For your account of the event, I have two rebuttals. First, by April-May 2022, it was clear that the Shanghai lockdown was doing more harm than good, whilst the Omicron was far less lethal than it was thought to be. So why did Xi wait until the white paper movement uprising in November to give order to life the lockdowns throughout China? There has to be some connection to Xi’s hope for a smooth transition to his third term in October. But he grossly miscalculated by assuming that people would simply allow themselves to be locked up like pigs in a slaughterhouse. Thus, he did not get his smooth transition and lost 面子。By November, however, it was too late. China’s economy had been thoroughly gutted, and youth unemployment rate skyrocketed. That’s why China never had a post-pandemic boom. Both employers and employees lost confidence, so they began to 躺平 and 摆烂. That’s when the “degenerate” elites and their western allies began to blast propaganda saying that there are no hopes in China’s economy, so it is time to move your corrupt assets out. If you are not rich, you were told to go through the U.S.-Mexico border via drug lords who would “protect” you if you pay them. The rising interest rates in the U.S. also facilitated this 润 campaign, but the main cause is still the pessimism surrounding the great 2022 lockdown. His public manhandling of Hu Jintao (a separate issue) further eroded his image. Secondly, it is true that there are shitty human beings as you mentioned everywhere. But when these shitty human beings were given the power to carry out certain authorities by force without accountability, they REALLY enjoyed exercising their newly given power. That’s was the problem of the CPC’s bureaucracy, where folks were only accountable to those above them, not folks who they govern. When when their boss give them the power to forcefully take things away from people and evict people from their apartment to quarantine camps, these shitty carry them out zealously because they found self values in abusing others under the cover of legitimate authority. It was same thing that led to the high death rate of the Great Leap Forward, the lower-tier red guards engaging in random massacres and even cannibalism during the Cultural Revolution, and those 大白 during the great 2022 lockdowns. These were classic examples of newly given authority without accountability and effective scrutiny (on whether such exercise of authority broke other PRC and local laws).
