THe more I read from people in China the worse this looming disaster appears to be.
The Shangjai lockdown will have long term catastrophic effects on the people of China and the world economy.
The worst immediate issue is that the large city lockdowns have ceased the flow of needed fertilizers from ports on the coast to farms on the interior. Farms are missing their spring plantings because of it.
Trucking in China has severely declined, which has all but stopped the flow in the other direction of food and produce into the cities, leading to large scale foot shortages. Truckers are told that if they enter Shanghai they will be forced to spend lockdown in their trucks... so food is just being dumped outside the cities.
The best analysis I've read from a blogger in China is that Xi is essnetially stuck in a sunk cost fallacy. His "Zero COVID" policy is a disaster, but he is unable to admit it because doing so means he loses his bid for a third term.. and, as in all Communist dictatorships, losing your leadership position is a death sentence. So Xi is stuck having to push forward with a catastrophic plan, pretending it's doing great, because the alternative is to stand before a firing squad.
The firing squad is inevitable, I think. This Zero COVID policy hits directly at Xi's power base, hitting the cosmopolitan city dwellers harder than the rural farming class.
Which brings me to my personal observation: It seems completely out of character to see the CCP run with such a clearly disasterous policy. In normal times Xi and the CCP would simply declare victory and shut down the data gathering and mute the statistics, much like they did 2 years ago. But Xi is coming up on another election, and it appears that there is a concerted effort by powers in the CCP to NOT hide the realities of Xi's Zero COVID policy in an effort to push him out of leadership, which in turn is driving Xi into ever more drastic enforcement of the policy in the hope that eventually it will "work".
It's pretty much carbon copy of every single Communist catastrophe of the last 100 years.