2) COVID and COVID policies have weakened the economy and in some cases have led to some discontent. To me, non-Chinese people typically oversimply the COVID issue and criticize it as being needlessly troublesome because they tend to just look at one side of the issue. To them, more COVID controls equals a weaker economy, and that’s it, so they believe that China should have fewer controls to get a stronger economy. However, there are a lot of older people in China (something like 175 million who are over 65[3]) and most aren’t vaccinated and don't want to get vaccinated. That’s because very few people have died from the disease and they worry that the vaccine will do more harm than good. I’m also told that China’s medical system, hospitals, and so on don’t have the capacity to handle large numbers of people. Because the old people are vulnerable and not protected and because the medical system is not prepared to adequately handle lots of old people with COVID, this is not an easy problem to solve, though it can be handled in a more targeted way, which is in the works. I’m told that they have a vaccine that they need to produce and administer, which, I gather, will take something like six months, and that it has good efficacy rates for preventing death (~92%). I’m not an expert on such things, but I gather from those who are that this COVID problem is likely to have a gradually diminishing effect over the next couple of years.