Socialism

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.

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.