BY STEPHEN GREEN | P J MEDIA
Shanghai, entering its second month of COVID-19
lockdowns, is considering a radical move to restart the city’s vital
industries.
City workers might be forced to trade getting locked down
at home for getting locked down at work, according to a new report from Are Technica.
Some factories have been able to continue operations
while minimizing the risk of COVID outbreaks by operating with workers shut
inside a “closed loop,” meaning that they have to remain inside a plant, eating
there and in some cases reportedly sleeping on the floor, for days or even
weeks at a time.
As Beijing demands that more business reopen, companies
are trying to figure out how to deal with conflicting demands to keep residents
locked down. “Most companies will ask people to live at the factory,” one
anonymous Shanghai resident told the press. “But how are you going to do it?
People may not be allowed to go home.”
In recent weeks, many of the city’s 25 million hungry
residents have taken to their balconies in protest. A few have even chosen
to fling themselves to their deaths rather than live one
more starving day trapped in their apartments.
Shanghai’s solution? Fence them in.
Images of white hazmat suit-clad workers sealing
entrances of housing blocks and closing off entire streets with roughly two
metre-tall green fencing went viral on social media, prompting questions and
complaints from residents.
Reuters says the fences are being erected around
buildings “where at least one person tested positive for COVID-19,” and that
residents aren’t allowed out of their own front doors.
The question might not be whether workers would be
willing to trade an at-home lockdown for an at-work lockdown, but whether
they’ll be allowed — or even physically able — to make the one-way commute.
There have been countless social media videos of Shanghai
residents being beaten by Shanghai’s “Big White” lockdown enforcers just for
being outdoors. I’d hate to imagine what might happen to someone trying to
scale a fence.
The discrepancy between Beijing’s draconian insistence on
a “Zero COVID” policy and the country’s need to avoid a recession — or worse —
couldn’t be more striking.
Despite Communist China’s complete failure to choke off
Shanghai’s mostly harmless omicron outbreak, the country might try the exact same totalitarian methods in the capital,
Beijing:
China’s capital, Beijing, began mass testing of more than
3 million people on Monday to find COVID-19 cases and restricted residents in
one part of the city to their compounds, sparking worries of a wider
Shanghai-style lockdown. While only 70 cases have been found so far in the city
of more than 21 million since a new outbreak surfaced on Friday, authorities
have rolled out strict measures under China’s “zero-COVID” policy to try to
prevent a further spread of the virus.
A local official called the situation in Beijing “urgent and grim,” even with the small number of cases and
omicron’s generally mild symptoms. In Shanghai, there were 19,000 new cases on
Sunday, in line with the weeks-long trend, but only 51 deaths.
That’s a mortality rate of about one-quarter of one
percent.
It’s difficult to determine just what Chinese strongman
Xi Jinping is trying to accomplish with Zero COVID.
The virus has become less harmful as it’s expanded from
epidemic to pandemic to endemic. And he’s put the Communist Party’s prestige on
the line (as well as his own), in a vain effort to use thugs and fences to
combat a virus.
Is all this just a crude show of force on his part? Is he
hoping to cause more damage to Western economies than his own, and thus improve
China’s relative position? Or, having decided on a useless and destructive
policy, is he just too stubborn or prideful to change tack?
