To what extent is the anti-China narrative simply a lot of people here collectively agreeing with the official Western news story that has been agreed on in the last three years, and how much of this is an actual assessment of how China has behaved/ How it will be perceived as having behaved?
I mean from my point of view, while clearly the low level people at the city level in Wuhan failed fairly badly when faced with a novel and very fast moving problem, at the national level though it looks like the Chinese government has reacted about as aggressively and as well as you could reasonably ask a government to respond to a situation like this.
Is there a reason everyone should be thinking of China as ‘ignoring signs for two weeks’ and not ‘shutting down everything everywhere for months, and building huge hospitals in ten days, and then all of these quarantine efforts actually worked’?
I think there is plenty of events reported in (English language versions) Chinese press and reports of events showing manipulation of the data to provide lower infections and death numbers by Chinese themselves to question the numbers. The fact that there might be a China-always-lies-about-data train that any number of people might be riding really has much to do with it.
They definitely have been taking some very serious actions. However they have also been using their dominant position in WHO to craft an international narrative that may well have allowed a greater international spread of the infection.
That said, clearly the existing meme and this outbreak seem very compatible with my bit above about xenophobic reactions. I do think it’s a risk, and certainly hope it does not play out, but as I said I think the end result in a few years is no one really remembers this any more than they do SARS and MERS.
[Things like this don’t help the case for believing China’s government. After releasing the first COVID-19 genome sequencing the Chinese lab was shutdown for “rectification” without any real explanation it seems.]
To what extent is the anti-China narrative simply a lot of people here collectively agreeing with the official Western news story that has been agreed on in the last three years, and how much of this is an actual assessment of how China has behaved/ How it will be perceived as having behaved?
I mean from my point of view, while clearly the low level people at the city level in Wuhan failed fairly badly when faced with a novel and very fast moving problem, at the national level though it looks like the Chinese government has reacted about as aggressively and as well as you could reasonably ask a government to respond to a situation like this.
Is there a reason everyone should be thinking of China as ‘ignoring signs for two weeks’ and not ‘shutting down everything everywhere for months, and building huge hospitals in ten days, and then all of these quarantine efforts actually worked’?
I think there is plenty of events reported in (English language versions) Chinese press and reports of events showing manipulation of the data to provide lower infections and death numbers by Chinese themselves to question the numbers. The fact that there might be a China-always-lies-about-data train that any number of people might be riding really has much to do with it.
They definitely have been taking some very serious actions. However they have also been using their dominant position in WHO to craft an international narrative that may well have allowed a greater international spread of the infection.
That said, clearly the existing meme and this outbreak seem very compatible with my bit above about xenophobic reactions. I do think it’s a risk, and certainly hope it does not play out, but as I said I think the end result in a few years is no one really remembers this any more than they do SARS and MERS.
[Things like this don’t help the case for believing China’s government. After releasing the first COVID-19 genome sequencing the Chinese lab was shutdown for “rectification” without any real explanation it seems.]