Chinese Economics Thread
- Thread starter Norfolk
- Start date
We will see probably a repetition of 2020, total debt will significantly increase to achieve growth.
Its not sustainable. Who is going to invest big money with all these lockdowns?
You can give loans all you want but if lockdowns press down domestic demand and cause logistics issues, its like trying to stop a fire by throwing money at it.
Say Shanghai is "fixed" in a month. What would happen if in June/July another Covid wave comes?
Hopefully by June/July they would have learned from their mistake in Shanghai, and optimize their strategy. Produce more medical supplies, build more emergency hospitals, test and isolate more actively. Don't let your guard down and prevent downplaying or hiding of cases like what happened in Xi'an and Shanghai.
I could never for the life of me understand the mindset behind that nonsense. Why the heck would those dumb dumb leaders could ever think that by employing the strategy of "see no evil; hear no evil" would do the trick against Covid-19 and that the central government would never find out their idiotic negligence of duty.
I know right? They had two bloody years to prepare and a lot of knowledge and strategies they can learn from the other province and overseas, but yet they were completely unprepared. Even made some horrific choices like separating parents from their infected children, and killing pet animals when they are disinfecting while the owner was in quarantine (not sure this is a policy, but there are multiple recorded instances of this happening).
I read awhile ago, that now they are giving out RAT kits to each households, instead of having them get out to test anymore because they'll be at risk of getting infected, and selectively locking down buildings and assigning risk level to them instead of having the entire city under lockdown. Both of which I think is a step in the right direction, when Shanghai is hopefully fixed, they'll be able to learn from those new strategies and adopt them on other provinces.
I don't know if the leadership has learned anything other than reacting in the most egregious fashion whenever a crisis occurs. The leadership on the provincial, municipal levels have given me a very negative impression which could only be worse from the people that are on the ground living under the incompetent leaders.
Which begs the question, why is there a tendency that these appointed leaders can't seem or has so far failed in being pro-active with their duties in terms of pandemic mitigation control, employing effective, and efficient communication to the public they serve ensuring a more trusting relationship between the state and the public. Transparency in terms of where the mistakes are made, why they were made, and what steps are being made to rectify the issues. Anger, disappointment, frustrations would inevitably happened despite best efforts whenever a crisis happens anywhere in the world let alone in China but the trick should be that holding yourself accountable by expecting public outrage as part, and parcel of being a leader or wanting to lead any public institution.
I get the sense that these Chinese regional or municipal leadership cadres have let their materialistic ambitions get in the way of fulfilling their duties responsibly or maybe they don't have the necessary tools to tackle such problems with respect to handling the pandemic. If that's to be the case, shouldn't all the big regional leaders hold meetings or review the processes of their municipal leaders to ascertain what are the existing deficiencies within the system that can potentially disrupt or harm the public life if and when any crisis (health, natural disasters) occurs. That way the relevant authorities can gain not just valuable insights but also put in place not just recommendations but actually shore up all possible contingencies to limit any potential damage from worst case scenarios.
I sure hope that the PLA isn't this incompetent, and that their leaders are not pencil pushers without any ounce of character because that would spell the end for the party as we know it if and when the fight against Taiwan and the U.S. turned into a massive defeat due to defective training, defective equipments, and leaders being appointed through patronage rather than Supreme competence. All these meritocracy spiel would be just reduced to irrelevance.