China 1989 and Now, Plus Risks of Relaxing COVID Measures

choi

(1) Alyssa Guzman, Apple plans to LEAVE China as COVID protests delay production of its products: Tim Cook could move factories to India and Vietnam after brutal lockdown at iPhone plant mean key deliveries won't arrive in time for Christmas. DailyMail.co.uk, Dec 3, 2022 (videos of Foxconn's Zhengzhou factory).
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news ... ction-products.html

(2) Andrew J Nathan, Why China Isn't Facing Another Tiananmen Moment?  Chinese protesters are fed up with the country's repressive 'zero Covid' policies, but the regime remains unified behind Xi Jinping. Wall Street Journal, Dec 3, 2022m at page C3 (every Saturday, section C is headlined 'Review')
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why ... -moment-11669996522
("Uniquely among modern regimes, Mr Xi assumed, China possessed the organizational capacity to impose the wide-ranging, fine-grained social controls to stop the disease. No other government could mobilize armies of functionaries in haz-mat suits to guard apartment complexes, facial recognition technology to identify errant citizens, and tracking technology on people’s mobile phones to control their smallest movements. Mr Xi expected his high-tech social engineering to show the world the superiority of the 'Chinese model.'   Instead, authoritarian hubris has trapped him between an exhausted populace and a relentless pathogen. China lacks an effective vaccine of its own")

Excerpt in the window of print: Every instrument of power remains in the hand of Mr Xi, and no one is in a position to challenge him.

My comment: There are risks to relax measures. But Professor Nathan is not a biologist. A biologist by training, I look at the China's official data on new Covid cases every day, the overwhelming of which have been asymptomatic. Besides, China's official statistics said clinical trials of its own vaccines succeed in around 70% of the recipients. That is the level expected from protein (as opposed to mRNA) used as vaccines in the case of Covid virus (because synthetic spike protein of the coronavirus tend to collapse in 3-D structure, absent replacement by at least two (2) proline amino acids in the natural sequences. In my view, therefore, the risks are small, IF all adults and teenagers are immunized with China's own vaccines -- but the risks of protein vaccines to young women (causing hemorrhage, especially in brain) are real.
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