April Fools: People that Beleive #'s from China.
April Fool’s News (March 29-April 4)
BEST NEWS SO FAR THIS MONTH—and, no, it’s not a joke: Possible Vaccine!
And now to what I had previously written.
I have a number of friends in the US that are/were members of the CCP prior to moving to the US, usually for graduate school. Most of them are adamantly opposed to the CCP. I have another group of friends, all extremely well educated, with whom I share news and personal stories on a regular basis. I attempted to mix the two groups and was surprised, I guess naively, that it didn’t work as I had hoped. The rise of the CCP, not Chinese individuals or companies, has created a real fear of Chinese people—the CCP is actively weaponizing Chineseness and that is creating fear (and racism) where it is unnecessary and did not exist before. While not all can be blamed on the CCP, there is much ignorance and hate in the hearts of people everywhere, MUCH of the problems that Chinese people face outside of China can be laid at their feet.
I am concerned about how the CCP could affect my life, but my family is from China and my profession is China-centered. Most people do not have this connection and likely never will, even if they work with/in China for a short period of time in the future. But, the fear is real—the CCP is more influential than we acknowledge. People not otherwise connected to China limit their contacts and self-censor out of fear (of the unknown). Transparency is the key to bringing down the CCP—there is a reason why its soft-power doesn’t work well outside of China: when in open competition with other, better ideas, CCP ideology almost always fall short. Thank God.
The COVID-19 Response in the US.
Your life is officially now a joke! Yours and mine and everyone's. This isn’t life and it will hurt millions of people that will not get sick regardless of infection or not. And our lives will NEVER be the same again. We are delaying the inevitable, likely only until fall or spring of next year—80% of the US will get this at some point. The question is, can we survive the cure? What happens when the economy grinds to a halt in May? How many countries on the planet can withstand the social pressures of economic collapse that are certainly coming? Quarantine may indeed be the best way to fight the virus, but epidemiologists don’t know how to run the economy.
China’s Multi-media Offensive.
First, China is doubling down on the strategy of never letting a crisis go to waste, promoting itself as the hero of Covid-19. Despite the unknown number of dead and the fact that it seems to be resurgent in China again, they are claiming not only to have defeated it but are the self-proclaimed saviors of the world as well. China is attempting to use divisions and monetary needs in other countries to insert the China-savior dialogue into the conversation in other countries in the EU and North America. Fortunately, there are people that are still pushing back, and China can’t disappear people in foreign countries as easily as they can people (princelings even) in China.
Here is a great piece that discusses China’s current PR situation globally and a few countries’ responses to China. And another article that details the lengths that China is going to to control the narrative in Italy.
More:
China hops to use CV as a platform to continue its campaign for a new world order. And another piece on the same theme—disinformation is key to Chinese PR.
Responses to China
China isn’t the only government that is attempting to take advantage of the crisis. Hungary is off the rails, but many other countries in SEA and other places are arresting journalists and limiting free speech on social media platforms.
Third, the effect of this is that relationships, both global and domestic are suffering. While we’ve probably seen this headline ever month for the past two years, it’s still true this time too: US-China relations at their lowest since Mao. The UK is pissed off too. Good—it’s helping to push them in the right direction, removing Huawei from their network already. We’ll see what’s next.
Here’s my two bits on this. I agree that the relationship is in a bad place right now. But I don’t think that that is worse than the prior status quo. China was literally getting away with murder and organ harvesting and espionage and violent repression against HK and encroachment of physical territory in SCS and threatening Taiwan. We needed someone like Trump to push back on China and not use traditional channels. The relationship needed to be reset completely. A half-hearted attempt that didn’t hurt the Wall-Street interests wasn’t going to cut it. Do I think that Covid-19 is necessary or deserved, of course not. But dramatic actions needed to happen and might not have been pursued completely without massive public disasters like HK and XJ and CV.
The human toll of this virus and the cure is going to be incalculable, but certainly greater than just the virus. Already, domestic violence is up and economic numbers are horrible. And really, only China has had a month+ of quarantine. Wait until June.
The virus started in Wuhan. We can all pretty much agree on that. The CCP itself was printing that in papers before they realized they were going to get blamed for a global pandemic. The real question though is where in Wuhan—papers in China in February, that have since been taken down, claim that it came from the govt labs. And it's not just twitter now, it’s being printed more and more and more (and more—I won’t link to the Wapo article since they have a paywall that I can’t get around)—this needs to become the global narrative.
There are a number of resources that are attempting to list out documented Chinese media and academic reports on the timeline of the CV-19 outbreak and Chinese govt response.
Wuhan Virus propaganda timeline.
And here, some China-focused Youtube guy has put together a list of media links in a video (links in the comments).
Here is a timeline linking the virus to the labs in Wuhan. I do know where it came from, I read something just yesterday that throat swabs indicated that it’s from pangolins. But I know that China covered it up and then reacted with the hammer of god—more so than with any previous disease outbreak. I would not be surprised if it was found to come from poor safety measures or an animal at a lab.
It’s from China, and Chinese scientists were telling a different story than the govt before they were shut down. So why put stock in this paper? Because it’s China’s MO to shut down stories that compete with the official narrative (and there can only be one) post hoc. And further, because nothing that “officially” comes from China is likely to be the truth—Death numbers form Wuhan, for example, are likely low “by a factor of 15 to 40.”
And now people are saying that China and WHO are responsible for a global genocide. And of course, the next step in this thought process is China paying compensation to the world. Um… never going to happen.
How Chinese lies started a Pandemic.
China is a hostile state. I completely agree, the only thing I would add is that this is not new as of the pandemic.
The best bad joke I’ve read on twitter this week was something along the lines: Chinese people are laughing at the US intelligence for publishing a letter this week saying that Chinese numbers are totally bogus—The Chinese have known this for years!
Much of the global industrial capacity was willing to live with the bad numbers in China when the prices were good and there was little to no political pressure. But the tradewar and the virus have forced companies to question their supply chain strategies.
On a related note, China is a bad global player, WeChat censorship and outreach on behalf of the Chinese State is widely known, but that it is extending its reach to both the Chinese community overseas as well as anyone with the app is an increasingly distressing reality.
And, if that wasn’t bad enough, Tencent (owner of WeChat) has just made a deal with the UN to carry teleconferences. China has a plan to remake the global order into its own system—if that benefits anyone else along the way, bonus! But mutual benefit is NOT the goal of a Chinese led system.
And a UK former supreme court justice has basically stated that the current cure is an unchecked police state and people need to be questioning authority. Why question? Because this is going to be the Great Depression all over again. It will be worse than 2008 for sure. And it’s not just the US and China that will be hurt, all of the world is going to suffer for years.
Any other options other than destroying the world economy? Some think so. And TAIWAN has certainly been more successful than anyone else—gee, I wonder why? Could it be that they’ve been prepping for war with China for decades now? Probably.
And a “fun” read, only in that it’s well written but should really scare the bejesus out us all. Chinese espionage.
Maybe the most memorable thing about this article won’t be that a billion-dollar Chinese company was a fraud, but that the author of the article that originally exposed it was mad at the inclusion of the word “some” in the article title: Luckin Coffee is a painful reminder of ‘the extreme fraud risk’ of some China-based companies.
The good news, for China but no one else, is that the UN, like WHO, is securely in China’s pocket. Tencent is going to facilitate global spying on behalf of China host teleconferencing for the UN moving forward. If you think I’m joking, read this about Zoom, another Chinese company, routing private calls through China and being an open party for hackers.
Here’s another piece on the same story. While I was in SZ conducting research, I would go to Starbucks in the AM, as would most of the C-level people in the company. Most of the staff, engineers, and salespeople drank Luckin—it was cheaper, delivered, and Chinese, a significant distinction I was told. Luckin was China’s and it was going to not just push Starbucks out of China, but go global too. I was a real source of pride for the Chinese to count more Luckin cups than Starbucks cups in the office each AM.
I wonder if these new limits in the US on Chinese tech can be retroactive to include Zoom? No? Oh well, at least Huawei will still be on the hook.
And as bad as the CCP is, I agree that we can’t curtail their free speech in the US to combat them. BUT but but, I do think that official CCP accounts online should be at least identified as such.
Masks.
Diplomatic tool? Virtue signal? Effective healthcare? CDC telling people in the US to wear masks. My opinion is that they work to keep you from spitting on others and/or other spitting on you. But they don’t keep out air-borne diseases and most people wear them wrong to boot.
If the US does anything cooperative with China, I’m going to regret voting for Trump. I have a specific list of issues that I use to measure candidates and China was at the top of the list in 2016.
Some idealist are still hopeful for the US—count me as one of them. The long-term bet is on democracy and freedom.
And finally, a person-to-person story about a mother in China and a daughter in the US trying to talk about CV and the political narratives and fallout. This is more common than you think.