Taiwanese businessman in Kunshan Electronics Factory confesses: Factory shut down, performance plummets, employees’ salaries will not be paid first
China’s zero-clearing policy was lifted in an instant, mutant viruses and drug rush storms are hitting neighboring countries such as Japan and Taiwan, and whether many infected elderly people can survive the cold winter has become a humanitarian crisis at the end of the Spring Festival.
Chairman Li, a Taiwanese businessman in Beijing, China, was very surprised. At the end of November 2022, the Taiwanese business circle in Beijing was still discussing how authentic the zero-clearing policy change was. The street nucleic acid testing station and “Dabai” (note: epidemic prevention staff) disappeared instantly. Drinking with friends to celebrate the long-awaited unblocking, less than a week of happiness, employees of Chairman Li’s trading company were diagnosed and asked for leave every day. On the 15th, Chairman Li began to have a fever and cough, and 6 more people were diagnosed the next day. The company 17 of the 30 employees were diagnosed, and he decided to suspend the company’s operations.
Chairman Li personally called the downstream customers to inform the postponement of delivery, but the customers did not complain, because the companies were facing a large number of employees who were diagnosed with the disease, and they were also unable to operate. We shared the difficulties, “Let’s postpone it for two weeks and then look at it.” .”
Li Dong described that the epidemic in China reminded him of the “3.11 Tsunami” in Japan in 2011. He was on a business trip in Japan that day when he encountered a sudden earthquake and a tsunami occurred just 30 minutes later. Li Dong said that the tsunami of the epidemic in China came too fast, the number of people was too large, the symptoms were more severe than expected, and everyone was unprepared. He didn’t know what would happen in the future, so he could only resign himself to fate.
“Employees’ salaries will not be paid if they can’t be paid”
In Kunshan, where Taiwanese businessmen gather, the spread of the epidemic is only a few days slower than that in Beijing. The general manager of the electronic parts factory Wang said that he was diagnosed, and suddenly 40% of the more than 300 employees in the factory were also diagnosed. Symptoms, in addition to the immediate shutdown of the factory, “Employees can stop paying their salaries if they can’t. It turns out that the performance has plummeted. If they continue to pay salaries, there will be major losses.”
However, General Manager Wang comforted his wife in Taiwan. He still had two cans of the cold medicine Ibuprofen (Ibuprofen) that he bought from Target supermarket in the United States. He thought that 500 pills per can was too much, and he always laughed at Americans. “Taking medicine is like eating rice”, this time it comes in handy. He estimated that 6 pills per day, 30 pills would be eaten in 5 days, a total of 1,000 American cold medicines, which could be distributed to 30 factory cadres, so that everyone would not have to rush for medicines, which is regarded as a company benefit. General Manager Wang looked at the label of the medicine jar, which said “Made in India”.
Neither Beijing Li Dong nor Kunshan President Wang went to see a doctor, and both complained that “the symptoms of themselves and the employees are more serious than imagined.” In addition to fever, especially coughing and coughing, coughing at night until they can’t sleep. By the deadline of December 25 On the 10th day, although Li Dong, who has entered the 10th day, turned negative, he still couldn’t stop coughing when talking on the phone. Both said, “Fortunately, we don’t need to go to the hospital.” None of the employees are seriously ill. They said that even the “third-level hospitals” in Beijing and Shanghai (similar to Taiwan’s definition of medical centers) are now hellish.
Beijing and Kunshan are still big cities with rich resources. Those rural areas with more grass-roots population and more marginalized areas have been hit harder. The county government was still building a makeshift hospital the day before. There is still a seal on it, strictly restricting free movement, and all anti-epidemic measures will be removed the next day after the unblocking order. There is no transition, no explanation, only rigid enforcement, and all the people are at a loss and involved in the unblocking torrent.
Social media platforms such as China’s Weibo are filled with “One village after another with fever, queuing up for infusion” posts, describing the tragic situation of farmers in the whole village being diagnosed, men, women and children collectively receiving intravenous drips in the open air outside the health center at several degrees below zero. It seems that the concept of Chinese peasants is still stuck in the collective myth of “getting a drip when you are sick”, so that the sick people can get a drip, which is also like a “political placebo” for the curative effect of Chinese public health myths.
Surprisingly, even the watertight media monitoring unit is at a loss. From the blank paper revolution to the new crown tsunami disaster, a large number of protests and complaints are posted on the Internet. It is difficult to explain what happened behind the scenes.
300 million people diagnosed in just three weeks
No one expected before that China’s policy of lifting the blockade would detonate the “coronavirus tsunami” in an instant. On December 20, the Beijing government (National Health Commission of China) estimated that the number of new confirmed cases approached 37 million that day, and it took only three weeks to go from almost zero to over 300 million confirmed cases.
The new crown tsunami came too suddenly, and due to the abolition of mandatory nucleic acid testing, scientific statistics can no longer be made. The speculated data is obviously inaccurate, and of course it is impossible to report meaningfully to the WHO. On December 25, the National Health and Medical Commission simply announced that it would no longer release daily information on the new crown epidemic, and that the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention would release relevant epidemic information “for reference and research purposes.”
China’s State Council abandoned the zero-clearing policy on December 7, and the “Combined Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism Group of the State Council’s Response to the Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia Epidemic” issued an order called “New Ten Articles” for short “Notice”), ordered that “except for special places, no negative nucleic acid test certificates are required, and health codes are not checked”, and no nucleic acid negative certificates and health codes are checked for cross-regional migrants.
Everything came very suddenly. Overnight, the tightly sealed testing stations all over the country were suddenly removed. Full-body protective clothing was worn in the streets and alleys. ” itself was removed without a trace.
The day after the “New Ten Rules” were announced, Li Lanjuan, director of the State Key Laboratory of Infectious Disease Diagnosis and Treatment and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, told the people of the country through the media, “Asymptomatic infection is not a disease, and there is no need for everyone to panic.” Three days later, it was conveyed again through the official media: “95% of Omicron (the term for Omicron in China) is asymptomatic and mild, that is, fever, runny nose, and slight fatigue”, “the probability of reinfection after one infection low, even with a faster course and less severe symptoms after reinfection.”
Li Lanjuan’s “expert speech” was obviously wrong. Neither she nor China’s Premier Li Keqiang and President Xi Jinping, who made the “New Ten Measures”, did not expect the tsunami of the new crown to come so violently.
China’s centralized government seems to be huge, and it must be said to be a professional decision-maker in science and technology, but important policies must be reported to the top leader Xi Jinping for approval. The suffocation of the zero-clearing policy, the unblocking and the detonation of the new crown tsunami, the fate of 1.4 billion people depends entirely on one person to make decisions.
Daniel J. Brown
Daniel J. Brown (Editor-in-Chief) is a recently retired data analyst who gets a kick out of reading and writing the news. He enjoys good music, great food, and sports, with a slant towards Southern college football, basketball and professional baseball.