How badly was China’s economy hurt by Covid-19?
The data suggest that the damage was quite severe. For example, in 2019, China’s GDP growth was 5.95 percent. But in 2020, GDP growth fell to 2.24 percent, a nearly 4 percent death-spiral entirely attributable to Covid-19. In 2021, China’s GDP growth rebounded to 8.45 percent, but then sharply declined in 2022 to a dismal 2.9 percent. Once again, the proximate cause of China’s shrinking GDP growth was Covid.
It’s worth noting, that China’s GDP growth has averaged over 9 percent since 1990. That’s 3 decades of meteoric growth that was suddenly derailed due to a relatively-mild viral infection. How does that happen?
It happened because the media, the pharmaceutical companies, the western governments and the public health experts greatly exaggerated the lethality of Covid which led to economy-wrecking restrictions. This was particularly true in the case of China which locked-down entire cities and tens of millions of people to fight a pathogen that killed less than .5 percent of the people it infected.
Editor Ron Unz believes that Covid-19 was a US-created bio-weapon that was used in an attack on China in late 2019. According to Unz, Covid does not derive from pangolins or bats, but is a lab-generated bio- weapon that was designed to sabotage the Chinese economy. We will explain how Unz arrived at his conclusions further along in the article, but for now, we are operating on the assumption that he is right and that the damage that was inflicted on China’s economy was a deliberate act of war. But, first, let’s look at a couple graphs that help to illustrate the magnitude of the damage. Here’s a chart that shows how the virus impacted consumer confidence:
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