China s Global Lockdown Propaganda Campaign – Tablet Magazine
The most benign possible explanation for the CCP s campaign for global lockdowns is that the party aggressively promoted the same lie internationally as domestically that lockdowns worked. For party members, when Wuhan locked down it likely went without saying that the lockdown would eliminate coronavirus; if Xi willed it to be true, then it must be so. This is the totalitarian pathology that George Orwell called double-think. But the fact that authoritarian regimes always lie does not give them a right to spread deadly lies to the rest of the world, especially by clandestine means.
And then there s the possibility that by shutting down the world, Xi Jinping, who vaulted through the ranks of the party, quotes ancient Chinese scholars, has mastered debts and derivatives, studies complexity science, and envisions a socialist future with China at its center, knew exactly what he was doing.