Xi Hopes 'Zero Covid' Means Total Control

The BBC reports that China's dictator has decided to imprison everyone in Shanghai Disney (among other places) until they test negative for Covid.

In addition, anyone who has visited the park since Thursday must "provide three negative test results over three consecutive days" or... The story doesn't say, but I presume those people will be under house arrest wherever they happened to have been when this ludicrous order went out.

As if treating human beings like cattle weren't enough, the government also spit in their faces and told them it was raining when it claimed that the above outrages were in the name of the "people's war to stop the spread of the virus."

That "war" was lost long ago, as anyone with half a brain knows.

Here's what life in China is like and, apparently has been for some time:

As well as the theme park, surrounding areas such as the shopping street were also abruptly closed shortly after 11:30 local time (3:30 GMT).

Videos posted on Chinese social media site Weibo showed people rushing to the park's gates following the announcement but finding them already locked.

How the hell can anyone live a halfway normal life if they are subject to arbitrary arrest anywhere or any time? (The pretext that someone in the same general area might have a disease that is harmless to almost anyone is arbitrary for all practical purposes.) This is a practical question, yes, but it is also a psychological one, and I think considering it in this way is the only path to understanding what is an otherwise incomprehensible policy.

Nobody who has considered the vast weight and variety of evidence about Covid from this three-year pandemic can rationally conclude that we are going to be able to eradicate this disease without also eradicating ourselves and its various host animal species.

With modern preventative and treatment options, the disease is as manageable as the flus and colds for which no government presumes to shut down amusement parks and shopping centers at the drop of a hat.

I'm no Sinologist, but I am sure that even China's "face culture" has limits and Xi, were he at all decent, could at some point admit his policy was wrong and move on without -- oh, I don't know -- killing himself.

One cannot understand a policy so grotesque, intrusive and destructive without asking what it accomplishes for its regime that said regime will choose it over things like prosperity, order, or the even the mental health of the people under its control.

For that, we turn to Ayn Rand, whose remarks about a capricious part of American (!) "law" and jurisprudence fit this situation to a tee. In "Antitrust: The Rule of Unreason," Ayn Rand first disposes of a common myth about dictatorships:

It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision. Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable; it is not the known that breaks men's spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictatorship has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear. [bold added]

A bit later, Rand hits the nail on the head even harder:

The threat of sudden destruction, of unpredictable retaliation for unnamed offenses, is a much more potent means of enslavement than explicit dictatorial laws. It demands more than mere obedience; it leaves men no policy save one: to please the authorities; to please -- blindly, uncritically, without standards or principles; to please -- in any issue, matter or circumstance, for fear of an unknowable, unprovable vengeance. [bold added]

This goal is about what I would expect of someone so thin-skinned as to ban Winnie the Pooh after an internet meme.

As if this kind of treatment weren't enough, the Chinese people recently were put on notice when Xi came out as the new Mao. He wants to rule over a broken people.

Let us hope the Chinese are a proud one, and will soon stop tolerating being treated like dogs.

-- CAV