People want the zero-COVID policy to end, and CPC ends it. Even if it might be the wrong decision, people speak their voice, and the party listens. Has any protest in the west actually achieve anything?
Xi said in 2005 (it’s important to read theories, bro)
“No matter how correct our policy is, if it is not understood by the masses, it will be difficult to implement it. If the masses don’t listen, you follow the masses first, and if the masses jump into the fire pit, you also jump down. The masses have awakened and climbed out of the fire pit, and they will eventually follow you. If the masses jump, and you don’t, the relationship between the cadres and the masses will be alienated. You jump together, get emotionally closer, and get the job done. What are the characteristics of mass work under the new situation? An important feature is that the people’s awareness of democracy and self-rights protection has been enhanced.”
Ackhually democracy is when President after 4 years who was voted because everyone hated the otherguy and doesn’t do anything useful,democracy also when small country kneel to west
Democracy is when aligned with Amerika
an example of actual freedom and democracy
This is a funny argument to confuse liberals but zero COVID policy ending has been planned for a while now before any protests happened.
cough cough Turkish Missile Crisis cough cough
Turkish Missile Crisis
What’s the connection there?
I’m not so sure that most Chinese people want zero-Covid to end. Just a particularly vocal minority and especially foreigners living in China. There is also evidence of foreign influence on the protests themselves like in Hong Kong, people getting paid and told where to stand and what to say while western media are in place to film them. A lot of staged productions, albeit to a much lesser extent now than in Hong Kong. It is also a bit comparable to what happened in Iran where media riled up the population with fake news, this time around the Urumqi fire.
I won’t deny that there is a legitimate and genuine element to these protests, obviously some people are getting a bit tired and annoyed, but personally i can’t tell how much of it is astroturfed. I feel like the government should have done a better job explaining why maintaining zero Covid is important and what would happen if they didn’t. Some people in China look at the West and see that restrictions are lifted there but it only seems like everything is fine because Covid infections and deaths have become so normalized and the media ignores it.
I don’t think that all protests, especially ones as small as these, necessarily reflect the will of the people. I pointed out Iran, but remember the protests in Cuba not too long ago. Of course in both cases the anti-government protests got all the coverage in western and western-influenced media but the counter-protests in support of the government were an order of magnitude larger in both cases. Only the anti-government ones had violent elements and especially in Iran killed a lot of police and other government workers, and even regular civilians.
The balance certainly has shiftly over a critical point that maintaining zero COVID will prohibitively expensive due to non-compliance.
Indeed, all it takes is a large enough minority becoming really non-compliant to cause major issues, that’s the “critical point”. This is what i mean. It’s not actually that the majority of people are against zero Covid, it’s that a small group can, if sufficiently determined and co-ordinated, essentially hold the rest of the country hostage on pandemic policy. That is not democracy. It is the government responding to the most vocal segment of the population and trying to appease them, instead of attempting to wage a mass media campaign to educate and mobilize people in support of the correct policy that will save more lives.
True democracy is also not about who’s the “majority” tho. It’s about taking everyone’s concerns into the decision making process.
indeed. tyranny of the majority is no true democracy.
I’m obviously not living in China, so maybe my experience and viewpoint should be taken with a mountain of salt. But I’m pretty sure China takes everyone’s voices into account, and is always education and explaining their policies. I think its reasonable that some zero-covid strategies are softened and more use of quarantine and at-home isolation is used right now.
No matter how correct our policy is, if it is not understood by the masses, it will be difficult to implement it.
…so why not educate the masses about your policies?
Im sure there’s efforts to educate. I doubt they just impose shit on the masses without first explaining and then listening.
I absolutely agree, China was an excellent model of what Zero Covid should look like in a country so susceptible to quick disease spreading(they do have a population of more than 1.5 billion people in a space smaller than the US after all), but now that things are significantly more controlled than the past 2 years, and the people call for change, I can understand why the CPC decided to go this way. I’m proud of China for having a party dedicated to fighting opportunism and dogmatic adventurism at damn near every step of their development
