Thread: The View, from China

Originally Posted by OhOh

Chinese companies are busy grabbing the opportunities provided by ASEAN.

buying up ASEAN you mean

Hong Kong CNN —
As Jo Wang, an event planner in Beijing, watched her family members fall ill with Covid-19 one by one late last month she had a single goal: find antiviral pills to protect her elderly grandfather when his turn came.

After three days of trying and failing to purchase a box of Pfizer’s Paxlovid on an e-commerce platform, she got lucky, scoring the Covid treatment via an official channel on the fourth day and receiving it by mail on the sixth. But Wang, who was breaking the rules by seeking the prescription proactively – before her grandfather fell ill – was also wracked with guilt.

“I felt really bad at that time … you don’t know how many days it will take to buy this medicine, it is completely unknown. And you don’t know how long the people in your family can hold on,” she said, stressing her fear that if she waited until the 92-year-old fell ill, it would be too late to get the pills, which are most effective early in the illness. “It’s a very desperate situation.”

Wang is not the only resident scrambling to secure Western medications as a wave of Covid-19 overwhelms China, driving up demand for treatment – especially for the country’s large undervaccinated elderly population.

In recent weeks, many have turned to the black market where hawkers claim to sell Covid treatments ranging from illegal imports of Indian-made generics of Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck’s molnupiravir to the bonafide product –up to nearly eight times the market price.

Rising frustration over the shortages wascompounded by an announcement Sunday that the government had failed to reach an agreement with Pfizer to include Paxlovid under its national insurance plan, with officials saying the price asked was too high. That decision could mean that after March 31, the drug will only be available to those who can afford to pay full price, with current rates reportedly around 1,900 yuan ($280) per course.

Paxlovid has been shown to reduce the risk of death and hospitalization in high risk patients when used soon afterthe onset of symptoms. Last February, the drug, widely used in developed countries, became the first oral pill specifically for Covid to be authorized in China.

China did agree to cover two other treatments used for Covid-19 in the latest talks – the traditional Chinese medicine Qingfei Paidu and the homegrown antiviral pill Azvudine. There is limited data on how well Azvudine protects against severe disease.

The pricing pitfall and shortages, nearly a year after the pill was first authorized and months after Pfizer tapped a domestic drugmaker for local production, showthe challenges facing China as its governmentgrapples with demand for treatments for its population of 1.4 billion after abruptly dropping its Covid controls last month.

Prized pill

Currently, Pfizer’s imported pill is available in community hospitals in some cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Guangzhou, according to state media. It is also sold on several e-commerce platforms, where there is some suggestion in local reports that supply constraints are easing.

But there are questions about how broadly the pills will be distributed across China and if there is sufficient medical resources to prescribe them – an urgent issue as the outbreak shifts from urban hubs to smaller cities and rural China. Experts say procurement appears to be decentralized, with the pills more readily available at hospitals in better resourced major cities and tougher to find elsewhere.

On Monday, Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla said the company had ramped up exports, sending millions of courses of Paxlovid to China in the past couple weeks, and was working with its domestic partner Zhejiang Huahai to manufacture Chinese-made Paxlovid in the first half of this year, according to Reuters.

But Bourla, speaking at a conference in San Francisco, also quashed hopes the company might reach a deal with China for domestic drugmakers to produce a generic version of the drug to be sold in-country – denying a January 6 Reuters report that such an arrangement was being discussed.

US-based Merck, known as MSD internationally, on Wednesday said on its WeChat account that it would take legal action against some manufacturers that are supplying unauthorized versions of its Covid drug. The company said it would also partner with domestic firm Sinopharm to supply China with its pill, which is sold under the brand name Lagevrio. Neither Western firm currently holds a patent for the drugs in China, according to a WHO-affiliated database, though both have filed for one.

But as the immediate shortages – and issues of cost – play out in one of the world’s largest generic drug-producing countries, they also throw the spotlight on global issues related to intellectual property rights, according to experts who examine access to medicines.

Two Chinese companies slated to manufacture generic versions of Paxlovid have already submitted their products for evaluation by the World Health Organization (WHO), according to the WHO-affiliated Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) – a signal that they are ready to begin producing the medicine.

Those companies, Zhejiang Huahai and Apeloa Pharmaceutical, along with two others in China, were granted sublicenses in 2022 to make the full generic pill to supply 95 lower and middle income markets – not including China – under an earlier deal between Pfizer and the MPP, an organization that facilitates access to treatments for people in poorer countries.

“At the scale of the health crisis taking place (in China), the most logical next step (would be) that these licenses are expanded to include allowing domestic supply in China, including from other producers (in the region),” said Ellen ‘t Hoen, a former executive director of the MPP and current head of the Medicines Law & Policy project.

However, if the drug developer was unwilling to take that step – as Bourla indicated Pfizer was on Monday – there are measures China could take, such as pledging to protect companies that make generic supplies or importing generics from elsewhere, using legal measures allowed under the World Trade Organization rules during health emergencies, ‘t Hoen said.

That potential has been discussed in public forums in China. Commentators there point out the country has no track record of using these flexibilities, which are often employed with caution by countries, given their potential to irk foreign pharmaceutical companies and the countries where they are based.

In China’s case, concerns about impacting the local economy – in which foreign pharmaceutical firms are major employers – was likely a key reason for the government’s reticence to use such measures, said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Beijing this month called on authorities to enhance oversight of online sales of drugs and crack down on price gouging, false advertising and the infringement of intellectual property.

Pfizer talks stall over cost

China may be hoping that more domestic antiviral pills in development are able to fill the void. Throughout the pandemic, its regulators have largely opted for homegrown tools to confront the virus – with Beijing yet to approve a foreign Covid vaccine.

Health officials have recently sought to assure the public about affordable access to treatments and downplay the potential impact of the government’s failure to include Paxlovid in its national insurance scheme. A top health official on Wednesday said that hundreds of pills to alleviate Covid symptoms were already covered by insurance and new viral treatments were in the pipeline.

State-run nationalist tabloid Global Times on Monday ran an opinion piece blaming “US capital forces” for China’s inability to cut a deal with Pfizer to include the pills in the national insurance.

“During the past days, a growing number of US politicians and media outlets have been making shrill ‘warnings’ about the epidemic in China … If they do care about it, why don’t Pfizer drop some pursuit of the profit, and cooperate with China with a little more sincerity?” said the article.

Bourlaon Monday said talks broke off after China had asked for a lower price than Pfizer is charging for most lower middle income countries.

In a separate statement to CNN, Pfizer declined to comment on what price it had offered, but said: the company “will continue to collaborate with the Chinese government and all relevant stakeholders to secure an adequate supply of Paxlovid in China” and remained “committed to fulfilling the Covid-19 treatment needs of Chinese patients.”

But for those who have been grappling with the immediate problems of gaining access to medicines for themselves and their families, like Wang in Beijing, there is a feeling – for now anyway – that the system isn’t working.

“It’s cruel … no matter how we feel, there’s nothing we can do,” she said. “It’s not the case that your effort or expectation can make the situation better.”

Frustration is rising over Covid drug shortages in China, and there are no easy answers | CNN

It's pretty obvious Mr. Shithole is banking on the less severe, newer variants to rip through and not do too much damage.

Which isn't going to be of much consolation to all of the people he's killed.

Wouldn't you know it, Mr. Shithole has finally fessed up after years of lying.

China has reported almost 60,000 COVID-related deaths since early December after the country dropped its strict lockdown restrictions.
The announcement follows complaints that the Chinese government was failing to release data about the status of the pandemic.

Trade between Laos and china has increased since the new rail line was finished. On would wonder though wether the cost was worth it for Laos people. costing around 6 billion with a fifity fifty payment between china and Laos means a 3 billion debt for Laos which represents 15% of its GDP a price Laos is unlikely to pay.

Why China can’t let Laos default – Asia Times

Originally Posted by Hugh Cow

Trade between Laos and china has increased since the new rail line was finished. On would wonder though wether the cost was worth it for Laos people. costing around 6 billion with a fifity fifty payment between china and Laos means a 3 billion debt for Laos which represents 15% of its GDP a price Laos is unlikely to pay.

Why China can’t let Laos default – Asia Times

Hey, it's not called "Belt and Owed" for nothing.

She Witnessed Mao’s Worst Excesses. Now She Has a Warning for the World.

Yuan-tsung Chen, an author, leaned forward in an oversize velvet chair to tell the story of the man so hungry that he ate himself.


Once, that tale had seemed unbelievable to her. “I thought that was an exaggeration,” she said. But living in a village during the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s calamitous attempt to catapult China into communist plenty in the late 1950s, changed her view on what extreme hunger could drive people to actually do.


“It wasn’t anyone’s exaggeration, it was as true as real life, but nobody would say it,” Ms. Chen said, recalling the desperation and starvation caused by Mao’s experiment. Historians estimate that up to 45 million people died over the course of five years.


Now, sitting at a restaurant in one of Hong Kong’s most opulent hotels, Ms. Chen, 93, says she has a warning for the world.


Having lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in China’s recent history, Ms. Chen disputes the Communist Party’s sanitized version of its past and worries it has allowed it to continue making mistakes with global consequences.


Her voice drops, barely audible among the din of cutlery and diners in the restaurant: “When you do things in the spirit of Mao, that scares me,” she says, referring to China’s top leader, Xi Jinping.


Her books, she said, are meant to add “blood and flesh” to the official party account and help readers empathize with the Chinese people who have suffered under an authoritarian system. But her efforts have raised questions about whose voice matters when it comes to narrating Chinese history.


Ms. Chen is part of the increasingly small group of people still alive who endured the worst of Mao’s excesses. She says she wants to set the record straight. But her critics — mostly men — have raised doubts about the details of her recollections and accused her of being a fabulist.


She welcomes the interrogation.


Her recent memoir, “The Secret Listener: An Ingenue in Mao’s Court,” was published last year. The book is the culmination of decades of writing and rewriting her personal history. She hopes it will help bring closer attention to places such as Hong Kong, her adopted home, where Chinese history is being rewritten once again, this time under Mr. Xi.


“I know the past fairly well and I can see something is coming,” she said.


Events in Hong Kong gave Ms. Chen the resolve to publish her recent memoir. They include the kidnappings in 2015 of several booksellers who sold salacious stories about China’s top leader and the enormous pro-democracy protests in 2019.


The rewriting of middle and high school textbooks in mainland China and Hong Kong sharpened her sense of purpose.


Under Mr. Xi, China enforced a sweeping crackdown on Hong Kong that included an all-encompassing national security law put in place in 2020. Since then, the city has fallen under a cloak of silence that Ms. Chen says she recognizes. “My current situation looks uncannily like the one I found myself in more than 60 years ago.”


Ms. Chen was a child of privilege who grew up in metropolitan Shanghai in the 1930s. She came of age in the early days of the People’s Republic of China, after Mao and the Communist Party took over in 1949. In 1958, she married Jack Chen, a Communist journalist who came from a prominent Chinese-Trinidadian family and had connections with top party officials such as Zhou Enlai.


Ms. Chen worked as a clerical assistant in Beijing’s Central Film Bureau, but she longed to write. Writing eventually became what jolted her out of her cautious optimism for the party and led to a nearly two decade struggle to get out of China.


In 1955, not long after Ms. Chen joined the Central Film Bureau, Hu Feng, a well-known Chinese Marxist writer, was detained for penning a report arguing that literature should allow for greater expressiveness.


His words triggered a purge that rippled through Ms. Chen’s circle of friends and colleagues, some of whom were accused of being part of Mr. Hu’s “counterrevolutionary clique.”


Then, unexpectedly, Mao began to welcome criticism of the party, urging a “hundred flowers to bloom,” a phrase meant to encourage people to speak up and criticize the party’s shortcomings.


Feeling inspired, Ms. Chen began to write. But before she had a chance to finish, Mao started rounding up the critics who had dared to speak out, accusing them of producing “poisonous weeds” instead of “fragrant flowers.”


Critics were executed or sent to labor camps for re-education. Petrified that her manuscript would reveal “poisonous” thoughts, Ms. Chen lit a match to it. “I scattered that manuscript like ashes,” she said.


The act would come back to haunt her.


By burning the first draft of her own story, Ms. Chen participated in what Orville Schell, a China scholar, has referred to as the destruction of historical memory. Some academics have questioned whether Ms. Chen’s accounts can be trusted, or if she has exaggerated her access to party officials such as Zhou Yang, who, she said in her memoir, asked her for advice on how to handle Mr. Hu’s case.


“This is one of the perils of the Chinese Communist Party’s destruction of historical memory,” said Mr. Schell, the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. Like others, Ms. Chen, he said, had to write her memoir “sort of stripped of all of her resources except her memory.”


Many of the scenes in Ms. Chen’s memoir come from books that she and her husband wrote years ago, as well as earlier manuscripts. Recently, in her small but sunny apartment on the south side of Hong Kong Island, she stood over books and old manuscripts piled atop a dining table.


She held up yellowing copies of books by her husband, like “A Year in Upper Felicity: Life in a Chinese Village During the Cultural Revolution,” and “Inside the Cultural Revolution,” about the period of political tumult when Mao, fearing that his revolution was being corrupted by compromise, unleashed young Red Guards to persecute officials, academics and others.


She also turned to manuscripts she wrote when she and her husband settled at Cornell University after finally fleeing China in 1971. “Cold Wind” is about her family’s experience during the Cultural Revolution. “The Dragon’s Village” was the basis for the chapters about the Great Leap Forward in her memoir.


“This is why I said I didn’t depend on my memory, and I have my own notes because after we came out, I took notes,” she said, holding a brown envelope with one of her manuscripts.


“The Dragon’s Village,” Ms. Chen’s first book, was published in 1980. Though it is a work of fiction, it is based on her experiences living in a village in 1960 during the Great Leap Forward.


Fearing she might attract suspicion during the anti-Hu purge, Ms. Chen volunteered to go to the countryside to help with land reform. There, she discovered that Mao’s earlier experiment with collectivization had been a disaster. Crops had been destroyed, wooded areas replaced with tree stumps. The land, she wrote, was like “a ruined cemetery where human remains had been dug up and exposed.”


It was clear to her that any success in land reform was an illusion when she met emaciated villagers with tales of family members who had died of starvation. Yet instead of reporting the true numbers of depleted crops, she and other villagers created a Potemkin wheat field for senior Party members in order to keep up the mirage of a bumper harvest.


Scenes like these in “The Secret Listener,” her latest book, read at times like a film script, with detailed dialogue between characters, a method she says she used to make the overall story more compelling.


In the late 1960s, the fury of vigilante Red Guard youth prompted Ms. Chen and her husband to send their young son away to live with his grandmother in Shanghai. Ms. Chen’s husband was at one point punished for being elite, given a new job cleaning toilets and banished to a slum. He would die in 1995, two decades after the family finally escaped.


In her memoir’s nail-biting ending, Ms. Chen describes pursuing increasingly desperate measures to acquire the exit visa she and her husband needed to leave China, with their lives under threat as they became entangled in ever bigger political struggles.


One by one, those in the government who could guarantee their escape were targeted by radical officials.


Chen Yi was a civil servant who had been tasked with helping the couple escape. One day, Ms. Chen looked up to see giant posters with his name on them: “Bash in Chen Yi’s Head and Boil Him in Oil!”


In the end, she and her husband were granted visas because of her husband’s friendship with Zhou Enlai. The visas were issued with the understanding Mr. Chen would promote communism abroad.


Today, Ms. Chen’s voice has been drowned out by party historians who gloss over events like the Great Leap Forward and dismiss the estimates of tens of millions of dead as “historical nihilism” intended to undermine the party.


“They say history is on their side and that means they are right,” Ms. Chen said about China’s Communist Party.


But, she added, “If you know the past and the way they did things then, you can understand better what is happening now.”

She Witnessed Mao’s Worst Excesses. Now She Has a Warning for the World. – DNyuz

Yes, it grew by a "mere" 3%- more than the World bank forecast of 2.7%. 2023 forecast is 5.7%, recently revised upward.
Economists see upside to China COVID chaos: higher 2023 economic growth | Fortune

I'm cool with that. I want the Chinese people to prosper. I hope the Winnie the Pooh look-a-like (Xi) is very rattled at China's falling population. He should be.

China's first population drop in six decades sounds alarm on demographic crisis

BEIJING/HONG KONG (Reuters) - China's population fell last year for the first time in six decades, a historic turn that is expected to mark the start of a long period of decline in its citizen numbers with profound implications for its economy and the world.

The country's National Bureau of Statistics reported a drop of roughly 850,000 people for a population of 1.41175 billion in 2022, marking the first decline since 1961, the last year of China's Great Famine.


That possibly makes India the world's most populous nation. U.N. experts predicted last year India would have a population of 1.412 billion in 2022 though they did not expect the South Asian nation to overtake China until this year.

India, however, only collects population figures every 10 years and its latest census, originally scheduled for 2021, has been delayed due to the pandemic.

Long-term, U.N. experts see China's population shrinking by 109 million by 2050, more than triple the decline of their previous forecast in 2019.


That's caused domestic demographers to lament that China will get old before it gets rich, slowing the economy as revenues drop and government debt increases due to soaring health and welfare costs.


"China's demographic and economic outlook is much bleaker than expected. China will have to adjust its social, economic, defense and foreign policies," said demographer Yi Fuxian.


He added that the country's shrinking labour force and downturn in manufacturing heft would further exacerbate high prices and high inflation in the United States and Europe.

"Economic growth will have to depend more on productivity growth," added Zhiwei Zhang, chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management.

Kang Yi, head of the national statistics bureau, dismissed concerns about the population decline, telling reporters that "overall labour supply still exceeds demand".

MORE China's first population drop in six decades sounds alarm on demographic crisis

I hope the Winnie the Pooh look-a-like (Xi) is very rattled at China's falling population. He should be.

Long term demographers predict that India's GDP will surpass that of China, to become the worlds largest, late this century- for that very reason.

Of course you will never read or see this this in MSM.

Originally Posted by sabang

Of course you will never read or see this this in MSM.

Of course not, the news media report news, not some wittering fucking brown noser's youtube video.

What sort of idiot are you?

One who would rather pay attention to actual on the ground accounts from people who (gasp!) actually live and work there, than embittered rants from some nobody who has never even set foot in the place. It remains the fact that China has incurred an astonishingly low rate of Covid morbidity compared to the West. A'www shucks, but it was bad for business for a while- but now it's back to business as usual. The Omicron variant has a virtually negligible morbidity rate for vaccinated people in China.

In China, doctors say they are discouraged from citing COVID on death certificates

BEIJING (Reuters) - During a busy shift at the height of Beijing's COVID wave, a physician at a private hospital saw a printed notice in the emergency department: doctors should “try not to” write COVID-induced respiratory failure on death certificates.


Instead, if the deceased had an underlying disease, that should be named as the main cause of death, according to the notice, a copy of which was seen by Reuters.


If doctors believe that the death was caused solely by COVID-19 pneumonia, they must report to their superiors, who will arrange for two levels of "expert consultations" before a COVID death is confirmed, it said.


Six doctors at public hospitals across China told Reuters they had either received similar oral instructions discouraging them from attributing deaths to COVID or were aware that their hospitals had such policies.


Some relatives of people who have died with COVID say the disease did not appear on their death certificates, and some patients have reported not being tested for coronavirus despite arriving with respiratory symptoms.


"We have stopped classifying COVID deaths since the reopening in December," said a doctor at a large public hospital in Shanghai. "It is pointless to do that because almost everyone is positive."


Such directives have led to criticism by global health experts and the World Health Organization that China has drastically underreported COVID deaths as the coronavirus runs rampant in the country, which abandoned its strict "zero-COVID" regime in December.


On Saturday, officials said 60,000 people with COVID-19 had died in hospitals since China's policy U-turn, a roughly ten-fold increase from previously reported figures, but still short of expectations of international experts, who have said China could see more than a million COVID-related deaths this year.


China's Center for Disease Control (CDC) and National Health Commission (NHC) did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment.


The doctors in this article declined to be named because they are not permitted to speak to the media.


Several said they were told such guidance came from "the government", though none knew from which department, a common situation in China when politically sensitive instructions are disseminated.


Three other doctors at public hospitals in different cities said they were unaware of any such guidance.


One of them, a senior emergency room doctor in Shandong province, said doctors were issuing death certificates based on the actual cause of death, but "how to categorise" those deaths is up to the hospitals or local officials.


'LOOKS LOW'


Since the start of the pandemic, which first emerged three years ago in its central city of Wuhan, China has drawn heavy criticism for not being transparent over the virus - an accusation it has repeatedly rejected.

Before Saturday, China was reporting five or fewer COVID deaths per day. Of the nearly 60,000 COVID-related fatalities since Dec. 8 it announced on Saturday since, fewer than 10% were caused by respiratory failure because of COVID. The rest resulted from a combination of COVID and other diseases, Jiao Yahui, head of the Bureau of Medical Administration under the National Health Commission (NHC), said on Saturday.


Michael Baker, a public health scholar at the University of Otago in New Zealand, said the updated death toll still "looks low" compared with the high level of infection in China.


"Most countries are finding that most deaths from COVID are caused directly by the infection rather than by a combination of COVID and other diseases," he said. "By contrast, reported deaths in China are mainly (90%) a combination of COVID and other infections, which also suggests that deaths directly from COVID infection are under-reported in China."


Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said it was unclear whether the new data accurately reflected actual fatalities, in part because the numbers include only deaths in hospitals.


The World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday recommended that China monitor excess mortality to gain a fuller picture of the impact of the surge in COVID.


Excess mortality is when the number of deaths for a given period is higher than it should be relative to historical averages.


TESTING ENDS


Seven people told Reuters that COVID was not mentioned on the death certificates of their recently deceased relatives, although the relatives had either tested positive for the virus or displayed COVID-like symptoms.


Social media has been full of similar reports.


When a Beijing resident surnamed Yao brought his COVID-positive 87-year-old aunt to a large public hospital late last month with breathing problems, doctors did not ask whether she had the virus and did not mention COVID, Yao said.


“The hospital was full of patients, all in their 80s or 90s, and doctors had no time to talk to anyone,” Yao said, adding that everyone seemed to have similar COVID-like symptoms.


Patients, including his aunt, were rigorously tested, although not for COVID, before being told they had pneumonia. But the hospital told him it had run out of medicine, so they could only go home.


Ten days later she recovered.


Medical staff at public hospitals in several cities in China said PCR testing, which under "zero COVID" was a near daily requirement for large parts of the population, has now been all but abandoned.


Taking the focus off testing may be the best way to maximise resources when hospitals have been overwhelmed, two experts told Reuters.


Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at Hong Kong University, said almost all patients with acute respiratory problems would have COVID: "Since antivirals are in very short supply, I don't think laboratory testing will make much difference to case management."


'BE CAUTIOUS'


A senior doctor in the eastern city of Ningbo said physicians there were told to be “cautious” about saying someone had died of COVID, but if they did wish to do so they would need to get approval.


No other disease required the same level of “caution” for entry on a death certificate, he said.


The doctor at a large public hospital in Shanghai said that weekly death rates since the recent COVID wave were three or four times higher than normal for this time of year. Most had more than one illness, but COVID worsened their conditions, she said.


"On the death certificate we fill in one main cause of death, and two to three sub-causes of death, so we basically leave out COVID," she said.


"There’s no other way but for us to follow the orders given by the hospital, which come from the government. I am too unimportant to make any decision," she said.

In China, doctors say they are discouraged from citing COVID on death certificates

The awkward fact is, Chinese life expectancy now exceeds that of the USA. This occurred during the Covid pandemic- for the first time ever. In HK, it is in fact the worlds highest- exceeding Japan. That speaks louder than any (usually biased) western media coverage- so lets see if it remains the case. The Omicron variant has extremely low morbidity & hospitalisation rates- the Chinese vaccines are quite effective there, but of course there will be an inevitable increase in Covid deaths just like in the west when things 'opened up'.

China tells the world that the Maoist madness is over – we can all make money again

China has extended the olive branch to Western democracies and global capitalists alike, promising a new era of detente after the coercive “wolf warrior” diplomacy of the last five years.


Vice-premier Liu He, the economic plenipotentiary of Xi Jinping’s China, told a gathering of business leaders and ministers in Davos that China is back inside the tent and eager to restore the money-making bonhomie of the golden years.


“We must let the market play the fundamental role in the allocation of resources, and let the government play a better role. Some people say China will go for the planned economy. That’s by no means possible,” he said.


“All-round opening-up is the basis of state policy and the key driver of economic progress. China’s national reality dictates that opening up to the world is a must, not an expediency. We must open up wider and make it work better,” he told the World Economic Forum.


The choice of Liu He as messenger of conciliation is lost on nobody. Both an economic moderniser and a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, his charm offensive in Davos hits two global constituencies at the same time.


It is a subtle way of telling the world that the neo-Maoist fever of Xi Jinping’s second term has subsided since the 20th Party Congress in October. Xi’s third term is going to be a giant pivot back to international harmony.


China is calling off its ruinous assault on technology companies – the country’s most dynamic entrepreneurs, but also the regime’s most powerful political foes. The green shoots of the next Chinese economic boom are already emerging.

“The technology sector is moving full steam ahead. We’re seeing the inflows come back through our China Connect and have got a hundred tech companies lining up to go public,” said Nicolas Aguzin, head of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The Hang Seng tech index is up 60pc from its nadir last year.


Aguzin said in Davos that China’s “remediation process” – a euphemism for the political purge of big business – has run its course. The Chinese people have accumulated $2 trillion in excess savings and are raring to go with an enormous spending spree.


It will act as a countercyclical buffer for the world as Europe and America struggle with recessionary forces. “China’s post-Covid reopening is the most positive catalyst for global markets this year,” he said.


Vice-premier Liu He’s conciliatory pitch is also a signal that China will return to its longstanding position as a stakeholder of the existing Davosian global order rather than a revisionist power determined to overthrow it.


“We need to uphold an effective international economic order. We have to abandon the cold war mentality,” he said, pledging a push for “economic re-globalisation”. There was not a whiff of criticism of the US or the West. No speech of this kind has been delivered by a top Chinese leader for years.


It goes well beyond the first signs of a tentative thaw at a US-China summit late last year, suggesting that China’s 20th Party Congress marked a watershed moment in Chinese strategic thinking. Whether it is authentic or tactical remains to be seen.


In a sense, the new policy is a recognition by the Communist Party that the democracies are not as weak as they looked a year or two ago. The West still controls the machinery of global finance, technology transfer, and maritime trade. The war in Ukraine has revealed that it can be remarkably unified and has a backbone of steel when seriously provoked.


Xi’s profession of friendship “without limits” for Vladimir Putin is surely an embarrassment he would rather forget – though there are some advantages for Beijing in a dependent Russia with nowhere else to turn. Russia’s military has been exposed as a paper tiger. Its value as an ally is enormously degraded.


Above all, Xi Jinping discovered that the US controls the global supply of advanced semiconductor chips, the primary fuel of the 21st century technological economy.


Without that you are nothing. China’s repeated efforts to close the chip gap have all faltered, and the latest has just been abandoned due to prohibitive costs.


Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s president, struck a more sceptical tone in Davos. Speaking immediately before Liu He, she accused China of actively trying to poach European green-tech companies with subsidies, labour dumping and regulatory arbitrage, while systematically obstructing foreign access to its internal market.


“Competition on net zero must be based on a level playing field. We will not hesitate to open investigations if markets are being distorted by such subsidies,” she said.


The White House remains wary of the softer Chinese tone. The violation of the 1984 accords on Hong Kong is now an irreversible fact. Military islands are still being developed in the territorial waters of other countries in the South China Sea. It will take more than words to repair that diplomatic damage.


Deng Xiaoping long pursued a policy of “bide your time and hide your strength”. When Xi Jinping abandoned this restraint and switched suddenly to a posture of impatient menace he revealed what China might be like as the global hegemon.


This reached its apotheosis in pandemic triumphalism. It was not an attractive spectacle. Switching back even more suddenly to global happy talk will be a hard sell.


Liu He said China’s property bust had pushed the economy close to a systemic crisis, requiring a “blood transfusion” and massive state bail-out of the mortgage system to restore confidence. The worst is now over and the economy should be back to pre-pandemic trend growth of 5pc or more this year.


Officially, growth was 3pc last year. The proxy measure of Capital Economic suggested that it was far worse, with output contracting almost 7pc in November (year-on-year), before Beijing threw in the towel on zero-Covid. By this measure GDP is barely higher than it was before the pandemic.


A V-shaped economic rebound is now on the cards. China’s property curbs – the “three red lines” – have largely been lifted. All levers of policy are stimulative.


For the rest of the world, the implications are bittersweet. The risk is that surging Chinese demand for oil, gas, and commodities risks setting off another round of imported inflation before Europe and America have fully recovered.


Strap your belts for another turbulent year.

China tells the world that the Maoist madness is over – we can all make money again

Originally Posted by sabang

The awkward fact is, Chinese life expectancy now exceeds that of the USA. This occurred during the Covid pandemic- for the first time ever. In HK, it is in fact the worlds highest- exceeding Japan. That speaks louder than any (usually biased) western media coverage- so lets see if it remains the case. The Omicron variant has extremely low morbidity & hospitalisation rates- the Chinese vaccines are quite effective there, but of course there will be an inevitable increase in Covid deaths just like in the west when things 'opened up'.

So what if they live longer?

They've been locked in their tiny, rabbit hutch apartments, cocooned from any real threats, living out their miserable, controlled lives.

Who the fuck wants to live longer like that?

I bet they hide their suicide figures the same way they hid their covid deaths.

Yes, I too am of the view that they should have 'opened up' sooner- bear in mind I lived in freewheeling, vibrant HK for 12 years, and I know for a fact the restrictions were really chafing there. But they didn't, and it is hard to knock their approach from a public health perspective. Of course it's an entirely different perspective if Big Biz rules the roost...

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

So what if they live longer?

Any nation where folks are living longer and birth rate is lower has a problem. Less working folks to support retired folks means gov must find revenue to pay retirees and/or raise retirement age.

It's a problem politically and economically.

They've already raised the pensionable age in Oz from 65 to 67. Makes you wonder how Japan gets by- they've got the oldest population. Then you've got the Filipines- they breed like rabbits and hence a young population, but are mostly poor.