this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2022
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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.
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!)
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.
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).
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.)
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.
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.
The CBC managed to interview a self-serving Canuckistani who was flexing how "brave" he was for not abandoning his family in Wuhan when the Canadian government sent evacuation flights, but not for dependent Chinese nationals. If an outfit as incompetent as the CBC can manage to track down an expat to interview, why couldn't professional vloggers with boots-on-the-ground contact networks?
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)
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.
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.
It was a new motion and I fucked up. *shrug* It happens. Since it was a new motion we went with light weight so the damage was minimal.
Almost as if where by design, right? ;)