Within China we see cracks in the body politic made more visible by the protests, cracks which track with the concentrated power in the Party and the function of the more autonomous local governments, as well as the uneasy relationship of these political entities with the mass of the people. The idea of Zero-Covid enters into this structure and is expressed as policy, being carried out in a geographically and structurally specific manner. At the same time, the West with its financially concentrated power, insists on the laissez faire of economic predators, letting their many ill mannered progeny run wild, kicking up all kinds of dust, which are waved away as externalities.
We also have to take this state of affairs as not occurring within a closed system, but an open one that must pit a more strictly economically and politically disciplined apparatus of control against an economically laissez faire one, being impressed to constantly clamp down on outbreak after outbreak, back to back, being regularly emitted by its Western trading partners and their constellation of colonies, who with their economic and free trade dogmas have acquiesced to becoming a perpetual rolling reservoir for the shifting and mutating virus. One's mind drifts to the fictional geopolitical dynamics of Starship Troopers, in which a beleaguered humanity must fend off with a belt of orbital cannons a never-ending stream of asteroids being hurled by the distant arachnids. Every once in a while one gets through...but I digress.
Covid turns out to be a very complicated problem that requires a coordinated public approach. The virus is highly contagious, and very good at repeatedly sneaking in due to its low profile, its shifting chimeric nature, and its low death rate (relatively speaking), but which does immense amounts of long term damage that is cumulative, both on the biological and on the socio-economic levels.
Yes, people do get tired of repeatedly being boxed in and isolated, but they also get tired of being perpetually irradiated by a ceaselessly shifting and voraciously spreading virus. There are many tools and approaches available in order to solve this problem, and a given constellation of techniques and policies may work differently over various geographical and temporal gradations.
For one thing, nothing less than a complete restructuring of infrastructure would be appropriate: the rethinking and retooling of ventilation in indoor spaces, the overhauling of indoor plumbing and venting, and the utilization and integration of outdoor spaces for starters, and then the organizational deployment of testing and contact tracing. There is also the cultural and economic matter of masking, and the ongoing technological development of vaccines, as well as alternative treatments and even preventative measures. What's more, this battery of measures must be coordinated: for example, the non-sterilizing vaccines become useless in the face of collapsing containment measures. All of this requires broad and energy-intensive social, political, and economic changes, which in turn requires an upstream marathon against the laws of economic concentration and political and organizational decay.
As a result, we are reduced to the steep simplification of all of these considerations into a strict binary, each pole presided over by great powers: clamp down completely or let it rip. We have a bifurcating world economic system, separating into two distinct blocs with distinct characters, both geographically derived, which in the past one hundred years were able to fold into one another, presided over by an exploitative imperial hegemon of course, but which now is separating into two, and which will continue to separate after the upheaval caused by those grinding tectonic plates. And that separation engenders sharper definitions of the competing systems.
The point I would like to make here is that this tussle over public health is really just warfare by another set of means. We can watch the spirit of war, or the god of war, whatever you prefer, begin to take shape and make its influence felt in the material world, fractally, in real time, through matters ostensibly distant to conventional conceptions of war.
What I mean is this: there are multitudes in the so-called West, and there are multitudes in the so-called East (unfortunate shorthand, the geopolitical picture is much more complicated), all of which could be marshalled to craft coordinated, creative, and geographically appropriate measures to contain the virus and mitigate its damage. But this is an ideal, comparable to the idea of global coordination to halt climate change, which is also in the course of breaking down in a similar way. In reality we gravitate towards the binary as it forms in the bifurcating world system, because we have concentrating powers of differing economic and political structure threatened by each other and by their own populations.
The threat of war encourages internal war within the powers as well: dissenting opinions must not be listened to and learned from, but rather suppressed and crushed, and between the powers, the internal dissent serves as handy levers for outsiders to do more damage besides: as an example, Chinese observers are noting the Western colonial efforts at riling up the dissenting youth to demand more "freedom" and etc. All of this weakens the respective powers internally, and the virus does more damage as a result, and the powers themselves become ever more insecure and belligerent and antagonistic to each other.
Cultural and economic warfare, in a complex modern industrial society, serves to strip away all of the many intricacies of running and coordinating such a society, throwing out the baby with the bathwater so to speak, so that all is left is the bare bone: an actual threatening enemy. The prophecy is self-fulfilled, and the spirit of war comes to full fruition and is able to express itself in kinetic, conventional warfare.
Its a bad way to go about things. Actually, its the worst way. As ecologically devastating as it is to bring in the bulldozers and the wrecking balls and the jackhammers and reshape the built environment, I'd much prefer the steady and measured hand of thoughtful and coordinated construction to the desperate razing and flattening of whole cities via aerial bombardment, a form of purification certainly, one the fascists are so fond of, but one that is devastating on every level and which lays the foundations for more of its kind.
