Ill news, spreads apace: covid in China

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Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. In London, I'm Jason Palmer.

And in New York, I'm Jon Fassman. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Since the earliest days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, We've been reporting on the transformative effects that drones have had for both sides. But unmanned attack craft don't just travel by air, and Ukraine is making much of those that travel by sea.

And few countries guard their linguistic purity as rigorously as France. Millennials, for instance, are properly termed by the Académie française, "enfants du numérique." But when it comes to brand names, All bets are off.

But first, across China, crowds gathered to see in 2023. For many, it will have seemed like a return to normality. After years of stifling COVID restrictions. [APPLAUSE] But life in China at the moment is far from normal. COVID is tearing through the country. The Chinese Communist Party has scrapped domestic travel restrictions, mass testing requirements, and its sudden precision lockdowns. As expected, that has brought rising case numbers, though the government is proving less than open about how big those numbers are. What seems to be the case though, is that China has gone from an incredibly small number of infections to being perhaps the world's largest COVID hotspot, with all of the horrors that brings.

So in the last few weeks, I've been visiting hospitals and crematoriums in Beijing and Dezhou, which is a small city to the south.

Gabriel Crossley is a China correspondent for The Economist and is based in Shanghai.

There's a strange kind of disconnect. So on the streets, things seem to be getting back to normal after restrictions ended, but in hospitals and crematoriums, things are looking much grimmer.

Grimmer how? What have you seen?

We visited an emergency room in a hospital in Durjo, and it was packed, mainly with elderly people with the COVID virus. While we were there, we saw an ambulance get turned away. Another family chose to wait in the lobby because they had their own oxygen concentrator. Nurses there said that more severely ill patients were arriving every day. And then outside these hospitals' intensive care units, there's relatives who've been sleeping on mats for days while their elderly family members get treated. And then at crematoriums, they're also busier than normal. One funeral director we spoke to in Duzhou estimated there have been 20 to 30% more deaths since COVID Zero was scrapped in December. Overall, although on the streets none of this is particularly visible and some of the kind of huge queues outside pharmacies and outside fever clinics have gone down, within hospitals things are looking a lot worse.

And so is it your view that the sort of scenes you've seen are representative of the national picture?

There are reports from around China which indicates hospitals in many cities are coming under similar kinds of pressures. This is all much harder to see in the official COVID data, which is still being released by authorities, even though I think people have less and less faith that it means anything. So officially, only a tiny number of people are dying of COVID just sort of 1 or 2 a day, but There are posts on social media which indicate many people's elderly relatives are dying. It's very hard to estimate exactly how many. Forecasts range a great deal, but there's a UK research firm which has estimated around 9,000 deaths every 24 hours from COVID And the World Health Organization has urged Beijing to be more transparent about numbers of hospitalizations, about the virus's mutations, and generally about the situation on the medical system.

So that is to say the Communist Party is almost pretending as if this isn't really happening this way?

I think there's been a bit of a shift there in the last couple of weeks. So state media is still insisting that China's decision to loosen controls in December, very unexpectedly and very suddenly, was correct. But there's also been quite a lot of reporting on the situation in hospitals and on the heroic efforts by medical staff to save lives, there's much less talk about the epidemic from China's top politicians. In his New Year's address, Xi Jinping only broadly referred to what he called tough challenges in COVID control and called for perseverance. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] What we've seen in the past when something is politically uncertain is that top leaders, especially Xi Jinping, will not comment on it until there is a clear, more positive way he can talk about it. So I don't think we should be surprised that Xi Jinping is not commenting recently. He seems to be concentrating more on foreign affairs than the domestic situation. So, for instance, he held a virtual meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin to affirm his support 10 months after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

And in the meantime, how do you expect the situation to evolve? How long until there is better news for Mr. Xi to report?

It's quite a different story depending on which age group we're talking about. So for young and middle-aged people, a lot of people have already been infected and recovered. So around New Year's Eve, we saw a lot of people going out onto the streets. Obviously, the situation is very different for the elderly, and in the next few weeks, millions of people will be heading back to their hometowns for Lunar New Year, and they will likely take the virus with them, which means that smaller cities and inland areas, rural areas with weaker medical systems, are going to be hit harder. Many of these places have very few medical supplies, and pressure on the healthcare system is unfortunately set to increase. Modeling by The Economist suggests that in the worst-case scenario, 1.5 million people could die from this virus if the medical system collapses under the pressure of all of the infections. Of course, given the huge uncertainties as to both the situation within China, given the lack of data we have, and how this virus might spread, these estimates should be dealt with carefully.

So it stands to reason that the party relaxed all of its zero-COVID restrictions, at least in part, in response to all of the protests that were on the streets, spreading on social media. Does this not create a worry of unrest if people's elderly relatives are dying at these kinds of rates?

The last few months have been turbulent. So Xi Jinping's zero-COVID strategy was decimating the economy. Now the strategy has been dismantled in an abrupt U-turn. Many people have complained about how suddenly the controls were dropped and the lack of preparation in the healthcare system. So many old people weren't vaccinated well enough. There doesn't appear to have been enough stockpiling of antiviral drugs. So there's certainly a sense of shock and frustration in the country alongside, I suppose, people kind of getting used to their new post-Zero-COVID freedoms. I think it's too early to tell what effect the mounting death toll will have on public sentiment. At the moment, when people are posting about the deaths of their relatives on social media, they tend to be talking about it as a private grief, not as a political matter. I don't think we'll be seeing anything like the protests we saw last year as a result of COVID deaths. Internally, it's possible that Xi Jinping may take some damage from this U-turn. His credibility has certainly been hurt, but I don't think we're likely to see any more visible sign that Xi Jinping's standing or political stability is going to be threatened in the next few months due to this.

And is some of the reason that you don't think it's such a political worry for Mr. Xi is that life is getting more back to normal for so many Chinese people?

Yeah, I mean, they got rid of the COVID restrictions in part to try and rescue the economy. The economy is still in very bad shape, and you're certainly in the medium and long term, the fact that zero COVID is gone is a good thing. If you're a young person, this is good for your economic prospects. The people I've talked to say that they understand that you couldn't keep restrictions forever. But on the other hand, although the end of zero-COVID will help China's economy in the near term, things are still going to be pretty tough for a lot of people. They'll have used up their savings over the last few years of restrictions. They'll be a lot less confident in spending. And a lot of the service industries which were most devastated by these policies have a long way to go before they can recover. There's a public health crisis which we've yet to go through, and it'll be a painful few months.

Thanks very much for joining us, Gabriel.

Thank you.

Healthcare can feel complicated. That's why Optum uses technology to connect the people and processes that make healthcare easier, more affordable, and more effective. We're making it clearer for you to know exactly what your benefits cover, and to help you better manage your health, we're coordinating care between your doctor and your technology. We believe better, simpler healthcare is always possible. That's healthy optimism.

That's Optum.

Visit optum.com to learn more.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky is warning that Russia is planning a prolonged attack using Iranian-made drones. Yesterday, he said his country's air force had shot down nearly 90 of them in 2 days. Drones have proved a key feature of this war, offering not just the potential for attack, but also intelligence gathering. Now, it seems Ukrainian forces are looking at different drones that could give them a naval edge.

Back in September, an odd new piece of kit washed up on the shores on the outskirts of Sevastopol in Ukraine.

Arthur Holland Michel writes about technology for The Economist.

It was about 5.5 meters long. It looked like a boat, but there was an odd difference about it. There was nowhere for a crew to stand. So the consensus was that it was a USV, unmanned surface vessel. These are essentially uncrewed boats, a drone that operates not in the air, but across the surface of the sea. And in this case, it had been put together by Ukraine's ingenious boffins, the folks who are what Q Branch is to James Bond.

And so have any more of these USVs been seen since then?

They have. On October 29th, just a few weeks after they initially surfaced, they were used in a brazen attack on the Sevastopol naval base, which is the headquarters of Russia's Black Sea Fleet. And operating through a hail of gunfire, they rammed into, according to the Ukrainians, at least 3 Russian boats, causing damage. According to the Ukrainians, and this is indeed backed up by video footage that was shot from aboard the drones themselves, these systems scored direct hits on the Admiral Makarov, which is the fleet's flagship, and two other vessels, causing, according to the Ukrainians again, pretty significant damage to all three, though Russia does deny this.

So how does this fit into the armaments that we keep learning about in the conflict in Ukraine?

Judging by the images and the specs that are available, none of the components of the Ukraine naval drones would be all that far out of reach for a small military, say, or indeed a somewhat sophisticated non-state group. The engine comes from a jet ski. It has cameras that are pretty commercially available, the sort of thing that you might, you know, put on your helmet if you're a cyclist. And these systems, they're not built in a sophisticated manufacturing facility. From the looks of it, they can be built in a fairly basic workshop. According to Ukraine, they only cost about $250,000. And that compared to a conventional anti-ship missile is a real bargain. Ukraine's small, A number of anti-ship missiles, the Neptune missiles as they're called, can cost millions of dollars and they're not easy to produce.

But what kind of efforts in this direction have been made before? This is surely not the first time people are trying to do what amounts to a drone by sea.

So as far back as 2012, for instance, the United States was experimenting with rigid-hulled inflatable boats with machine guns aboard them. Those efforts have evolved significantly and in the coming years. The US Navy has plans to spend billions of dollars, in fact, on a whole array of uncrewed ships, some of which will be very large, several hundred feet long, and will carry very, very heavy armaments. China, for its part, has also been working on variations on this theme. Some of their programs are, again, to build very large ships, but they've also unveiled a small vessel— they call it the JARI— which is kind of like a speedboat but without any humans aboard, and where the humans would ordinarily stand, it has guns, torpedoes, missiles. And then it's really proliferating. We're seeing Turkey, Portugal, South Korea, a whole range of countries all coming up with armed boats in one form or another.

And what about the defensive end of things? How to stop these things?

Well, you can certainly try shooting at them. Though this doesn't seem to have been all that effective in the attack on Sevastopol. And then just like any new technological threat that emerges from the shadows, it is being met with a wide range of more, shall we say, experimental countermeasures. The UK and the US are, for example, testing high-powered lasers that they hope can be used for disabling incoming naval drones. One of the measures that is popular for stopping aerial drones is to jam their radio signals, and because naval drones will largely rely on a radio link with the operator, jamming could be an option in this case as well. And then there are really out-there ideas that have been proposed— indicator nets in the style of World War I systems that we used to try and stop U-boats might see a return to service. Or in the case of the US Navy, they're actually experimenting with a slime inspired by the defensive secretions of the hagfish to try and gunk up the propellers of these incoming boats. But it very much remains to be seen whether any of that is actually going to stick.

We keep hearing in the Ukraine conflict things that seem to indicate the warfare of the future, the shortcomings of the warfare of the past and sort of future directions. Do you think this fits in there?

It's easy to declare that a new weapon system is going to fundamentally revolutionize warfare, and that is not always necessarily the case. I think here these boats are going to become a fixture in future naval warfare. Established militaries will certainly begin using them. They're going to become, I believe, common among non-state groups. And in fact, in a world where drones like the Ukrainian explosive boats are common, available to anyone with a few hundred thousand dollars and a metal workshop, anyone who does business on the sea is going to have to keep a very keen eye trained on the horizon. And this will all become even more complicated and even more disruptive once these boats become more autonomous, once they're able to be used without a human in the loop controlling the system. And indeed, autonomy will allow these boats to be used in swarms, operate in evasive and offensive ways that are exceedingly difficult to defend against. No amount of netting or hagfish slime or lasers is going to be able to stop a truly sophisticated swarm of naval boats whipping towards you across the waves.

Arthur, thank you very much for your time. It's been wonderful to be here.

As Voltaire, a French Enlightenment writer, once opined, Common sense is not so common. That thought might apply to people at companies in France in charge of naming their brands.

Easy peasy.

Easy peasy.

Easy peasy.

It's leading to the mangling of a language that its government has long sought to protect.

From Louis Vuitton to Hermès, France's luxury brands proudly ooze their quintessential Frenchness. It's part of the fantasy that consumers are buying into.

Sophie Petter is The Economist's Paris bureau chief.

And while that works for handbags and scarves, many other French firms seek to disguise their national origins.

But tell us more about those firms. Who is making a conscious effort to mask their French identity?

Well, lots of them are French household names like AXA, a French insurer, which chose a name that pretty much means nothing and can be pronounced in all languages. Or GDF Suez, a French energy firm, which renamed itself 'Engie,' a word that apparently evokes energy in all cultures according to their own literature. France, after all, is a nation forged through a common language, and it doggedly strives to defend this. But now, honestly, it's taking such linguistic mangling to another level.

That's too tempting not to dig into. Tell us more about this linguistic mangling.

Well, in recent years, along with a surge in tech firms, the country has succumbed to meaningless globish that's beloved of startups the world over. So Take Luncher, for example, which is a firm that operates a smart card for meal vouchers. And recently it rebranded itself Swile, which to the English ear sounds like a mixture of swill and bile. In fact, the latest trend is to apply this phonetic play to English words, which may themselves be unfamiliar in France, but they become even more so in the French rendering. My favorite is a new brand called Easypizi, that's spelt I-Z-I-P-I-Z-I. It's a fashionable chain of spectacles, which to the English ear sounds like easy peasy. Another is spelt Y-O-M-O-N-I, or YOMONI, an online investor that actually in English sounds like your money. And then there's YGHION.AI, a retailing service that sounds as if a French person is saying hitch. It's unclear whether the French grasped the English resonance, and perhaps that doesn't even matter.

And what about the inverse? Are we seeing any companies embrace their French roots through their brand names?

Well, there are some delightful examples of French brands composed of phonetic misspellings of its own phrases. So take, for example, Killu2, which in French sounds like qui loue tout, or who hires everything. And it rents out, guess what, diggers and mechanical equipment.

So Sophie, at the start of this interview, you mentioned the zeal with which France defends its language, the purity of its language. How have all of these names gone down in France?

Well, of course, to the guardians of linguistic purity, all this is a terrible affront. The Académie française was established by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635, and it still rules today on which foreign words are acceptable. It disapproves, for example, of millennials. It favors enfants du numérique, or dry January. To which it prefers 'genvié sans alcool'. The Academy doesn't pronounce, though, on brand names. So unless it's a matter of silk scarves or designer handbags, France's ambition to appear on trend globally will mean the ongoing mutilation of its own language as well as English. And all the more so if the enfants du numérique have anything to do with it.

All right, Sophie, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks very much.

I I love Enfants du Numérique.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch at podcasts@economist.com.

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Healthcare can feel complicated. That's why Optum uses technology to connect the people and processes that make healthcare easier, more affordable, and more effective. We're making it clearer for you to know exactly what your benefits cover, and to help you better manage your health, we're coordinating care between your doctors and your technology. We believe better Better, simpler healthcare is always possible. That's healthy optimism. That's Optum. Visit Optum.com to learn more.