When lockdowns started soon after COVID-19 hit, nobody could have predicted the unintended short and long-term consequences. Sure, lockdowns were necessary to halt the spread of the virus, but there’s debate surrounding the psychological–and political–costs of such measures, especially on young people. Straight Arrow News contributor Larry Lindsey argues the costs to both the U.S. and Chinese populations go far beyond the economics, albeit in different ways:
You may have heard recently that China is lifting the very draconian lockdowns imposed on its largest city and financial capital, Shanghai, in part also on Beijing, and other cities in China. Now, there was actually a long political struggle to get to this point.
The general party secretary, Xi Jinping, was the architect of their so-called zero-COVID policy, where they were going to impose lockdowns until COVID went away. Well, they lifted them when the amount of COVID was down, but it had hardly gone away. The victor in this debate was a gentleman named Li Keqiang, who by the way, he is an economist, kudos to him — and is the Head-of-State, whereas Xi Jinping is the head of the Communist Party.
You know, the debates go on even in dictatorships, although rarely do they get to be as public as this one. But the effects of the lockdowns were devastating. And that’s what drove Li to urge them to be removed. China’s official GDP growth target for the year is 5.5%. The first quarter came in below that at 4.8%. And the second quarter, which is when the lock downs really took effect is probably going to come in at zero growth. Now, that makes it impossible for them to hit their official growth target. In reality, the Chinese statistics mill, which is rigged, may still produce that number, but even for them it’s going to be a real stretch. This was an economic disaster.
But there were profound effects even beyond the economics. The main one was a breakdown in the social contract between the Communist Party and the people. It goes like this: The Communist Party delivers improving living standards, some modest degree of freedom, in return for which the public doesn’t complain. What the lockdowns did was to keep people locked in their apartment buildings — you couldn’t get out, there were gates put in front of the apartment buildings, no exit permitted. And a lot of people actually went hungry because there were problems of going out to get food — you had to hope someone was going to deliver it. This was rough. Now, this was a big abrogation of the social contract in the view of many.
Well, what’s going to happen to China? Only time will tell, but the U.S. — which had less draconian lockdowns — has a much more developed mental health care state. And from the Chinese point-of-view, has a lot of so-called “snowflakes” here who, you know, complain all the time. In spite of all that, our numbers were really horrible.
