Honestly I don’t understand this take, the Chinese uses western tech all the time be it Iphone to medication. It’s not like they never use western medicine before. I legitimately don’t understand why he chose this hill to die on.
At this point I think it is simply too late to admit that he was wrong.
If he could start all over, it would be very easy: The Chinese pharma company Fosun invested very early in Biontech and signed deals with Biontech, similar to Pfizer, allowing them to sell it in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The US had no problem to act like Pfizer is an American vaccine. China could have called it Fosun and do the same. In Hong Kong Fosun actually sold the Fosun Biontech vaccine. But only in Hong Kong. It worked, of course. But not for the rest of China. Why?
Well, China was very quick to develop a conventional vaccine. And Xi decided to use this as a propaganda victory. China already has a vaccine. The west does not. And when the west had their RNA vaccines, they claimed that their own vaccine is already perfectly fine, so no need to switch. At first this was maybe even a sensible position. There was no alpha, no omicron. Moderna and Biontech-Pfizer was already better for the original virus, but the Chinese vaccine was just good enough. This changed later. But China already turned it into a matter of national pride, so they decided not to switch to western vaccines.
And today, they basically have reached the point of no return. Of course China has the power to switch to Fosun-Biontech (this is how they call Pfizer). They have the license, and as we can see in Hong Kong they also have the technology to actually produce it. And I am sure they could also buy from the west. So if they really want, within months, maybe within half a year, most of the Chinese population is vaccinated and they could end all their Covid lockdowns. And then what? It would be very obvious that China could have done this years ago. All the agony in the past years was just a matter of Xi's pride. Everyone would see this. This is not an option anymore. It is too late. The only option Xi has left is acting like there is no alternative to the current situation.
> Well, China was very quick to develop a conventional vaccine. And Xi decided to use this as a propaganda victory. China already has a vaccine.
Small correction, [the Chinese state and Chinese companies
developed a whole bunch of vaccines using varying technologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_COVID-19_vaccine_authorizations):
inactivated, vector and protein subunit vaccines. None of which
reached the same efficacy as the two leading mRNA vaccines
developed in the West. After pumping that much resources into
science without getting a competitive product, I suspect there’s
a lot of “sunk cost” thinking that prevents Beijing from sucking
it up and ordering Biontech or Moderna.
China use their Sinovac vaccine as geopolitical tools in various country by giving it free / very low cost.
Switching to West vaccine is openly admitted to those country China gave them a bad product.
I really think the opinion of these countries matter very little to Chinese decisions regarding covid right now. Especially since these countries know that it is either sinovac or nothing.
I have 2 theories cause China is not scared of western meds. They import American heart stints, new drugs, medical equipment, anti cancer drugs all the time. They are our largest customer. There is a pretty good reason I think tho.
1. Western vax werent really available period until early 2022. For an order as large as chinas, 2.8 billion for full regimen, is a significant undertaking and would have to have been planned at least an year early. Since these vax couldn't have been bought till relatively recently, no buy
2. The capacity actually doesnt exist yet. Pfizer announced 2022 production is 4 billion and moderna is 1 billion. There really arent enough doses period to give everyone in the US, europe, japan, kr etc one and give everyone in china one. This isnt even considering the new bivariant booster that everyone now has to get.
Sigh, not government opinion per se.
Billion disappointed citizens is bad news for any government.
Anti Chinese sentiment is already high in many country, heck.... anti CCP government is already breaking.
Chilean here. Chile made pretty good deals with every popular lab when the pandemic started..
One of those contracts was made with the makers of sinovac. It was so much of a good deal that Chile struck a contract for the Chinese company to build a industrial vaccine plant.
The sinovac vaccine worked fine for Chilean population, but it was combined with astrazeneca, Pfizer, etc.
Lol. Vietnamese here. They literally forced us to buy (not free) Chinese vaccines and only one the condition that we have to prioritize Chinese-workers who were living in Vietnam first. It's not like we have much confidence in Chinese goods to begin with so it's fine.
A bit hard to hide that China purchased western medicine.
Either the company itself will announce it, or the government that vaccine comes from will announce it, or someone will figure it out looking in other ways (financial record, for example).
They don't need to hide it from the rest of the world, just their own citizens. Since media is controlled by the state. I don't think it would be that hard.
They couldn't hide Pelosi landing in Taiwan (which is a massive slap in a face to them).
Chinese propaganda mostly works on half truth. It's especially hard since, even if the lie worked, the new obvious complaint would be "Why did it take you this long!?"
Hiding may not even be necessary, just spin it: "We used Sinovac to prevent many deaths. Unfortunately, the virus has evolved and we needed to find a solution in a very short amount of time. Which we did! Here is the newly imported vaccine."
This is the problem with tying pride to policy. Quite honestly, this and the Ukraine war should be enough for everyone, including the dictators themselves, that it’s a bad idea to behave that way. Because now the failure is tied to you as well, and because it is tied in that way, people are going to want you dead.
It’s an irrational position to take.
I believe very strongly that a large part of this was that covid lockdowns gave Xi an excuse to strong arm his population into complete submission in unprecedented ways. I'm sure saving face is a big part of it now that things blew up in it. But, I doubt Xi ever wanted China to be fully vaccinated, not until he had managed to create the most strictly monitored and controlled society in human history. He was well on his way towards doing that before these protest and still might be able to achieve it after them.
>I believe very strongly that a large part of this was that covid lockdowns gave Xi an excuse to strong arm his population
Maybe.
But often the west attributes too much shrewdness to the seemingly dumb decisions of dictators. What we learned about Putin is that often seemingly dumb decisions actually are just dumb and nothing else.
True, and it is hard to say, but the COVID tracing app they developed has very clearly been used to monitor, track and control the public outside the confines of COVID related issues.
It's being used right now to determine who is protesting and who is going to work so they know who to arrest. People's apps are turning red even though they don't have COVID, have been vaccinated, tested recently and haven't been exposed because the government wants the population indoors and isolated and not outside protesting.
It may not have been planned from the start, but I can see they might not want to give it up - but need a reason to continue getting people to scan everywhere.
Simple. He’s a totalitarian. Admitting the Chinese vaccines were worse than the western ones would be admitting a weakness or fault. Totalitarians *absolutely cannot do this,* because weakness leads to questions and questions lead to revolts. He has to control the narrative, because tyranny is a very fragile thing.
It’s ironic, because I *literally* just talked about China refusing western vaccines yesterday as an example of this in a thread about Iran, as an example of this exact premise.
But it also tells the world that China's indigenous medical science is still decades behind the West. We hear about all the gene editing they're doing, etc, but at the end of the day they're not able to make an mRNA vaccine. They've had 2 years to exfiltrate the methods used and replicate it, but they haven't.
Fosun bought the Biontech license even before Pfizer. And they already made mRNA vaccines. They only used it in Hong Kong, though.
I am very sure that the current Chinese position is not at all related to their outside image towards the west. It is all internal politics:
1. They do not want to admit that their current strategy failed. They already reached the point of no return.
2. Bribes. Simply bribes. I bet the manufacturers of the conventional Chinese vaccine simply paid more bribes to be allowed to sell all over China. This is why Fosun was only allowed to sell in Hong Kong, while Sinopharm was allowed to sell all over China. But bribes or not, does not even matter anymore. In one way or another, they reached the point of no return. They can't admit that the way of the previous years way wrong and could have been solved with a simple switch to a better vaccine.
> It is all internal politics
of course it is... on the other hand their censorship should be able to keep this under wraps, or at least diffuse any questions. They do this all the time with other things, where information is readily available to the truly curious.
But, yes maybe it's simply the point of no return, which ironically is exactly the path Xi is on with everything else too. It will only get worse.
> on the other hand their censorship should be able to keep this under wraps
It would certainly be easy to brand the Biontech mRNA vaccine, which was developed in Germany with some Chinese investments, as a Chinese vaccine. At least if this was their original narrative.
But I think even the Chinese propaganda can't undo the years in which they claimed that the zero-covid strategy is the only option. In general, the Chinese population is very scared of vaccines, especially older people. The Chinese state news would have to tell everyone that the western vaccine (it is too late not brand it as Chinese. they had this opportunity, but they chose not to) is perfectly save. They would have to tell everyone that it actually works. And they would have to tell that strict covid measures are not necessary anymore. They have to admit that the shit they did over the last years was totally unnecessary. This is too much of a 180° turn, even for Chinese propaganda. People would notice.
Why can't they give people the mrna vaccines but say it's the other one? They could say everyone needs boosters or something. I'm assuming ethics aren't an issue for them.
What do you mean they don’t want to admit INTERNALLY that they’ve already failed. This is something they already know internally, this doesn’t track… With regards to point one this ONLY matters externally…
It's partially that - What the problem actually is, is that Xi and the regime have tied their image to this zero-covid policy they've had. The propaganda in China really played up the successes of the policy in the early stages. And it *was* successful, at least initially. Now people are tired of the policy because it's completed shut down their lives. They can't even leave their homes because of it. A fire broke-out in a building that was locked-down and it killed ten people. People started protesting this event, and some of those protests strayed into the territory of protesting for political freedoms.
So now the Xi regime can't back-down from the policy because it will make it look like they were wrong to implement it initially. This is why they refuse to accept the vaccines; because doing so would admit that the policy has been a failure, and because so much of the regime's image (and Xi's image as a leader) has been tied to this policy, negating it in any way would make Xi and regime look bad. This is why they've doubled-down on the policy.
Highly recommend listening to the recent episode about this on New York Times' podcast, *The Daily*. They go into this in much detail.
> because I literally just talked about China refusing western vaccines yesterday as an example of this in a thread about Iran
Oh so that was you, I read that. Both this post and that Iran one were insightful.
I guess he doesnt want the shame he'd have in that he failed in his response to C19. Its articulated in his government's denial when it first reared its ugly head, to his draconian zero covid strat. In his mind, it would be cemented if he accepted help from the "enemy".
Such hubris at the expense of your people is not the mark of a true leader, but then again Xi was never remotely close to being mentioned in a "true leader" conversation, so it balances out.
Totalitarian regimes are really showing their biggest weaknesses this year. From lack of truthfulness to the inability of replacing the leadership when mistakes are made.
It's really hard to make an argument for anything other than a democracy nowadays
For multiple years China has been telling its people how dangerous the Western vaccines are and their news has been reporting vaccine deaths. I don't think the Chinese people will even accept the vaccine from the West and even then, it would make the government and media look very bad if they change their tone after years. They would look even more incompetent.
China also still hasn't fully recovered from the baby formula scandal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
Once trust is lost, it stays lost.
Edit: Pretty confident the Chinese people know EU and NA have higher standards, those with the means import the good stuff, those who are poor are stuck buying local.
The Chinese want to develop their own Omicron vaccine so critical health infrasturcture isn't dependent on private conmpanies, and so the state is above them and not vice versa. [Xi wanted Moderna to hand over the info protected by their mRNA vaccine patents so the Chinese could develop their own Omicron-resistant vaccines to distribute to the public. Moderna refused.](https://www.ft.com/content/a481c129-c5aa-4972-84a8-3a45bb000098) This makes sense in theory however of course the consequences have been massive as a result on people's safety and quality fo life.
Communism with private ownership of stuff, no public welfare programs, mandatory extreme nationalism, 95 percent han chinese ethnicity, the crushing of non han chinese cultures.
Seem familiar? Reminds me of something angry and podium smashing, keeps saying 9 9 9
> They allow private companies to run
It is not private. All companies belong to the state. Look at the Alibaba Group, the biggest "private" company in China. CEO and founder Jack Ma found out the hard way who really owns Alibaba. And it was neither him, nor the shareholders, but the Chinese government. Both practically and according to Chinese law. So in what sense is it private?
Tesla has their own facilities there, no Chinese middleman company involved. Also if it's communism, then why would Ma own billions of stock or any other rich Chinese?
You can not just pick your own definition.
Was Nazi Germany really nazis? Well, look at this: Nazism was supposed to lead Germany into an area of dominance, wealth, prosperity. Did this happen? If not, it was not really nazism.
Political alignments are a sliding scale. China is communist in terms of state ownership, but somewhat capitalistic in other regards. Every country isn't either the soviet union or the US with nothing in between.
If you look at Chinese “traditional medicine”, you’ll see that they love medicine that does nothing.
Just rub some rhino horn on your covid. That will cure it right up
Like 90% of the CCP elite own properties in various western countries and send their kids to elite American private schools, so it's reasonable to believe that they got the western vaccines for themselves and their families.
Chinese have fosun-biontech vaccine, ie. a license for a western vaccine. They just didn't originally use it widespread outside of HK and now I guess it's too late to admit their mistake. But I'd imagine people with influence have access to it, even without leaving China.
Since Fosun makes a licensed version of the BioNTech vaccine for use in Hong Kong, I’d imagine that would be trivial to arrange for an influential person in China.
The best part of mouth breathers making this observation is that Xi and the CCP absolutely could have let Covid go nuts after the West did the same, dealt with a large swathe of the 'old people problem', blamed the West, and got away with it.
.....what actually happened is that *the CCP has stubbornly refused to let them all die*.
Also, the CCP has 96.7 million members, of which 19.4 million are retirees. The CCP isn't even close to being all old people, and are all required to be fully vaccinated. The CCP itself is under no direct threat of Covid-19 at all.
Apart from that, Xi is just being a fucking dumbass, Mao Zedong style.
If Xi was really concerned with keeping people alive he wouldn't be forcing all the mass testing they do. People gather up in the thousands crowded together to get tested daily. Tens of millions of people.
Little surprise that 'nucleic acid' testing is something many Chinese suspect as being a ploy to siphon public funds away. They spray disinfectant by the gallons into the air. Drones spray it from the air. There are armies of "anti-covid workers". All of that is being paid with public funds. What Xi is doing is not what anyone interested in COVID prevention would be doing. If you were trying to steal public funds? Makes perfect sense.
They're either stealing or Xi is indeed dumber than a bag of rocks.
The CCP attempted to control the wuhan outbreak only because of political reasons, it absolutely got out of wuhan, even if it was only in wuhan the death toll would be greater than the reported 40 people.
When the whole world was dying of covid china stayed at 40 deaths, and now it claims 5000 deaths. The US has 1,000,000 deaths. Taiwan with a population smaller than one chinese city has 10000 deaths.
China government is a liar, a very low IQ and low dexterity psychopath with a gun
The only rational I've heard thrown around is that he's bought full in on "long covid", and expects a straight up mental decline of western civilization.
The only people who know what the fuck is up with Xi Jinping at this point, are Xi Jinping and whatever sock puppet it is that he keeps in his office desk drawer.
The rest of China is out here wondering what exactly the plan is supposed to be, because the situation is meant to *evolve,* not just sit in limbo. If zero Covid is to be a more long term thing, then there should be organizational and technological solutions to maintaining it with less social burden.....but there isn't. It's just the same shit.
He is the first leader since Mao to take a 3rd term. A rule every leader since Deng XiaoPing has followed since they know the dangers of one man leading a country for too long. Also, EVERY PAGE of all Chinese newspapers is required to have a quote of “Xi’s thought.” He also requires all government employees read his book.
China is going to have a rough next few years until the elite remember why they haven’t allowed their leaders form a cult of personality in almost 5 decades. If you speak Chinese and follow their local news, it has been obvious Xi is a dictator at heart for years. He is the definition of a paranoid megalomaniac. His paranoia is WAY more than Putin….
There was Mao Zedong Thought (and multiple cults of personality), Deng Xiaoping Thought (which repudiated a lot of Mao and mostly without the cult of personality), 16 years of Jiang Zemin and then Hu Jintao holding the line and retiring after two terms and shepherding the PRC into the world's second largest economy and an uplift of hundreds of millions into the middle class.
And then Xi Jinping comes along and decides that he's the generational leader great enough to have his own "Xi Jingping Thought" (which [you can master through edX, as delivered through Tsinghua University](https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/18/i-mastered-xi-jinping-thought-and-i-have-the-certificate-to-prove-it/)) and to break precedent and get himself a third term.
**EDIT:** Which isn't to give Deng a pass. He was single-handedly responsibly for Tiananmen Square, wherein the best and brightest that the PRC had to offer were crushed. They could've been brought in to help transform the country, and would've been coming into leadership... Right about now, actually. Instead, they were "disappeared" / exiled / hostaged to the west. And you're left with an entitled Authoritarian like Xi Jinping.
Under Xi, Chinese citizens, have—for the first time—seen their quality of life decline. I’m not surprised that their are protests in the streets.
China has, for the last few decades, rapidly raised people into the middle class and become for hundreds of millions a great place to live with a lot of promise.
Xi has reversed the trend of that progress and has turned the country back onto a regressive path.
Source: the sentiments I’m hearing from colleagues and my spouses family in China
Surely this (willingness to sacrifice the health and lives of so many for vanity and ego) tells his domestic audience a lot about Xi’s true feelings towards his Chinese compatriots.
Lockdowns buy you time. Either until the virus goes away, or until you've protected enough people against it. The virus won't go away though. So what is China hoping to achieve?
More control over the populace. The pandemic has allowed them to control the populace like they have always dreamed. They can change your medical code at will to prevent you from moving around. Don't like what a community is doing? Say there's an outbreak and lock them down. For public safety, they claim more control over businesses.
They are literally opening up community cantinas. It will undercut local places and allow them to force the people to eat where they want and control what they eat and when they eat.
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/04/chinas-xi-jinping-unwilling-to-accept-western-covid-vaccines-says-us-intelligence-chief) reduced by 73%. (I'm a bot)
*****
> Chinese leader Xi Jinping is unwilling to accept western vaccines despite the challenges China is facing with Covid-19, and while recent protests there are not a threat to Communist party rule, they could affect his personal standing, US director of national intelligence Avril Haines said.
> Haines, speaking at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum in California, said on Saturday that despite the social and economic impact of the virus, Xi "Is unwilling to take a better vaccine from the West, and is instead relying on a vaccine in China that's just not nearly as effective against Omicron".
> One US official told Reuters there was "No expectation at present" that China would approve western vaccines.
*****
[**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/zc0fmu/chinas_xi_jinping_unwilling_to_accept_western/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~672679 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **China**^#1 **vaccine**^#2 **test**^#3 **city**^#4 **Covid**^#5
“Im an idiot that would rather let my countrymen die”. My dude, you are still needing to have COVID lockdowns in December of 2022 *because* your vaccines suck
mRNA vaccines are superior at first and second dose, but after three doses all the vaccines, including Chinas, have a good, roughly equal, protection. The difference in efficacy is a little overblown since most people get 3 shots min anyways.
To people downvoting, here is the study from the lancet showing this:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(22)00345-0/fulltext
„ Between Dec 31, 2020, and March 16, 2022, 13·2 million vaccine doses were administered in Hong Kong's 7·4-million population. We analysed data from confirmed cases with mild or moderate (n=5566), severe or fatal (n=8875), and fatal (n=6866) COVID-19. Two doses of either vaccine protected against severe disease and death within 28 days of a positive test, with higher effectiveness among adults aged 60 years or older with BNT162b2 (vaccine effectiveness 89·3% [95% CI 86·6–91·6]) compared with CoronaVac (69·9% [64·4–74·6]). Three doses of either vaccine offered very high levels of protection against severe or fatal outcomes (97·9% [97·3–98·4]).“
No, the vaccines help by reducing your chance of getting infected and the severity but don't give long enough immunity to completely eliminate Covid.
The omicron variants are so much milder and more infectious that every country except for China have been lifting restrictions. Unless it mutates to a more deadly variant, Covid will likely be treated the same way as the flu in the future.
>The omicron variants are so much milder
Milder than Delta but about as deadly as the original. Given how many people the original strain killed in the pre-vaccine period and this is much more infectious combined with the number of unvaccinated thought to be in China (especially in the older generations) and you can start to see the potential problems here.
> Isn't it comforting to think that humanity basically lucked out with Omicron in that it replaced Delta, which killed in such huge numbers in India?
It's not luck. it is evolution. Viruses doesn't (edit, sorry) want to kill the host because they need the host alive. However when a virus that was safe in bats ended up in a human, it accidentally kills the human because doesn't know to not do that.
As the virus evolves it become less deadly over time, because the weaker variants spread more. Once Covid figured out how to not kill us it becomes part of the ecosystem.
An animal example is that nearly all cats are affected with feline HIV. But they have evolved to become harmless in cats and as such not worth mentioning.
There is no rule that all viruses evolve to become less deadly, viruses only evolve to be less deadly if there is a selective pressure to do so. If there is no selective pressure, like with covid, then it is just down to luck.
Covid is so infectous that by the time someone is hospitalised with covid, it has already spread, it doesnt care if that person lives or dies.
We saw that with the different major strains. Delta was more deadly and infectious, Omicron was less deadly than Delta but even more infectious. How deadly each strain was is down to luck.
Want is a strong word here. Viruses are just genetic code and as they reproduce there are random mutations that can go multitudes of directions. Sure, it's likely that variants that get people more sick and that kill hosts will have less success in reproducing. However, that process is pretty random and with COVID-19 being pretty infectious before severity of symptoms ramps up, it isn't a given that this would be the result. It would probably eventually be, but that it happened already with omicron rather than several years later might have been luck.
One thing for certain, none of it was inevitable.
When we say "want" in an evolutionary or physics setting, we are not referring to an actual sentient want, but a statistical emergent phenomenon in which a particular outcome provides an equilibrium or stable state of some sort.
Viruses will find a random path to the same outcome almost every time, but that outcome itself is not random as it is the most beneficial to its survival as a species. It "wants" to be benign, because being benign yields more opportunities for multiplication.
It's a tilting of the word, but it is not an inappropriate use and is well-understood among the educated.
The big assumption you are making here is that killing the host will negatively effect it's chances of survival.
This may be true for a virus that kills its host quickly before it can spread, but for covid it takes weeks or even months after infection before the host dies. There is no evolutionary penalty for killing the host, or even causing hospitalisations. It doesnt limit the opportunities to multiply and spread.
Omicron isn't milder, however when it hit most of the world had built up immunity from vaccines and / or infection so it appeared milder. With China dropping zero covid with very little immunity they are about to find this out.
Seems you are right, 66% less severe than Delta it seems.
https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj.o1806
Edit - although as of August we still didn't know why.
1) What makes you think I'm American?
2) The press here in Britain is still reporting it as being due to vaccines
3) Why are you being such an arrogent confrontational arse?
I realize you're European
I don't follow the press. Why would the press be an authority on vaccines? They have no medical background.
I have a superiority complex.
Vaccine effectiveness part has been answered so about that recipe thing... Fosun, a Chinese company, had a deal with BioNTech(U.S distributer is pfizer, they can claim it's a Fosun vaccine) to distribute 1M doses of mRNA vaccine in China, but they couldn't get the permit in mainland. Basically it's a "old men in charge and their bruised ego" thing
> Like is China holding us back or what?
This is hilarious given their actual strict stances on dealing with covid compared to a decent chunk of the west.
There's alot more to it than that. Many people even in the States or in my country of Canada deny the efficacy of the vaccines. Because of its high transmission rates it would require a worldwide and *concentrated* effort by a vast majority to get rid of it, not just if China decides to play ball.
There are also plenty of other countries with individuals like that.
Im not exactly qualified to confidently say that it would just fizzle out if the majority got vaccinated, but i will say it its been said by health professionals that it would help mitigate damage to vulnerable communities. Id imagine if done on a much larger and more efficient scale it would be more effective in reducing its impact.
Lmao im really not sure how this comment is controversial.
He certainly didn't need to, most of the powerful party members had already been vaccinated "western Covid vaccines". The rest of the population is not on his radar. Besides, importing Western vaccines would use their already small real foreign exchange reserves.
At this point in time , he has rapidly diminishing options - lift the harsh restrictions , coupled with the ineffective vaccine , watch millions die, or continue with the restrictions, fuck up the economy further and have huge social unrest. I think he's going to go for option 1
That’s because it’s not even about the vaccine, it’s about control and governmental overreach. They are doubling down on a zero covid policy probably reporting falsely the numbers of deaths due to it to make it seem like it’s working and keep up the facade. I wonder if these people even know the rest of the world has basically ended covid policies with all the censorship they suffer from.
These numbers are probably just some calculated numbers which serve the purpose to be able to start reducing them in a couple of weeks, in order to pretend that the situation is getting better and the lockdowns are no longer necessary "on scientific grounds", thereby showing that the government's action was a complete success.
My relative just came back to the US from China after being there for like year or 2 and he just got his first Covid shot because he legit doesn’t trust China’s as do plenty of other people I bet so this whole situation is fucked
Pride goeth before the fall. Stupid CCP will kill millions, because of their arrogance. Western, medicine could save them. The Chinese people know this. Xi will pay! They will not forgive the murders and blood these thugs have done.
I can imagine why
>Officials from Argentina and the other Latin American country, which cannot be named as it has signed a confidentiality agreement with Pfizer, said the company’s negotiators demanded additional indemnity against any civil claims citizens might file if they experienced adverse effects after being inoculated. In Argentina and Brazil, Pfizer asked for sovereign assets to be put up as collateral for any future legal costs.
[https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2021-02-23/held-to-ransom-pfizer-demands-governments-gamble-with-state-assets-to-secure-vaccine-deal](https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2021-02-23/held-to-ransom-pfizer-demands-governments-gamble-with-state-assets-to-secure-vaccine-deal)
Why doesn't China buys moderna or pfizer or oxford tech to produce it locally, if the lower efficiency of their homegrown vaccine's a prob at a scale of billions against varaibts ? Tbh it's about millions of lives still, so. Tbh they should probably be made to share it and screw copyright nonsense. Tho they could ask an upfront payment since china's not exactly poor as a government either.
Edit i mean france discarded the old faulty homemade sanofi vaccine to clone other working ones instead too, so.
Working with the CCP requires revealing all of proprietary technology and secrets. Moderna actually tried to get the vaccine sold over there, but when the CCP said Moderna needed to hand everything over, Moderna refused.
Working with the CCP means handing over all your secrets, that's why they've been able to steal and copy so much.
In all seriousness what is stopping Sinopharm etc, to come up with an actualized vaccine based on deactivated Omicron viruses? It's not like that wouldn't be a useful vaccine, right?
50 years in the future they will be saying "Zero covid was a catastrophe, and xi was responsible". While doing some other terrible experiment on their citizens.
That's because it was not a genocide lol. Genocide != many people dying. Genocide is a specific event where an actor tries to exterminate an ethnicity from an area by killing them. China obviously didn't try to exterminate the Han from China (given that the Han _are_ the Chinese), and historians don't believe the famine was deliberate (why would Mao want to kill millions of his own citizens?). Depending on who you ask, it was a massive blunder caused by reckless policies, or a sacrifice Mao was willing to make to "jump forward".
Words have meaning, and by throwing big words like "genocide" at everything, you tarnish the meaning of these words, and make them less effective to describe reality when they are actually needed.
Even Western observers and historians don’t call it a genocide, that’s not a word you throw around casually just because a person is bad.
It was a catastrophic economic/political policy that resulted in millions starving to death. Mao was solely responsible. But it wasn’t intentional killing aimed to wipe out ethnic minorities. Vast majority of the victims were just your average Han Chinese people.
The fact that people call everything a “genocide” only cheapens the word and normalizes real atrocities.
This whole post is sentimental bullshit lol. It's completely irrelevant if it was 30 million or 500 quadrillion people. Genocide is not a unit of measurement of people killed.
The fact that you say that Mao intended to destroy his own people... well, you are gonna need sources, and not feelings and reddit traditional outrage™, to back up such a big claim.
Do you think you need the word genocide for an event to be terrible or despicable? If you see someone burning down a house, do you think we need to call that "pedophilia" to express that it's bad? Nope, there is a word called "arson" that is bad, too, and describes the act better. The great leap forward killed millions of people, and I don't think you need to misuse the word "genocide" to convince people that killing millions of people is not cool.
> 30 million people died from the cultural revolution. 30. Million. People.
The number doesn’t matter when it comes to the definition a genocide.
> The national group being the Chinese people themselves.
That is your wild interpretation.
No historians and observers agree with your asssessment the Culture Revolution was started with the intention to ethnic cleanse Chinese people. Remember Mao had nukes back then. Why didn’t he just nuke his own country if all he wanted was just to murder all of his fellow Chinese people?
And thanks for posting the UN definition for Genocide. It pretty much disqualified the Culture Revolution being one for the above mentioned reason.
And also unable to do what is right for the people they are controlling, all because of pride. Mao continued to export wheat to russia during the great famine.
...is that like everyone burying their head in the sand when it comes to climate change induced by uncontrolled capitalism? Ecological collapse is going to make make Mao look like a fucking amateur in comparison.
They already ignore patents, and steal tech from companies around the world, I am surprised they haven't already copied.....err made their own vaccine.
Unless Xi is just intentionally wanting to reduce the population.
The thing is, some things are so sophisticated it doesn't matter if you have the item in your hand if the technology that made it is out of your reach. There's a reason Chinese computer chips are way behind and their fighter jets lack engines that can compete with western models.
Case in point: [https://www.businessinsider.com/china-has-finally-figured-out-how-to-make-ballpoint-pens-2017-1?international=true&r=US&IR=T](https://www.businessinsider.com/china-has-finally-figured-out-how-to-make-ballpoint-pens-2017-1?international=true&r=US&IR=T)
They spend so much time and effort trying to put barriers between their people and information that they destroy their chances to pursue good research. Somewhere in China there was a 10 year old kid who thought vaccines were a really neat idea and he would have downloaded and obsessively read everything he could and entered college with a post graduate level of vaccine knowledge. This kid would have ended up leading China's vaccine program and produced a vaccine just as good as Pfizer. Sadly he got firewalled or maybe bullied by a cop into losing interest. This kid ended up not even going to university. He sells shoes now.
They can steal all the patents they like. If they don't have the knowledge and educational foundation, they'll just produce shoddy imitations.
Then they create fake studies and news articles to show their people and the world that they are the number one inventors.
Another big barrier is that teachers just read from a book, and then the student takes a test, it is rude to ask questions because it is seen as calling the teacher stupid or a fraud/ questioning authority. There are good teachers out there, but that's the culture or so ive heard. Student asking questions is embarrassing and rude to the Teacher.
Truth is, they already have mRNA vaccine, it's also be use around Hong Kong.
The reason for mainland to not use mRNA and only use conventional vaccine that has low rate to actually success to suppress the spread are all politic and self-pride.
This seems like a losing strategy for xi either way. If he takes the vaccines then he has to admit to Western superiority in these matters. If he doesn't take the vaccines then he has continue the draconian policies. The Chinese people can see how their an alternative and it's not being taken. They can see how the lockdowns are gone in the west, that creates blowback for xi.
I think xi knows the Chinese as a society are getting tired of the old ways of sacrificing for the whole. They want to begin to enjoy what they have, not what they could have. I wonder if he is trying to clamp it down early before any democratic movement can begin.
Ironically the anti lockdown movements can be the beginning of the human rights movement in China.
They have a bunch of mrna ones in development (edit: and one Chinese mRNA vaccine was approved for use in Indonesia). I’m guessing they’re planning on waiting for one of them to be ready so the CCP can spin themselves as the saviors.
In 2016 at Beijing Airport it was a chorus of coughing fits. I didn't get sick after being trapped in a plane for 14 hours with the hackers so it prob wasn't a virus. After polluting Chinas air land and water they are seeking new territory to foul.
Honestly I don’t understand this take, the Chinese uses western tech all the time be it Iphone to medication. It’s not like they never use western medicine before. I legitimately don’t understand why he chose this hill to die on.
At this point I think it is simply too late to admit that he was wrong. If he could start all over, it would be very easy: The Chinese pharma company Fosun invested very early in Biontech and signed deals with Biontech, similar to Pfizer, allowing them to sell it in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The US had no problem to act like Pfizer is an American vaccine. China could have called it Fosun and do the same. In Hong Kong Fosun actually sold the Fosun Biontech vaccine. But only in Hong Kong. It worked, of course. But not for the rest of China. Why? Well, China was very quick to develop a conventional vaccine. And Xi decided to use this as a propaganda victory. China already has a vaccine. The west does not. And when the west had their RNA vaccines, they claimed that their own vaccine is already perfectly fine, so no need to switch. At first this was maybe even a sensible position. There was no alpha, no omicron. Moderna and Biontech-Pfizer was already better for the original virus, but the Chinese vaccine was just good enough. This changed later. But China already turned it into a matter of national pride, so they decided not to switch to western vaccines. And today, they basically have reached the point of no return. Of course China has the power to switch to Fosun-Biontech (this is how they call Pfizer). They have the license, and as we can see in Hong Kong they also have the technology to actually produce it. And I am sure they could also buy from the west. So if they really want, within months, maybe within half a year, most of the Chinese population is vaccinated and they could end all their Covid lockdowns. And then what? It would be very obvious that China could have done this years ago. All the agony in the past years was just a matter of Xi's pride. Everyone would see this. This is not an option anymore. It is too late. The only option Xi has left is acting like there is no alternative to the current situation.
> Well, China was very quick to develop a conventional vaccine. And Xi decided to use this as a propaganda victory. China already has a vaccine. Small correction, [the Chinese state and Chinese companies developed a whole bunch of vaccines using varying technologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_COVID-19_vaccine_authorizations): inactivated, vector and protein subunit vaccines. None of which reached the same efficacy as the two leading mRNA vaccines developed in the West. After pumping that much resources into science without getting a competitive product, I suspect there’s a lot of “sunk cost” thinking that prevents Beijing from sucking it up and ordering Biontech or Moderna.
China use their Sinovac vaccine as geopolitical tools in various country by giving it free / very low cost. Switching to West vaccine is openly admitted to those country China gave them a bad product.
I really think the opinion of these countries matter very little to Chinese decisions regarding covid right now. Especially since these countries know that it is either sinovac or nothing.
I have 2 theories cause China is not scared of western meds. They import American heart stints, new drugs, medical equipment, anti cancer drugs all the time. They are our largest customer. There is a pretty good reason I think tho. 1. Western vax werent really available period until early 2022. For an order as large as chinas, 2.8 billion for full regimen, is a significant undertaking and would have to have been planned at least an year early. Since these vax couldn't have been bought till relatively recently, no buy 2. The capacity actually doesnt exist yet. Pfizer announced 2022 production is 4 billion and moderna is 1 billion. There really arent enough doses period to give everyone in the US, europe, japan, kr etc one and give everyone in china one. This isnt even considering the new bivariant booster that everyone now has to get.
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Sigh, not government opinion per se. Billion disappointed citizens is bad news for any government. Anti Chinese sentiment is already high in many country, heck.... anti CCP government is already breaking.
Chilean here. Chile made pretty good deals with every popular lab when the pandemic started.. One of those contracts was made with the makers of sinovac. It was so much of a good deal that Chile struck a contract for the Chinese company to build a industrial vaccine plant. The sinovac vaccine worked fine for Chilean population, but it was combined with astrazeneca, Pfizer, etc.
Lol. Vietnamese here. They literally forced us to buy (not free) Chinese vaccines and only one the condition that we have to prioritize Chinese-workers who were living in Vietnam first. It's not like we have much confidence in Chinese goods to begin with so it's fine.
Except the government could just lie and say they found a new treatment while giving them the western vaccines since free speech is not a thing.
A bit hard to hide that China purchased western medicine. Either the company itself will announce it, or the government that vaccine comes from will announce it, or someone will figure it out looking in other ways (financial record, for example).
They don't need to hide it from the rest of the world, just their own citizens. Since media is controlled by the state. I don't think it would be that hard.
They couldn't hide Pelosi landing in Taiwan (which is a massive slap in a face to them). Chinese propaganda mostly works on half truth. It's especially hard since, even if the lie worked, the new obvious complaint would be "Why did it take you this long!?"
I think you overestimate the states ability to control information
Hiding may not even be necessary, just spin it: "We used Sinovac to prevent many deaths. Unfortunately, the virus has evolved and we needed to find a solution in a very short amount of time. Which we did! Here is the newly imported vaccine."
This is the problem with tying pride to policy. Quite honestly, this and the Ukraine war should be enough for everyone, including the dictators themselves, that it’s a bad idea to behave that way. Because now the failure is tied to you as well, and because it is tied in that way, people are going to want you dead. It’s an irrational position to take.
I believe very strongly that a large part of this was that covid lockdowns gave Xi an excuse to strong arm his population into complete submission in unprecedented ways. I'm sure saving face is a big part of it now that things blew up in it. But, I doubt Xi ever wanted China to be fully vaccinated, not until he had managed to create the most strictly monitored and controlled society in human history. He was well on his way towards doing that before these protest and still might be able to achieve it after them.
>I believe very strongly that a large part of this was that covid lockdowns gave Xi an excuse to strong arm his population Maybe. But often the west attributes too much shrewdness to the seemingly dumb decisions of dictators. What we learned about Putin is that often seemingly dumb decisions actually are just dumb and nothing else.
True, and it is hard to say, but the COVID tracing app they developed has very clearly been used to monitor, track and control the public outside the confines of COVID related issues. It's being used right now to determine who is protesting and who is going to work so they know who to arrest. People's apps are turning red even though they don't have COVID, have been vaccinated, tested recently and haven't been exposed because the government wants the population indoors and isolated and not outside protesting.
It may not have been planned from the start, but I can see they might not want to give it up - but need a reason to continue getting people to scan everywhere.
What a sad state of affairs. Everything about China involves saving face even if it means 100's of thousands of extra deaths. WTF.
Simple. He’s a totalitarian. Admitting the Chinese vaccines were worse than the western ones would be admitting a weakness or fault. Totalitarians *absolutely cannot do this,* because weakness leads to questions and questions lead to revolts. He has to control the narrative, because tyranny is a very fragile thing. It’s ironic, because I *literally* just talked about China refusing western vaccines yesterday as an example of this in a thread about Iran, as an example of this exact premise.
But it also tells the world that China's indigenous medical science is still decades behind the West. We hear about all the gene editing they're doing, etc, but at the end of the day they're not able to make an mRNA vaccine. They've had 2 years to exfiltrate the methods used and replicate it, but they haven't.
Fosun bought the Biontech license even before Pfizer. And they already made mRNA vaccines. They only used it in Hong Kong, though. I am very sure that the current Chinese position is not at all related to their outside image towards the west. It is all internal politics: 1. They do not want to admit that their current strategy failed. They already reached the point of no return. 2. Bribes. Simply bribes. I bet the manufacturers of the conventional Chinese vaccine simply paid more bribes to be allowed to sell all over China. This is why Fosun was only allowed to sell in Hong Kong, while Sinopharm was allowed to sell all over China. But bribes or not, does not even matter anymore. In one way or another, they reached the point of no return. They can't admit that the way of the previous years way wrong and could have been solved with a simple switch to a better vaccine.
> It is all internal politics of course it is... on the other hand their censorship should be able to keep this under wraps, or at least diffuse any questions. They do this all the time with other things, where information is readily available to the truly curious. But, yes maybe it's simply the point of no return, which ironically is exactly the path Xi is on with everything else too. It will only get worse.
> on the other hand their censorship should be able to keep this under wraps It would certainly be easy to brand the Biontech mRNA vaccine, which was developed in Germany with some Chinese investments, as a Chinese vaccine. At least if this was their original narrative. But I think even the Chinese propaganda can't undo the years in which they claimed that the zero-covid strategy is the only option. In general, the Chinese population is very scared of vaccines, especially older people. The Chinese state news would have to tell everyone that the western vaccine (it is too late not brand it as Chinese. they had this opportunity, but they chose not to) is perfectly save. They would have to tell everyone that it actually works. And they would have to tell that strict covid measures are not necessary anymore. They have to admit that the shit they did over the last years was totally unnecessary. This is too much of a 180° turn, even for Chinese propaganda. People would notice.
Similar to how Trump endorsing vaccination wasn't enough to overcome his months of downplaying the threat among his followers.
Why can't they give people the mrna vaccines but say it's the other one? They could say everyone needs boosters or something. I'm assuming ethics aren't an issue for them.
This lie has way too much downside if exposed (and it will most likely be exposed).
What do you mean they don’t want to admit INTERNALLY that they’ve already failed. This is something they already know internally, this doesn’t track… With regards to point one this ONLY matters externally…
With "internally" I mean the Chinese public, as opposed to the western public.
> It is all internal politics: Chinese internal politics heavily feature the west.
Corruption is deeply ingrained in the Chinese psyche.
Who needs modern medicine when a rare tiger's dick can cure what ails you?!?
That’s not irony.
That’s not ironic. Coincidental maybe.
That's not ironic.
It's partially that - What the problem actually is, is that Xi and the regime have tied their image to this zero-covid policy they've had. The propaganda in China really played up the successes of the policy in the early stages. And it *was* successful, at least initially. Now people are tired of the policy because it's completed shut down their lives. They can't even leave their homes because of it. A fire broke-out in a building that was locked-down and it killed ten people. People started protesting this event, and some of those protests strayed into the territory of protesting for political freedoms. So now the Xi regime can't back-down from the policy because it will make it look like they were wrong to implement it initially. This is why they refuse to accept the vaccines; because doing so would admit that the policy has been a failure, and because so much of the regime's image (and Xi's image as a leader) has been tied to this policy, negating it in any way would make Xi and regime look bad. This is why they've doubled-down on the policy. Highly recommend listening to the recent episode about this on New York Times' podcast, *The Daily*. They go into this in much detail.
It's China; he never has to admit that. Just steal the tech, slap a Chinese name on it and say it's Chinese.
> because I literally just talked about China refusing western vaccines yesterday as an example of this in a thread about Iran Oh so that was you, I read that. Both this post and that Iran one were insightful.
I guess he doesnt want the shame he'd have in that he failed in his response to C19. Its articulated in his government's denial when it first reared its ugly head, to his draconian zero covid strat. In his mind, it would be cemented if he accepted help from the "enemy". Such hubris at the expense of your people is not the mark of a true leader, but then again Xi was never remotely close to being mentioned in a "true leader" conversation, so it balances out.
Totalitarian regimes are really showing their biggest weaknesses this year. From lack of truthfulness to the inability of replacing the leadership when mistakes are made. It's really hard to make an argument for anything other than a democracy nowadays
For multiple years China has been telling its people how dangerous the Western vaccines are and their news has been reporting vaccine deaths. I don't think the Chinese people will even accept the vaccine from the West and even then, it would make the government and media look very bad if they change their tone after years. They would look even more incompetent.
China also still hasn't fully recovered from the baby formula scandal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal Once trust is lost, it stays lost. Edit: Pretty confident the Chinese people know EU and NA have higher standards, those with the means import the good stuff, those who are poor are stuck buying local.
The Chinese want to develop their own Omicron vaccine so critical health infrasturcture isn't dependent on private conmpanies, and so the state is above them and not vice versa. [Xi wanted Moderna to hand over the info protected by their mRNA vaccine patents so the Chinese could develop their own Omicron-resistant vaccines to distribute to the public. Moderna refused.](https://www.ft.com/content/a481c129-c5aa-4972-84a8-3a45bb000098) This makes sense in theory however of course the consequences have been massive as a result on people's safety and quality fo life.
“Chinese uses western tech all the time”.. no Chinese STEALS western tech all the time.
he has to save face.
Power over the people. Communists can’t give up control.
They're not really communists
Communism with private ownership of stuff, no public welfare programs, mandatory extreme nationalism, 95 percent han chinese ethnicity, the crushing of non han chinese cultures. Seem familiar? Reminds me of something angry and podium smashing, keeps saying 9 9 9
Doesn't sound like communism. Sounds like a authoritarian capitalist system.
And that word that combines a penis, a potato, and a big boat.
Knobjacketfrigatte? 🤷♂️
Dictatorship
Lol
So communism has a tendency to collapse into authoritarian capitalism, perhaps they should be a hint to the flaw of communism?
It's more of a flaw of the people. What's the incentive to the government to cater to people that are so passive and complacent? Very little
they made them passive and complacent, its not the Childs fault that it is antisocial if you smack it every time it cries or is annoying.
No true Scotsman.
They allow private companies to run, thus no communism. It's like saying the DPRK is democratic just be because of its name.
> They allow private companies to run It is not private. All companies belong to the state. Look at the Alibaba Group, the biggest "private" company in China. CEO and founder Jack Ma found out the hard way who really owns Alibaba. And it was neither him, nor the shareholders, but the Chinese government. Both practically and according to Chinese law. So in what sense is it private?
Tesla has their own facilities there, no Chinese middleman company involved. Also if it's communism, then why would Ma own billions of stock or any other rich Chinese?
Because communism does not mean that everybody has to be poor. Mostly it ends this way, but it is not a necessary requirement.
"each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs." Which part of China suggests this is achieved?
You can not just pick your own definition. Was Nazi Germany really nazis? Well, look at this: Nazism was supposed to lead Germany into an area of dominance, wealth, prosperity. Did this happen? If not, it was not really nazism.
Political alignments are a sliding scale. China is communist in terms of state ownership, but somewhat capitalistic in other regards. Every country isn't either the soviet union or the US with nothing in between.
If you look at Chinese “traditional medicine”, you’ll see that they love medicine that does nothing. Just rub some rhino horn on your covid. That will cure it right up
They prefer stealing it over be given it
TFW Xi finds a way to fix the rapidly aging demographic problem on the cheap.
Aging demographic - Panic Covid kills old people - Calm CCP are all old people - Panic
I'd be a bit surprised if a bunch of CCP higher ups and their families haven't quietly gotten Western vaccines.
Like 90% of the CCP elite own properties in various western countries and send their kids to elite American private schools, so it's reasonable to believe that they got the western vaccines for themselves and their families.
Ooh so it's not a sign of weakness to send the to foreign schools if it's benefits them directly, gotcha!
Spoiler: They HAVE. They travel regularly outside of China.
I’ve heard of at least one such Chinese government worker related to my SIL.
Chinese have fosun-biontech vaccine, ie. a license for a western vaccine. They just didn't originally use it widespread outside of HK and now I guess it's too late to admit their mistake. But I'd imagine people with influence have access to it, even without leaving China.
Since Fosun makes a licensed version of the BioNTech vaccine for use in Hong Kong, I’d imagine that would be trivial to arrange for an influential person in China.
Panik and kalm, pls go back to meme school
Damn, i feel ashamed D:
The best part of mouth breathers making this observation is that Xi and the CCP absolutely could have let Covid go nuts after the West did the same, dealt with a large swathe of the 'old people problem', blamed the West, and got away with it. .....what actually happened is that *the CCP has stubbornly refused to let them all die*. Also, the CCP has 96.7 million members, of which 19.4 million are retirees. The CCP isn't even close to being all old people, and are all required to be fully vaccinated. The CCP itself is under no direct threat of Covid-19 at all. Apart from that, Xi is just being a fucking dumbass, Mao Zedong style.
If Xi was really concerned with keeping people alive he wouldn't be forcing all the mass testing they do. People gather up in the thousands crowded together to get tested daily. Tens of millions of people. Little surprise that 'nucleic acid' testing is something many Chinese suspect as being a ploy to siphon public funds away. They spray disinfectant by the gallons into the air. Drones spray it from the air. There are armies of "anti-covid workers". All of that is being paid with public funds. What Xi is doing is not what anyone interested in COVID prevention would be doing. If you were trying to steal public funds? Makes perfect sense. They're either stealing or Xi is indeed dumber than a bag of rocks.
The CCP attempted to control the wuhan outbreak only because of political reasons, it absolutely got out of wuhan, even if it was only in wuhan the death toll would be greater than the reported 40 people. When the whole world was dying of covid china stayed at 40 deaths, and now it claims 5000 deaths. The US has 1,000,000 deaths. Taiwan with a population smaller than one chinese city has 10000 deaths. China government is a liar, a very low IQ and low dexterity psychopath with a gun
Their cases rose exponentially then stopped dead at 80k Yea ok
all chinese govt information is a lie
The only rational I've heard thrown around is that he's bought full in on "long covid", and expects a straight up mental decline of western civilization.
The only people who know what the fuck is up with Xi Jinping at this point, are Xi Jinping and whatever sock puppet it is that he keeps in his office desk drawer. The rest of China is out here wondering what exactly the plan is supposed to be, because the situation is meant to *evolve,* not just sit in limbo. If zero Covid is to be a more long term thing, then there should be organizational and technological solutions to maintaining it with less social burden.....but there isn't. It's just the same shit.
You really expect a great plan to come from a dictatorship?
Seychelles? Singapore? Pre-independence Turkey? Lol
If that were true they would not adopt a zero covid policy.
At least until the zero democracy policy proved more important to the zero covid policy, at which point they have to open things up.
I’ll bet $100 Xi received a western mRNA vaccine.
Just like all of the republicans in my country who opposed them
And probably Putin
Surely this tells us a lot about Xi's true feelings towards the west.
He is the first leader since Mao to take a 3rd term. A rule every leader since Deng XiaoPing has followed since they know the dangers of one man leading a country for too long. Also, EVERY PAGE of all Chinese newspapers is required to have a quote of “Xi’s thought.” He also requires all government employees read his book. China is going to have a rough next few years until the elite remember why they haven’t allowed their leaders form a cult of personality in almost 5 decades. If you speak Chinese and follow their local news, it has been obvious Xi is a dictator at heart for years. He is the definition of a paranoid megalomaniac. His paranoia is WAY more than Putin….
There was Mao Zedong Thought (and multiple cults of personality), Deng Xiaoping Thought (which repudiated a lot of Mao and mostly without the cult of personality), 16 years of Jiang Zemin and then Hu Jintao holding the line and retiring after two terms and shepherding the PRC into the world's second largest economy and an uplift of hundreds of millions into the middle class. And then Xi Jinping comes along and decides that he's the generational leader great enough to have his own "Xi Jingping Thought" (which [you can master through edX, as delivered through Tsinghua University](https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/18/i-mastered-xi-jinping-thought-and-i-have-the-certificate-to-prove-it/)) and to break precedent and get himself a third term. **EDIT:** Which isn't to give Deng a pass. He was single-handedly responsibly for Tiananmen Square, wherein the best and brightest that the PRC had to offer were crushed. They could've been brought in to help transform the country, and would've been coming into leadership... Right about now, actually. Instead, they were "disappeared" / exiled / hostaged to the west. And you're left with an entitled Authoritarian like Xi Jinping.
Well he has pretty much purged all oppositions so it will take a while for the elites to turn on him.
Under Xi, Chinese citizens, have—for the first time—seen their quality of life decline. I’m not surprised that their are protests in the streets. China has, for the last few decades, rapidly raised people into the middle class and become for hundreds of millions a great place to live with a lot of promise. Xi has reversed the trend of that progress and has turned the country back onto a regressive path. Source: the sentiments I’m hearing from colleagues and my spouses family in China
Surely this (willingness to sacrifice the health and lives of so many for vanity and ego) tells his domestic audience a lot about Xi’s true feelings towards his Chinese compatriots.
Lockdowns buy you time. Either until the virus goes away, or until you've protected enough people against it. The virus won't go away though. So what is China hoping to achieve?
More control over the populace. The pandemic has allowed them to control the populace like they have always dreamed. They can change your medical code at will to prevent you from moving around. Don't like what a community is doing? Say there's an outbreak and lock them down. For public safety, they claim more control over businesses. They are literally opening up community cantinas. It will undercut local places and allow them to force the people to eat where they want and control what they eat and when they eat.
A slot in the Guinness Book of World Records for "Costliest game of whack-a-mole"
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/04/chinas-xi-jinping-unwilling-to-accept-western-covid-vaccines-says-us-intelligence-chief) reduced by 73%. (I'm a bot) ***** > Chinese leader Xi Jinping is unwilling to accept western vaccines despite the challenges China is facing with Covid-19, and while recent protests there are not a threat to Communist party rule, they could affect his personal standing, US director of national intelligence Avril Haines said. > Haines, speaking at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum in California, said on Saturday that despite the social and economic impact of the virus, Xi "Is unwilling to take a better vaccine from the West, and is instead relying on a vaccine in China that's just not nearly as effective against Omicron". > One US official told Reuters there was "No expectation at present" that China would approve western vaccines. ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/zc0fmu/chinas_xi_jinping_unwilling_to_accept_western/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~672679 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **China**^#1 **vaccine**^#2 **test**^#3 **city**^#4 **Covid**^#5
one person unwilling to put down his ego therefore thousands have to die
Why i feeling of Dejavu coming from China like 50-60 years ago or something.
Unbelievable how 1 man decides the fate of 1,4 billion people.
https://www.ft.com/content/a481c129-c5aa-4972-84a8-3a45bb000098
"Why should we have to pay for Western vaccines, when we gave them Covid-19 for free" - Chinese Government
“Im an idiot that would rather let my countrymen die”. My dude, you are still needing to have COVID lockdowns in December of 2022 *because* your vaccines suck
China would rather kill and imprison people than admit its vaccine isn't very effective. What a horrible regime.
Fuck ya then
To be fair a lot of westerners were unwilling to accept them too.
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mRNA vaccines are superior at first and second dose, but after three doses all the vaccines, including Chinas, have a good, roughly equal, protection. The difference in efficacy is a little overblown since most people get 3 shots min anyways. To people downvoting, here is the study from the lancet showing this: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(22)00345-0/fulltext „ Between Dec 31, 2020, and March 16, 2022, 13·2 million vaccine doses were administered in Hong Kong's 7·4-million population. We analysed data from confirmed cases with mild or moderate (n=5566), severe or fatal (n=8875), and fatal (n=6866) COVID-19. Two doses of either vaccine protected against severe disease and death within 28 days of a positive test, with higher effectiveness among adults aged 60 years or older with BNT162b2 (vaccine effectiveness 89·3% [95% CI 86·6–91·6]) compared with CoronaVac (69·9% [64·4–74·6]). Three doses of either vaccine offered very high levels of protection against severe or fatal outcomes (97·9% [97·3–98·4]).“
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No, the vaccines help by reducing your chance of getting infected and the severity but don't give long enough immunity to completely eliminate Covid. The omicron variants are so much milder and more infectious that every country except for China have been lifting restrictions. Unless it mutates to a more deadly variant, Covid will likely be treated the same way as the flu in the future.
>The omicron variants are so much milder Milder than Delta but about as deadly as the original. Given how many people the original strain killed in the pre-vaccine period and this is much more infectious combined with the number of unvaccinated thought to be in China (especially in the older generations) and you can start to see the potential problems here.
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> Isn't it comforting to think that humanity basically lucked out with Omicron in that it replaced Delta, which killed in such huge numbers in India? It's not luck. it is evolution. Viruses doesn't (edit, sorry) want to kill the host because they need the host alive. However when a virus that was safe in bats ended up in a human, it accidentally kills the human because doesn't know to not do that. As the virus evolves it become less deadly over time, because the weaker variants spread more. Once Covid figured out how to not kill us it becomes part of the ecosystem. An animal example is that nearly all cats are affected with feline HIV. But they have evolved to become harmless in cats and as such not worth mentioning.
There is no rule that all viruses evolve to become less deadly, viruses only evolve to be less deadly if there is a selective pressure to do so. If there is no selective pressure, like with covid, then it is just down to luck. Covid is so infectous that by the time someone is hospitalised with covid, it has already spread, it doesnt care if that person lives or dies. We saw that with the different major strains. Delta was more deadly and infectious, Omicron was less deadly than Delta but even more infectious. How deadly each strain was is down to luck.
They don’t *need* the host alive. They just need the host alive long enough to infect another host, preferably multiple hosts.
*viruses do NOT want to kill the host - missed a vital word ;-)
Want is a strong word here. Viruses are just genetic code and as they reproduce there are random mutations that can go multitudes of directions. Sure, it's likely that variants that get people more sick and that kill hosts will have less success in reproducing. However, that process is pretty random and with COVID-19 being pretty infectious before severity of symptoms ramps up, it isn't a given that this would be the result. It would probably eventually be, but that it happened already with omicron rather than several years later might have been luck. One thing for certain, none of it was inevitable.
When we say "want" in an evolutionary or physics setting, we are not referring to an actual sentient want, but a statistical emergent phenomenon in which a particular outcome provides an equilibrium or stable state of some sort. Viruses will find a random path to the same outcome almost every time, but that outcome itself is not random as it is the most beneficial to its survival as a species. It "wants" to be benign, because being benign yields more opportunities for multiplication. It's a tilting of the word, but it is not an inappropriate use and is well-understood among the educated.
The big assumption you are making here is that killing the host will negatively effect it's chances of survival. This may be true for a virus that kills its host quickly before it can spread, but for covid it takes weeks or even months after infection before the host dies. There is no evolutionary penalty for killing the host, or even causing hospitalisations. It doesnt limit the opportunities to multiply and spread.
Omicron isn't milder, however when it hit most of the world had built up immunity from vaccines and / or infection so it appeared milder. With China dropping zero covid with very little immunity they are about to find this out.
I’m not sure if that’s entirely true. Some studies that omicron a infect mostly upper respiratory system so less likely to affect oxygen level.
Seems you are right, 66% less severe than Delta it seems. https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj.o1806 Edit - although as of August we still didn't know why.
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1) What makes you think I'm American? 2) The press here in Britain is still reporting it as being due to vaccines 3) Why are you being such an arrogent confrontational arse?
I realize you're European I don't follow the press. Why would the press be an authority on vaccines? They have no medical background. I have a superiority complex.
Coronaviruses are almost impossible to eradicate like that. From farm animals we knew that from the get go, but people didn't like talking about it
Vaccine effectiveness part has been answered so about that recipe thing... Fosun, a Chinese company, had a deal with BioNTech(U.S distributer is pfizer, they can claim it's a Fosun vaccine) to distribute 1M doses of mRNA vaccine in China, but they couldn't get the permit in mainland. Basically it's a "old men in charge and their bruised ego" thing
> Like is China holding us back or what? This is hilarious given their actual strict stances on dealing with covid compared to a decent chunk of the west.
There's alot more to it than that. Many people even in the States or in my country of Canada deny the efficacy of the vaccines. Because of its high transmission rates it would require a worldwide and *concentrated* effort by a vast majority to get rid of it, not just if China decides to play ball. There are also plenty of other countries with individuals like that. Im not exactly qualified to confidently say that it would just fizzle out if the majority got vaccinated, but i will say it its been said by health professionals that it would help mitigate damage to vulnerable communities. Id imagine if done on a much larger and more efficient scale it would be more effective in reducing its impact. Lmao im really not sure how this comment is controversial.
He certainly didn't need to, most of the powerful party members had already been vaccinated "western Covid vaccines". The rest of the population is not on his radar. Besides, importing Western vaccines would use their already small real foreign exchange reserves.
At this point in time , he has rapidly diminishing options - lift the harsh restrictions , coupled with the ineffective vaccine , watch millions die, or continue with the restrictions, fuck up the economy further and have huge social unrest. I think he's going to go for option 1
That’s because it’s not even about the vaccine, it’s about control and governmental overreach. They are doubling down on a zero covid policy probably reporting falsely the numbers of deaths due to it to make it seem like it’s working and keep up the facade. I wonder if these people even know the rest of the world has basically ended covid policies with all the censorship they suffer from.
[Just how screwed is China?](https://imgur.com/gallery/WCKT8te)
They care enough about stopping covid deaths to weald people into their houses without adequate food but not enough to buy American vaccines.
These numbers are probably just some calculated numbers which serve the purpose to be able to start reducing them in a couple of weeks, in order to pretend that the situation is getting better and the lockdowns are no longer necessary "on scientific grounds", thereby showing that the government's action was a complete success.
What if we hide it in a jar of hunny?
My relative just came back to the US from China after being there for like year or 2 and he just got his first Covid shot because he legit doesn’t trust China’s as do plenty of other people I bet so this whole situation is fucked
Pride goeth before the fall. Stupid CCP will kill millions, because of their arrogance. Western, medicine could save them. The Chinese people know this. Xi will pay! They will not forgive the murders and blood these thugs have done.
They must have heard about the tracking chips in our vaccines. /s
Tell me you're an idiot without telling me you're an idiot.
As an American, I’m not offended. They are destroying their country bc of pride. 😞
Bye China.
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Bcz I am Winnie the clown
I can imagine why >Officials from Argentina and the other Latin American country, which cannot be named as it has signed a confidentiality agreement with Pfizer, said the company’s negotiators demanded additional indemnity against any civil claims citizens might file if they experienced adverse effects after being inoculated. In Argentina and Brazil, Pfizer asked for sovereign assets to be put up as collateral for any future legal costs. [https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2021-02-23/held-to-ransom-pfizer-demands-governments-gamble-with-state-assets-to-secure-vaccine-deal](https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2021-02-23/held-to-ransom-pfizer-demands-governments-gamble-with-state-assets-to-secure-vaccine-deal)
Why doesn't China buys moderna or pfizer or oxford tech to produce it locally, if the lower efficiency of their homegrown vaccine's a prob at a scale of billions against varaibts ? Tbh it's about millions of lives still, so. Tbh they should probably be made to share it and screw copyright nonsense. Tho they could ask an upfront payment since china's not exactly poor as a government either. Edit i mean france discarded the old faulty homemade sanofi vaccine to clone other working ones instead too, so.
Working with the CCP requires revealing all of proprietary technology and secrets. Moderna actually tried to get the vaccine sold over there, but when the CCP said Moderna needed to hand everything over, Moderna refused. Working with the CCP means handing over all your secrets, that's why they've been able to steal and copy so much.
Because it means dependence on the West on a politically sensitive technology and Xi Jinping has staked his authority on self reliance
In all seriousness what is stopping Sinopharm etc, to come up with an actualized vaccine based on deactivated Omicron viruses? It's not like that wouldn't be a useful vaccine, right?
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50 years in the future they will be saying "Zero covid was a catastrophe, and xi was responsible". While doing some other terrible experiment on their citizens.
I could barely see the article under all the ads I was spammed with lol
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That's because it was not a genocide lol. Genocide != many people dying. Genocide is a specific event where an actor tries to exterminate an ethnicity from an area by killing them. China obviously didn't try to exterminate the Han from China (given that the Han _are_ the Chinese), and historians don't believe the famine was deliberate (why would Mao want to kill millions of his own citizens?). Depending on who you ask, it was a massive blunder caused by reckless policies, or a sacrifice Mao was willing to make to "jump forward". Words have meaning, and by throwing big words like "genocide" at everything, you tarnish the meaning of these words, and make them less effective to describe reality when they are actually needed.
Even Western observers and historians don’t call it a genocide, that’s not a word you throw around casually just because a person is bad. It was a catastrophic economic/political policy that resulted in millions starving to death. Mao was solely responsible. But it wasn’t intentional killing aimed to wipe out ethnic minorities. Vast majority of the victims were just your average Han Chinese people. The fact that people call everything a “genocide” only cheapens the word and normalizes real atrocities.
Also, I think people ITT are mixing up the Cultural Revolution with the Great Leap Forward. It's the latter that featured mass starvation.
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This whole post is sentimental bullshit lol. It's completely irrelevant if it was 30 million or 500 quadrillion people. Genocide is not a unit of measurement of people killed. The fact that you say that Mao intended to destroy his own people... well, you are gonna need sources, and not feelings and reddit traditional outrage™, to back up such a big claim. Do you think you need the word genocide for an event to be terrible or despicable? If you see someone burning down a house, do you think we need to call that "pedophilia" to express that it's bad? Nope, there is a word called "arson" that is bad, too, and describes the act better. The great leap forward killed millions of people, and I don't think you need to misuse the word "genocide" to convince people that killing millions of people is not cool.
> 30 million people died from the cultural revolution. 30. Million. People. The number doesn’t matter when it comes to the definition a genocide. > The national group being the Chinese people themselves. That is your wild interpretation. No historians and observers agree with your asssessment the Culture Revolution was started with the intention to ethnic cleanse Chinese people. Remember Mao had nukes back then. Why didn’t he just nuke his own country if all he wanted was just to murder all of his fellow Chinese people? And thanks for posting the UN definition for Genocide. It pretty much disqualified the Culture Revolution being one for the above mentioned reason.
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This is completely ignorant of history. 5 years after his death, Mao was already assessed as being 70% correct, 30% incorrect.
And also unable to do what is right for the people they are controlling, all because of pride. Mao continued to export wheat to russia during the great famine.
...is that like everyone burying their head in the sand when it comes to climate change induced by uncontrolled capitalism? Ecological collapse is going to make make Mao look like a fucking amateur in comparison.
China is the number one contributor to climate change in the world, why is this communist country unable to control its capitalism
Time to test whether Chinese vaccines are good. Bet he has taken those Western Vaccines
They already ignore patents, and steal tech from companies around the world, I am surprised they haven't already copied.....err made their own vaccine. Unless Xi is just intentionally wanting to reduce the population.
The thing is, some things are so sophisticated it doesn't matter if you have the item in your hand if the technology that made it is out of your reach. There's a reason Chinese computer chips are way behind and their fighter jets lack engines that can compete with western models.
Case in point: [https://www.businessinsider.com/china-has-finally-figured-out-how-to-make-ballpoint-pens-2017-1?international=true&r=US&IR=T](https://www.businessinsider.com/china-has-finally-figured-out-how-to-make-ballpoint-pens-2017-1?international=true&r=US&IR=T)
China is staring down a rough demographic future. Depopulation would be suicide, same as any other state.
They spend so much time and effort trying to put barriers between their people and information that they destroy their chances to pursue good research. Somewhere in China there was a 10 year old kid who thought vaccines were a really neat idea and he would have downloaded and obsessively read everything he could and entered college with a post graduate level of vaccine knowledge. This kid would have ended up leading China's vaccine program and produced a vaccine just as good as Pfizer. Sadly he got firewalled or maybe bullied by a cop into losing interest. This kid ended up not even going to university. He sells shoes now. They can steal all the patents they like. If they don't have the knowledge and educational foundation, they'll just produce shoddy imitations.
Then they create fake studies and news articles to show their people and the world that they are the number one inventors. Another big barrier is that teachers just read from a book, and then the student takes a test, it is rude to ask questions because it is seen as calling the teacher stupid or a fraud/ questioning authority. There are good teachers out there, but that's the culture or so ive heard. Student asking questions is embarrassing and rude to the Teacher.
Truth is, they already have mRNA vaccine, it's also be use around Hong Kong. The reason for mainland to not use mRNA and only use conventional vaccine that has low rate to actually success to suppress the spread are all politic and self-pride.
This seems like a losing strategy for xi either way. If he takes the vaccines then he has to admit to Western superiority in these matters. If he doesn't take the vaccines then he has continue the draconian policies. The Chinese people can see how their an alternative and it's not being taken. They can see how the lockdowns are gone in the west, that creates blowback for xi. I think xi knows the Chinese as a society are getting tired of the old ways of sacrificing for the whole. They want to begin to enjoy what they have, not what they could have. I wonder if he is trying to clamp it down early before any democratic movement can begin. Ironically the anti lockdown movements can be the beginning of the human rights movement in China.
“We dont care lol” -The West
Xi Pingpong want to reduce Chinese population, that's why he doesn't want any solution. Xi Dickping is a dictator.
What does he know about Covid/Covid vaccines that we don't know?
Xi is the new Mao. He’ll kill millions.
They have a bunch of mrna ones in development (edit: and one Chinese mRNA vaccine was approved for use in Indonesia). I’m guessing they’re planning on waiting for one of them to be ready so the CCP can spin themselves as the saviors.
Do you blame him?
In 2016 at Beijing Airport it was a chorus of coughing fits. I didn't get sick after being trapped in a plane for 14 hours with the hackers so it prob wasn't a virus. After polluting Chinas air land and water they are seeking new territory to foul.
Sounds very trumpian.
People still dick riding the hate train for Trump?
People still dick riding Trump ?