 All right. I want to say quickly something about the lockdown in China that were opened, I think, today, yesterday, the last couple of days, the Shanghai lockdown has been loosened. 25 million people have finally been allowed out of their homes, have been allowed to get food, have been allowed to go back to work, have been allowed to go back to school, have been allowed to just go outside and get some fresh air. What happened in Shanghai over the last two months is truly stunning and horrific. It is, I can't think of an example, anything as bad as what they did, 25 million people. I mean, they'd locked down smaller cities, 10, 15, 25 million people. Shanghai, I don't know how many of you have been to Shanghai. Shanghai is one of the most exciting cities in the world. It is vibrant, dynamic, full of energy, skyscrapers on the best skyscrapers in the world. It has some of the most exciting manufacturing plants in the world, including a Tesla plant. It is an incredibly productive area. It is one of the engines of the Chinese economy. People who live there are people who have migrated from the countryside, people who have left farming, have left villages all over China and migrated to Shanghai to find a better life. Shanghai is a city of vast inequality. You can see it. I mean, the condo buildings along the river, some of the most amazing condos in the world, some of the most amazing views in the world, some of the greatest light shows in the world, a vast middle class, huge middle class, living primarily in modern condominium buildings, many of them very beautiful. And then of course, then, of course, you've got massive slums, huge numbers of slums with very, very poor people living in them. These are the latest people to come from the countryside who then slowly make their way up the socioeconomic ladder. To take 25 million people who are so dynamic, so full of energy, so productive, and locked them up for two months, over two months, it's just stunning. And we don't know, and my guess is we will never know, ever. No. How many people died while they were locked up? How many people starved to death? There were real food shortages? How many people, and this is probably the majority of the people who died, how many people died because they didn't get medical care? For a variety of different ailments unrelated to COVID, how many people are going to be penalized for standing up against the lockdown? There were some. And it truly is a horror. Chinese social media, in spite of the census, in spite of the authoritarian nature of the regime, Chinese social media, people are complaining bitterly about the conditions under which they were forced to live under, they're complaining about the government, they're complaining about the leadership. It's going to be really, really, really interesting. As we had in the early fall, into the once every five years meeting of the Chinese Communist Party, where they basically choose their leader for the next five years, Xi is up for his third term. In the past, they have been termed out after two terms. This is post, I think during Deng Cha Peng's era as president, leader, whatever it's called, both power was diffused across a number of leaders and term limits were put in place. Xi is doing away with those term limits, is going to run for, is going to nominate himself a third term and it's completely, you know, likely that he will get it, that's what everybody expects. They thought it would be smooth and unquestioning, but it's turned out that there was a lot of questions being raised about the zero tolerance, zero COVID policies, about a two month lockdown in Shanghai, about why it took so long, whether the policy makes any sense, why the Chinese vaccine is so weak and bad, why they refused, for example, to import mRNA vaccines and vaccinate their population, why they're not just opening up given that Omnicron and its variants are relatively weak and don't cause the kind of death rates, the first wave of COVID force. And of course, the consequences of all this and the consequence globally are broken supply chain, which means higher prices, empty shelves, it means complete disruption and distortion of the global economy. But domestically it means a real shrinking in the size of the Chinese economy, a real economic slowdown, real economic problems. At the same time, a lot of the tech industry is in shambles because of the crackdowns from the central government, and a lot of people are complaining about that. The real estate market is has crashed, people have lost a lot of money, people are unhappy about that. The stock market is, people have lost a fortune and the stock market much worse than what's happening in the United States. People are super unhappy right now in China with Xi and with the Communist Party. And it's going to be interesting whether he can pull it off, whether he can pull off a third term. I mean, I think he has basically spent the last 10 years basically taking over all the levers of power so that he has almost guaranteed another appointment. But I think it's going to be much rougher, I think it's going to give people are going to be much more unhappy. I think he's going to have a harder time. And I only see things getting worse in China, not better. There's a huge movement of my young people in China to leave China and not to return. There's also movement by the authorities to make it more difficult now for Chinese to go on vacation because they worry they won't come back. So we're going to see a movement out of talent, a brain drain out of China. And I think the Chinese authorities are going to be worried about that. So I see China as a threat that is being reduced. And while I generally despise the Biden administration and everything that they do and his policies have been awful and terrible and destructive on almost every front, I will say that Biden has been braver than any president in the last, any president really, including Trump, in reaching out to the Taiwanese, expressing support for Taiwan. There is now being negotiated kind of a free trade deal with Taiwan, which is kind of a slap in the face to the Chinese. The Chinese again are apoplectic and angry and they want the Americans to immediately rescind us. But the US just signed some kind of free trade agreement. I mean, it's not free trade. It's a little bit less restricted trade with a bunch of Asian countries. They excluded Taiwan because these other countries didn't want to piss off the Chinese. So what the US did is they took exactly the same program that they did with these other countries and they're applying it to Taiwan without these other countries so that other countries can't suffer won't be blamed for what the United States is doing. But in a sense, the United States is standing up to the Chinese in action, not just in words. And that's a good thing. I would like to see the Biden administration as part of that eliminating the tariffs that Trump placed on trade, all trade, including Chinese trade, while basically reducing tariffs to zero with Taiwan and selling them the best weapon systems we have in stock. And ultimately, the solution for Taiwan is to have a nuclear, is to have nukes, which would stop the Chinese from doing anything. So it's going to be interesting. For two years, the Chinese model of locking down, shutting down cities, starting with Wuhan, seemed to have been superficially successful. It seemed like China was going to avoid the economic problems that the West had. And man, has that all come back to haunt them. Man, has that come back in spades because they locked everybody down. Natural immunity was never created because they locked everybody down. People expect zero COVID. And because they could not produce vaccines, they were worth anything. And because they refused to import vaccines from the West, the Chinese population is not vaccinated. So even though we have mild strains of COVID now, if if China just opened up, COVID would go wild over there because they have no immunity. While the death rates would be a lot lower, there would be significant death rates, and that's what they're afraid of. So if they open up, they're screwed. They shut down, they're screwed. I think they have to open up. But at this point, they committed to this zero COVID strategy, which is insane. And they've they've kept the shutdowns. Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com slash support, by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals, and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see The Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content. And of course, subscribe, press that little bell button right down there on YouTube, so that you get an announcement when we go live. 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