Coronavirus: the Chinese Political Angle

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Life in Wuhan is still far from normal. Official opening was Apr 08 but they relaxed a week ago. To leave Wuhan for Shanghai or Beijing requires two tests. One before leaving and one on arrival. Every one is colour coded for health and its a quick scan. This actually works as a pass into malls, big stores etc.

I do think walking around in a hazmat suit is overkill though.

How familiar what he says is ...... no advance warning, everything suddenly shut down. Rely only on yourself & family.

Funny how he says he had snacks like instant noodles. I was in the store yesterday and this guy in front of me bought like fifty packets of instant noodles.

Wonder if i should buy some as well, you know, just for emergencies..

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Meh, Taiwan cheated : D

These guys should be the next W.H.O

They prefer to be in Taiwan than in England.

At first i thought it was the shitty weather but they're actually saying they feel safer back home.

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China does not want its own citizens (around 1.5m) back because it fears re-infection ?

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yes, yes situation is still bad, just watch this...

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China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

[Double Edge]

China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest

Interested to see how they pull this bit off

“They are seeking to transform it from a massive disaster to one where the government did everything right and gave the rest of the world time to prepare,” Carrico said.

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hbogyt?

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China Is Avoiding Blame by Trolling the World

The evidence of China’s deliberate cover-up of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan is a matter of public record. In suppressing information about the virus, doing little to contain it, and allowing it to spread unchecked in the crucial early days and weeks, the regime imperiled not only its own country and its own citizens but also the more than 100 nations now facing their own potentially devastating outbreaks. More perniciously, the Chinese government censored and detained those brave doctors and whistleblowers who attempted to sound the alarm and warn their fellow citizens when they understood the gravity of what was to come.

Some American commentators and Democratic politicians are aghast at Donald Trump and Republicans for referring to the pandemic as the “Wuhan virus” and repeatedly pointing to China as the source of the pandemic. In naming the disease COVID-19, the World Health Organization specifically avoided mentioning Wuhan. Yet in de-emphasizing where the epidemic began (something China has been aggressively pushing for), we run the risk of obscuring Beijing’s role in letting the disease spread beyond its borders.

China has a history of mishandling outbreaks, including SARS in 2002 and 2003. But Chinese leaders’ negligence in December and January—for well over a month after the first outbreak in Wuhan—far surpasses those bungled responses. The end of last year was the time for authorities to act, and, as Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times has noted, “act decisively they did—not against the virus, but against whistle-blowers who were trying to call attention to the public health threat.”

This is what allowed the virus to spread across the globe. Because the Chinese Communist Party was pretending that there was little to be concerned about, Wuhan was a porous purveyor of the virus. The government only instituted a lockdown in Wuhan on January 23—seven weeks after the virus first appeared. As events in Italy, the United States, Spain, and France have shown, quite a lot can happen in a week, much less seven. By then, mayor Zhou Xianwang admitted that more than 5 million people had already left Wuhan.

If that weren’t enough, we can plumb recent history for an even more damning account. In a 2019 article, Chinese experts warned it was “highly likely that future SARS- or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased probability that this will occur in China.” In a 2007 journal article, infectious-disease specialists published a study arguing that “the presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb. The possibility of the reemergence of SARS and other novel viruses from animals or laboratories and therefore the need for preparedness should not be ignored.” It was ignored.

The political scientist Andrew Michta has drawn controversy and accusations of racism for stating what any measured overview of the evidence makes clear. “The question about assigning agency and blame is pretty straightforward to answer,” he writes in The American Interest. The Chinese state, he says, is culpable.

But is this a time for blame? Yes, it is. Accounting for responsibility when a disaster happens—particularly one likely to devastate entire countries, leaving thousands dead—is not beside the point, particularly as Chinese officials move to take advantage of the crisis and launch a disinformation campaign claiming that the U.S. Army introduced the virus.

Well before the new coronavirus spread across American cities, the Chinese regime was already rather creatively trolling U.S. publications, expelling American journalists, and “weaponizing wokeness” over anything it perceived as critical of China’s role in mishandling the epidemic. To hear Chinese spokespeople use the language of racism and prejudice is somewhat surreal, considering this is a regime that has put more than 1 million Muslims and ethnic minorities in “reeducation” camps.

Of course, Americans will have to be vigilant against scapegoating Asians in general or the Chinese people in particular. With one of the highest infection rates and death tolls, Chinese citizens have suffered enough. The Chinese leadership, however, is another matter. A government is not a race. It’s a regime—and easily one of the worst and most brutal in our lifetime. Criticizing authoritarian regimes for what they do outside their own borders and to their own people is simply calling things as they are. To do otherwise is to forgo analysis and accuracy in the name of assuaging a regime that deserves no such consideration.

Those American critics who raise the racism canard are themselves inadvertently collapsing the distinctions between an authoritarian regime and those who live under it. Too many also seem comfortable drawing moral equivalencies between the Chinese regime and Donald Trump. This attitude is hard to take seriously. Trump didn’t block the media from reporting on the coronavirus; he did not disappear his critics. The nature of a regime matters. And this is why I, for one, am glad to live in a democracy, however flawed, in this time of unprecedented crisis.

After the crisis, whenever after is, the relationship with China cannot and should not go back to normal. Nothing, in any case, will go back to normal after the sheer scale of destruction becomes clear. Of course, the rest of the world will have to live with the Chinese leadership as long as it remains in power. But this pandemic should, finally, disabuse us of any remaining hope that the Chinese regime could be a responsible global actor. It is not, and it will not become one.

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The WHO: a mouthpiece for Beijing

Over 80,000 have died in this global pandemic and a gloomy economic forecast looms. A quarter of the world population is under some form of quarantine. Yet, this crisis could have been avoided, or significantly minimised, if not for the incompetence at the core of the World Health Organisation (WHO). Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general throughout the Covid-19 crisis, is a symptom of the incompetence at the heart of this UN agency, which has placed the lives and livelihoods of billions at risk. What’s more, the WHO has allowed itself to become a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party.

Tedros is the first WHO director-general who is not a trained medic. Having gained his PhD in Community Health from the University of Nottingham, he then began his career as a bureaucrat back in Ethiopia. Some improvements were recorded during Tedros’s time in the ministry, but numerous scandals came to light in 2017, as Tedros campaigned for his current role.

The health ministry under Tedros was at the centre of a disagreement over cholera outbreaks in 2006, 2009 & 2011. The ministry declined to diagnose the outbreak as cholera, claiming that test results were outstanding at the time. Opponents accused the government of keeping the outbreak under wraps by labelling it as “ acute watery diarrhoea ” — a symptom of cholera — to downplay its severity. This is not to mention the generally abysmal human rights record of the Ethiopian administration that Tedros served, which has routinely misdirected funds, including for the construction of unsuitable medical facilities.

The African Union delegation to the UN dismissed a 2017 New York Times expose on Tedros’s track record, as “ an unfounded and unverified defamation campaign .” There was never an investigation.

During Tedros’s term as Ethiopian foreign minister, the Kenyan president and his deputy faced crimes against humanity charges for the alleged orchestration of a killing spree in the aftermath of a disputed 2007 election. Amid the international controversy in 2013, Tedros said “Sitting heads of state and government should not be prosecuted while in office. We have resolved to speak with one voice to make sure that our concerns are heard loud and clear.”

Holding office does not absolve a politician of moral or legal consequences. By refusing to pressure sitting politicians to face trial, especially in regimes where term limits are already subject to abuse, alleged illegal activities are able to flourish. It also leaves the apparatus of government in the hands of authorities that may seek to suppress opposition to the ongoing abuses.

Tedros’s political instincts have also been apparent in his handling of the Covid-19 outbreak. He allowed the WHO to accept China’s denial of human-to-human transmission of Covid-19 in the virus’s early stages — it is usual for the WHO to take account of evidence provided by its member states. The WHO accepted China’s account of the disease despite Taiwan’s evidence to the contrary. Taiwan is not a member of the WHO. As a direct result, the world lost a window of time in which a pandemic may have been averted.

Meanwhile, 5 million people were permitted to leave Wuhan in the early stages of the Coronavirus outbreak, negating the international benefits of the quarantine. Despite this, Tedros and the WHO have continued to praise Beijing’s cooperation and transparency . This is despite the fact that Chinese authorities have imprisoned citizen journalists reporting on the virus , along with banning countless foreign correspondents . The Chinese government undoubtedly continues to manipulate infection and death figures.

This continued cowardice in the face of Chinese imperialism led to an awkward exchange between a Hong Kong journalist and a WHO epidemiologist. The epidemiologist refused to discuss Taiwan’s response to the pandemic. When the interviewer raised the prospect of Taiwan joining the WHO — a notion that China strongly opposes — the WHO official “claimed not to be able to hear the question properly, after which the line disconnected.” The WHO has even caved in to promoting pseudoscientific Chinese herbal remedies as a measure against the virus.

No political career is blameless, but Tedros’s efforts at the WHO have been cause for deep concern. He is now no longer just a threat to Ethiopia. He is a threat to the world.

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hbogyt?

You should've messaged me. I only saw it now.

I leave this one to SJWs. I have a very narrow focus - East Asians - a group who's often neglected by the narrative driven, virtue signalling, liberal left. Not that I don't sympathise with the Africans here. It's just they're already in good hands - those detestable narrative driven, virtue signalling, liberal leftist.

Edit 1: also, I don't think the Chinese MSM will denounce it. The government will probably just order those stores to remove the signs, on the quiet.

Edit 2: it's like, everybody makes a big deal of the glass ceiling for women, but doesn't give a damn about the bamboo ceiling for Asians.

Edit 3: ok, I'll add some casual commentary. I have noticed some racism in the Mainland, which is similar to that in Hong Kong and Taiwan. I have seen netizens from all three countries refer to black people as N*****s.

I think this may have a few root causes:

1. Hubris related to the past glory of the Chinese civilsation.

2. Arrogance related to their new found wealth.

3. Right wing pseudo-scientific racism, in a fashion similar to how Western racist right wingers judging the intellect or character of people based on their home civilsation.

Overall, I must say it's more benign in some ways, than instances of racism in the West. I have my biases, so correct me if I'm wrong. In China, you won't see Neo-Nazis physically attacking and some times killing blacks, Jews or Asians.