The Chinese Big Lie

Yurt2

deathbomber wrote: »

WHO are not a laughing stock. It is a complex situation. They have to exercise caution, you cannot simply address the world and ask them to go into lockdown for every viral outbreak, there are economic consequences (as we all see now). Also, you cannot just roll up to the local Chinese airport and start an investigation in said country. It is a communist state, the WHO are simply playing the game and ultimately trying to accomodate a communist regime/outlook so they can have some kind of access to assess the situation

There's being accommodating, and there's rolling up in-country, taking a perfunctory look at the situation, kick some tires and then saying: "Fair play lads, looks great. Send us on your press release and we'll cog it."

_Brian

khalessi wrote: »

Maybe I am wrong but China had info on this in December and only released information in January when they could no longer control the narrative.

It was in world news over Christmas.

deathbomber

Yurt! wrote: »

There's being accommodating, and there's rolling up in-country, taking a perfunctory look at the situation, kick some tires and then saying: "Fair play lads, looks great. Send us on your press release and we'll cog it."

not really, it's all politics, WHO are well aware China is a high risk country for spawning new diseases, they need to keep them on side. Chinese government are scoundrels, everybody knows this, they cannot be trusted, the WHO would have no issue saying this off the record but they simply can't

Apollinaris

cryptocurrency wrote: »

Early weeks, China still acted faster then any nation would have and got the info out. Thats being honest and not supporting beijing.

Anyone who can look at the Mr Bean like preformance western nations to a real crisis would think the blaming of WHO is the desperate moves of a paper tiger.

This crisis has made me embarrassed ...no more lauding it now. The west is a tinpot paper tiger.

Define early weeks. There were confirmed reports at the end of November (if not earlier) of a new virus causing very serious respiratory illness. China made their move 2 months later when they could no longer hide the outbreak. They released this plague on us with their communist hush-hush secrecy.

silverharp

cryptocurrency wrote: »

every nation has...including commie dictatorships

And? you havnt demonstrated your point

Podge201

BarryD2 wrote: »

And buried up to their arse, with their legs wiggling about. Nobody has yet managed to explain just what the Chinese authorities supposedly did to halt the growth of the virus over just a few days. It's entirely possible that the figures when they do emerge will put the USA & Europe completely in the shade.

Yes they may have enforced a better 'lockdown', they may have traced more effectively, they may wear more masks but these are all tactics that other more transparent states have followed. Possibly not in quite the same authoritarian manner but sufficiently close and yet the results/ trajectories vary widely compared to what China reports. It doesn't add up.

There are many Chinese living in fairly cramped housing, no great wealth or anything like that - seems impossible that this virus would not have penetrated and caused great numbers of deaths in these districts?

They gave a vaccine to them.

Yurt2

deathbomber wrote: »

not really, it's all politics, WHO are well aware China is a high risk country for spawning new diseases, they need to keep them on side. Chinese government are scoundrels, everybody knows this, they cannot be trusted, the WHO would have no issue saying this off the record but they simply can't

Then you'd wonder what's the point of the organization in the first instance?
If they roll-over to every slippery autocracy when there's a fairly obvious threat growing within a country, they're supine and useless. You may as well have sent Spongebob and Patrick the Starfish to inspect Wuhan.

And your hypothesis is even more frightening, i.e. they knew something was desperately wrong and they didn't even move to alert the world of it.

Captcha

Yurt! wrote: »

Then you'd wonder what's the point of the organization in the first instance?
If they roll-over to every slippery autocracy when there's a fairly obvious threat growing within a country, they're supine and useless. You may as well have sent Spongebob and Patrick the Starfish to inspect Wuhan.

And your hypothesis is even more frightening, i.e. they knew something was desperately wrong and they didn't even move to alert the world of it.

We need to consciously decouple from ccp cHina

https://www.chinalawblog.com/2020/04/its-time-for-conscious-uncoupling-with-china.html

"Every few years I will read or hear or see something that changes a good chunk of my worldview. The book, World on Fire, by Amy Chua (yes, that Amy Chua, of Tiger Mom fame) did that by convincing me that for democracy to work it must be essentially home-grown. My going to the Cu Chi tunnels in Vietnam convinced me how deeply people hate being ruled by a foreign power. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Atlantic Magazine article, The Case for Reparations, convinced me that America’s ~ 200 years of racism infuses and impacts today. Andrew Sullivan’s 1989 New Republic article convinced me to favor gay marriage. I was either leaning towards or vaguely “feeling” all these views before the readings/events above, but these things both crystalized and hammered them home.

The first thing I read today was a New York Magazine article entitled, It’s Time for Conscious Uncoupling With China, written by Andrew Sullivan (yes, the same Andrew Sullivan who so influenced my views on gay marriage 30 years ago). And this new Sullivan article is (for its first half) as clear, thoughtful, well-written, accurate and measured as his 1989 gay marriage article.

Sullivan begins by his article by discussing COVID-19’s overwhelming power and the deep impact it has and will have on the United States. He then segues into how impacts global trade and, in particular, trade with China:

It’s a brutal reality check, this thing — relentlessly ripping the veil off our delusions of control. So much is being laid bare. The promise of a truly globalized world, where government is increasingly international, and trade free, and all would benefit, was already under acute strain. Now, it’s broken, perhaps irrevocably.

The nation-state was beginning to reassert itself before, but COVID-19 has revealed its indispensability. Europeans realized, if they hadn’t already, that a truly continental response was beyond the E.U. Borders were suddenly enforced, resources hoarded by individual nations, and the most important decisions were made by national governments, in national interests. Americans, for their part, saw their own dependence on foreign countries, especially dictatorships, for core needs — like medicine, or medical equipment — as something to be corrected in the future. Japan is now spending a fortune paying its own companies to relocate from China to the homeland.

He then blames China’s intentionally brutal handling of the coronavirus for pretty much all of this:

And for both Europe and America, the delusions that sustained the 21st-century engagement with China have begun to crack. We still don’t know how this virus emerged — and China hasn’t given any serious explanation of its origins. What we do know is that the regime punished and silenced those who wanted to sound the alarm as early as last December, and hid the true extent of the crisis from the rest of the world. There had been 104 cases in Wuhan by December 31, including 15 deaths. Yet as late as mid-January, the Chinese were insisting, in the words of the World Health Organization, that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” On January 18, despite the obvious danger, the Chinese dictatorship allowed a huge festival in Wuhan that drew tens of thousands of people.

On January 23, President Xi locked down all air traffic from Wuhan to the rest of China — but, as Niall Ferguson pointed out, not to the rest of the world. It’s as if they said to themselves, “Well, we’re going under, so we might as well bring the rest of the world down with us.” This is not the behavior of a responsible international state actor. Trump’s ban on Chinese travel was better than nothing, but it did not prevent over 400,000 non-Chinese from arriving in the U.S. from China as COVID-19 was gaining momentum. It’s fair to say, I think, that after the immediate, unforgivable cover-up in China, a global pandemic was inevitable.

I’m not excusing Trump for his delusions, denial, and dithering — he is very much at fault — but the core source of the destruction was and is Beijing. Bringing a totalitarian country, which is herding its Muslim inhabitants into concentration camps, into the heart of the Western world was, in retrospect, a gamble that has not paid off. I remember the old debate from the 1990s about how to engage China, and the persuasiveness of those who believed that economic prosperity would lead to greater democracy. COVID-19 is the final reminder of how wrong they actually were.

I confess to have welcomed China into the family of nations. I advocated for China’s admission into the WTO back in 2000-2001, believing, like so many, that this would inevitably lead to China slowly but surely become more democratic. I saw China developing politically along the lines of a Taiwan or a South Korea. And for many years, China did get “better” and I would cheer it along while explaining to people both on this blog and elsewhere that so long as China was making progress, we needed to be patient. But the China of today is not the China of 2001 and those who will not admit to China’s backsliding on pretty much every measure of democracy and human rights are either lying to themselves or to us.

China cannot be integrated into the democratic world economy. Is there really any other way to look at a country that has put around two million people in concentration camps? I know all the arguments about how China — unlike so much of the West — has never sought to go beyond its own borders, but that is both untrue and irrelevant. China is today beyond its own borders in Tibet, in Xinjiang, in Mongolia, in Hong Kong and, yes, in Taiwan too. Not to mention China’s longstanding issues with Vietnam and the Philippines. China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its domination and co-option of world bodies like the WHO is imperialism by any other name.

Or as Sullivan says:

The Chinese dictatorship is, in fact, through recklessness and cover-up, responsible for a global plague and tipping the entire world into a deep depression. It has also corrupted the World Health Organization, which was so desperate for China’s cooperation it swallowed Xi’s coronavirus lies and regurgitated them. At the most critical juncture — mid-January — the WHO actually tweeted out Communist Party propaganda: “Preliminary investigations by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel Coronavirus.” On the same day, another WHO official was telling the world that there was “limited spread” of COVID-19 by human-to-human transmission, and alerted hospitals about the risk of super-spreading the virus. And so the virus has forced us to accept another discomforting reality: Integrating a communist dictatorship into a democratic world economy is a mug’s game. From now on, conscious decoupling is the order of the day.

But instead of defining what conscious decoupling is or should look like, Sullivan veers off and compares the coronavirus to AIDS.

I love the term “conscious decoupling”, even though I do not know exactly what it means. I don’t think it means an immediate severing of all commercial ties with China as that would be both suicidal and impossible. Literally suicidal, as the world desperately needs PPE and China produces something like 88 percent of it. So decoupling there must be gradual. It also does not mean immediately blocking all other transactions with China as that too would be unwise and impossible. There are just too many Made in China products that will take years to be made elsewhere at anything approaching the same costs.

What then does it mean? Probably more importantly, what should it mean and what should it look like?

Should we boycott everything China? I vote no (for now) because it is unrealistic to ask someone just rendered unemployed by the coronavirus to spend way more on non-Chinese products. I also think it too early to penalize foreign companies that make their products in China. A large part of my law firm’s business these days is helping foreign companies move their China manufacturing to another country and so I can tell you that this is never easy nor fast. See How to Move Your Manufacturing From China: Rule One, Be Careful. I can also tell you that nearly all our clients who manufacture in China want out of China and are doing what they can to try to that happen. They are cognizant of growing anger with China and how this has and will impact their businesses both within China and worldwide. China’s increasingly bad treatment of foreigners does not exactly make them want to stay either. Should we consciously try to choose products not made in China over those that are? I give a somewhat reluctant yes to this.

Getting countries (like Japan, to which Sullivan cites above) to subsidize their companies leaving China is a good start, and there is increasing talk about the U.S doing something similar. Selective and gradual tariffs on goods that are being competitively made in countries other than China would be good too. Do we boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics? I lean towards this but I also remember how my law school friend, Rudy Chapa, never got to participate in the Olympics because of the 1980 boycott, and it pains me to penalize the athletes. A tourism boycott? I guess so.

So maybe that’s what conscious decoupling means; it’s a sort of crossing the river by feeling the stones or I know it when I see it sort of thing. It’s a “let’s discuss what we should do and start doing it” sort of thing. But that means we need to do that. So please chime in below with your comments, and let’s move this discussion along everywhere else as well. Let’s figure out how to consciously decouple from China. Now.

NOTE: I know many will view my posting a picture of the Nazi Olympics above as inflammatory and so I feel some explanation of that choice is warranted.

I do not see the CCP as the equivalent of the Nazis. Not today, anyway. But I do see the way the world has been responding to China as not too dissimilar from how it responded to Nazi Germany in 1936. The ten stages of genocide is widely considered as the best way to predict (and hopefully prevent) a genocide and I defy anyone to read about those ten stages and then claim China is not nearing a genocide in Xinjiang. Nearing a genocide does not mean a genocide will happen, but it does up the odds and it does mean that we need to be acting to try to prevent it."

syndrome777

Documentary About COVID-19 That Will Knock Your Socks Off

https://www.facebook.com/WayneDupreeShow/videos/565333511002518

sorry if this was already posted.

Wibbs

"On January 23, President Xi locked down all air traffic from Wuhan to the rest of China — but, as Niall Ferguson pointed out, not to the rest of the world. It’s as if they said to themselves, “Well, we’re going under, so we might as well bring the rest of the world down with us.” This is not the behavior of a responsible international state actor." This particular act by the Chinese authorities on its own shows the level of contempt for the rest of the world those bastards have. IMHO it was not far off an act of war.

cryptocurrency

Wibbs wrote: »

"On January 23, President Xi locked down all air traffic from Wuhan to the rest of China — but, as Niall Ferguson pointed out, not to the rest of the world. It’s as if they said to themselves, “Well, we’re going under, so we might as well bring the rest of the world down with us.” This is not the behavior of a responsible international state actor." This particular act by the Chinese authorities on its own shows the level of contempt for the rest of the world those bastards have. IMHO it was not far off an act of war.

Act of war? please explain the logic behind the CPC thinking that

cryptocurrency

syndrome777 wrote: »

Documentary About COVID-19 That Will Knock Your Socks Off

https://www.facebook.com/WayneDupreeShow/videos/565333511002518

sorry if this was already posted.

I said to myself that if this is the epoch times story I knocking it straight off....sure enough

BarryD2

Podge201 wrote: »

They gave a vaccine to them.

Is this a conspiracy theory? i.e. the Chinese developed the virus, let it affect a few thousand of their own citizens and vaccinated the remaining 1.4 billion? Then let it go in the rest of the world and clean up afterwards???

Hmm... not very plausible to my mind. Far more likely the virus is killing many there but they've just concealed this as there's money to be made opening the factories and flogging dodgy PPE to the west.

cryptocurrency

_Brian wrote: »

It was in world news over Christmas.

So they hid nothing? it was just massive western failures

cryptocurrency

silverharp wrote: »

And? you havnt demonstrated your point

To imply the very delayed reaction was comprehensive as they have risked depression but the same could be said for the decisive reactions in east Asia

BarryD2

cryptocurrency wrote: »

So they hid nothing? it was just massive western failures

Forget what they hid or didn't hide at Christmas. The question is what are they hiding now?

You seem to have a very positive view of China, which is entirely your're right. But even if you lived in the state and were able to report back openly and freely exactly what you were seeing, you'd still have no way of knowing what is really happening in the next town, city, region. The Chinese state is perfectly capable of controlling the flow of information both to it's own citizens and the outside world.

No matter how positive you are, you have to accept that you can't really know what is happening. But we can infer something from we know of the virus in other more transparent states.

Wibbs

cryptocurrency wrote: »

Act of war? please explain the logic behind the CPC thinking that

If you were a farmer who discovered some of your herd in one paddock had foot and mouth, but you kept it quiet and quarantined them from the rest of your herd, but then let them be sent off to market to mingle with other farmer's stock. While bitching and moaning to all that would listen that not to be allowed do this was prejudice against you. Would you consider that morally OK? Would the other farmers? Would you blame the other farmers? My bollocks you would. Your continuing defence of and support for that tinpot dictatorship is frankly baffling at this stage.

silverharp

cryptocurrency wrote: »

Act of war? please explain the logic behind the CPC thinking that

if you killed people in another country to drum up domestic business, thats not far off an act of war. Back in medieval times if you wanted to move on a siege , you would chuck infected bodies over the city wall. Flying them out on shiny planes seems to be the 21st century method
You could see the logic, if China contained it , it would only affect China, if the world catches it then Chinese investments are no worse off on an international basis.

cryptocurrency

silverharp wrote: »

if you killed people in another country to drum up domestic business, thats not far off an act of war. Back in medieval times if you wanted to move on a siege , you would chuck infected bodies over the city wall. Flying them out on shiny planes seems to be the 21st century method
You could see the logic, if China contained it , it would only affect China, if the world catches it then Chinese investments are no worse off on an international basis.

how much do you think the face mask industry is making compared to closing the whole economy for two months and restricting it since. Are you like 12 years old?

cryptocurrency

Wibbs wrote: »

If you were a farmer who discovered some of your herd in one paddock had foot and mouth, but you kept it quiet and quarantined them from the rest of your herd, but then let them be sent off to market to mingle with other farmer's stock. While bitching and moaning to all that would listen that not to be allowed do this was prejudice against you. Would you consider that morally OK? Would the other farmers? Would you blame the other farmers? My bollocks you would. Your continuing defence of and support for that tinpot dictatorship is frankly baffling at this stage.

They didn't have a clue what it was and if you think the other governments would have acted faster or better then you are off yer head.

We have seen over the last month the western governments are run by Mr Bean clones.

Yurt2

syndrome777 wrote: »

Documentary About COVID-19 That Will Knock Your Socks Off

https://www.facebook.com/WayneDupreeShow/videos/565333511002518

sorry if this was already posted.

The Epoch Times is Falun Gong linked and has managed to tap funding from assorted right wing weirdos in the States.

In an age of misinformation, I think we should be taking what we can be sure to know to be true from sources better than this.

maninasia

cryptocurrency wrote: »

They didn't have a clue what it was .

Lies.

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/490258-what-did-chinas-xi-jinping-know-and-when-did-he-know-it

https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-02-29/in-depth-how-early-signs-of-a-sars-like-virus-were-spotted-spread-and-throttled-101521745.html

Let's examine the timeline of the origins of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Last December, China knew the virus was transmitted human to human. Between Dec. 27, 2019, and Jan. 5, 2020, five firms and institutions detected a SARS-like coronavirus that caused pneumonia among people in Wuhan. The researcher who first sequenced the virus exclaimed that it could be more prevalent than the plague. One tester mistakenly reported that the virus was SARS. As a result, the Wuhan Health Commission issued an internal urgent notice about the virus and reported it to China's central government, while telling the public that no clear evidence existed for person-to-person transmission.

This caused at least eight medical professionals to sound the alarm to the public. Chinese police censured these "rumor-mongers" and silenced any other whistleblowers. On Dec. 31, China's National Health Commission dispatched the first group of experts to Wuhan and the WHO learned of the outbreak. We now know that by the end of 2019, there were at least 104 cases in Wuhan. With so many cases, most governments would institute an emergency response.

cryptocurrency

maninasia wrote: »

Let's examine the timeline of the origins of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Last December, China knew the virus was transmitted human to human. Between Dec. 27, 2019, and Jan. 5, 2020, five firms and institutions detected a SARS-like coronavirus that caused pneumonia among people in Wuhan.

Thats actually an extreme fast timeframe and by the 10th the world new the virus and even had it's make up. You've done nothing but support how fast they acted.

Could you imagine if that took place in europe or the US? shambles

Wibbs

cryptocurrency wrote: »

They didn't have a clue what it was and if you think the other governments would have acted faster or better then you are off yer head.

I note you're completely avoiding my question.

They did know or why did they lock down the largest city in central China and its eleven million inhabitants? Clearly to stop the spread of the virus.

Why did they close flights from the same city to the rest of China? Clearly to stop the spread of the virus.

But - and again answer this question - why did they continue to let flights out of Wuhan to the rest of the world, in the middle of the largest contagion lock down in history? How would that stop the virus?

We have seen over the last month the western governments are run by Mr Bean clones.

Avoiding the question yet again. My question is not about western governments. Oh and in case it missed your notice, or your little red book on the defence of the CPC isn't so clear, this Chinese pox has infected the world, Western, Eastern whereever. I find it interesting your criticism is only in one direction.

cryptocurrency

Wibbs wrote: »

I note you're completely avoiding my question.

They did know or why did they lock down the largest city in central China and its eleven million inhabitants? Clearly to stop the spread of the virus.

Why did they close flights from the same city to the rest of China? Clearly to stop the spread of the virus.

But - and again answer this question - why did they continue to let flights out of Wuhan to the rest of the world, in the middle of the largest contagion lock down in history? How would that stop the virus?

Avoiding the question yet again. My question is not about western governments. Oh and in case it missed your notice, or your little red book on the defence of the CPC isn't so clear, this Chinese pox has infected the world, Western, Eastern whereever. I find it interesting your criticism is only in one direction.

I will critise the Chinese governement all you like, all day long. I don't like them at all. I just find the virus angle a bad one as they done better then most would.

I have no little red book or any support but pick a topic worth bashing them on, and not one just because it has been a global pandemic which come to the news when in China.

Wibbs

And yet you have avoided this question completely:

They did know or why did they lock down the largest city in central China and its eleven million inhabitants? Clearly to stop the spread of the virus.

Why did they close flights from the same city to the rest of China? Clearly to stop the spread of the virus.

But - and again answer this question - why did they continue to let flights out of Wuhan to the rest of the world, in the middle of the largest contagion lock down in history? How would that stop the virus?

cryptocurrency

Wibbs wrote: »

And yet you have avoided this question completely:

They did know or why did they lock down the largest city in central China and its eleven million inhabitants? Clearly to stop the spread of the virus.

Why did they close flights from the same city to the rest of China? Clearly to stop the spread of the virus.

But - and again answer this question - why did they continue to let flights out of Wuhan to the rest of the world, in the middle of the largest contagion lock down in history? How would that stop the virus?

They didn't have a clue they were holding world record buffets on the 18th. They then closed the flights but if thye closed all the international flights how would foriegn nationals leave? Should they have been imprisoned in the city with the virus? I'm sure the same clowns would have been screaming that angle if they did and demanding their citizens are freed from the city prison and "certain death". I can't take people like you seriously at all. It's as childish as a Trump press conference.

Do you want to look at the italian flights timeframe to Ireland? or Spain? or even still the UK to this very day?

Wibbs

cryptocurrency wrote: »

They didn't have a clue they were holding world record buffets on the 18th. They then closed the flights but if thye closed all the international flights how would foriegn nationals leave? Should they have been imprisoned in the city with the virus?

Yes. If they were serious about spread beyond China as much as they were within it. Clearly they weren't. Apparently it was verboten and understandably so for Chinese nationals to fly from virus central Wuhan to the rest of their country, or even leave their homes without very good reasons, but was perfectly fine for them to fly off to Paris, or Milan, or Madrid, or London, or New York, or Dusseldorf?

I'm sure the same clowns would have been screaming that angle if they did and demanding their citizens are freed from the city prison and "certain death". I can't take people like you seriously at all. It's as childish as a Trump press conference.

Do you want to look at the italian flights timeframe to Ireland? or Spain? or even still the UK to this very day?

And again moving all responsibility away from China to the "West". I have long criticised the Irish response to this and have even stated we're a nation of sheep being led by sheep and the HSE and gov "leadership" in this has been delayed at best, farcical at worst. But - and the title of the thread should give the game away - we're not discussing the Irish response, or the Italian, or Spanish. But you knew that and now when caught out in your little Chinese corner break out the Trump press conference angle. Yeah, doesn't really work, or needs more polish.

Captcha

cryptocurrency wrote: »

how much do you think the face mask industry is making compared to closing the whole economy for two months and restricting it since. Are you like 12 years old?

Are you even 10 yet?

What a silly statement, clearly you are very disconnected from reality. One of those who cannot see things for what they are.

cryptocurrency

Captcha wrote: »

Are you even 10 yet?

What a silly statement, clearly you are very disconnected from reality. One of those who cannot see things for what they are.

We will agree to disagree. You seem focused on blaming China no matter what. i view your stance as coming across a bit jingoistic and bu** hurt.

I on the other hand look at the G7 response and think cringe, we are total spoofers. A crisis comes and we are a total shambles, a paper tiger, scrambling now to blame who we can.

We have totally different points of view on this, the only thing is, I am right.