Why China is Suffering Several Debilitating Problems

Why is China suffering several debilitating problems due to the lack of an effective vaccine? According to CanSino, and the last from Gao’s team in partnership with Anhui Zhifei Longcom, the effectiveness of the vaccines range from just over 50% to 79%, based on what the companies have said.

This is compared to Pfizer-BioNTech, which has an effectiveness of around 95%. However, the actual effectiveness of the Chinese vaccine is up for debate. Peter Zeihan, a geopolitical writer, consultant, and author, stated that the “Chinese vaccine does not work”.

The problem with getting information from China is that it is a centralised and dictatorial state, meaning getting precise information is hard to gather. The state regularly gives false reporting; for example, the Chinese government accidentally discounted 100 million Chinese citizens.

China countryside — Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash

Xi Jinping, leader of China

According to Peter Zeihan, China is a fascist regime which derives its legitimacy from economic success. Still, the economy is failing due to internal structural problems with the one-child policy that started in 1979, which led to the fall of the Chinese labour market.

The Chinese population is not at a sustainable level of 2.1 to replace previous generations; it is estimated that by the end of the 21st century, the Chinese population will be around 500 600 million from its high of 1.2 billion.

Why is this relevant for Chinese Herd immunity and the survival of the Communist regime? The answer is that Xi Jinping has accumulated more power into one individual than the old Roman emperors like Nero and previous Chinese regimes such as Chairman Mao Zedong.

President Jinping has boxed himself into a corner where he cannot admit the failure of the Chinese vaccine, which is not helped that communists cannot ask places like the United States or other locations to use their vaccines, such as Pfizer.

This is due to the Communist parties internal propaganda criticising the effectiveness of Western-developed scenes as well as the misinformation campaign, which means politically, the Communist regime and not ask for or purchase help.

The democratic ballet — Photo by Arnaud Jaegers on Unsplash

Lack of democracy

The Chinese political system predominantly comes historically in two forms an overcentralised central government that can lead to tyranny where the centre is dominated by a bureaucracy and yes-men, which leads to the collapse of the political system.

Peter Zeihan argues that in China, all political decisions and difficult decisions on how to run the government are all being run through Xi Jinping, who does not have the technical skills or the ability to work with others to run the kind of dictatorship the Chinese government needs to succeed.

Mr Zeihan compares with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud who does not have an ego that gets in the way of government and is a greater grass of communication and people skills impaired Xi Jinping.

Currently, China is not just a one-party system but a political system where all decision-making is run by its president. The provinces are unwilling to adapt to different crises and its political system than being purged of alternatives by Xi Jinping.

With the Chinese system in a dictatorship, there are no democratic means to bring about change across all problems that are the fault of the Chinese Communist Party.

It is different from the United States, where there are elections for governors and senators or the national and state level, as well as the choice of the president of the United States of America.

The same goes for other democratically run nations; there is an opportunity to change the leadership and policies of previous governments in China; they don’t have that option preventing China from dealing with the Covid 19 crisis.

The great wall of China — Photo by Robert Nyman on Unsplash

Compounded Problems with China

China is an ageing population and reached its peak production capabilities at the lower-end supply chain of products and services, predominantly low inside manufacturing back during the early 2000s CE.

The demographic problem in China is also severe: an ageing population, a lack of young people who moved to cities to have families and a higher rate of diabetes than in the United States of America.

Again, this is related to the lack of herd immunity because of the deep structural problems that have been growing in China since 1979 and have been addressed by the Chinese government as well as other governments, such as Russia, that have demographics that are as bad as the Chinese, Japanese and the Germans.

Trading — Photo by Dominik Lückmann on Unsplash

China and the Economy

Peter Zeihan describes the global economy since industrialisation in the 19th and 20th centuries as moving from pyramid-style demographics towards a more chimney shape.

What this means is that before modern medicine, half of the children typically died before adulthood and what this meant is that as people got older, they would be progressively fewer older people than young people due to dying from war, disease or other methods of death.

In the 20th century, after the Second World War and the end of the Cold War in 1989, nations that did not industrialise began the process of industrialisation. The baby boomer generation was born in 1945 in 1960, humanity and its largest generation.

China, for example, experienced over 300 million births with baby boomers after the Second World War.

The work chain is large enough for the Chinese people to work for low-end manufacturing with the capital supplied by the Global North with wealth from the boomer generations.

The one-child policy and the demographic problems within China are exacerbating and showing the issues in Chinese and other demographics worldwide.

Without enough people aged 20 to 35, there is no workforce to drive manufacturing and consumer goods and services in our modern economies.

With the boomers entering retirement in the 2020s, the environment of cheap capital investment is fading, and there isn’t a replacement generation to run manufacturing in a place like China.

This is linked to a lack of herd immunity because the Chinese problems are all interconnected with Covid-19, internal government, and demographics, all causing problems.