https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/09/cdxo-d09.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
The leading representatives of world capitalism—the heads of the World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organization (WTO)—have assembled in China this week for their “1+6 summit,” where the CCP has officially pledged that China is reopening for business and will no longer impose lockdowns or other public health measures to stop the spread of COVID-19.
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The Western media presents the lifting of Zero-COVID in China as a response to recent anti-lockdown protests, which were centered among layers of the affluent middle class at universities. The CCP, the Western propagandists claim, frightened by the specter of mass opposition to its deeply unpopular COVID-19 policy, is at long last lifting its draconian controls. Not a word of this narrative is true.
A survey conducted in Shanghai in October and November and published by the China Data Lab at UC San Diego found that only 11.9 percent of the population favored “large-scale adjustment” of the country’s Zero-COVID policy. More than twice this number, 24.4 percent, stated that Zero-COVID “must be upheld without adjustment.” The majority of those surveyed, 58.5 percent, stated that Zero-COVID needed “adjustment on specifics” but did not call for “large-scale adjustment.” The policy of Zero-COVID retains immense popular support, and fully 83 percent of those surveyed want it to be continued.
The fact that the China Data Lab survey was conducted in Shanghai is particularly significant. A city of 25 million people, economically vital and with a mass working class population, Shanghai lived through multiple extended lockdowns over the past two and half years. If one believed the accounts in the Western media, no city would have more widespread anti-Zero-COVID sentiment than Shanghai. Yet when popular opinion is scientifically surveyed, one finds overwhelming support for the continuation of the necessary public health measures to prevent the spread of the pandemic.
The protests cited by the Western media were small, numbering in the hundreds in a nation of 1.4 billion people, and based almost exclusively among upper middle class students at the country’s elite universities. The protests were staged not with an eye not to rousing the sentiment of the broad Chinese population but to providing photo ops for Western journalists. The protesters issued invitations to all the major international news outlets, who photographed the blank pieces of paper held up in the rallies and wrote ecstatic editorials on the birth of “freedom” in China.
As the WSWS has documented, the moves by the CCP to scrap Zero-COVID predate the protests. In the final analysis, the protests served the social function of legitimizing the policies adopted by the CCP, presenting the opening to the pandemic as an outgrowth of popular demand, as if the Chinese people were clamoring to be infected.
The demand for mass infection in China comes not from the Chinese people but from world capitalism. The Wall Street Journal wrote today that “disruptions to businesses [are] threatening the country’s status as the world’s factory floor.” Terry Guo, the founder of Foxconn Technology Group, the company responsible for the mass production of Apple’s iPhone in China and is now facing a shortage of workers in the Foxconn assembly plants, wrote a letter at the beginning of November to the CCP government warning that “strict COVID controls would threaten China’s central position in global supply chains.” Apple signaled that it was thinking of moving production elsewhere. There were similar rumblings from Samsung, Nike, Volkswagen and other major international firms.
China’s Zero-COVID policy saved millions of lives and prevented the virus from ravaging the country. It was not a top-down imposition on society, but the planned and coordinated mobilization of vast collective efforts. The Chinese people sacrificed and worked together to ensure the nation’s public health.
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