A health worker in protective gear takes a swab from a man for a nucleic acid test to detect COVID-19 as others line up at a mass testing site on Jan. 24, 2022 in Beijing, China. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
The harsh zero-tolerance policy designed by the ruling Chinese communist regime to eradicate the COVID-19 outbreak seems to have made China a burden, dragging down the economic recovery of the world.
Tang Jingyuan, a current affairs commentator with many years of clinical medical experience, told the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been competing to be dominant and a voice in international society, and in epidemic prevention policy, now that it is obsessed with portraying China as the beneficiary of its harsh move.
“It [the CCP] promoted its zeroing-out model and shaped it up as a symbol of the ‘superiority’ of the regime’s totalitarian rule.” This is the most important reason for the regime’s insistence on its zeroing-out policy, Tang said.
Paramilitary police officers (C) march by as police stand guard at the entrance to the closed Xinfadi market in Beijing on June 13, 2020. Eleven residential estates in south Beijing have been locked down due to a fresh cluster of coronavirus cases linked to the Xinfadi meat market, officials said on June 13. Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images
The strict dynamic zeroing-out policy has failed to stop the epidemic outbreaks.
In early 2022, besides the Delta variant, Omicron indigenous cases and localized outbreaks have broken out in more than 20 provinces and cities across China, including such provinces as Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Guizhou, Heilongjiang, and Guangdong as well as Shanghai and the host city of the 2022 Winter Olympic games Beijing.
China’s aggressive anti-COVID policy keeps the country on lockdown for two years and will act as the number one global political risk in 2022, said Eurasia Group, a United States political risk consulting firm, in a Jan. 3 report.
According to the report, China’s “one-size-fits-all” methods would exacerbate global supply chain disruptions and put more pressure on inflation. “Shipping constraints, Covid-19 outbreaks, and shortages of staff, raw materials, and equipment—all more acute because of China’s zero-Covid policy—will make goods less available,” the report said.
Foreign Companies
An employee wearing a mask as a precaution uses iPhone at a Shanghai Volkswagen of ID.3 during the Wuhan Motor Show 2021 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, on Oct 21, 2021. Photo by Getty Images
The CCP’s zeroing-out regulations have affected the export processing industry in the country’s shipping ports. Japanese semiconductor company Rohm’s Tianjin plant was forced to temporarily shut down on Jan. 9, with no date set for resumption. Meanwhile, Volkswagen of Germany and Toyota of Japan have also announced the suspension of production at their Tianjin plants due to closure management requirements.
Tianjin, a municipality with a population of 13 million, is a well-developed industrial port city. The authorities haven’t yet announced lockdown of the city, but an Epoch Times reporter interviewed many Tianjin residents in recent weeks, who confirmed that Tianjin is basically sealed off and residents have been locked up in their living communities, “All that’s needed is an official [lockdown] notice on TV,” a doctor in Tianjin said.
Xi'an, a semiconductor manufacturing town in China, just ended a 32-day lockdown that brought an inevitable impact on the production of DRAM and NAND memory chips for smartphones, PCs, and servers by Samsung of South Korea and Micron of the United States.
Japanese camera manufacturer Canon announced on January 12 that it is closing its production plant in Zhuhai city, Guangdong Province, a port city near Macau, due to “huge operational difficulties” and “the prolonged outbreak of the COVID virus.” The plant has been operating in China for more than 30 years.
Travel and quarantine restrictions are two difficulties in trading with China, said Frank Rueckert, Germany ambassador in China. “There are uncertainties about risks and potential disadvantages [in China] for foreign businesses and global trade that weigh on the business environment,” reported South China Morning Post on Jan. 18.
According to a Jan. 16 report by Munich Personal RePEc Archive, a network of economists, since China, Germany’s largest importer, imposed a strict lockdown and thereby stopped producing essential intermediate supply goods, German companies faced a devastating supply shortage and even a shutdown crisis, including automotive giants Mercedes, BMW, and Volkswagen.
Chairs are stacked on tables at a restaurant-bar that was closed as a precaution to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, in Beijing on June 19, 2020. Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images
Dr. George Calhoun, Director of the Quantitative Finance Program at Stevens Institute of Technology, said during an interview with New Tang Dynasty television network on Jan. 25 that China’s zeroing out policy is an attempt to sacrifice the economy in exchange for public health, and with the highly contagious Omicron variant, the policy is questionably effective.
In a previous interview, Calhoun said that the sign of a slowdown in China’s economy can be found from its continued downturn in the stock market, while in other countries, markets have surged significantly in the last year or two.
“[China’s] lockdown is going to be one of the factors that will have that type of depressive effect on the financial … on the valuations of Chinese companies,” he said.
The Chinese communist ruling regime has likely underreported the true COVID-19 death rate by 170 times, according to Calhoun’s quantitative calculations.
A Burden to Global Economy
Speaking at the video conference of the World Economic Forum on Jan. 21, Kristalina Georgieva, director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), rarely criticized China’s “zeroing out” policy and called on Beijing to change its prevention and control measures. She said that China’s current approach presents greater risks than benefits.
She warned that with a global outbreak of the highly contagious Omicron, strict restrictions would not only be less effective but would also be a burden on both the Chinese economy and the recovery of the world economy.
The IMF released an annual assessment report on Jan. 28, saying that China’s strict lockdown and prevention measures have kept consumer consumption low, leaving the country’s economy in a “lingering weakness” and that consumption is one of the main factors driving a country’s economy. The IMF also devalued the growth forecast for China’s economy in 2022 to 4.8 percent from its prior rate of 5.7 percent.
Goldman Sachs and Nomura predict that the CCP’s zeroing-out policy will persist until the end of this year, that is, after the 20th Communist Party Congress, according to NIKKEI Asia on Dec. 28, 2021.
Tang Jingyuan holds similar views, saying out of concerns over their political needs, Chinese authorities will not abandon their radical epidemic elimination policy until the convening of the CCP’s 20th Congress, which is expected to produce the next head of the regime.
The 20th CCP Congress will be held in Beijing in the second half of 2022, and the authorities have started to deploy the election of 2,300 delegates to the meeting by the end of this June according to Chinese official media.
Jennifer Bateman is a news writer focused on China.
