The Morning Dispatch: The Shanghai Time Capsule

China’s draconian COVID restrictions hearken back to the earliest days of the pandemic.

By and
368

Happy Friday! On this day in 1943, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to curb inflation by freezing prices, limiting pay raises, and banning people from switching jobs unless it would help the war effort. Don’t get any ideas, Joe.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

  • The Senate voted 53-47 on Thursday to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, with three Republicans—Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitt Romney—joining all 50 Democrats in support. She won’t be formally sworn in until Justice Stephen Breyer retires this summer, but will then become the 116th justice and first black woman to serve on the court.

  • The Senate voted unanimously on Thursday to suspend normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus and ban oil and gas imports from Russia, sending the measures to President Joe Biden’s desk. Biden had already issued an executive order banning Russian energy imports, but suspending normal trade relations and another measure in the bill reauthorizing human rights-based sanctions powers will free the United States to raise tariffs on Russian products and issue still more sanctions.

  • The United Nations General Assembly voted 93-24—with 58 countries abstaining—to suspend Russia from its Human Rights Council in response to reports Russian soldiers committed war crimes in Bucha. Russia—which subsequently said it is quitting the council—is the first permanent U.N. Security Council member to lose membership in any U.N. body.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Mike Kupfer

    "What do you make of that worry now?"

    Pretty much the same as at the start of the pandemic. Authoritarian governments can move more nimbly than democratic ones, but the quality of the response depends too much on too few people. Like the girl in the Longfellow poem, when they're good, they're very good indeed, but when they're bad, they're horrid. I keep noticing that when Chinese figures talk about how much better China's system is compared to democracy, they manage to avoid any mention of the Cultural Revolution.

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    Theirn Scott

    Ordering people indoors until they starve is one thing. Murdering a Corgi left outside so he has a chance to survive, is, well, inhumane.

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    John Russell

    Dear Dispatch team: you report that, "The United Nations General Assembly voted 93-24...to suspend Russia from its Human Rights Council." So far, so good, but after that you make the assertion that "Russia...is the first permanent U.N. Security Council member to lose membership in any U.N. body." By my reckoning, this assertion is in accurate: on October 25, 1971 the Republic of China, a.k.a. the government of Taiwan---which was one of the original permanent members of the U.N. Security Council---lost its membership in both the Security Council and the U.N. and its seat was filled by the People's Republic of China, a.k.a. Communist China under Mao.

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  4. learnin4life

    "There’s never been a point where they’ve told the truth about the number of cases,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Derek Scissors says of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), arguing it’s the trendline that’s actually worth paying attention to. “The [25,000] cases, honestly, it’s at least 10 times that much, probably more. But they’re never going to report that, because it’s destabilizing. They will never report that the Party has lost control of an important situation.”"

    While the numbers available on Covid's impact in China seem fanciful based on the experience in the US and other countries, I just can't accept the foregoing conclusory statements without some further support beyond because I [Scissors] say so. Where are the sources that were consulted which definitively put the lie to Chinese statements? I'm not saying Scissors is wrong, I'm asking for more than broad unsupported statements.

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  5. Avatar photo
    Mike B

    No Dispatch Podcast? No Dispatch Live? What happened to Steve Hayes, I haven't seen or heard hide or hair of him this week. What gives, Dispatch? Did I miss an announcement somewhere?

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      Mike B

      OK, the Dispatch Podcast was published shortly after my comment. At the end [spoiler alert] they said Dispatch Live will be back this Tuesday, hooray! Still not sure what they've done with Steve, but hopefully he reappears soon. Did he take a vacation and I just missed it?

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    Brian

    I agree with Stirewalt about all the things baseball has done to lose former diehard fans like me, but I never understood the case for making us watch pitchers batting .065 flail away helplessly because of strategy, or tradition, or whatever the arguments were. Nothing wrong with the DH for me.

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    Jean-Christophe Jouffrey

    Dear Anna,

    yes, confusing...

    democracy is not an economical system: democracy is a political system to which belong the question of the military strength. It should be basic understanding...

    Joining NATO , having its defence provided by the USA is the continuation of what also happened with Japan: keeping the military forces of both weak enough and having to rely on the USA for defense, and of course the inability to "project" their power outside, unless under the control of NATO.

    You seem to have forgotten all the complaints of Trump echoed in many comments here about the nations belonging to NATO taking advantage of the US for their defence...

    I am not painting anything just describing, you are however sketching... 😏

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  8. P Satter

    QOTD: I never want to live where if I am singing on a balcony a drone appears, telling me to "..control my soul's desire for freedom."

    I have a relative in Italy and they were very strict at the onset, more so than the US, but you could still go to the doctor, grocery store, or pharmacy. And singing from balconies was encouraged: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDRiINXik00




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      Mike B

      I'd be strongly tempted to grab a broom and try to swat that drone out of the park. But it was probably out of broom range.

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      1. P Satter

        It sounds like something out of a dystopian sci-fi novel.

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      C C Writer

      I hope they sang songs from their souls about the meaning of freedom--which would not be incompatible with understanding that temporary isolation had a purpose.

      I'm sure the subject is covered from all angles in opera.

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  9. Brendan Bossard

    The picture of Shanghai and the description of drones reminded me of "Blade Runner" and the world of the video game "Deus Ex."

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  10. Brendan Bossard

    QOTD: I am neutral on this matter. China's autocracy clearly has failed to control the epidemic itself or develop effective treatments, based on the information in the article. On the other hand, we will not know how many less deaths or long term problems more free countries would have if people had simply cooperated with government mandates. I think the answer is somewhere in the middle.

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