Talking stupidly about China
The Chinese dragon traditionally represents Health, strength, and luck but these are all now absent in China’s response to Covid.
There is much nonsense talked about China by world experts. Almost everything they say about that country turns out to be wrong. Nothing refutes expert opinion more than time. This applies especially to the Covid pandemic which recently has reached infection rates of 80% in some isolated parts of the population in Chinese cities and it is expected to kill untold numbers of people especially the largely unvaccinated elderly.
Nothing refutes expert opinion more than time.
In November last year, Nectar Gan for CNN reported the death of a little boy in Gansu province. The family had been locked in a compound by healthcare workers who were attempting to isolate the family and the whole compound in order to prevent the spread of Covid. The death of this three-year-old was to have a profound effect on the whole of China. The child’s father was attempting to get help but was not allowed out by the health workers who were isolating them as part of the country’s “zero covid” policy.
This death proved to be an ember sparking a much wider fire throughout the dry tinder box of dissent in China already well established by the zero covid policy.
As riots spread, they revealed the horrible truth that China, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has become a failed state.
Other terrible stories emerged of people being welded into their apartments and starving to death, or people forced into stadiums denied sanitation, unable to reach family members who were dying at home. Riots began throughout the country as people began to attack the legions of healthcare workers charged with testing people and locking them in. Nationwide unrest was occurring for the first time since the death of Mao Zedong, the killer of untold millions of people, whose portrait by Ge Xiaoguang still figures prominently at the gate of the palace at Tiananmen Square. In the face of these riots which continued to spread, the CCP was forced to abandon the “zero covid” policy and let the virus run unchecked throughout the country.
On the face of it, the “zero covid” policy made no sense. To understand why it was chosen is to understand more about how China works and above all to explain the fact that homicidal regimes can only survive by lying to their people.
It is known that the Covid virus emerged in Wuhan city the capital of Hubei province but there is no certainty whether it came from a laboratory there or wet markets. As I noted in my travels in China in the early eighties not long after Mao died, wet markets provide most of the fresh food to the Chinese people and this has not changed. Wet markets to European sensibilities are vile places. The ones in Wuhan sell rats and bats for consumption but also domestic dogs which are still killed inhumanely and eaten in many places in China.
The reason wet markets were suspected is that throughout history many of our worst and most infectious diseases have arisen from other species through eating or contact.
When a dangerous and infectious disease emerges, the first impulse of a corrupt regime is to kill the messengers, the people who raise the alarm and conceal what is happening. Then they withhold this information from the rest of the world and rapidly the Covid virus spreads throughout the world by passenger routes.
The CCP remains acutely sensitive to what the world thinks about China. There is a lot to conceal including genocide in Xinjiang and Tibet. The origin of the virus was denied and vaccines were developed, Sinopharm and Sinovac but rushed out without proper trials and given to the Chinese and many other parts of the world. The CCP lied about the vaccine’s effectiveness and pursued a “zero covid” policy in other words they tested and isolated people with the virus, locking down wherever it emerged. What else could be expected from a regime that conspired with corrupt property developers in a giant Ponzi scheme to steal the savings of the people of China who were banned from investing in anything except real estate?
The locking down of the population became a gargantuan exercise with whole cities like Shanghai closed off. Video exists of dozens of large apartments in the city showing thousands of residents crying out for help and release while banging on pots and pans. People confused by these lockdowns fail to understand that China has the worst health infrastructure in the world. The idea of the family doctor and local hospitals as we understand them in the west simply does not exist. This is why their only option was to test people and lock them down. Finally and only after people began dying, like the little boy reported by CNN, and riots began, the CCP ended the zero covid policy and let the virus run throughout China.
In some parts of China, the infection rates have reached 80% and soon 2 million of its elderly, largely unvaccinated, citizens will die.
There are two Chinas, the glittering modern state the CCP would have us believe exists and the real China where the state cannot provide decent care to its citizens, where concrete structures, bridges, and buildings are falling apart, and where thousands drown in tunnels that have no proper drainage when they flood.
What usually happens to states that are failing like this? They start a war to distract from what is really going on. This is what the threats to Taiwan are all about. But even this is propaganda because the Chinese government has neither the will nor the ability to carry out the invasion of Taiwan which would require the largest sea invasion in history.
For many years world experts have been telling us that China is on track to become the greatest power of this century. What will it take to change their minds?