As we enter the third year of the ongoing COVID pandemic, we are witnessing a major shift in how China operates on the global stage.

The Chinese Communist Party once based its legitimacy on guaranteeing full employment and economic prosperity for its people. Now, the Chinese population looks to Beijing to guarantee its health, especially with the Omicron variant spreading worldwide. Zero-tolerance lockdowns, like the one currently underway in Zhejiang and the globally significant port of Ningbo, reflect a Chinese strategy geared toward proving to its citizens that it takes their concerns regarding COVID seriously.

The focus is no longer on keeping jobs at a factory or port facility filled, reaching artificial production quotas, or making sure foreign supply demand is met. What in the world is forcing China’s hand?

Number one, China’s vaccine doesn’t work, which means that they have to maintain their zero-tolerance policy. If they open up, they get rapid province and countrywide outbreaks that would absolutely crush their health system and destroy whatever political legitimacy the communist party thinks it still has.

It’s only going to get worse in the months to come because COVID, the original strain out of Wuhan, was triple the communicability of the flu. The Delta strain that we’ve been struggling with for the last several months is triple the communicability of the original Wuhan strain. And now Omicron is twice to triple the communicability of Delta, which means that we’re dealing with the pathogen that is the highest communicability of any disease out there right now.

And the Chinese are discovering in bits and pieces that they can’t keep everything out. So we’re gonna see more and more lockdowns throughout the Chinese system.

The second big problem is legitimacy between a financial breakdown, a demographic implosion, a housing implosion, populist issues challenging the trade industry, and the United States under first Trump and now Biden having a more and more and more aggressive position versus China on economic issues.

We have a China that is becoming decoupled from the global system, not so much out of choice, but because out of circumstance.

So if you are involved in the world of manufacturing or consumption or imports or transfers or whatever it happens to be that’s China-centric, you’re gonna have to find a new way of operating very soon.