China Against Capitalist-Induced Entropy
How should China behave when capital demands the lives of its citizens in order to continue the onward march of profit? Forces guided by capitalism—beyond and within the borders of China—threaten China’s economic, political, and social existence by the refusal to allow for the prudent and necessary control of a disease that through continued reinfection has the potential to significantly alter the life expectancy and mental acuity of its victims.
Capitalist Pressure with Western Characteristics
What is pressure to a modern superpower nation-state with a population of over 1.4 billion souls, and what are these capitalist forces exerting this undefined ‘pressure’ on it? Pressure is economic, pressure is social, pressure comes from T.V. diplomats and it comes from the unwashed masses yearning for understanding why the price of milk has shot up and why the chicken they had not just a year ago is ten euros now instead of four-and-a-half.
China has come from the fields, into the workshops, and onto the world stage since the first five-year plan in 1953 under Mao. After decades of hard earned industrialization—and a most interesting foray into co-opting capitalism in order to slingshot themselves closer to a socialist paradise under Deng Xiaoping—China has opened up to, and participated in the ‘global market’ as how it would be defined by neoliberalism. With foreign capital influx, comes foreign capitalist pressures. Economic pressure or imperialism-as-a-service can be the result of actions such as lending and borrowing, or the withholding of borrowing or the suspension of repayment1. For China this simply put borrowing trap is dim as its economy is large and important enough to supplant any diplomatically uncouth calls for recovering an excessive amount of debts in service of reducing SARS-CoV-2 (SARS-2) restrictions.
Economic pressures from capital-holders (companies, extremely high net worth individuals, country’s whose government has been essentially subsumed by companies) come in shapes and sizes that defy the imagination of the most gifted child. A key pressure point has been the signaling of the reduction of foreign investment of capital by companies upset by the restrictive lockdowns and testing routines of the Chinese government2. This signaling is done by proxy as major capital holders play all angles and most understand the concept of not pulling the trigger until their secondary manufacturing scheme is at least partially fledged and ready to absorb the necessary burden from a transition away from China. As China’s manufacturing costs have increased due to higher labour costs this provides a dual purpose: the real transition away from China due to the actual increase in the cost of labour3, and a clever ploy to help reduce the SARS-2 ‘burden’ in their home nations. The real economic decrease because of continued precautions from the pandemic in China serves as a perfect set piece to scare subservient governments in reducing their own anti-SARS policies when framed deceptively. This reduction in anti-SARS policies gives control back to companies and pro-company parties, allowing for an assumed increase in profit due to an assumed increase in consumption, health system collapse be damned.
A more multi pronged pressure is by pro-SARS countries coverage of China in their relevant media organs, this helps boost the public’s already warped perception of the role of SARS-2 in their own lives and allows them to shoulder a greater burden under the guise of ignorance as a socially cohesive glue.
Local and national news punditry serves as a proxy for almost all of the publicly-facing pressure against China. An all-out front is being played against China and its SARS-2 restrictions as the state—currently facing the brunt of the attack—is one of the very last places on the planet to hold out against these pressures.
News Punditry as Proxy for Thought
There is a severe defect in many news pundits and many experts: they were almost invariably trained under neoliberal institutions whose aims almost always never to report the exact truth, but something adjacent to the truth. This adjacent thing, created under the aegis of what they believe in their heart of hearts to be their true outpouring of love for freedom, would contain a mixture of their earnest attempts to process reality through what someone may call their capitalist reality, their actions manufacturing consent.
In relation to China this means incidentally misinterpreting China’s means by every way possible, no conscious effort needed; the reality in China must not only be shifted to fit the pundit’s reality, but must also be explained in a way that conforms with their unassuming peers. This projection beamed into masses eyes thickens the walls of this self-imposed ‘reality’ and makes escaping it an ever greater feat.
SARS-CoV-2
Putting things plainly: socialism and by extension communism has a far different threshold of acceptable losses in which SARS-2 in its destruction would snuff out millions of lives from the disease directly, then a few short decades after, tens if not a hundred million more from severe SARS-induced long-term illness. Medical resources in China would be ground to dust, healthcare spaces would resemble current clinics in the nearly neo-feudalistic countries: understaffed medical practitioners eking out an existence on poverty wages with severely limited supplies while hollow factories lie in waste, these medical wage-slaves begging for scraps from the tables of their country’s capital-holding hostage takers, a nation under back breaking extraction; parasitism.
The medical field collapsing due to expert mismanagement in some Western nations.
SARS-2 and its affect on the human immune system is devastating as the newest variants are transmissible4. Its functions are reminiscent of immunodeficiency viruses in that the depletion and exhaustion of T cells—a kind of lymphocyte or white blood cell—give the potential for other afflictions to take route, temporarily working immunomodulating agents notwithstanding. This lack of efficacy against something that with repeated exposure acts as ratcheting gear advancing the victim towards epithelial lining degradation5, severe mental discombobulation, and immune breakdown poses one of the greatest health threats seen in modern human history. The Chinese government like all governments is fully aware of the effect this disease has on the population, its actions are different than others not because of novel information but because of its government’s communist trappings and its top political leadership understanding the game capitalism likes to play. While one-by-one capitalist countries give up against fighting the virus and frames it as success, China keeps fighting the good fight.
The Pundit Class Strikes
There is rarely a subject rightists and centrists agree on more than enforcing the protection of corporate profits, as the protection of profit allows their reality to continue to exist in its current form, this same reality that allows useless commodities to flow into their children’s wishlists and for their isolated and neutered lives to continue to be distracted by consumption. But, ensuring the state of capital by way of chastising China on the world stage in regards to SARS-2 restrictions is a higher calling still.
Convinced of their truth that capitalism is not only still needed but the only system that can exist, neoliberal individuals and groups such as the New York Times, the Fox gremlins and the Washington Bezoars, the pundit classes, and expert-minors and majors on social media generally believe in these three things: that SARS-2 restrictions is a major social misstep, it is antithetical to the dogma that acceptable losses must exist for the continuity of ‘civilised’ society—see the way the existence of the disabled is completely ignored and the deeply racist way Chinese citizens are not talked about as real human beings but rather as robots. That SARS-2 restrictions are a major economic error, in that China’s decreased economic output combined with the mismanagement of the population of yore will permanently set the country back with infantilizing and Sinophobic talk of ‘for their own good’ and the safety of ‘region-wide and global stability’, that they should take steps to wind-down their zero-COVID policy. Lastly and most obtusely: that these SARS-2 restrictions strangle the freedom of the people, the freedom to not wear masks when sick, the freedom to become a modern-day Typhoid Mary—the truest pioneers of rugged individualism that live and spread and die daily in the ‘more enlightened’ societies.
A pundit based in Hong Kong, seemingly giddy in excitement at mass illness.
Recognition that many countries have acquiesced to acceptable losses in regards to SARS-2 has to not only be accepted, but enforced globally. One of the most damaging concepts for capitalism is in regards to its immense cruelty; to have an alternative system exist at any point in time, be it in history or in the present that does away with this feature of capitalist existence is fatal. Anything that can be compared with what current capitalist reality imposes must be stricken, allies need to be coerced, votes need to be whipped, meetings need to be had about ‘moving on’, lives ‘need to be lived’, books that will serve as kindling by month’s end need to be written, enemies need to cross aisles and shake hands. This is critical for capitalism to keep people in their slumber, an eye lazily opening even for a millimeter causes a paroxysm on par with bullet leaving a chamber. To have China be economically successful in any capacity, in any minor way, and simultaneously able to control the proliferation of the virus pierces the heart of the narrative that there is no other choice but capitalism. So damaging would this be that capital forces and their governments would rather gouge the eyes out of every citizen and have them walk the world blind if it means keeping their hoard. A thing they’ve done successfully with concepts such as masking.
Like a parent admonishing a child the various commentators call for China to continue being the world’s factory lot in spite of SARS-2. The idea that China does not know better, and needs a public beating about what to do with their economy is a prospect so laughable it could only come down from the most overstuffed turkeys of the most soulless executive suites, men fat on zero-interest loans convinced they are truly Midas with an off-switch straight to the wannabe Tracy Enid Flicks of the newsrooms they own. This argument reaches no human ears when price gouging by companies is noticed by even the most uninformed paupers. Truly this argument only serves as a barely veiled pretext for industrialists to exit their positions in the country with no consequence.
Random commentators decrying the state of investment in China.
Thirdly, the saddest of the beliefs is this: the freedom of the people deserves to exist whenever it serves capital interests, when it does not then it is a suffocation of true free speech. This pattern of manipulation is practiced by most often by the most staunchly fascistic of the commentator class but it can be seen in the usual centrists easily too. Capital evangelists online and myopic news anchors would decry the color of the sky if it meant it would serve capital better. Whenever a mismanagement is committed by an incompetent official during a SARS-2 lockdown of a building or a block—as there only exists imperfect systems and less imperfect systems—and there is justified outrage of one kind or another on WeChat, or in someone’s apartment complex where the Shequ(社区) or resident committees are being overzealous, you can find the most mundane of people giving their two cents on the matter. “Why would China allow these poor people to be locked up, what did they do wrong?” Says the man ‘just asking questions’ as a contagious disease with the characteristics outlined above have been potentially exposed to the now isolated individual. The responses to the common threads of a pinch of prevention is worth a pound of cure are not only boring but incredibly simple to see through. Do they ever get tired of pretending they care about people’s freedom let alone a group of people that they don’t even consider fully human?
Fascistic media and political entities using China as a bludgeon against domestic enemies.
The November Protests
China is fighting a battle against capitalist entropy—99% of countries outside of China are extremely content with with SARS-2 proliferating internally. The medical, social, psychological cost of doing nothing or the bare minimum will never outweigh the perceived economic cost of zero-COVID. And for most countries there own citizens have been taught to not only accept this behavior but to champion it wherever they go like an olympic torch of ignorance6. Every country on the periphery of China aside from North Korea only cares about SARS-2 restrictions in relation to trade with China, so while China attempts to stamp out SARS-2 permanently in its own borders, plague-states the world over let SARS-2 run rampant with no care for its increasingly high cost at all. Capitalist entropy demands that China becomes as infected as possible, to “get it over with”. The mass death, disabling, and sickness must occur so that China can realign itself with the rest of world’s mistakes; this is capital using SARS-2 as a proxy for itself, that it is inevitable as We, Capitalism, is inevitable. Capitalism believes itself to be nature just as SARS-2 is.
While the fight against SARS-2 rages, the people become exhausted by the lack of progress. The constant vigilance against SARS-2 is essentially the same battle as the vigilance against capitalism as an ideology, how difficult of a watch it is. So now, with mismanagement pounding at the gates of the less focused officials in China, we have a situation where people are upset, tired, lying flat (躺平) then letting it rot (摆烂), worn down, sick of it all. Capitalism has been borrowed to accelerate and improve living conditions in China for the past few decades, but now outside of China it’s truly gotten out of control and begun eating itself, and inside the country some of the very people socialism is protecting from this outside entropy have started to ponder alternatives to their current way of living, their search for something better leading them to and fro—a frantic political meandering—all due to being under the hot lamp of mismanagement. All of the people’s demands are completely natural and justifiable, who among any of us wants to live under bumbling fools? But the answer is not sacrificing the country to the altar of capitalism, the answer will never be that.
Conclusion
To be frank, China as a state will not survive have a very hard time if SARS-CoV-2 is allowed to spread unabated. There needs to be internal reform and re-education of the offending local governments, the bad eggs of the Chinese government needs to be cracked and the Shanghai clique needs to be solved as they are some of the worst offenders. This long and hard battle of reorganizing of poor management sects is paramount in quelling the dissatisfaction of the people. Food needs to be plentiful and care needs to be taken to help those with illnesses not just related to SARS-2 even during quarantine. China needs to be the outcast and to keep SARS-2 out, for the destabilization from SARS-2 deaths and a total medical system collapse would far outpace any effect protests would have on the government.
Capital forces cannot be allowed to win, its entropy must be halted at the borders and preferably also abroad. Any official in China with a complete understanding of Marxism needs to be elevated, for the only ones that can save China from the capitalist beasts at the gate are those who have studied the only weapon that can slay the wolf and advance civilization.
