Terror by Starvation
As the world watches aghast, government lockdowns reflecting the Chinese Communist Party’s “zero Covid policy” have left nearly 400 million Chinese immured within their houses and apartments, struggling to survive without food, water, medicine, and other essentials. Shanghai, one of the world’s largest and most prosperous cities, has been reduced to a pitiful state, with hundreds, and possibly thousands, of people dying from lack of medicine, food, and clean drinking water, and some even taking their own lives to escape the horrors of starvation within their own apartments. Thousands of trucks bearing food deliveries from outside Shanghai have been blocked from entering the city, and their cargoes of vegetables, fruit, and other essentials have been deliberately destroyed by authorities or left to rot on loading docks. Meanwhile, farmers in one of China’s most important agricultural regions, Jilin Province, have been blocked from planting crops because of province-wide lockdowns extending to the most rural villages, leading to fears of widespread famine later this year.
All of this madness is being perpetrated, supposedly, in the name of eradicating the highly contagious omicron variant of Covid-19; yet many in Shanghai are beginning to suspect a more sinister motive for the horrors to which they are being subjected — namely, that the Shanghai lockdown and engineered food shortage is being inflicted in order to punish the city and its wealthy, cosmopolitan population long known for bucking Beijing and its fanatical CCP cadres. The immense wealth concentrated in Shanghai certainly poses a significant challenge to the authority of China’s increasingly totalitarian dictator, Xi Jinping. The great lockdown of 2022 is looking more and more like an excuse to quell potential resistance from Shanghai and its pro-capitalist elites; only time will tell how far the Xi regime is willing to press to bring Shanghai under the CCP thumb.
Such a scenario might seem preposterous in the 21st century, in one of the world’s largest and most advanced cities. Yet the past 100 years have seen numerous examples of man-made famine, of starvation arising from the fanatical implementation of socialist and communist principles, and even of engineered mass starvation used as a cynical tool of repression.
JBS Member or ShopJBS.org Customer?
Sign in with your ShopJBS.org account username and password or use that login to subscribe.
Subscribe Now
- 24 Issues Per Year
- Digital Edition Access
- Exclusive Subscriber Content
- Audio provided for all articles
- Unlimited access to past issues
- Cancel anytime.
- Renews automatically
Subscribe Now
- 24 Issues Per Year
- Print edition delivery (USA)
*Available Outside USA - Digital Edition Access
- Exclusive Subscriber Content
- Audio provided for all articles
- Unlimited access to past issues
- Cancel anytime.
- Renews automatically