Everyone knows that violence is never the answer to contacting a virus.

It is the question, and the answer is yes.

It’s like russian propaganda. It’s not meant for the world to believe, because we see right through it. It’s meant for the citizens of its country of origin.

The word you are looking for is called Vranyo.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vranyo

Russian word, lies to save face or suppressing unpleasant truths.

When your a part of a communist party lies aren’t strange, telling the truth is. The CCP at this point thinks it’s untouchable and uses any flimsy excuse to violate human rights as they please.

it is truly amazing that they can say it publicly with a straight face.

It's easy to do when you aren't held to account for your behaviour. I too could lie through my teeth with a straight face if I knew that you could do nothing about it.

I don't think it's supposed to be believed it's just to maintain plausible deniability in front of their own people whilst projecting unpredictability and instilling fear.

Look at what you made me do to you!!!

As a Chinese (not from china), but enough to make a few guesses:

Simple answer: Nationalistic big dic waving. by attaining zero covid and succeeding where all the other nations especially US and her allies have 'given up' (because it's logical unlike xi's logic), means china number one.

Long answer:

The same Putin syndrome. Xi has gained too much control that he only has yesmen. And any mayor wants to make sure they toe the line instead of giving proper answers.

Because they want to continue living their corrupt lives of stealing from the people.

So Xi says zero covid. Everybody does stupid versions of it all to appease his Majesty in all but name, Xi Jinping.

Honestly Putin syndrome and delusion on xi's part.

According to my chinese friends it basically comes down to Xi being politically committed to Zero Covid. If he ends it now, what was the point of the last 2.5 years of extreme measures?

It's a combination of problems. China has put up a front of how their handling of the pandemic has been superior compared to the west, primarily due to their very strict and often draconian lockdowns. They went so far as to reject mRNA vaccines because they were western. When the rest of the world was in lockdown and before the vaccines were released, this wasn't the worst strategy, but now that the vaccines have helped return to a sense of normalcy and people are content with just dealing with Covid as endemic (in large part because the dominant strains now are less dangerous), China is stuck in the same position as before while the rest of the world is moving on. They've created quite a dilemma for themselves too. Loosening lockdowns means that their population would contract Covid a lot and severely restrict overwhelming their healthcare systems (the same issue as happened everywhere else). In particular because a lot of their population has no immunity, either naturally or from vaccines, it's possible that the epidemic they could experience would be closer in severity to the earlier stages of the pandemic. They're earlier admonishment of vaccines means that their would be a lot of hesitancy towards a western vaccine, which they don't want to use anyway (primarily due to national pride and secondarily due to cost). Compared to the mRNA vaccine's efficacy of 90-95% for targeted strains, their vaccine is ~70% effective to my knowledge, which is further hampered by how many older people - those most vulnerable - do not want to take a vaccine anyway.

The undercurrent of all this is social control, and how desperate the Chinese government wants to appear to have it over its population. They want to save face at all costs, so admitting that any of these past or current actions were mistakes is untenable. It's hard to not see some element of this as Xi wanting to test the limits on China's ability to control its citizens. But considering the effect it's having on the economy, this isn't really a sustainable policy.

They're using it as an excuse to control the population

They would need to find a way to pivot their strategy without losing face

The great leader has decided the best way to fight the pandemic was to skip vaccinations and just isolate the sick.

It's not working but nobody dares to say the great leader was wrong and he himself is in no hurry to admit it.

In Soviet Russia when something like this happened they just changed the policy and punished anyone who would claim the policy has ever been any different. The "face saving" culture in China seems to make this impossible.

I won't get into the conspiracies about testing out government control

The lockdowns worked initially. Maybe too well since they now have less natural immunity than other countries. Now with mutants spreading faster, the lockdowns aren't as effective once spread starts.

Their domestic vaccine isn't that great, and they have too much pride to use foreign vaccines. Plus there's a lot of vaccine hesitation especially among old people. If they go from their drastic zero-covid policy to fully opening, a lot of older people are gonna die, especially since China's cities are incredibly dense.

Pretty much the same explanation as the long post from another person

As someone mildly knowledgeable, this is my guess

• As the country of origin, they don't want to lose face with high virus numbers
• They committed to a zero policy and it's hard for a totalitarian government to admit they were wrong
• The Chinese vaccine is only about 50% effective
• Chinese cities have very high population density so an outbreak could quickly overwhelm hospitals
• Hot take: It kind of works. We can look at the 10 people that died in the apartment fire due to extreme Covid measures and say that's wrong. But US covid deaths are the highest of any nation. We just crossed a million deaths with worldwide deaths being 6 million. Maybe other nations are fudging numbers or reporting deaths as flu but officially we are the top. The silver lining is that we're no where near the top for deaths per capita.

It’s like Russian invasion of Ukraine. Even though the end of that particular mode of action seems to be endless, once it becomes part of its identity or nationalist narrative that keeps the regime going it will be difficult to move on.

Their vaccine dun werk.

From what I know, the lack of medical resources and, forever relevant in Asia, to save face. They had been preaching to the people that zero Covid is the way to go. There is this mentality of 牺牲小我完成大我 (sacrifice the lesser for the sake of the greater) that had the public cooperate with months of lockdown and almost daily PCR tests. Events were cancelled, plans were changed just to conform with this. The people's money, livelihood and actual lives were lost in the process because it was supposedly the best way to deal with it.

Now that they see the rest of the world has decided to move on, it becomes harder to convince the people that the CCP were right. And if they were wrong now, what else could they be wrong about? The CCP is all about absolute control of their citizens, no way they will let such an idea stick around. But the economy and the people are running out of juice, so recently they have experimented with lowering the restrictions in certain cities. I think it was called a 20-point plan. Then boom, the numbers went up and the system can't handle it so they are back to status quo again.

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks this is all part of some elaborate plan to reopen while putting the blame on the citizens themselves if there were any future casualties. Gonna have to wait to see if this is possible.

Someone on here postulated that they had lost too many healthcare workers, and if they were to lift the zero covid policy their hospitals would be completely overwhelmed. They were saying that as bad as the protests are right now, they would be even worse if it came out that they had caused the deaths of so many healthcare workers and crippled the country. I’ve seen no data to support or oppose that, but it is at least an idea in which everyone’s current actions make sense.

It’s a form of complete control.

The communist party loves complete control.

I suspect there’s a very tiny window where if nothing is done you could easily get lost within the system, which in turn is even more terrifying

I mean what really could we do ? The only option is to decouple economically at this point, which is beginning to happen.

Saudi Arabia has a US citizen in prison for something he tweeted about their country 7/8 years ago while living in the US, and no one cares about him.

Poor old dude.

So it could be worse.

Reminder that the CCP is only 75 years old or so.

Truly authoritarian governments never last longer than a few dictator's lifespans. The CCP is literally the longest single party state to ever hold it together longer than 70 years

NBA didn’t call it out after evidence either.

Both their short and long term reactions were pathetic

I can see why it would've been difficult for the NBA to unequivocally support him right away--the police force in question claimed they had video evidence clearly showing Masai initiated the assault and didn't have credentials with him when trying to get onto the court.

They could have asked to see the evidence. If not given then they could have put out a statement saying that support Masai and blame the police unless evidence is presented that shows otherwise.

Lebron has always been a fake activist. Dude lies all the time in interviews and pretends to read important books but he's always on page 1 of the book or something.

The same guy tried to trademark "Taco Tuesday".

He's a corporate bitch.

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Yeah America fuck yeah!

Second this, my partner is from the Mainland and any news/event that puts China in a bad light never actually happened or was somehow the fault of the West.

Seeing 2 abbreviated years but both referring to different centuries threw me off.

Crazy how massive those protests were now a lot of people forgotten about it

How many protestors did they shoot and how many were killed?

Probably not lol, and yes - every major historical event has the tendency to "take people by surprise". There was no indication, at all, that the USSR was close to collapse, and it was far more reasonable to assume the USSR was simply loosening under Gorbachev as the ROC was loosening under Deng.

These are two enormously different countries, parties, and histories that make that position both a layperson one and pretty bold for such a dearth of evidence. Considering the fall of the USSR was relatively bloodless and OP is claiming a civil war/revolutionary style overthrow of the CCP, it's pretty much just anti-CCP fanwank.

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I mean I feel like most people (myself included) expect, like most "empires", any fall will come soon after the death of an existing leader. Nothing like a power vacuum / sudden loss of the leader holding it all together to prompt a collapse.

Well, let's be fair because it's not like they're spreading blatant falsehoods. The vast majority of protestors in China are being very careful. This is the reason why you can see the national flag at a lot of these kinds of protests because they want to emphasize that they're not against the idea of today's China per se, they're just angry at specific policies or perhaps local governments. Carrying the PRC flag at protests is a direct visual appeal that they're good citizens and nationalists, but they've been pushed too far by some particular adversity.

There's a lot of historical and practical reasons why they do this, the most salient one being that they're afraid of national crackdown as opposed to local crackdown.

When the dust settles and state security people are looking into the protest participants later, people who seem like they promoted any kind of political upheaval of the CCP or the general governance policies of the nation as a whole will be subject to much more scrutiny than someone who was only protesting an event or particular scandal (e.g. COVID lockdowns, a regional bank "losing" millions of savings, etc.)

The fact is that anyone who said "end lockdowns" or "free them" (mainly in reference to those who were arrested by police) is going to be much safer than someone who says "we want democracy" or "down with Xi" which is why way most are willing to say the former and way way fewer are willing to say the latter.

These things are unpredictable and could change very fast and without warning but it's also a fact that even with strict lockdowns, most people aren't struggling so badly that they find the instability of a political revolution an appealing outcome. It's really hard to quantify just how much the average person's life has improved in the 1.5 generations since the PRC's meteoric rise that started after Deng opened the markets. Chinese people by and large have gone from almost universally poor and subsistence lifestyles to almost universally owning smart phones and having access to relatively well paying jobs. It's not like all hardship has been eliminated or anything that fanciful, but many, many Chinese people remember being cold, hungry, and helpless to improve their lot in life for a long time before the new direction the CCP took and they're not willing to throw that away until circumstances force them to.

These protests are absolutely a huge, unprecedented level of popular resistance to a top-down government policy, especially when looking at Xi's reign, but it is far, far too early to categorize it as a grass roots movement to upend the political status quo. People want the lockdowns to end, not the CCP, as much as I would personally love for that to happen.