Commentary 
The horrific scenes in Shanghai in the last few weeks, as residents face starvation because of the way China’s Zero-COVID policy is being enforced, reminded me of my first trip to China over forty years ago, when I ran a conference between Australian and Chinese journalists in November 1981.
Figure 1: A photo of the participants in the “Sino-Australian Press Seminar” that I organized on behalf of the Australia-China Council and the All-China Journalists’ Association. I’m the young man with a beard in the front row. (Steve Keen)
The seminar itself was a fascinating experience, but the key issue which today’s catastrophe brings to mind was a bizarre pair of economic statistics. Just before the Australian delegation departed for Beijing, China announced that light industry output had risen by 17 percent in the previous year—but heavy industry output had fallen by 7 percent.
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