I doubt that it was due to Socialism that China managed Covid so we’ll - in fact I would even argue China is not a Socialist country. Instead I believe it were the drastic measures that China being an authoritarian state was able to impose (e.g. locking down 13 million people because of 50 covid cases in Xi’an).
China is able to keep covid in check precisely because it is a socialist nation that puts the interests of the majority above the interests of capitalists. The only segment of the population that’s not happy about the handling of the pandemic in China are the rich who are inconvenienced by the quarantines and travel restrictions. If China was a capitalist nation, then it would’ve handled the pandemic exactly the same way all the actual capitalist nations did.
Westerners thinking they understand what political system China has better than people who actually live in China has to be one of my favorite tropes. 87.6% of young Chinese identify with Marxism, and the party has 95 million members. The idea that they don’t understand how to do socialism right is peak chauvinism.
do we gotta use china as our example? A place with even worse controlled media, bad history of lying to WHO etc…
I live here. Which specific lies are you thinking of? Let’s see if I can’t put any of them to bed for you.
I am not a Sinophobe (many know that well here), but I really have trouble believing that there are merely 100K cases among 1.4B people, unless they literally locked people away in their homes. 100K is 0.071% for such a colossal population size.
Since you are native (or living atleast), please clear my doubt. It is not sowed by Western propaganda media, but just the sheer practicality of the situation.
I am from India, and while our case numbers used to stay high, they stay low now, but I really want to know how this is even possible. Is it because asymptomatic testing was avoided entirely? What goes on?
Edit: I read the threadreader link below, but I feel there is more to it. My dad is a doctor, and so we knew on ground what went in India.
If you “know” more than people with boots on the ground there is simply no hope of convincing you. I’ve learned since the Great Wuhan Lockdown not to argue with people who are convinced and can’t be unconvinced. I just break out the popcorn and enjoy their lamentations.
But the fact is that my direct social sphere numbers in the thousands (courtesy of 16 years of teaching … that’s a lot of students, and in China students keep in touch). With my family (spread out over about four cities here—including Wuhan), my friends (mostly just Wuhan), my colleagues (again mostly Wuhan), and my former students I know nobody directly who has had a case of COVID-19. None of their family or other people important to them have had cases. And take that another degree of separation and still, thus far, not a single reported case.
I’m also in a few QQ and WeChat groups that have people spread around the country. These groups have participation measured in six figures or more. Not a case reported. My Weibo interaction is smaller, but that’s another 50,000 or so people, from a brief eyeballing, that have no reported cases.
Oh and somewhere along the way I also managed to completely fail to fall over the stacks of bodies that would be required for some of the more hysterical death estimates. (Some fuckwits are saying 21 million dead because mobile phone cancellations.)
Oh, sorry. I lied. I do know a friend who got COVID-19.
In Poland.
Not a single person in China.
So … your dad is a doctor, but he’s not a doctor IN CHINA. He has not seen what mitigation efforts were used IN CHINA. He has not seen the behaviour of people IN CHINA. He is, to put this bluntly, not a source of information. He is at best a slightly better than average source of speculation.
But speculation don’t mean shit in the face of actual information and experience.
Here’s a few clues, however, to help you through your confusion.
… unless they literally locked people away in their homes …
When the Great Lockdown occurred in Wuhan, there were no locks. But yes, people were required to remain in their domiciles for all but a very small number of very specific activities. For two months my world was my apartment with my wife, my son, and my mother-in-law. We were permitted to leave only to drop off refuse, and to pick up food deliveries (in timed small batches of people) from the compound gate. When we had a lockdown, it wasn’t that cosplay shit the west called a lockdown. It was a genuine lockdown. For two months. Dead streets. Dead businesses. Dead parks. Dead everything. The only things that moved were ambulances, police vehicles, and the delivery trucks.
(The story of those delivery trucks alone is worth a fucking movie. They were the real heroes of Wuhan, topping even the health workers by a small margin!)
Is it because asymptomatic testing was avoided entirely?
The exact opposite. In the summer of 2021 when we had a Delta outbreak in Wuhan, the entire population of Wuhan (11 million people) were tested. Twice. Inside of two weeks. Again, the Chinese didn’t do the cosplay shit the rest of the world did in fighting COVID-19. When a case was found (note: A CASE, singular!), a large district of the city was shut down in a mini-lockdown, contract tracing was turned back on, everybody was tested (twice, as I said), and that was kept up for a few weeks until it was clear the Delta spread had been stopped. Then life returned to normal.
So … your dad is a doctor, but he’s not a doctor IN CHINA. He has not seen what mitigation efforts were used IN CHINA. He has not seen the behaviour of people IN CHINA. He is, to put this bluntly, not a source of information.
Yeah we obviously know what went on ground zero in India, and not in China. I meant to say we know what goes on in the whole medical procedure, and how people interact, since our country has a similar sized population, and so it should be relatable.
I remember the Wuhan lockdown lasted 3 weeks or so, not sure. You say 2 months… so that is new. And I saw this before https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46DfBFWxTuM. A lot of my knowledge on Wuhan stems from here. Can you brief this one?
When a case was found (note: A CASE, singular!), a large district of the city was shut down in a mini-lockdown
This is also being told in the recent case of Xi’an, where due to 50 cases, 13M people essentially got a lockdown. Western media likes to call it their favourite words “authoritarian” “draconian”. India is generally lax but still has a far, far more compliant population than West, and there are not really anti maskers or anti vaxxers here. Why are the attitudes of people there compliant both on micro and macro scales when compared to rest of the world?
Me and my friend discuss things, and we feel Western countries might still struggle with this for a year, and USA for even close to 2 years, at the rate the whole scenario is going on.
And I saw this before https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46DfBFWxTuM.
Sorry, I’m not going to watch an almost hour-long thing to get maybe ten minutes’ worth of actual information. If there’s something to read, I’ll read it. (I read like lightning.) I do not have an hour out of my day to watch what is very likely a bunch of bullshit (given that it’s on Youtube).
Why are the attitudes of people there compliant both on micro and macro scales when compared to rest of the world?
Better education, more trust in expertise (because education is valued), and better government in the experience of an overwhelming majority of the population.
On that latter point, as incredible as it may sound, keep in mind that the single largest source of government interaction most people have is with their community officials … who are their literal neighbours. Keep in mind too that in my lifetime China went from a mostly-agrarian economy to the #2 economy in the world, having switched from (barely) rural majority to full-blown urban majority population not only in my lifetime but in the time I’ve been here. (It was 60% rural when I came. Now it’s approaching 80% urban, if I remember the stats right.)
The government, to the shock and dismay of western pearl-clutchers, has a lot of credibility with the Chinese. As I’ve heard from quite a few people: if everything changed today and genuine free and open elections were held, the current government would win in a landslide. (This is especially true given the utter shit show that the western world has become in controlling a disease that was almost contemptuously handled by Chinese authorities, not to mention the clowns the “free” world put into power around the world … including India.)
There are a lot of factors that play into why China handled COVID-19 so well, and its authoritarian government is probably the least important of them (though it obviously had an impact: building two massive hospitals in under a month is something that could not happen in Canada, for example, because there would be people profiteering from the land sale, people launching lawsuits to block it on stupid grounds, etc. etc. etc.)
Me and my friend discuss things, and we feel Western countries might still struggle with this for a year, and USA for even close to 2 years, at the rate the whole scenario is going on.
A year? You’re an optimist. Look at the chart I posted. Two years into a pandemic that has already killed over 5.5 million people and infected over 300 million and … Europe and North America both are having sudden rapid rises in infections. Two years in and they haven’t learned even the basics that China learned in the first three months or so (from the December start date, not the date of the Great Lockdown).
This is not going away anytime soon. Five years from now there will still be outbreaks all over the “free” world and more and more people are going to stack up in body bags.
I think you should atleast open the link and check the video description and comments. Probably it might surprise you.
The government, to the shock and dismay of western pearl-clutchers, has a lot of credibility with the Chinese
Harvard study made that very clear, and to every single person I have mentioned it as a response to “haha but gubmint evil CCP bad no freedom”, each of them has acted like a denialist. I always tell them as an asterisk that CPC does not get to fund Harvard, so they should use better arguments to convince me.
Our elected government at the moment is a caste supremacist fascist party, and we have had a lot more chaos than just COVID. Whoever is dissing on us does not exactly have an idea about the hellish chaos we are going through, and it is not looking good unless this party gets kicked out forever. Their politics is Trump-ish but way worse, in a nutshell.
One more question here. Since Russia and other socialist countries also have “authoritarian” governments yet clearly have had a response failure, why is China so different? Socialist countries generally have people in solidarity, so I want to make sense of that.
Personally, I talk to many foreigners, and to me it seems like they will just learn to live with ignorance within a year or two. It has been troublesome for many, but atleast we are getting by here. For India, omicron is super spready, but our troubles are over in general, and the minor omicron spread we have had is all thanks to Europeans and foreigners travelling over, accounting for 80% of the omicron cases.
I think you should at least open the link and check the video description and comments. Probably it might surprise you.
I’ll do so when I have some spare time. (Last night was a non-starter. I got injured working out so my night was spent mostly whining quietly in my corner. :D)
Harvard study made that very clear, and to every single person I have mentioned it as a response to “haha but gubmint evil CCP bad no freedom”, each of them has acted like a denialist. I always tell them as an asterisk that CPC does not get to fund Harvard, so they should use better arguments to convince me.
As a general rule of thumb, when I see people use “CCP” I map in “ignorant asshole”. It’s kind of … ballsy … to claim expertise in a subject when you can’t even get the name right, after all.
One more question here. Since Russia and other socialist countries also have “authoritarian” governments yet clearly have had a response failure, why is China so different? Socialist countries generally have people in solidarity, so I want to make sense of that.
Rice culture.
No, really. It’s a thing.
When the main crop of the bulk of your society is rice, and has been for thousands of years, cooperation is in your genes and memes. Rice is not a crop you can farm large-scale individually. Using ancient techniques, for a village to even farm enough rice to feed itself (not to mention an excess for use in trade) it takes a lot of cooperative behaviour that is not needed if you’re, say, farming wheat or potatoes or such. Any person not doing their thing kills the whole. Villages that didn’t learn that lesson starved to death and stopped the spread of their genes and their cultural memes. Farming rice turns out to be a powerful vaccination against maladaptive selfishness.
Russia (which is not particularly socialist right now, and maybe never really was) doesn’t have that need to cooperate hammered into its very genetic and memetic structure. Japan and South Korea (neither of which is even remotely socialist) both do. This is why Russia fared pretty pathetically in facing a threat that was society-wide and J/SK fared relatively well.
I think you should atleast open the link and check the video description and comments. Probably it might surprise you.
It was a pleasant surprise, yes, though less pleasant was they didn’t seem to talk to any expats in Wuhan proper. That’s a damned peculiar oversight.
(As a side note, whenever someone opens with “I am not X, but…” my brain automatically finishes that with “…I totally am X.” You might want to work on that.)
I know. But I trusted people here, just as they trust me, and had no clue how to rephrase it in this instance. People play those cheap cards all the time, which is why I attempted to phrase the comment well.
I am not a Sinophobe (many know that well here), but I really have trouble believing that there are merely 100K cases among 1.4B people, unless they literally locked people away in their homes. 100K is 0.071% for such a colossal population size.
I am having trouble picturing how China could have only 100K cases among 1.4B people. A 0.071% case rate is just too low for me to fathom it happening unless they literally locked people away in their homes.
That would have been a better start. That whole ‘I am not X’ construct has been poisoned by literally centuries of bad-faith use of it. Don’t use it.
I didn’t think you were an actual Sinophobe which is why I put it as a side note and addressed your points directly. (Had I thought of you as a Sinophobe I’d likely have just made fun of you. I’m just oh so weary of those motherfuckers.)
I understood your approach.
Two more questions unrelated to post if you do not mind. (I am curious because Indians are generally not interested in China, and I am an exception that is just too curious and Chinese diaspora views all of us as offensive. Also I feel very lonely as someone who is not aggressive against China in these McCarthyism times.)
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What is the current consensus regarding Indians in China?
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What is the consensus regarding topics like privacy, anonymity, Tor, censorship et al, since I advocate privacy stuff (r/privatelife, c/privatelife and also mod c/privacy), and China does not have the kind of privacy/anonymity culture like in Western “freedom” countries? I have never gotten an opinion on it from China’s perspective, and it is just a very odd question.
I can only speak for things I’ve observed or talked about with people, so my perspective is necessarily limited.
What is the current consensus regarding Indians in China?
I suspect that for most it’s not given much thought. Indian food is well-regarded as exotic, yet palatable. It kind of occupies the same space as Italian food in Canada (right down to being largely inauthentic). For a long time, Indian soap operas were a major hit on television. Nobody in my household watches television any longer (we’ve all switched to streaming to private devices) so I don’t know if that’s the same now. Several of my friends used to go to India once a year and loved it there. One of them wishes he’d stayed in India, in fact, because it seems he’ll never get back given the state of the pandemic.
So largely I suspect the opinions, on average, range from “don’t know, don’t care” leaning toward approval.
What is the consensus regarding topics like privacy, anonymity, Tor, censorship et al, since I advocate privacy stuff (r/privatelife, c/privatelife and also mod c/privacy), and China does not have the kind of privacy/anonymity culture like in Western “freedom” countries? I have never gotten an opinion on it from China’s perspective, and it is just a very odd question.
This is one area where the Chinese are definitely different from westerners. Privacy and anonymity are not huge cultural touchstones. While at the same time they cheerfully use the very kinds of services I’m using to circumvent the Great Firewall because the “Golden Shield” (to give it its proper name) inconveniences them at their work and play.
If you were to go on about anonymity here you’d get people wondering what it is you’re trying to hide, likely causing suspicion, not “HELL YEAH!” responses.
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