“When the ability to govern decreases, even in the absence of any particular policy from the top, the ineptitude, brutality, and ignorance of lower-level officials will brew disasters for the common people they rule over,” said Mr. Wu, who is a senior research scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions.
Many businesspeople have lost a lot of money under “zero-Covid,” which has shuttered cities and locked millions of people in their homes for weeks at a time as the government seeks to eliminate the coronavirus.
“Under the leadership of this dictator, our great country is falling into an abyss,” said a hardware tech executive in Shenzhen. “But you can’t do anything about it. It pains and depresses me.”
Despite many conversations over the years, we never talked about politics. I was surprised when he called after the party congress to talk about his “political depression.” He said he used to…
