This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, March 6, 2020:
The spark could be the “white hot” outrage that followed the death of the whistleblower from Luhan, China who tried to warn people of the virus. On December 30, Dr. Li Wenliang, a local ophthalmologist, typed his warning into a chat group of his former medical school classmates: “A new coronavirus infection has been confirmed and its type is being identified. Inform all family and relatives to be on guard.”
On February 7, he died after catching the virus from a patient he was treating.
By noon, the hashtag “#LiWenliangHasPassedAway” was the number one trending topic on China’s Twitter-like platform Weibo, with 10 billion mentions. Weibo users flooded Wi’s webpage, leaving more than 150,000 comments, many of them critical of local authorities who had punished Li for “spreading rumors.”
China expert Gordon Chang, in an interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., said “Maybe we’re starting to see the same dynamic [that Chernobyl had on the demise of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s] now. The Communist Party certainly is weakened and it’s fighting to keep itself in place.” He added that the Chinese Communist Party is “in trouble,” with a number of academics in Beijing demanding that President Xi Jinping resign.
Chang added: “We don’t know what the consequences of [the economic slowdown] will be, but we know that after the death of one of the doctors in Wuhan [Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower] who tried to tell people about what was going on, his death caused white hot anger.”
That anger is being fueled by oppression by the authorities in their failing attempt to rein in the virus. Those tactics are slowing the Chinese economy to a standstill.
Estimates from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) show the impact of measures mandated by the Chinese communist government to stanch the spread of the COVID 19/Coronavirus. In January, the IMF reduced its growth outlook from 6.4 percent for 2020 to 6.1 percent. On Thursday, it reduced that outlook further, to 5.6 percent, thanks to what the IMF’s managing director Kristalina Georgieva called the “sheer geographic spread” of the virus.
And the group’s forecast could be reduced further: “We are already looking at adverse scenarios … in which the impact on growth for China is more significant … the Chinese authorities themselves are recognizing that there would be lower growth this year.”
The IMF noted, for example, that the purchasing managers’ indexes (PMIs) for both the manufacturing and the service sectors of China’s economy, released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics on Sunday, fell precipitously in February. The Caixin manufacturing PMI fell a staggering 50 percent, from 51.8 (anything above 50 is expansion; below is contraction) in January to 26.5 in February. Its services PMI fell from 54.1 in January to 29.6 in February, while its “export orders” sub-index plunged from 51 in January to 28.7 in February.
Chinese authorities reported to the IMF that output in the country’s factories has fallen by 40 percent, while ANZ (the Australian and New Zealand Banking Group) estimated that China’s economy is operating at only 20 percent of capacity. As a result, ANZ revised its outlook on China as well, estimating that China’s GDP would slide to 4.1% this year, with growth of just 2% in the first quarter compared to a year ago.
There are other indicators reflecting China’s economic woes. Subway ridership across eight major cities was just one-fifth of normal on Thursday, according to the Wall Street Journal‘s calculations. And those calculations don’t include the city of Wuhan, the center of the outbreak, where the subway that normally carries 3.4 million passengers every day has been closed for weeks.
Of China’s 290 million “migrant” workers (those who travel from rural areas to the cities to take on construction, manufacturing or service jobs), only 80 million had returned to work by mid-February.
Another indicator is provided by NASA’s pollution monitoring satellites. From January 1 to 20, and from February 10 to 25, pollution – the density of NO2 concentrations from cars, trucks, buses and power plants – was almost 30 percent lower than normal. See Sources below for the link to those images.
Stephen Roach, a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, was even more negative. On CNBC‘s “Squawk Box” last Friday he said “The impact of unprecedented quarantines and restrictions on travel have brought the Chinese economy right now to a virtual standstill.”
The devastation of China’s economy could have lasting impacts, not the least of which is its forcible detour from the communists’ projected plan – the Chinese Dream – to dominate the world. Instead, it has the potential of turning that Chinese Dream into a nightmare for the country’s leaders and lighting the first spark in the fight for freedom for its citizens.
Sources:
TIME: ‘An Eternal Hero.’ Whistleblower Doctor Who Sounded Alarm on Coronavirus Dies in China
WolfStreet.com: China’s Non-Manufacturing & Manufacturing PMIs Show to What Unfathomable Extent the Economy Has Collapsed
BBC: Coronavirus: Eight charts on how it has shaken economies (especially China’s)
The New York Times: China Stopped Its Economy to Tackle Coronavirus. Now the World Suffers.
CNN: China’s economy could shrink for the first time in decades because of the coronavirus
The Wall Street Journal: The Coronavirus Is Hammering China’s Economic Outlook
South China Morning Post: Coronavirus: IMF again cuts 2020 China growth forecast as Covid-19 shakes the global economy
WND: China expert: Coronavirus could lead to collapse of Communist Party
Background on the Chinese Dream
Background on Professor Stephen Roach
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