They genuinely care for people and are doing this for their people's best:
Please explain how the continued lockdown in Shanghai is doing good for its citizens vs. not wanting to lose face on an absurd zero covid policy as a way to secure political points?
China's total deaths from covid are likely in the tens of thousands. These "extremely harsh" zero covid policies have saved countless lives in the most populous country in the world (and lives in other countries). This is a pretty bizarre thing to criticize China about. In terms of the total amount of people they've had to lockdown and for the total length each person had to be locked down for, they've done way less than any other major country including the US
Indeed, I was very surprised to run the numbers a few days ago and realize we've been locked down here for around 4 months total on average (not including curfews). Now the lockdowns weren't nearly as severe as those in China, but it's interesting the average Chinese citizens only had to endure a few days of lockdown (obviously the distribution is massively skewed).
Not to be semantic but this can be measured very differently depending on who you ask, and if someone's objective function has deaths weighing much more heavily than personal freedom (actually not an insignificant amount of people in the US as well subscribe to this for covid) then yea that is "good". Else I'm unaware of a universal agreed upon definition of the best tradeoff to make.
this is ridiculous. It can genuinely believe that lockdown is the best approach, even if said approach turns out to be the wrong move. Which is hardly even a settled point.
In fact, it seems like the height of arrogance to think China is making decisions about its greatest city with Western opinion in mind.
Please explain how the continued lockdown in Shanghai is doing good for its citizens vs. not wanting to lose face on an absurd zero covid policy as a way to secure political points?