THE FORMER Bank of England Governor Mark Carney yesterday warned that China’s ‘zero-Covid’ strategy is ‘at risk of derailing the global economy and driving up inflation’. Carney said that China will have to ‘evolve or pivot’ towards managing the disease through vaccinations, adding: ‘There are real economic consequences if a hard, zero Covid policy is maintained.’
With this single comment, the crisis of capitalism is exposed and its attitude towards workers and their families. This shows firstly, the capitalist economies are completely reliant on China and secondly that capitalist countries would rather learn to ‘live with Covid’ and damn the consequences rather than eradicate it. The consequences are millions dead!
Carney added that if China doesn’t change course, ‘then we will continue to have a series of disruptions in terms of supply chains and those frictions and inflationary pressures that come from it’.
However, the death toll figures speak volumes! They show the difference in death toll for China’s zero-Covid approach as opposed to the death toll in the capitalist nations with their ‘learn to live with it’ approach.
The Chinese deformed workers’ state was able to shut down, with no loss of wages to workers, and to conduct a massive campaign to defeat the virus. They definitely did not learn to live with it!
In December 2019, a pneumonia outbreak was reported in Wuhan, China. On 31 December 2019, the outbreak was traced to a novel strain of coronavirus. Wuhan was completely shut down.
By January 24, diggers began clearing the ground for the new 1,000-bed facility, named Huoshenshan Hospital. Just 10 days after the start of its construction it opened with the first wave of patients accepted on Monday February 3, 2020.
By March 19, just a month and a half later, China announced no new domestic transmissions of Covid-19, a major milestone in the country’s fight against the pandemic. China through a policy of strict lockdown managed to beat the virus with their policy of ‘zero-Covid’. China suffered 5,697 deaths from coronavirus – an extraordinary achievement when you consider China’s 1.4bn population.
Compare this to the UK with a population of 67.2 million, with as many as 165,534 deaths from coronavirus as a direct result of the ‘learn to live with it’ policy.
China showed the only way to eradicate the virus. Lock the country down, have trained people in hazmat suits to deliver food and essentials to people’s doors. Go door to door, testing and tracing. All those found to be positive for the virus and all those who they had been in contact with removed from their homes and taken to hospital to recover.
This scientific method, to systematically go through all neighbourhoods in every town, village and city in the country, is the only way to eradicate a virus. And it is something that was successfully achieved in both Vietnam and China.
Capitalist countries are not prepared to do this. The capitalist leaders are not directed by the needs of the people, but by the needs of the bosses to continue to make profits. While China completely shut down Wuhan to defeat the epidemic, Tory PM Johnson’s government put saving capitalism first. This is the same attitude as the United States which has suffered 780,775 deaths.
China’s economy grew 4.9% in the third quarter from July to September. In the same period, the US economy grew by just 2% and the UK economy 1.3%.
The former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, has a raw cheek, making demands of the Chinese bureaucracy to adopt capitalist measures which has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and globally millions of workers and their families, all to make profits, when the Chinese economy itself with its policy of ‘zero-Covid’ has outstripped in growth all of the capitalist nations.
The Russian revolution of 1917 and the Chinese revolution of 1949 showed that the establishment of a world socialist republic is the only way forward for the masses of workers and youth throughout the world.
These revolutions released production from the grip of private companies and enabled both Russia and China to advance industry, production and technique at an extremely rapid rate.
The energy crisis, petrol crisis, crisis of production, debt crisis and the shut-down of industry throughout the pandemic have tipped the capitalist economies over the edge. How the mighty have fallen! The ‘great’ capitalist nations are now completely and utterly reliant on the extraordinary productivity of the nationalised Chinese economy.
Carney’s bleating is a desperate reflection of the crisis that capitalism finds itself in. The bankruptcy of mass production for profit is glaring.
The only way forward is for the workers of the US and UK to rise up in socialist revolutions to end bankrupt capitalism once and for all and go forward to workers governments and socialism.
