is the same for both, but just as we would look at 1, 2, 3 and think ‘one, two, three’ a French person would look at it and think ‘un, deux, trois’, if you see what I mean!
 

M-Train

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My friend’s Chinese wife came from Qingdao in the north, and she found it really difficult to understand Cantonese when she visited Guangzhou in the south. Of course the written language is the same for both, but just as we would look at 1, 2, 3 and think ‘one, two, three’ a French person would look at it and think ‘un, deux, trois’, if you see what I mean!
The divergence is…well I suppose that’s actually a fairly accurate comparison! Though very often even the written forms of the non-Mandarin languages may not be understood in the ‘wrong’ part of the Sinosphere; the grammar can be noticeably different, and a number of the characters too, evem where the script is the same overall. There are many more tongues between HK & just above Shanghai (~6-7 major ones and a host of local variants of each) where the Mandarin belt starts.

Now Qingdao etc (Shandong province), though in the Mandarin belt, isn’t exactly northern, but the whole North does speak Mandarin natively, and they roll their tongues a lot, as they are known to do in the rest of the Sinosphere.
 
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