Shanghai video overwhelms Chinese censor, gets 400M views
austrianchina.substack.comWhat really grates at people’s nerves?
Uncertainty. Not knowing when you will end up testing positive and be whisked off by one of the commissar’s white costumed goon squads in the middle of the night. If you don’t agree, that’s when they typically come, like the NKVD secret police back in the Soviet Union. And not knowing what will happen to your children, your elderly parents and your pets if / when that day comes.
https://austrianchina.substack.com/p/tragedy-and-hope-in-sha...
Very interesting. Not doubting the severity of the situation, but I'm curious where you get this info – you seem to have knowledge of the inside baseball (like emergency meetings held by CCP admins) and I don't know how to trust that it's accurate.
Out of experience in Hong Kong, this is exactly what happened. People weren't afraid of testing positive, they were afraid of being taken away to a poorly maintained quarantine facility for two weeks. Even your close contacts would be quarantined for two weeks, making it so that many people (unsurprisingly) lied about who they met, or where they went.
For people, who live paycheck to paycheck, this would essentially destroy their livelihoods. They would be out of money (since they won't get paid for weeks), could potentially not feed their families, and are at risk of losing their jobs.
Indeed, that was exactly the issue in Hong Kong and when the likelihood of having this happen in HK with the mandatory tests and rising cases started to skyrocket, that's when I left to go take refugee outside the madness. Ironically, I promptly got covid in Europe and it was no big deal. The disease itself is no big deal, the real risk is authoritarian governments who have gone mental. All of my friends who have gotten covid in HK are keeping it very secret, which explains how we only have a bit over 1M reported cases, vs. likely 4M+ cases in 3 months (out of a population of 7M).
And we have it easy in HK. What's happening in Shanghai is far scarier. They're literally going around forcibly imprisoning people and starving them, and killing their pets arbitrarily. In HK they only tried to kill people's hamsters, but at least didn't go for our dogs. If they had gone for my boy, that's when I'd turn full revolutionary.
fellow HK gweilo here - me too would have gone full John Wick mode! it is impressive to witness such a mass psychosis, but if you touch my dog, then...
They wouldn’t even blink twice when they take your dog away. When I returned to HK in January, the entire experience was so dehumanising. You’re literally treated like cattle, from the moment you get off the plane, you’re just following a long queue, going through different station, and end up waiting for hours without anyone telling you what’s going on.
Everyone on my flight ended up waiting for over 12 hours i the airport, because people tested positive. Not a single person came to explain what was going on, it took several passengers shouting at staff to get bits of information. I saw a woman with kids break down in tears because she too had been there for over 12 hours.
Don’t even get me started on the two week quarantine, I felt like I was treater as a prisoner. I’ve lived here long enough to not expect decent customer service, but it wasn’t my choice to be locked up for two weeks, the least staff can do is treat people nicer.
>fellow HK gweilo here
LOL. May be after the lockdown we should make a Hong Kong HN gathering event.
> The disease itself is no big deal
Well, not for you personally I guess.
A lot of it is public information though, if you know where to look.
People have more pressing issue I imaging: food shortage is not a matter of incertitude, it's already there, lack of space is another. If you have enough propaganda to put some people, who happen to live in very comfortable homes, with gardens etc, food coming from the outside as anything else and they still get payed as usual probably only few will revolt.
That's indeed the Great Reset/World Economic Forum model https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s... only they imaging to been able to substitute large homes with garden with a Virtual Revolution alike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Revolution capsule homes with metaverse-alike seats. A modern version of the classic panem et circense.
IMVHO China want to change it's demography quickly so they have to manage some justified enormous amount of "elderly" deaths to lower their mean population age. They need more young and they can't even nourish actual adults. A pandemic as excuse, with proper "cures" (not to cure but to kill), pushing people to suicide, ... is a mildly effective technique. In the meantime they can test countless of things and nearly no one will spot them. Some might see this as a so extreme theory that follow some flat-earth believers, and that's exactly why it might be a "good" one: the classic Goebbels "kill 100 children and the entire world will be against you, kill 100M and no one will believe, almost anyone will remain silent or even criticize those who speak".
I suggest a small reasoning in the end:
- did we agree that Earth is overpopulated?
- did we agree that IPCC/GIEC reports on climate might be realistic enough to be called true?
- did we agree that any human being rightly want to live better and so no demand of real, tangible "food rationing, lifestyle changes" can happen and be effective without some enormously real or mocked emergency (cfr. the classic Capitalism and Freedom)?
That what you think it can be done from here to 2030, a VERY short period of time in social changes terms, to completely transform the society? In the past we used wars, but with nukes it's not much a good idea AND wars tend to kill more young that old people...
I don’t think it is ok to compare covid quarantines to concentration camps.
That is not a comparison, it is a description and an identification (a "classification", in ML terms).
When people hear "concentration camp," they think about the Nazi camps during WWII where people were gassed, starved or worked to death. They don't think of a large makeshift hospital that you go to for 10 days, in which you're given 3 hot meals a day, and in which you spend your time lying in bed, trying to fight off boredom by scrolling your smartphone.
This sort of hyperbolic language is silly, and is disrespectful to the memory of people who perished in actual concentration camps.
Diogenes, while I agree that «hyperbolic language is silly» and occasionally «disrespectful», if we let "history", the non progressive instances of history, eat up our language then we would lose something extremely precious.
«"When people hear they think"» is an enemy of language and more.
If you wanted to interpret «"occasionally"» in the first sentence of this post as "seldom", because "when people hear they think", instead of "according to occasion", which is what was meant, then that very sentence would be disrespectful. But you should know this was not what was intended.
You know how it works with servers: strict in the output, tolerant in the intake.
The term "concentration camp" is almost entirely associated with the Holocaust.
The people using that term to describe makeshift hospitals want their listeners/readers to draw that connection.
> The term... is almost entirely associated
By whom? Who tells you the speaker considers their association(s) relevant? They are not entitled to assume those associations outside their own mind (and even inside it, that does not seem proper mental hygiene nor proper process).
> The people using that term
False. /Some/ people - irregardless of the number - use language that way. Other people do not, and hold that treatment of language in contempt: they do not care about "familiar" language in which a clan of two or two billion decide that they will interpret some term in some way specific to them. (What does 'familiar' mean just a few terms earlier?)
> By whom?
By people who speak the English language.
The reason why people are calling makeshift hospitals "concentration camps" is precisely because they want their listeners/readers to think about Nazi concentration camps, and to recoil in horror. If you look at the specific blog we're talking about, they use terms like "deportation," which are likewise meant to make people think of the Holocaust.
This is a common rhetorical tactic, and it's not limited to the term "concentration camps." During the pandemic, opponents of vaccine passes and testing requirements have frequently compared these measures to measures taken by the Nazis.
As for your talk of "clans" and such, I'm a bit puzzled as to what you're talking about. Language is a means of communication, and it's clear that this blog is trying to communicate the message that sending people who test positive to makeshift hospitals in like the Nazis deporting millions of people to concentration camps.
> By people who speak the English language
No, really not. I do speak it, and I surely I would not use it that way.
> If you look at the specific blog
If you believe that the author of that page was being manipulative, I will not argue - I don't know. If you are sure of that, I hope you are on solid grounds. But in general, when somebody says 'deportation', that is meant to mean some meaning in the cone of "deportation" as a function of the context - not "the statistical mode in the set of interpretations that a mesmerized mind crippled to passivity has emerge in a game of associations".
> I'm a bit puzzled
If you chose as a name "Diogenes Kynikos", you should consistently be wary and distant of what people in general do and think. If one does, like Diogenes Kynikos does, others will too, surely. That rules out that language could ever universally be some "game of associations", as some surely would not participate to it - Diogenes would not. And cultural differences suffice to break the possibility of relying on cultural associations (outside the manipulation of specific targets by malicious agents) - you cannot know if your listener is part of your "clan" and shares your metaphors, the "language to understand each other in the family". And this is part of why we do not rely on cultural references in our expression.
Also, we would not because language intended to be evocative of emotionally charged images would be, immoral (emotional manipulation is immoral). So, no, normal people do not speak that way. Malicious agents could - only them actually.
One thing that I observe about how China deals with COVID: leadership assumes that they have perfect control over perfect people.
Therefore they try these type of solutions like complete lock-down of a city of 26m people.
They assume that they are perfect as leaders, so planning is perfect and takes everything into consideration.
They assume that people will execute their orders perfectly, even under extreme hardship (hunger, lack of medication, being separated from children in hospital, being separated from sick parents, etc).
Of course none of that is true.
For all its failures, democracy at least has taught us to incorporate the human imperfection into the process and the decisions.
We have to compensate for human imperfection, the same way a good engineer takes into consideration the imperfection of the materials, imperfection of signals, numerical imperfections in algorithms, etc.
I am curious when China will adjust their model/plan for COVID to consider the vast amount of counter-evidence that is accumulating.
>One thing that I observe about how China deals with COVID: leadership assumes that they have perfect control over perfect people.
This is absolutely not unique to China. How many times have we heard "if only everyone did this or that, the measures would have worked!" coming from official authorities here in the west? I know it happened a lot where I live, and It honestly surprised me how almost every measure was based on that crappy assumption.
I think the opposite: that China is a powder keg ready to go off at any moment - and the leaders know it very well and are generally pretty afraid of things blowing up.
There are a lot of protests in China we don't hear about.
Something about Chinese (in China) ... leads me to think they go big on memes. They revolt unlike anything we know of.
Do you remember the video form Feb 2020 in Wuhan? The madness, hospitals flooded?
Imagine all over China.
As long as the economy is steaming forward, people will look the other way.
But as soon as that starts to slow down, then I think it's going to get hot.
Edit, for my naysayers:
"The number of workers' strikes rose to a record level in 2015. The China Labor Bulletin mentioned 2,509 strikes and protests by workers and employees in China."
That's just labour disputes and doesn't include disputes concerning appropriated land, safety issues with products - i.e. the kinds of things where there's some tolerance for dissent. [1] And note that it's increasing every year.
Especially due to the power of Social Media, if China didn't have censorship the CCP would be out within months. They are well aware of this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protest_and_dissent_in_China
Revolutions use angry young men as fuel. China's young men population is proportionally small. Further, due to the legacy of the four-grandparent-policy and Confucian respect-for-elders tradition, the young that exist have high family responsibilities. Perhaps there will be something new in China - something that comes from the same place as revolution but without the testosterone.
> China's young men population is proportionally small
But their population of young women is even smaller.
I doubt their model is that people are perfect. I think their model assumes that if they set strong enough incentives, the human-error will only be a second order effect and can be safely ignored. I don't know how well they've estimated the political price for some of these incentives, and whether they have the political capital to expend to maintain this lockdown for much longer.
Their model is that you are assumed to be right, and when you're not, you save face by still acting like you're right. They're in too deep and they can't admit their policy is wrong since it admits that the west's approach is superior.
I like to use an analogy where every country is represented by a couple of people in a bar. China is the group who plans their consumptions two months in advance and sticks to its plan. America is the group that gets into a brawl in one moment, and in the next, builds a functional rocket in the parking lot.
I have an easier to understand analogy: China is the country that will try to solve an integral using Gaussian quadrature while USA will use some kind of Monte Carlo.
I presume you weren’t around when most of the posters here were clamoring for the same measures that are now failing in Shanghai?
‘Just 15 days to stop the spread!’
‘The lockdowns should be stricter, look at how well it works in China!’
‘If you are against lockdowns, you’re killing grandma and you should be locked up!’
> If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
Federalist No. 51, James Madison
> I am curious when China will adjust their model/plan for COVID to consider the vast amount of counter-evidence that is accumulating.
Probably it will take at least one year and a half - two years, at least that's how long it took the Western authorities to somehow change their discourse. Some people around the Western parts of the world still believe in mask mandates, to say nothing of the vaccine mandates if you want to visit their country (Greece, for example).
Thankfully all this China situation will have eased up the censorship reflex present in some Western media/social platforms, now it's again cool and super ok to complain about the lockdowns and to call them authoritarian because it's the evil Chinese that are implementing them. When us, the West, were doing them it was "for democracy" and for the greater good (for "the demos"). When the streets of NYC or London were empty because of lockdowns it was a civic thing, when the streets of Shanghai are empty (as The Economist was decrying in one of the its latest issues) is because the Chinese authorities want the worst for their people.
The UK has chosen about 400 deaths a day instead as a level that the media are comfortable with.
Where is this 'vast amount of evidence' anyhow?
So far they've had to have ugly lockdowns in a few cities, but it's a tiny fraction of the overall population.
If it goes on for a long while - this will be a problem, but if they got away with it by having lockdowns - even late into the game - I wouldn't call it a failure.
That said, we really don't know what a lot of the numbers are.
Here in Canada some provinces did use lock-downs (even with curfews) and some didn't, and comparisons made between them show that lock-down was one of the least effective measures.
I am sure similar data exists for US states, EU countries, etc.
> Some people around the Western parts of the world still believe in mask mandates, to say nothing of the vaccine mandates if you want to visit their country
Yes, people believe in mask mandates because masks are an effective way to prevent the spread of COVID. This is indisputable, so of course people support mask mandates.
> will have eased up the censorship reflex present in some Western media/social platforms
You can say whatever you want about COVID on social media in the west -- worst case your post is displayed with a warning stating it may be misinformation (and there is a lot of misinformation on western social media).
This is communism in a nutshell. The government decides the people are forced to follow. Even if it results in millions dead.
More like totalitarianism, that all well known communist systems have also been more or less totalitarian is something to think about tho.
This is not an accident. In 1888 (long before any socialist or communist country existed to validate the theory), the American socialist Benjamin tucker predicted that the Marxist form of socialism and it's derivates would necessarily lead to totalitarianism, with some eerily prescient predictions born out by the experiences in Venezuela, Cuba, china, USSR, etc.
If anyone claims that state socialism will have any other outcome (assuming they believe in science the process of prediction and confirmation) then it's on them to explicitly explain what, exactly, in their proposed implementation diverges from Tucker's model that would make their vision of state socialism turn out differently.
Yeah it's ridiculous that people keep using this no true scotsman fallacy argument about communism, even after 100 years of large scale experiments that all lead to the same outcome, with enormous loss and suffering.
And absolute monarchism, and classic dictatorship, fascism, etc. Communism isn't the only ideology which usually ends up totalitarian.
But it’s the only one that always does.
> leadership assumes that they have perfect control over perfect people
Only androids that are physically unable to empathise would make such an assumption. That's literally the definition of android from Philip K. Dick, and the basis of cyberpunk stories like Blade Runner. In this case the androids are the Communist Party of China and are trying to contain a virus with no knowledge or understanding how tens of millions of citizens would react to being locked in their tiny homes risking starvation.
At least the current evidences (excluding Shanghai) has shown that the virus can be contained. Yes, there are cases, but cities have managed to contain it and people are normally back to normal after two weeks semi-lockdown. Of course, with Shanghai keeps having new cases, things may change.
The government is pushing for old people to get vaccination. Old generation in China are not getting vaccinations because they worry it may have side effects. As far as I have heard, the government is pushing it by linking some money (old people get some government money for special occasions) with the vaccination.
Overall, the country will have to accept the fact that the virus will spread, especially if they want to open borders. The current strategy is to contain it as much as you can. Once it open up, it will have a peak similar to Hong Kong, maybe hundred of thousands of old people will die.
Yes if you ignore all the times when it doesn't work, then lockdown works. It's an irrelevant tautology with no intellectual or scientific merit.
There is no Shanghai exception for lockdown as a scientific policy, just like there is no Swedish exception. To decide if a policy advertised as based on universal biology is working you need to evaluate all the evidence, and cases where it doesn't work either disprove the theory or require refinement. As nobody can come up with a plausible refinement that means it's disproven.
Agree and disagree. Lockdown can work until it does not work. Science can evaluate the speed of spread, does not dictate what's happening. My city had a short lockdown a few month ago, Shenzhen and Guangzhou just finished lockdown. It is fair to say 9/10 worked. It is more difficult to contain Omicron, science can say that. Also virus won't spread when no one is moving, science can also say that. It is just a trade off in the end.
This is yet more tautologies. Science doesn't dictate what's happening but it is meant to predict what's happening. That's the whole point of science. In this case the fake pseudo-scientists that claim to understand disease spread predict that lockdown will reduce disease spread but it doesn't. They can't explain why lockdowns don't work, which makes it not science.
As for your belief that 9/10 worked - please. Please! This is a tiger-protecting rock fallacy. Yes if you wear a rock around your neck, more than 99% of the time you will not be eaten by a tiger. The arguments that lockdowns work are all forms of this type of nonsense when examined. Correlation doesn't imply causation, you need to have very compelling evidence to show causality and "sorta overlaps sometimes, maybe" is not evidence of anything because people epidemics have natural cycles and governments tend to trigger lockdowns as they come up to their peaks. That doesn't mean the peaks are caused by lockdowns and it's the exceptions where they have no effect that prove this.
> In this case the fake pseudo-scientists that claim to understand disease spread predict that lockdown will reduce disease spread but it doesn't.
What's your basis for saying that lockdowns don't reduce spread? They do dramatically affect spread - that's been seen in every country. It's almost impossible for them not to affect spread. The virus propagates from person to person, mostly by them breathing the same air. If you reduce contacts between people, you reduce viral spread. This is about as well established as the statement that things fall.
Unfortunately for some, whatever “science says” will be ignored next time.
Well, it has worked amazingly well for the last 2 years in China. It's been a CoVID-free bubble in which life has been close to normal for the vast majority of the time, for the vast majority of the people.
A lot of people commenting here are going on the basis of their experiences in countries that had on-again, off-again lockdowns, but in which the virus was largely allowed to spread. Yes, if you do a partial lockdown during the peak of a surge, and then start reopening once the surge starts to subside, you'll never eliminate the virus.
China's strategy has been completely different. It locked down hard in early 2020, and completely eliminated the virus within its borders. It then shifted attention towards stopping the virus from getting back into the country, by requiring international arrivals to quarantine. It also built up extremely good contact tracing systems, to identify and contain new outbreaks before they could spread widely.
That has worked remarkably well for over 2 years now. This is the first time that Shanghai has had to lock down since early 2020.
So yes, it's obvious that the overall strategy that China has followed is effective, and it does involve lockdowns, along with other measures like border quarantine and contact-tracing apps. This isn't a tautology. It's just an observation: there's a strategy that a massive country followed, which obviously worked.
Do you have any proof the CCP is not lying about the numbers? There were some people in China who claimed the official numbers are nowhere near the real levels. If the CCP is lying we have no evidence the virus can be contained.
"For all its failures, democracy at least has taught us to incorporate the human imperfection into the process and the decisions."
<Sarcasm>which is why all democracies defeated COVID with the three-week lockdown in which no one left home unless they had to and took proper precautions to ensure that they did not dare transmit any disease to anyone else</sarcasm>
No, I would say that modern democracies and enshrine human imperfections into the process in order to further the will to power that exists in those seeking office.
At least in Europe we never had a lockdown comparable to the Shanghai lockdown. People always could go to get food, medicine and get to work. The highest level of lockdown was that in-door and outdoor meeting in private were restricted somewhat (in Germany you could only walk with a single person from another household but couldn't sit down on a park bench).
I think western democracies had a much more commensurate approach to Covid even though they failed in protecting the nursing home population.
It is difficult to name a country that has "defeated" COVID. This video is from one of the best responses if you believe the lies the Chinese government pumps out about their COVID case counts. The situation today remains the same as the situation in March 2020 - anyone who doesn't die quickly of other causes is going to get COVID. The only surprise the entire way through the pandemic is they managed to rush a vaccine into mass production in ~12 months rather than a couple of years (very much a record!).
Even with that good news the damage from the lockdowns may not have been worth it, the world is re-emerging into a rather unstable environment with a lot of nervous people that looks ripe for WWIII. It is debatable whether the government interventions were actually a good idea, we don't have the full picture of what the costs were. I'd still rather have seen them pushing out honest, current information and then letting individuals make decisions for better or worse.
> then letting individuals make decisions for better or worse
That sounds a lot like anarchy to me. I believe we invented laws (and religion before that) exactly because individuals can't be trusted to make informed decisions in certain cases.
I don’t know what your culture claims, but freedom isn’t a privilege, and the only good social contract is a voluntary one. Things are never going to work otherwise in the US.
I think about these issues a lot in my spare time. I am curious if you have any favorite modifications/alternatives to democracies.
> They assume that people will execute their orders perfectly, even under extreme hardship
China has also taken 1 billion people out of poverty in just 3 decades.
> For all its failures, democracy at least has taught us to incorporate the human imperfection into the process and the decisions.
Since we’re talking counter evidence:
- Singapore is a benevolent dictatorship - Japan’s schooling system prepares its citizens to be model minorities, and most of the orderliness or Japan is because of cultural reasons. Additionally, people are expected to not make mistakes.
America does have other ways it recognizes and adapts to human flaws: by embracing the free market. Adam Smith’s wealth of nations mentioned it not out of altruism, but selfishness that everyone thrives.
It’s not entirely attributable to democracy. In fact, many are arguing to remove the electoral college. A popular vote would be more Democratic in the Ancient Greek sense no? But our founder fathers designed America against that, to prevent tyranny of the masses.
> For all its failures, democracy at least has taught us to incorporate the human imperfection into the process and the decisions.
This is not uniquely America or contemporary. Any great past civilization accounted for this if it lasted for a long time.
"China" didn't do that. The Chinese people did that after Deng Xiaoping got into a position where he could stop the government actively destroying all progress in the country.
And whilst I used to be impressed by this "lifted a billion people" take, the reality is that lots of countries industrialized, modernized and huge numbers of people left behind agrarian poverty. This isn't unique or special and in fact when ranked against other countries like Taiwan, Korea, Japan - let alone countries like the USA or UK - China has turned in one of the worst performances. China still has widespread poverty and in many ways is still a developing country, 80 years after Europe utterly destroyed itself in WW2 and Japan had two of its major cities leveled by atomic bombs.
There's really nothing impressive about China beyond the sheer number of people the government has managed to hold back. If your foot is constantly on the brake of a very large vehicle, lifting your foot even half way will cause a lot of mass to start moving. That doesn't mean you get credit for it.
> Taiwan, Korea, Japan
Japan has less than 1/10th China’s population. Taiwan has less than 20% of Taiwan.
Japan was far richer than China per capita before WWII. Japan was the superpower that believed it could take on the West. Until recent, did China ever try to expand and attack the West?
Japan was never occupied by a resource colonizer, while China had the opium war.
Right now, both Japan and Taiwan’s economy are at stagnating. How do I know? I’m a permanent resident of one, and have a passport from the other. The argument that democracy exists, and let people do whatever they want will lead to prosperous is false. Otherwise America wouldn’t be at risk of slowing growth, potentially civilization decline.
Also, what are your thoughts on Singapore which is a one family dictatorship ?
> Japan had two of its major cities leveled by atomic bombs.
Have you been or is this armchair philosophizing from intro to WWII? I’ve been to the monuments at both, but the fact of the matter is those were military cities. Those cities by themselves are not what crippled the Japanese economy post WWII.
> There's really nothing impressive about China beyond the sheer number of people the government has managed to hold back.
Is that why India and Africa with a billion people are in poverty still?
Being from Africa and now living in the first world, my experiences align with what native_samples is saying. We had colonialism and then most countries in Africa had governments with understandably anti-Western ideas - for decades.
Even today a very serious issue holding back progress there is thousands of little regulations that are designed to lead to bribes.
If Africa’s national borders and governments could be redrawn from scratch, it would organize itself into a much happier, richer place.
> Taiwan has less than 20% of Taiwan.
You are mistaken. Taiwan is 100% of Taiwan.
> It’s not entirely attributable to democracy. In fact, many are arguing to remove the electoral college. A popular vote would be more Democratic in the Ancient Greek sense no? But our founder fathers designed America against that, to prevent tyranny of the masses.
That's at least a gross oversimplification. One of the primary reasons for the electoral college was that it allowed the compromise with southern states that they could count slaves as population (well half actually), without letting them vote. There was also the difficulty of the voting process during those times. I'm not aware of documents actually stating that the electoral system was about preventing the "tyranny of the masses".
Federalist 10 (James Madison) does pretty explicitly state this. It seeks to explain how the proposed US Constitution protects against one of the key problems with representative government -- that of faction (aka, what we would call parties today). The tyranny of the majority is described as follows:
> When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens
And the remedy provided by the indirectness of the American system (i.e., election of representatives, senators, and electors instead of direct democracy) is that it will
> refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose
Generally I recommend reading this whole paper, 18th century prose aside, as it provides a fascinating insight into how the framers thought of some of the key points of the Constitution
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/primary-sources/federalist...
>China has also taken 1 billion people out of poverty in just 3 decades.
Capitalism took them out of poverty once Mao died and the Chinese government mostly got out of the market's way
The secret police apparently got to the author of the video:
- "“However, I don’t wish this video to be distributed in the directions I don’t want,” he added. “I hope everyone stops sharing, or please asking people you know to stop sharing.”"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/22/sound-of-april...
Reminds me a little of You should migrate any data encrypted by TrueCrypt to encrypted disks or virtual disk images supported on your platform.[0]
How so? Do you think that message was coerced?
No. The common theory is that TrueCrypt was compromised by a three letter agency and the creator was not content to let people use compromised encryption. So he ended the product and could plausibly tell everyone that the software was no longer secure, since it wasn't receiving updates.
We now know that the FBI/CIA/etc have broad authority to do things like:
* Install back doors into any software present in America.
* Summarily search and collect any data on any US server.
* Prevent the vendors speaking about any of it.
This case is a little murkier because TrueCrypt was open source. The common retort is: "clearly anyone would see if it were compromised." Unfortunately there aren't a lot of people in the world capable of understanding the maths involved in complicated encryption algorithms. Especially not as they relate to novel implementations TrueCrypt was using, like the lauded hidden OS feature. It is equally likely that some agency were able to break the encryption using some kind of exploit, and compelled TrueCrypt to never change their algorithm. Or perhaps the download websites were being actively monitored for downloads, and those IPs were being heavily scrutinised and cross-referenced.
It's also possibly none of these. I found an old Reddit thread with some interesting details (link dead): https://www.reddit.com/r/techsnap/comments/4cgked/paul_le_ro...
One could write an exciting mini-series over this.
The successor is generally considered VeraCrypt, though it is not clear how secure it is: https://www.veracrypt.fr/code/VeraCrypt/
"Hello, friend. Please do not share this [linked] video. Pass on the message to everyone you know. Thanks"
> The secret police apparently got to the author of the video
My understanding is that this kind of thing is handled by the ordinary police.
Did you just make that up?
How did this article get the view "behind the curtain"? Conference calls of the Beijing network surveillance office are hardly public knowledge? Together with the imprecise writing ("All the alerts went red") the articles claims are hard to take at face value.
That's the part that stood out to me, doesn't seem plausible that a random account on substack knows so much about behind the scene stuffs. Even things like the 400m number (or any number in there actually), where did those numbers come from? I don't even know what the original platform of the video was, which I assumed was not Youtube?
It's largely translated from a Chinese social media post [1] that's been floating around without clear attribution.
Yes, this is the source.
I think it's better to treat that post as part of the protest (someone supporting the message of the video imagining how it spreads far and wide) than as a reliable source on things like traffic figures (which, realistically, even the authorities can't know because of all the different copies floating around).
So...how can we trust the writings of the author? Can the data be validated elsewhere? A video posted 8PM with ...11PM it has 30 million views...midnight 100 million, 1:05AM, 300 million. There were 200 million WeChat users up between 12AM and 1:05AM who viewed it?
And with all those views - the Chinese government did not hold a conference call till 12:30PM? 12 hours later?
I'm no dictator, but I would have circuit breakers much earlier than at 400 million, and if things go 'red' I wouldn't wait till after lunch the next day to convene a meeting. But, that's just me.
They did take it down, and people reuploaded it, flipped or rotated or with minor edits, and those got deleted too, and more people uploaded it, and those got deleted, and even more reuploaded it
I assume the 400M view is with the original, rather than adding up all views from different uploads.
Thanks for catching this typo. It should read 12:30 am.
> So... how can we trust the writings of the author?
Are you saying you're sceptical of something published by Austrian China: View from China with an Austrian School of Economics Perspective? Austrian economists are well-known for their firm evidence-based reasoning, right? :)
> At this time the public opinion control system warning was triggered, and manual intervention began. ... manual intervention could not keep up with the speed of retweeting and posting. All available staff were called up to support the suppression effort.
How does the authors know all this? This sounds like super detailed insider information.
>> At this time the public opinion control system warning was triggered, and manual intervention began. ... manual intervention could not keep up with the speed of retweeting and posting. All available staff were called up to support the suppression effort.
> How does the authors know all this? This sounds like super detailed insider information.
My guess is it's made up: it reads like sci-fi (take an idea, and hang some plausible-sounding narrative on it), and I doubt someone actually privy to the inner workings of the Chinese censorship apparatus probably not say "retweeting."
Also:
>> View from China with an Austrian School of Economics Perspective
This (and a few other things) give me the impression of someone who thinks their ideology lets them see through walls, so to speak.
> All available staff were called up to support the suppression effort.
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021h.html#ch17The orders already issuing from the telescreen, recalling them to their posts, were hardly necessary. Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound−tracks, photographs all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere. The work was overwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it involved could not be called by their true names. Everyone in the Records Department worked eighteen hours in the twenty−four, with two three−hour snatches of sleep. - excerpt from 1984Quotes from 1984 are cliche, and they tend to obscure more than they elucidate.
After this I bet they will create mechanisms to automatically ban videos if they didn't already have one.
One aspect of this that i'm hoping a more informed person can comment on:
Are the news reports of anger by shanghai residents directed against the national or provincial(?) government? From what I previously read Shanghai was discussed as a factional stronghold not wholly subservient to the national government (to Xi). That being the case i've been curious if these draconian measures have been imposed from the national level meant to weaken that faction's provincial support?
Given the numbers of deaths being so low and not having read about overwhelmed hospitals, these almost seem like own-goals by the chinese government? But a factional dispute would explain it, in my mind. Does anyone have any better data?
Well Beijing has taken over Shanghai. The number of deaths is miss reported. (If someone has heart disease and dies of covid it’s reported as heart disease, this keeps their numbers Low and explains why America gets 22k deaths from seasonal flu and China gets 50 despite having 4-5 times the population.)
And hospitals aren’t coping, and office blocks are being turned into quarantine facilities that lack basic things like showers.
Even the actual quarantine facilities are being used despite not being completed.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CcJFpN3pEN3/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M...
https://www.whatsonweibo.com/aerial-view-photos-of-shanghai-...
> Are the news reports of anger by shanghai residents directed against the national or provincial(?) government?
To the terminology question, Shanghai is a city (市) and not a province (省). However, it is one of four cities that have a special status formally equal to that of provinces. (Imagine if New York City was torn out of the several states it's technically in and made into its own state.) Practically, Shanghai is more important than some of the less significant provinces.
To the substance of the question, whether blame falls on the government of China or more specifically on the government of Shanghai, my view is limited. But I can report that one resident of Shanghai, a longtime friend of mine, is pretty vocal about blaming the Shanghai government.
The Shanghai government was completed sidelined, and the health department top officials replaced by people brought in by Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan. She even attempted to replace Shanghai's health code management software with her own, but that attempt was just abandoned. This article tells the story:
https://austrianchina.substack.com/p/when-the-commissar-came...
That's not really relevant to who takes the blame, is it?
The Shanghai government will take the blame as they failed to implement the lockdown early and hard policies the rest of China was following.
I doubt deaths are very low. I have basically no network there but even I have heard of multiple deaths.
I wonder whether the Shanghai situation will be what finally catalyzes real political reform. The people have put up with a lot from this regime over the years. Shanghai has historically been where anti-government movements get going. It will be interesting to see what transpires over the next few months.
These same draconian measures were how China supposedly weathered the initial spread of COVID well if those reports are to be believed, and even if you don't it's the party line. Given that, it would seem more likely that they'll double down since "this worked before."
Along these same lines, crushing dissenters is also something the government has much experience with, and has also "worked before" in the worst ways. I don't hold out much hope in terms of anti-government movements taking root and actually effecting change.
Yeah... but those lockdowns weren't in "first-tier" cities, it was lockdowns of dirty provincials.
If the elites in Beijing are locked in their apartments for months on end, and start to go hungry... idk. I'm not saying there's going to be some fantastical democratic reform, but a coup that replaces Xi seems plausible.
>If the elites in Beijing are locked in their apartments for months on end, and start to go hungry... idk
That's why Beijing is getting better treatment.
>A defence of Beijing’s strict border controls might stress the importance of shielding the central government from outbreaks. But that does not explain why pandemic rules inside the capital have been strikingly lenient, compared with those imposed on humbler places like Langfang. For instance, more than half a dozen covid cases were found in April in Jiuxianqiao, a district of Beijing near modern-art galleries and posh apartment blocks. A compact “high-risk zone” was drawn around that outbreak as if with a scalpel. Nearby schools, shops and restaurants stayed open.
https://www.economist.com/china/2022/04/21/chinas-harsh-and-...
Is xi Jinping’s grip on power really that strong? Is there no chance the CCP can vote to remove him and change course? I doubt all of them feel great about returning to a new Mao-like era when the more economically free system was clearly pleasant enough.
The congress in October is precisely why the covid 0 policy is maintained, so he won't be blamed for a large outbreak.
You have just answered, with the most cynical note, possibly eye-opening, to a question that many have raised, including people of refined intellect. Maybe they were missing the notion of the appointment on the calendar, maybe they did not associate the two (or did not instinctively believe they could be associated - but when you add the "mitigating factors", the decision gains an aspect of "rational", or of /rationalized/).
I dunno, one of the stronger sentiments seems to be "the Shanghai government is fucking this up, we need the central government to take over and fix this".
It is my opinion as well. If you look at other cities, they all followed the zero-covid policy while Shanghai's official was declaring the city will not lock down for a few days or a week to get over the virus, instead, she insists there has only been one severe case, ignoring the numbers from all other countries (0.1% death rate). That's why I believe if they have acted properly at the beginning, the lockdown can start a week earlier and finish 4 weeks earlier.
I have heard this line a fair few times as well (not taking a stance in terms of whether it is factually true or not) and it is in my experience fairly common among supporters of authoritarian systems. Given that the leadership is largely (if not entirely) infallible, clearly it was the execution of their orders that was flawed and the fix should be to give them further power and prune some underlings. Rinse, repeat, and the system survives.
Look at a TV “audience” with Putin and you will see the very same pattern.
Same thing in Nazi Germany. The Fuhrer was considered to be above party politics and the anti-semitic actions of the nazi state. Of course he wasn’t, but its a tried and true tactic I guess.
Precisely. It's all "spin", every government does it, China is an expert at it.
Things go well: CCP success story and demonstration of superiority of China (note, not the Party, because "the people and the party are ONE")
Things go poorly: Local government incompetence, foreign interference, reactionary saboteurs "picking fights and quarrels"
Shanghai gov did fuck up. Now Beijing gov is fucking up.
Yeah the outcome of Beijing will be more important than Shanghai
I hope it doesn’t, political reform in China is dangerous and may cause chaos - call me selfish but let my younger sister out first
Repost from somewhere else:
---
What bothers me in the past few days is to make sense of what’s happening in Shanghai. There are quite a bit of rumors, but nothing makes sense. However, now I think that I have arrived at a reasonable explanation of what happened.
First, let’s establish some facts:
1. Once you have more than 10k cases in a city with Omicron (R0 ~ 9), true zero-covid policy (as opposed to zero-covid in-face policy, a.k.a. Hong Kong) will cause big human suffering no matter what. There are limitations on what an organization can do.
2. Xi is not a smart person, but he has a big picture in mind and is ruthless. He doesn’t mind being hated in one place, as long as he maintains the power.
3. There are no success stories under CCP to fight one faction against another with street movements. CCP is allergic to any instability, especially after the Cultural Revolution. That is why 1989 can only be ended in that particular way. If you only looked at the symptomatic cases in Shanghai, it can be argued that the dynamic zeroing policy is working, and there is no exponential growth.
With these facts in mind, it doesn’t make sense if Shanghai Clique wants to use the Shanghai situation as ammunition against Xi. The dissatisfaction of Shanghai people will only translate into street movement, a.k.a: instability. If it is a way to prove zero-covid policy doesn’t work, anywhere else is much better to start, and you want it to be nation-wide. For example, Beijing is a much better place to start and Xi would lose face big time.
What’s more plausible, is the following:
Shanghai encountered an outbreak of Omicron, and they chose to weather through this with a combination of under-testing and natural immunity (Shanghai has the highest vaccination rate in China and it shows from the asymptomatic cases). Xi & his people saw an opening to expel Shanghai Clique once for all, and start to implement the most strict zero-covid policy in Shanghai.
So far, the reaction has been what they were expecting. People are revolting, which in turn fueled hatred against Shanghainese in other parts of China. Further instability in Shanghai ensured, and that can only help him to consolidate power more just before the Conference. Remember, Xi’s base is never the middle-class from big cities.
What Shanghai Clique can do:
Contrary to other rumors, there are limited options Shanghai Clique has. Street movements (like Colour Revolution) would guarantee a failure, and further erosion of their power. However, they can leverage Jiang’s influence by having him visit Fangcang. He enjoyed great respect from the old generation of Shanghai. However, this is a tricky balance because aligning themselves as sympathizers to street movements is a sure way to lose power within CCP (like Zhao in 1989).
The numbers provided for "asymptomatic" cases are meaningless, since cases are only considered "symptomatic" if they are exhibiting the severe symptoms associated with the Alpha and Delta versions. By the time most people get back a definitive positive PCR test report, most have already gotten over the sore throat and fever phase and are left with mere coughing. Some only get the coughing and nothing else. Regardless, these are objectively speaking also symptoms, but they don't get counted that way.
Today's article mentions this: https://austrianchina.substack.com/p/beijing-lockdown-rumor
"Shanghai encountered an outbreak of Omicron, and they chose to weather through this with a combination of under-testing and natural immunity (Shanghai has the highest vaccination rate in China and it shows from the asymptomatic cases)."
The reasons I am strongly against the action (if it is the action taken by Shanghai government) are: 1) Shanghai is not an isolated state, it is a hub, any action taken by the government should also consider other cities because it will definitely spread into other cities. Shanghai has the highest vaccination rate, highest medical facility per capital, but other cities does not have such luxury. 2) You can have strict policy and then relax it when needed, it does not go the other way around, the first thing you want to do the test in a controlled environment, not having the virus spreading out of control; It is far easier to take full control at the beginning, and then try to relax in small areas; 3) the fact that the health department referring to 1 severe cases at the beginning scared me, ignoring the fact that all other countries in this world has shown .1% death rate, how can they be so naive. (I have friends also ignores numbers from other countries, arguing life is fine, but life is not fine for people lost their families); 4) the fact that Shanghai keeps emphasis that their unique measurements for covid different than others show their ignorance at the very beginning, which unfortunately led to current situation.
I can see million death if the Shanghai cannot contain it properly in the coming month.
For context - Shanghai is reporting around 50 COVID deaths per day at the moment:
https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3175393...
Shanghai adds 51 new deaths from Covid-19, takes total toll to 138 amid rise in symptomatic cases
City reports rise in new symptomatic cases to 2,472, while total new infections amounted to 19,455 in the previous 24 hours, a slight decline
Local health authorities in Beijing say the virus has been spreading undetected in the city for about a week
I can confirm that this was being shared Friday and Saturday and a lot of people cross posted screenshots of deleted videos to their Instagram stories.
Honestly, this video is sad, but it's incredibly tame compared to criticisms of western Governments you see every day online. China even with their firewall can't stop people sharing this kind of thing widely. Everyone knows all their "official" figures around Covid are made up. I think they are backing the wrong horse on this occasion and their strategy could backfire bigtime. I don't think the other countries will have much sympathy if there is widespread hunger and unrest in China. Will be interesting to see what happens.
Typing this from shanghai now.
It is crazy that CCP is again on the course of self destruction.
Maybe this sort of self destruction is inevitable for every single major power. It is just a matter if one can correct the wrong and change course before it is too late.
USA ditched Trump by election. Putin is doing shit to Russia.
It is happening in China now.
Chinese people can put up with CCP because we have been through too much disasters. A stable and somehow rational one-party rule is NOT so bad as long as stability is maintained and people's private space is respected to an acceptable level.
Shanghai is right now at the edge of breaking this unwritten agreement between CCP and the people. If this goes on for a few more weeks, there will be social unrest.
I am not optimistic about it.
Just a note, the English subtitling in the video embedded in this post is pretty inaccurate in places. Not in a malicious way, I think the translator just isn't very skilled at English. If you haven't seen the video before I would suggest this version which should be easier to understand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38_thLXNHY8
Does anyone understand why China is willing to implement these extremely draconian lockdown measures, but not to mandate vaccination? As I understand it the main reason why the virus is still so dangerous there is due to the low vaccination rate among the elderly population. I'm not saying I personally support forced vaccination, but I'm surprised that the CCP doesn't, given they're willing to forcibly detain people who test positive.
Home made vaccine isn't as effective against variants as thought, so mandatory vaccinations would expose its ineffectiveness. Importing Western made mrna vax (Moderna, Pfizer) runs contrary to years of CCP propaganda where China has outsmarted capitalist Western ideas. China's response has been nationalist in nature, a "China strong, rally around the CCP" world where they painted themselves as the only ones in the world who had it figured out.
Xi is also up for a historic 3rd term after removing most of the checks on his power. The thrust of his campaign has been give more power to Xi, because authoritarianism solves your problems.
Anything that runs contrary to these narratives is not going to happen, even if it benefits the nation.
Peter Zeihan says that they never secured a supply of mRNA vaccine. Instead, (partly because of national pride) they created their own non-mRNA vaccine, which does not work as well.
I don't know who Peter Zeihan is or what authority he claims, but you probably should stop listening to him if he spouts idiocy like this.
The BioNTech vaccince - an mRNA vaccine - has been produced and shipped not just by Pfizer in the US but also by Fosun Shanghai, since all the way back in December 2020. If you know anyone in HK for instance, chances are high that they were vaccinated with Fosun mRNA vaccine. This is not a secret or anything...
For all intents and purposes, HK is not China. BioNTech shots were only available in HK, and not in mainland China, and data from HK's recent outbreak shows very clearly the Sinovac vaccine is an order of magnitude less effective than the BioNTech vaccine, at best.
I can also add that because of this, people in other cities do not see the wechat moments posts of people in Shanghai. May have been relaxed by now but has been the case.
Numbers from China always seem outrageous, 400 million views? It's lik there's too many zeroes added.
It's a big country.
That's like a third of the population of China.
To put that in perspective, the fastest video on Youtube to reach 500M was Adele's Hello in 34 days, and that was the entire global internet.
Why isn't this being called a humanitarian crisis by our illustrious Western leaders?
My guess is there's too much money on the table for those in the western establishment (corporate media and government) to call a spade a spade. If official criticism of China becomes too strong then the public might start asking for the sort of economic sanctions that would hurt western business interests as well. Basically, a manifestation of that old theory about international trade preempting wars.
There have definitely been signs of serious disquiet amongst the western business community; earlier this month the European Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai sent an open letter saying in the usual diplomatese "this can't go on, it's a serious problem." [1] The Japanese did something similar. [2]
This is not out of humanitarian interest. It's starting to affect business very significantly.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/european-business-chambe...
[2] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/04/16/business/japan-...
No, the simpler answer is that lockdowns, especially in response to a pandemic, are possibly authoritarian but it's not a humanitarian crisis.
Some in the west certainly have labelled it that. There's quite a number of humanitarian crises going on at the moment, as have been over the past few years (and basically forever). Western leaders don't get up in the morning and recite lists of them.
>"Western leaders don't get up in the morning and recite lists of them."
Well they should as they've caused quite a share of those crises.
Because it's not a humanitarian crisis?
It's one form of response to a deadly disease.
If people were literally starving in the streets, then yes, but that's not what's happening.
It's 'very authoritarian' - but we already all know that.
Because "it's for covid", and our illustrious western leaders are either covid maximalists or focused on Ukraine.
The lockdowns might be useful from a strategic perspective for western leaders (ie undermining faith in Chinese leadership within Shanghai residents), while also actively calling it a humanitarian crisis would hurt the relationship with China which is already extremely fragile because of Russia/Ukraine (ie official criticism of the Chinese government may result in additional support for Russia).
> an event or events that threaten the health, safety or wellbeing of a large group of people
In a despotic country that could be a constant thing.
My western biased understanding of China has me convinced this is at least mostly true. I am confused, though, about the calculation of what percentage of Chinese netizens saw the video.
Base on my experience, everyone on my social network have watched it, including myself.
Getting Akira vibes from that Video.
That's a great anime. I'd highly recommend it even if you're not an anime fan.
It is astounding to see that people don't revolt. Just get to the streets and kill everyone in uniform from whatever service they are, burn police stations and resume normal life. What will authorities do? Send the army into a 20M city?
They tried that in 1989. Might want to look up what happened in Tiananmen Square.
Except those were peaceful protests
> and resume normal life
Others would call this idea "«astounding»".
#shanghai404 on Instagram
#shanghaistrong
it reminds me of the hollywood-esque videos we seen from ukraine, same team?
what does china govt know that rest of the world doesn't know about current spread of virus...??? Such extreme measures make me think we are missing something
it's about losing face and showing the control, we are not missing anything, old population in China ain't vaccinated because they don't wanna show support for western vaccines and Chinese vaccines are inefficient and they wanna show all these lockdowns work and they are not for nothing, basically just obedience test
Honestly I don't understand them, they could easily sell their COVID zero strategy as big success since they waited out much more dangerous variants until this common cold aka Omicron and they should now let it roam across China freely without any restrictions, though even with fatality rate comparable with flu it will surely kill a huge number of Chinese just because of sheer population. It would still not contradict narrative that previous variants were very dangerous and required harsh measures.
Or maybe I'm looking at it from wrong angle and this is really not about COVID at all, it's just convenient way to keep people locked NoKo style with all these health apps, but once you lift restrictions you lose control over people under pretense of fight against deadly disease (which is really on par with common cold/flu).
I think they might just be running out of food.