Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) concession to end Beijing’s “zero COVID” policy is a rare accomplishment for any protest in China. While giving credit to the “Blank Paper Movement,” where the credit is due, there were indications that the COVID-19 pandemic in China had surged beyond belief. Xi might be simply leveraging on the protests to lift quarantine restrictions and disguise his inability to handle the pandemic.
The recent deaths of 21 retired professors and 12 retired staffers from Tsinghua University and Peking University within one month is the tip of the iceberg that betrays Beijing’s massive fatalities under the surface.
Infections and deaths are also exploding in other cities to the extent that medicine stocks are running out or are priced at hundreds of US dollars. The human plight might be exploding on an unimaginable scale.
China was among the first to develop a COVID-19 vaccine by means of an inactivated virus, which was the basis for vaccines against polio, as developed by Jonas Salk in the 1950s, and rabies and hepatitis A, for example. Inactivated virus vaccines cannot infect cells, but stimulate antibody-mediated responses, and therefore have weaker and shorter-lived immune response.
According to a study published in The Lancet and cited by The Economist earlier this year, one or two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine produced in China by Sinovac Biotech Ltd (科興) has much lower efficacy than Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine in all age groups in general, but among older people in particular.
However, a third dose of Sinovac’s vaccine showed about equal efficacy for the earlier variants, but does not protect as well against the Omicron subvariants of SARS-CoV-2, Bloomberg reported.
The sad truth is that national pride has led the Chinese government to reject outside help. China’s authoritarian model of combating the COVID-19 pandemic did not champion the protection of lives, especially those aged 65 and older.
By contrast, Taiwan leveraged its experience in containing the 2003 SARS outbreak by responding to the COVID-19 crisis with rapid measures, early deployment, prudent action and transparency. The latest data show that among 8.5 million infections, only 0.45 percent became seriously ill.
The lack of transparency in the authoritarian model of disease prevention has left many serious questions to be asked. What is the population percentage inoculated with three doses of vaccines? If the Chinese vaccines were effective, why was a strict lockdown necessary?
As many retirees, including a number of well-known people, died suddenly, what are the real-life efficacy rates among different age groups? Did China stock enough medicines to treat patients? How effective are the Chinese vaccines against serious symptoms, and what are the chances of mutated pathogens developing if many people become seriously ill?
This last question is critical, as Western vaccines might prove to be much less effective against variants that might develop. That means the COVID-19 pandemic could easily re-emerge around the world as a result.
Demanding the Chinese government to be open and transparent required a nationwide protest to protect lives in China, and beyond, which allowed the international community to better prepare and offer help. In fact, Washington said it would help China deal with the surge of COVID-19 infections if Beijing requests assistance.
The Chinese government must make a choice to either cover up the problem for the sake of national pride, or be open to outside help to save lives in an unprecedented crisis.
Only a democratic government that upholds human rights and freedom of speech can offer transparency. This pandemic can be an opportunity for China to grow into a democratic and free country, and to benefit people at home and abroad.
James J.Y. Hsu is a retired professor of physics.
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
RSS