China

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 06, 2020 11:31 am

Latest on the novel coronavirus outbreak
chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2020-04-06 09:42
The novel coronavirus has spread across China and beyond.

April 6

Outside China

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The latest figures reported by each government's health authority as of April 6, 2020.
- US virus deaths top 1,200 in last 24 hours: Johns Hopkins tracker

- Captain removed from coronavirus-stricken aircraft carrier reportedly tests positive for COVID-19 (Read more)

- Italy records lowest daily coronavirus deaths in nearly three weeks

- Tiger at New York's Bronx Zoo tests positive for coronavirus, in the first known case of a human infecting an animal (Read more)

- Scotland's chief medical officer resigns after violating lockdown rules

- South Korea reports fewer than 50 new coronavirus cases for first time since Feb 29 peak

China

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Data released by National Health Commission by midnight, April 5, 2020.
- Chinese mainland reports 39 new COVID-19 infections and 78 new asymptomatic cases on Sunday (Read more)

- Govt to blacklist passengers for providing wrong health information (Read more)

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People are out shopping in Wuhan on April 5. [Photo by Wang Jing/chinadaily.com.cn]

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Healthcare workers wheel the bodies of deceased people from the Wyckoff Heights Medical Center during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, New York, April 4, 2020. [Photo/Agencies]

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20200 ... 7b4ba.html
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 07, 2020 11:20 am

Efficiency, transparency and collectivism: long reads
7 APRIL, 2020
A series of long reads for the day.

First, a piece in China Daily called ‘Efficient measures key to containment’.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202004/0 ... 9d0_1.html

Second, a detailed timeline has been published by the State Council Information Office, called ‘Timeline of China releasing information on COVID-19 and advancing international cooperation on epidemic response’. The full text is available on multiple platforms, but I am using one on Xinhua News http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-0 ... 951662.htm .

Since many of you probably have long hours at home, it is well worth taking your time with these texts. But here are some of the key points:

Efficiency of the socialist system

Alongside the most noticeable features – Wuhan lockdown, massive testing, strict quarantine regulations and timely treatment-there are some other crucial features: swift national mobilization, especially assistance to Wuhan on a huge scale; cooperation from the public, which made various isolation and social distancing policies a reality; and the country’s strong command system with President Xi Jinping as the core, which ensured efficient and synchronized policies in various regions.

A careful read of the ‘Efficient Measures’ piece will show how dire the situation in Wuhan was at the beginning of the outbreak, with shortages of medical staff, equipment, and hospital beds. This experience is now being seen in other countries.

The massive difference was the way the whole of the country and whole of society responded in a highly coordinated manner. Manufacturers rapidly set up supply chains for medical equipment, the system of governance meant that teams of medical workers from each province in China were despatched to Wuhan, hundreds of locations were converted for quarantine and treatment, and two specific-purpose hospitals – Huoshenshan and Leishenshan – were built for severe cases at typical ‘Chinese Speed’. There were many, many more examples.

International Transparency

The key text is the timeline, but let me quote from an article published in The Lancet (here), already on 7 March, 2020:

Health authorities there have been working tirelessly to respond to and control the COVID-19 outbreak within China, providing countries around the world precious time needed to prepare for the possible arrival of the virus inside their borders. Importantly, health authorities in China have paved the way for the international scientific community to join the fight.

China’s doctors laid the foundation for this mobilisation of scientific and research muscle by rapidly identifying the new coronavirus in the middle of the influenza season. Chinese scientists lifted obstacles to researching the virus by sharing its genome sequencing publicly. The fact that this information was shared with networks worldwide is accelerating the design of vaccines and drugs targeted at the new coronavirus.

Collectivism

Wang Zhen, from the Shanghai Mental Health Center, said … traditional Chinese culture emphasizes collectivism, rather than individualism. “For us, the nation is the biggest collective, and collectivism will be activated when the nation faces a major disaster, so that we can carry out various disease control measures better than people in some Western countries.”

But this is not some vague concept:

Liu Jinlong, a professor of agriculture and rural area development at Renmin University of China, said, “Communities are at the frontline of epidemic control this time, and our efforts to improve community management in recent years have paid off.

“In places where more progress has been made in community management, such as the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta, epidemic control measures appear to be more timely and effective.”

Post-epidemic containment: a universal health ‘app’
To conclude: what does the China Model indicate after the pandemic is contained and before a vaccine is available?

One notable feature is a universal health ‘app’, which enables someone with a ‘green’ clearance to move about. The app also includes a map that identifies where the most recent infections have been in your area, with colour coding for how long ago such infections occurred. It uses AI logorithms to ensure real-time updates. In China, it is often attached to Wechat or Alipay apps, but it is noticeable that South Korea quickly followed the Chinese model and also uses such an app.

I notice an increasing number of calls in other places for such an ‘app’ (see here), but this development is fascinating, since it indicates profound cultural differences in understandings of the state, science and technology.

In those states that derive from the ‘Western’ liberal tradition, there are deep-seated suspicions of the state, science and technology. The reasons are many, but a major one is that the regimes in question have a long history of surveillance of the population. Couple this reality with the primacy of the individual (who is, as Marx already pointed out, in a profound contradiction between being a private individual and citizen of a state) and you have situation that leads to resistance to any universal health app as an ‘invasion’ of privacy.

By contrast, as Domenico Losurdo pointed out, in the countries that have been colonised or semi-colonised in the past, the state is generally seen in a good light. To be sure, it has to be a competent, transparent and thus trustworthy state (see here). Why this trust? A strong and capable state is the guarantee of freedom from (neo-)colonial interference, but it is also necessary for ensuring improved education, healthcare, care for the elderly, a robust economy, and so on. A comparable sensibility applies to science and technology (already with Deng Xiaoping), which are seen as productive forces in their own right and must be developed to improve the wellbeing of all.

For these reasons, a universal health ‘app’ is widely approved in a country like China. Simply put, it is necessary for the common good.

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 10, 2020 11:17 am

Truth and Propaganda About Coronavirus
Vijay PrashadApril 7, 2020

Part 1: Growing Xenophobia Against China in the Midst of CoronaShock
Violent attacks against Asians in the United States has spiked as a consequence of the stigma driven by the Trump administration.

March 31, 2020

On March 25, the foreign ministers of the G7 states failed to release a statement. The United States—the president of the G7 at this time—had the responsibility for drafting the statement, which was seen to be unacceptable by several other members. In the draft, the United States used the phrase “Wuhan Virus” and asserted that the global pandemic was the responsibility of the Chinese government. Earlier, U.S. President Donald Trump had used the phrase “Chinese Virus” (which he said he would stop using) and a member of his staff was reportedly heard using the slur “Kung Flu.” On Fox News, anchor Jesse Watters explained in his unfiltered racist way “why [the virus] started in China. Because they have these markets where they eat raw bats and snakes.” Violent attacks against Asians in the United States has spiked as a consequence of the stigma driven by the Trump administration.

Quite correctly, the World Health Organization’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for “solidarity, not stigma” in a speech given on February 14, long before the virus had hit Europe or North America. Ghebreyesus knew that there would be a temptation to blame China for the virus, in fact, to use the virus as a weapon to attack China in the most repulsive way. His slogan —solidarity, not stigma—was intended to sharply demarcate an internationalist and humanist response to the global pandemic from a narrow bigoted and unscientific response to the virus.

Origins

SARS-CoV-2, which is the official name for the virus, developed in the way many viruses develop: through the transmission between animals and humans. There is as yet no firm consensus about where this virus developed; one suggestion is that it developed in the west end of the Hunan Wholesale Sea Food Market in Wuhan, in China’s Hubei province, where wild animals are sold. A central issue is the expansion of agriculture into forests and hinterlands, where humans have a greater chance to interact with new pathogens, such as SARS-CoV-2. But this is not the only such virus, even though it is undoubtedly the most dangerous to humans. In the recent period, we have seen a range of panzootic avian flu such as H1N1, H5Nx, H5N2 and H5N6. Even though H5N2 was known to have originated in the United States, it was not known as the “American virus” and no-one sought to stigmatize the United States for it. The scientific name was used to describe these viruses, which are not the responsibility of this or that nation; the arrival of these viruses raises the more fundamental question of human encroachment into forests and the balance between human civilization (agriculture and cities) and the wilds.

The naming of a virus is a controversial matter. In 1832, cholera advanced from British India toward Europe. It was called “Asiatic Cholera.” The French felt that since they were democratic, they would not succumb to a disease of authoritarianism; France was ravaged by cholera, which was as much about the bacteria as it is about the state of hygiene inside Europe and North America. (When cholera struck the United States in 1848, the Public Bathing Movement was born.)

The “Spanish Flu” was only named after Spain because it came during World War I when journalism in most belligerent countries was censored. The media in Spain, not being in the war, widely reported the flu, and so that pandemic took the name of the country. In fact, evidence showed that the Spanish Flu began in the United States, in a military base in Kansas where the chickens transmitted the virus to soldiers. It would then travel to British India, where 60 percent of the casualties of that pandemic took place. It was never named the “American Flu” and no Indian government has ever sought to recover costs from the United States because of the animal-to-human transmission that happened there.

China and the Coronavirus

In an important article published in the medical journal The Lancet, Professor Chaolin Huang wrote, “The symptom onset date of the first patient [of SARS-CoV-2] identified was December 1, 2019.” Initially, there was widespread confusion about the nature of the virus, and whether it could be transmitted from human to human. It was assumed that the virus was one of the known viruses and that it was mainly transmitted from animals to humans.

Dr. Zhang Jixian, director of the Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine of Hubei Province Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, was one of the first doctors to sound the alarm about the novel coronavirus pneumonia outbreak. On December 26, Dr. Zhang saw an elderly couple who had high fever and a cough—symptoms that characterize the flu. Further examination ruled out influenza A and B, mycoplasma, chlamydia, adenovirus and SARS. A CT scan of their son showed that something had partially filled the interior of his lungs. That same day, another patient—a seller from the seafood market—presented the same symptoms. Dr. Zhang reported the four patients to China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention of the Jianghan District of Wuhan. Over the next two days, Dr. Zhang and her colleagues saw three more patients with the same symptoms who had visited the seafood market. On December 29, the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention sent experts to investigate the seven patients at the hospital. On February 6, Hubei Province recognized the valuable work done by Dr. Zhang and her team in the fight to identify and reveal the virus. There was no attempt to suppress her work.

Two other doctors—Dr. Li Wenliang (an ophthalmologist from Wuhan Central Hospital) and Ai Fen (chief of the department of emergency treatment at Wuhan Central Hospital)—played a significant role in trying to break through the confusion to bring clarity toward the new virus. In the first days, when everything seemed fuzzy, they were reprimanded by the authorities for spreading fake news. Dr. Li died of the coronavirus on February 7. Major medical and government institutions—the National Health Commission, the Health Commission of Hubei Province, the Chinese Medical Doctor Association and the Wuhan government —expressed their public condolences to his family. On March 19, the Wuhan Public Security Bureau admitted that it inappropriately reprimanded Dr. Li, and it chastised its officers. Dr. Ai Fen was also told to stop spreading fake news, but in February she received an apology and was later felicitated by Wuhan Broadcasting and Television Station.

The provincial authorities knew about the new virus by December 29. The next day, they informed China’s Center for Disease Control, and the following day, on December 31, China informed the World Health Organization (WHO), a month after the first mysterious infection was reported in Wuhan. The virus was identified by January 3; a week later, China shared the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus with WHO. It is because China released the DNA that immediate scientific work took place across the planet to find a vaccine; there are now 43 vaccine candidates, four in very early testing.

China’s National Health Commission assembled a team of experts from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences; they conducted a series of experiments on the virus samples. On January 8, they confirmed that the novel coronavirus was indeed the source of the outbreak. The first death from the virus was reported on 11 January. On January 14, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission said that there was still no evidence of human-to-human transmission, but they could not say with certainty that limited human-to-human transmission was impossible.

A week later, on January 20, Dr. Zhong Nanshan said that the novel coronavirus could be spread from human to human (Dr. Zhong, a member of the Communist Party of China, is a famous respiratory expert and a leading person in the fight against SARS in China). Some medical workers were infected by the virus. That day Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang instructed all levels of government to pay attention to the spread of the virus; the National Health Commission and other official bodies were told to begin emergency response measures. Wuhan went into full lockdown on January 23, three days after human-to-human transmission of this virus was established. The next day, Hubei province activated its Level-1 alert. On January 25, Premier Li assembled a coordinating group. He visited Wuhan two days later.

It is unclear if China could have done anything different as it faced an unknown virus. A WHO team that visited China from February 16 to 24 praised the government and the Chinese people in its report for doing their utmost to stem the spread of the virus; thousands of doctors and medical personnel arrived in Wuhan, two new hospitals were built for those infected by the virus, and various civic bodies went into action to assist families under lockdown. What the Chinese authorities did to stem the rise of the infections—as a major new study shows—was to put those infected in hospitals and those who had been in touch with them into quarantine. This targeted policy was able to identify those who had been in the chain of infection and thereby break the chain.

The World and China

The Indian state of Kerala’s Health Minister K. K. Shailaja followed the rise of the cases in Wuhan and began emergency measures in this state of 35 million people in India. She did not wait. What China was doing taught Shailaja and her team how to respond. They were able to contain the virus in this part of India.

The United States was informed about the severity of the problem early. On New Year’s Day, Chinese Center for Disease Control officials called Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while he was on vacation. “What he heard rattled him,” wrote the New York Times. Dr. George F. Gao, the head of the Chinese CDC, spoke to Redfield days later, and Dr. Gao “burst into tears” during the conversation. This warning was not taken seriously. A month later, on January 30, U.S. President Donald Trump took a very cavalier position. “We think it’s going to have a good ending for us,” he said of the coronavirus. “That I can assure you.” He did not declare a national emergency till March 13, by which time the virus had begun to spread in the United States.

Others around the world were as cavalier. They were like the French politicians of 1832 who felt that France would not be affected by “Asiatic cholera.” There was no such thing as Asiatic cholera in 1832, but only cholera that would harm people with poor hygienic systems. In the same way, there is no such thing as a Chinese virus; there is only the SARS-CoV-2. The Chinese people showed us the way to confront this virus, but only after some trial and error on their part. It is time to learn that lesson now. As the WHO says, “test, test, test,” and then carefully calibrate lockdowns, isolations, and quarantine. Chinese doctors who developed expertise in fighting the virus are now in Iran, Italy, and elsewhere, bringing the spirit of internationalism and collaboration with them.

On March 4, Dr. Bruce Aylward, who led the WHO team to China, was interviewed by the New York Times. When asked about the Chinese response to the virus, he said, “They’re mobilized, like in a war, and it’s fear of the virus that was driving them. They really saw themselves on the frontlines of protecting the rest of China. And of the world.”

Part 2: How China Learned About SARS-CoV-2 in the Weeks Before the Global Pandemic
In the early weeks when the virus emerged in Wuhan, the Chinese government neither suppressed evidence nor did their warning systems fail.

April 6, 2020

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the WHO, said at the press conference on that day that this was “the first pandemic caused by a coronavirus.” He said, “In the past two weeks, the number of cases of COVID-19 outside China has increased 13-fold, and the number of affected countries has tripled.” From March 11 onward, it became clear that this virus was deadly and that it had the capacity to tear through human society with ease. But this was not always so clear.

On March 17, Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute in California and his team showed that the new coronavirus strain, SARS-CoV-2, had a mutation in its genes known as a polybasic cleavage site that was unseen in any coronaviruses found in bats or pangolins and that there is a likelihood that the virus came to humans many years ago, and indeed not necessarily in Wuhan. Dr. Chen Jinping of the Guangdong Institute of Applied Biological Resources, along with colleagues, had earlier published a paper on February 20 noting that their data did not support the claim that the new coronavirus in humans evolved directly from a pangolin coronavirus strain. Zhong Nanshan, a noted epidemiologist, said that “although the COVID-19 first appeared in China, that does not necessarily mean it originated here.”

Scientific studies will continue and will eventually give us a conclusive understanding of this virus. For now, there is no clarity that it emerged directly from the Wuhan market.

The Western media have consistently made scientifically unfounded claims about the source of the virus, even when Western scientists were urging caution. They were certainly not listening to the doctors in Wuhan or to public health experts in China.

When doctors in Wuhan first saw patients in their hospitals in December, they believed that the patients had pneumonia, although CT scans showed severe lung damage; the patients were not responding to the typical medical treatment. Doctors were alarmed by the situation, but there was no cause to imagine that this was going to escalate into a regional epidemic and then a global pandemic.

The doctors and hospitals in Wuhan eventually came to grips with the evidence before them, and as soon as it became clear that this was an unfamiliar virus and that it spread rapidly, they contacted China’s national Center for Disease Control (CDC) and then the WHO.

You would not know this if you only read Western newspapers, notably the New York Times, which suggested in a widely circulated report that the Chinese government had suppressed information about the epidemic and that the Chinese warning system did not work.

Our investigation finds neither of these arguments to be true. There is no evidence that the Chinese government systematically suppressed information; there is only evidence that a few doctors were reprimanded by their hospitals or the local police station for divulging information to the public and not using the established protocols. There is also no evidence that the Chinese direct reporting system was faulty; instead, there is only evidence that the system, like any system, could not easily adjust to unknown or unclassified outbreaks.

The Chinese medical system, like other systems, has a rigorous procedure to report such things as health care emergencies. Medical personnel report to their hospital administration, which then reports to the various levels of CDC and the Health Commissions; they can also use the internet-based direct reporting system. It did not take long for the medical personnel to report the problem, and even less time for a high-level investigation team to arrive in Wuhan. This is what our investigation found.

Did the Chinese Government Suppress Information?

Dr. Zhang Jixian, director of Respiratory and Critical Medicine at the Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese & Western Medicine, saw an elderly couple on December 26. Their ailment bothered her. She arranged CT scans of the lung of the couple’s son who otherwise appeared healthy; the result, however, “showed ground glass opacity.” Uncertain about the causes, Dr. Zhang reported the situation to Xia Wenguang, the vice president of the hospital, as well as other departments of the hospital; the hospital promptly told Jianghan District Center for Disease Control and Prevention. This took place within 24 hours.

More patients arrived at the Hubei Provincial Hospital on December 28 and 29. The doctors still did not know more than that these patients presented symptoms of pneumonia, and that they had significant lung damage. It became clear to them that the immediate location for the spread of the virus was the South China Seafood Market. On December 29, as the cases increased, the hospital’s vice president Xia Wenguang reported directly to the disease control department of the provincial and municipal Health Commissions. That day, the disease control department of the municipal and provincial Health Commissions instructed Wuhan CDC, Jinyintan Hospital and Jianghan District CDC to visit the Hubei Provincial Hospital for an epidemiological investigation. On December 31, an expert group of the National Health Commission arrived in Wuhan from Beijing. In other words, officials from Beijing arrived in Wuhan within five days of the first sign of a problem.

The day before the expert group arrived from Beijing, one doctor—Dr. Ai Fen—expressed her frustration at the mysterious virus with some medical school classmates. Dr. Ai Fen saw a test report of unidentified pneumonia. She circled the words “SARS coronavirus” in red, photographed it, and passed it on to a medical school classmate. The report spread among doctors in Wuhan, including Dr. Li Wenliang (a Communist Party member) and seven other doctors who were later reprimanded by the police. On January 2, the head of Wuhan Central Hospital Supervision Department warned Dr. Ai Fen not to release information outside the channels of the hospital.

The reprimands received by these doctors are offered as evidence of suppression of information about the virus. This is not logical. The reprimands took place in early January. By December 31, a high-level team arrived from Beijing, and on that day, the WHO had been informed; China’s CDC and the WHO had been informed before these two doctors were reprimanded.

On February 7, 2020, the National Supervision Commission decided to send an investigation team to Wuhan to investigate the situation. On March 19, 2020, the team published the results of their investigation and held a press conference to share their findings. As a result of the investigation, the Wuhan Public Security Bureau issued a circular to revoke the letter of reprimand issued to Dr. Li Wenliang. On April 2, Dr. Li Wenliang and 13 others who died in the fight against the virus were honored by the government as martyrs (this is the highest honor given by the Communist Party and the People’s Republic of China to its citizens).

There is no evidence that local officials were afraid to report the epidemic to Beijing. There is no evidence that it took “whistleblowers,” as the New York Times put it, to shine a light on the issue. Dr. Zhang was not a whistleblower; she followed the established protocol, which led to information being passed on to the WHO within days.

China’s Early Warning System

In mid-November 2002, a SARS outbreak broke out in Foshan, Guangdong Province, China. Doctors could not easily understand what was going on. Eventually, in mid-February China’s Ministry of Health wrote an email to the WHO Beijing office “describing ‘a strange contagious disease’ that has ‘already left more than 100 people dead’” in one week. Also mentioned in the message was “a ‘panic’ attitude, currently, where people are emptying pharmaceutical stocks of any medicine they think may protect them.” It took eight months to contain this SARS outbreak.

In its aftermath, the Chinese government set up a direct reporting system to catch any health emergencies before they go out of control. The system works very well for clearly defined infectious diseases. Dr. Hu Shanlian, a professor of health economics at Fudan University, describes two such incidents. As part of the polio eradication expert group, his team found two cases of polio in Qinghai. The local government reported the cases to the central government, and it began emergency immunization as well as gave children a sugar cube vaccine to effectively control the imported poliomyelitis. As well, he reports about the two cases of plague in Beijing that came from the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. “Diseases like these,” he wrote, “can be quickly absorbed from the direct reporting system.”

Well-known ailments such as polio and plague can easily be entered into an early warning system. But if the doctors are confounded by the virus, the system cannot easily work. Dr. Ai Fen, who forwarded some clinical records to her colleagues, said that the direct reporting system is very effective if the ailment is commonplace, such as hepatitis and tuberculosis. “But this time it was unknown,” she said. Dr. Zhang Wenhong of Shanghai said that the direct reporting system “is more powerful than those in most countries in the world for known pathogens [such as MERS, H1N1] or pathogens that do not spread quickly and have limited human transmission [such as H7N9].” If confronted with a new virus, the medical personnel and the direct reporting system are bewildered.

The most effective way to proceed when there is no clarity about the infection is to inform the disease control department in the hospital. This is exactly what Dr. Zhang Jixian did, and her superior, the head of the hospital, contacted the local CDC, who contacted China’s national CDC and the National Health Commission of China. Within five days of Dr. Zhang’s alarm, the WHO was informed about a mysterious virus in Wuhan.

Since January 21, the WHO has released a daily situation report. The first report highlights the events from December 31 to January 20. The first bullet point of that report says that on December 31, the WHO China Country Office was informed that there were “cases of pneumonia unknown etiology (unknown cause) detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China.” The Chinese authorities isolated a new type of coronavirus on January 7, and then on January 12 they shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus for use in developing diagnostic kits. Precise information about the virus’s form of transmission would not come until later.

The direct reporting system was updated on January 24, 2020, with the information about the novel coronavirus. It has now learned from experience.

Facts and Ideology

Florida Senator Marco Rubio accused the WHO of “servility to the Chinese Communist Party.” He wrote that the United States will open “investigations into the WHO’s unacceptably slow decision-making on whether to declare a global pandemic and into how China has compromised the integrity of the WHO.” U.S. funds for the WHO are in the balance. Characteristically, Rubio offered no facts.

Was the WHO slow in declaring a global pandemic? In 2009, the first known case of H1N1 was detected in California on April 15; the WHO declared a global pandemic on June 11, two months later. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the first known cases were detected in January 2020; the WHO declared a global pandemic on March 11—one and a half months later. In the interim, the WHO sent in investigation teams to Wuhan (January 20-21) and to Beijing, Guangdong, Sichuan, and Wuhan (February 16-24); their investigation, before the declaration, was thorough. The timeframe for the WHO declaration is similar, even faster in 2020 than it was in 2009.

Whether it is the New York Times or Marco Rubio, there is an urgency to conclude that China’s government and Chinese society are to blame for the global pandemic, and that their failures not only compromised the WHO but caused the pandemic. Facts become irrelevant. What we have shown in this report is that there was neither willful suppression of the facts nor was there a fear from local officials to report to Beijing; nor indeed was the system broken. The coronavirus epidemic was mysterious and complex, and the Chinese doctors and authorities hastily learned what was going on and then made—based on the facts available—rational decisions.

(These are the first two articles in a three-part series, which will be fully available here.)

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than twenty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017).

Du Xiaojun works as a translator and is based in Shanghai. His research is in international relations, cross-cultural communication, and applied linguistics.

Weiyan Zhu is a lawyer based in Beijing. She is interested in social and political issues.

https://independentmediainstitute.org/g ... ronashock/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Thu Apr 16, 2020 2:27 pm

Latest on the novel coronavirus outbreak
chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2020-04-16 08:00
The novel coronavirus has spread across China and beyond.

April 16

Outside China

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The latest figures reported by each government's health authority as of April 16, 2020.
- Trump says US has passed the peak on new cases and will release guidelines on reopening economy on Thursday (Read more)

- US coronavirus death toll exceeds 30,000: Johns Hopkins University

- WHO chief says 'regret' US decision to halt funding to WHO (Read more)

- UN spokesman says up to WHO's governing body to find funds after US withholds (Read more)

- European Union sets out roadmap for lifting restrictions, urges coordination (Read more)

- Latin America sees continued rise in COVID-19 cases as Argentina takes stricter measures (Read more)

- Last passengers of coronavirus-stricken cruise ship disembark in Uruguay (Read more)

China

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Data released by National Health Commission by midnight, April 15, 2020.

- Chinese mainland reports 46 new COVID-19 infections on Wednesday, with 34 being imported cases (Read more)

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20200 ... 15085.html
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 17, 2020 10:55 am

How China dealt with the outbreak of a brand new virus
17 APRIL, 2020

This is the third part of a long piece that is the most detailed explanation in English of what actually happened when a brand new viorus was identified and diagnosed in China. Originally published on Independent Media (here), it also appeared in Counterpunch (here). After reading this you will appreciate how quickly China’s socialist system moved into action. The article relies heavily on transparent Chinese sources (ht NT).

On March 31, 2020, a group of scientists from around the world—from Oxford University to Beijing Normal University—published an important paper in Science. This paper—“An Investigation of Transmission Control Measures During the First 50 Days of the COVID-19 Epidemic in China”—proposes that if the Chinese government had not initiated the lockdown of Wuhan and the national emergency response, then there would have been 744,000 additional confirmed COVID-19 cases outside Wuhan. “Control measures taken in China,” the authors argue, “potentially hold lesso[n]s for other countries around the world.”

In the World Health Organization’s February report after a visit to China, the team members wrote, “In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history.”

In this report, we detail the measures taken by the different levels of the Chinese government and by social organizations to stem the spread of the virus and the disease at a time when scientists had just begun to accumulate knowledge about them and when they worked in the absence of a vaccine and a specific drug treatment for COVID-19.

The Emergence of a Plan

In the early days of January 2020, the National Health Commission (NHC) and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began to establish protocols to deal with the diagnosis, treatment, and laboratory testing of what was then considered a “viral pneumonia of unknown cause.” A treatment manual was produced by the NHC and health departments in Hubei Province and sent to all medical institutions in Wuhan City on January 4; city-wide training was conducted that same day. By January 7, China CDC isolated the first novel coronavirus strain, and three days later, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Chinese Academy of Sciences) and others developed testing kits.

By the second week of January, more was known about the nature of the virus, and so a plan began to take shape to contain it. On January 13, the NHC instructed Wuhan City authorities to begin temperature checks at ports and stations and to reduce public gathering. The next day, the NHC held a national teleconference that alerted all of China to the virulent novel coronavirus strain and to prepare for a public health emergency. On January 17, the NHC sent seven inspection teams to China’s provinces to train public health officials about the virus, and on January 19 the NHC distributed nucleic acid reagents for test kits to China’s many health departments. Zhong Nanshan—former president of the Chinese Medical Association—led a high-level team to Wuhan City to carry out inspections on January 18 and 19.

Over the next few days, the NHC began to understand how the virus was transmitted and how this transmission could be halted. Between January 15 and March 3, the NHC published seven editions of its guidelines. A look at them shows a precise development of its knowledge about the virus and its plans for mitigation; these included new methods for treatment, including the use of ribavirin and a combination of Chinese and allopathic medicine. The National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine would eventually report that 90 percent of patients received a traditional medicine, which was found to be effective in 90 percent of them.

By January 22, it had become clear that transport in and out of Wuhan had to be restricted. That day, the State Council Information Office urged people not to go to Wuhan, and the next day the city was essentially shut down. The grim reality of the virus had by now become clear to everyone.

The Government Acts

On January 25, the Communist Party of China (CPC) formed a Central Committee Leading Group for COVID-19 Prevention and Control with two leaders—Li Keqiang and Wang Huning—in charge. China’s President Xi Jinping tasked the group to use the best scientific thinking as they formulated their policies to contain the virus, and to use every resource to put people’s health before economic considerations. By January 27, Vice Premier of the State Council Sun Chunlan led a Central Guiding Team to Wuhan City to shape the new aggressive response to virus control. Over time, the government and the Communist Party developed an agenda to tackle the virus, which can be summarized in four points:

1. To prevent the diffusion of the virus by maintaining not only a lockdown on the province, but by minimizing traffic within the province. This was complicated by the Chinese New Year break, which had already begun; families would visit one another and visit markets (this is the largest short-term human migration, when almost all of China’s 1.4 billion people gather in each other’s homes). All this had to be prevented. Local authorities had already begun to use the most advanced epidemiological thinking to track and study the source of the infections and trace the route of transmission. This was essential to shut down the spread of the virus.

2. To deploy resources for medical workers, including protective equipment for the workers, hospital beds for patients, and equipment as well as medicines to treat the patients. This included the building of temporary treatment centers—including later two full hospitals(Huoshenshan Hospital and Leishenshan Hospital). Increased screening required more test kits, which had to be developed and manufactured.

3. To ensure that during the lockdown of the province, food and fuel were made available to the residents.

4. To ensure the release of information to the public that is based on scientific fact and not rumor. To this end, the team investigated any and all irresponsible actions taken by the local authorities from the reports of the first cases to the end of January.

These four points defined the approach taken by the Chinese government and the local authorities through February and March. A joint prevention and control mechanism was established under the leadership of the NHC, with wide-ranging authority to coordinate the fight to break the chain of infection. Wuhan City and Hubei Province remained under virtual lockdown for 76 days until early April.

On February 23, President Xi Jinping spoke to 170,000 county and Communist Party cadres and military officials from every part of China; “this is a crisis and also a major test,” said Xi. All of China’s emphasis would be on fighting the epidemic and putting people first, and at the same time China would ensure that its long-term economic agenda would not be damaged.

Neighborhood Committees

A key—and underreported—part of the response to the virus was in the public action that defines Chinese society. In the 1950s, urban civil organizations—or juweihui—developed as way for residents in neighborhoods to organize their mutual safety and mutual aid. In Wuhan, as the lockdown developed, it was members of the neighborhood committees who went door-to-door to check temperatures, to deliver food (particularly to the elderly) and to deliver medical supplies. In other parts of China, the neighborhood committees set up temperature checkpoints at the entrance of the neighborhoods to monitor people who went in and out; this was basic public health in a decentralized fashion. As of March 9, 53 people working in these committees lost their lives, 49 of them were members of the Communist Party.

The Communist Party’s 90 million members and the 4.6 million grass-roots party organizations helped shape the public action across the country at the frontlines of China’s 650,000 urban and rural communities. Medical workers who were party members traveled to Wuhan to be part of the frontline medical response. Other party members worked in their neighborhood committees or developed new platforms to respond to the virus.

Decentralization defined the creative responses. In Tianxinqiao Village, Tiaoma Town, Yuhua District, Changsha, Hunan Province, Yang Zhiqiang—a village announcer—used the “loud voice” of 26 loudspeakers to urge villagers not to pay New Year visits to each other and not to eat dinner together. In Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, the police used drones to play the sound of trumpets as a reminder not to violate the lockdown order.

In Chengdu, Sichuan Province, 440,000 citizens formed teams to do a range of public actions to stem the transmission of the virus: they publicized the health regulations, they checked temperatures, they delivered food and medicines, and they found ways to entertain the otherwise traumatized public. The Communist Party cadre led the way here, drawing together businesses, social groups, and volunteers into a local self-management structure. In Beijing, residents developed an app that sends registered users warnings about the virus and creates a database that can be used to help track the movement of the virus in the city.

Medical Intervention

Li Lanjuan was one of the early medical doctors to enter Wuhan; she recalled that when she got there, medical tests “were difficult to get” and the situation with supplies was “pretty bad.” Within a few days, she said, more than 40,000 medical workers arrived in the city, and patients with mild symptoms were treated in temporary treatment centers, while those who had been seriously impacted were taken to the hospitals. Protective equipment, tests, ventilators, and other supplies rushed in. “The mortality rate was greatly reduced,” said Dr. Li Lanjuan. “In just two months, the epidemic situation in Wuhan was basically under control.”

From across China came 1,800 epidemiological teams—with five people in each team—to do surveys of the population. Wang Bo, a leader of one of the teams from Jilin Province, said that his team conducted “demanding and dangerous” door-to-door epidemiological surveys. Yao Laishun, a member of one of the Jilin teams, said that within weeks their team had carried out epidemiological surveys of 374 people and traced and monitored 1,383 close contacts; this was essential work in locating who was infected and treated as well as who needed to be isolated if they had not yet presented symptoms or if they tested negative. Up to February 9, the health authorities inspected 4.2 million households (10.59 million people) in Wuhan; that means that they inspected 99 percent of the population, a gargantuan exercise.

The speed of the production of medical equipment, particularly protective equipment for the medical workers, was breathtaking. On January 28, China made fewer than 10,000 sets of personal protective equipment (PPE) a day, and by February 24, its production capacity exceeded 200,000 per day. On February 1, the government produced 773,000 test kits a day; by February 25, it was producing 1.7 million kits per day; by March 31, 4.26 million test kits were produced per day. Direction from the authorities moved industrial plants to churn out protective gear, ambulances, ventilators, electrocardiograph monitors, respiratory humidification therapy machines, blood gas analyzers, air disinfectant machines, and hemodialysis machines. The government focused attention on making sure that there was no shortage of any medical equipment.

Chen Wei, one of China’s leading virologists who had worked on the 2003 SARS epidemic and had gone to Sierra Leone in 2015 to develop the world’s first Ebola vaccine, rushed to Wuhan with her team. They set up a portable testing laboratory by January 30; by March 16, her team produced the first novel coronavirus vaccine that went into clinical trials, with Chen being one of the first to be vaccinated as part of the trial.

Relief

To shut down a province with 60 million inhabitants for more than two months and to substantially shut down a country of 1.4 billion inhabitants is not easy. The social and economic impact was always going to be very great. But, the Chinese government—in its early directives—said that the economic hit to the country was not going to define the response; the well-being of the people had to be dominant in the formulation of any policy.

On January 22, before the Leading Group was formed, the government issued a circular that said medical treatment for COVID-19 patients was guaranteed and it would be free of cost. A medical insurance reimbursement policy was then formulated, which said that expenses from medicines and medical services needed for treating the COVID-19 would be completely covered by the insurance fund; no patient would have to pay any money.

During the lockdown, the government created a mechanism to ensure the steady supply of food and fuel at normal prices. State-owned enterprises such as China Oil and Foodstuffs Corporation, China Grain Reserves Group, and China National Salt Industry Group increased their supply of rice, flour, oil, meat and salt. All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives helped enterprises to get direct connection with farmers’ cooperatives; other organizations like China Agriculture Industry Chamber of Commerce pledged to maintain supply and price stability. The Ministry of Public Security met on February 3 to crack down on price gouging and hoarding; up to April 8, the prosecutorial organizations in China investigated 3,158 cases of epidemic-related criminal offenses. The state offered financial support for small and medium-sized enterprises; in return, businesses revamped their practices to ensure a safe working environment (Guangzhou Lingnan Cable Company, for instance, staggered lunch breaks, tested the temperature of workers, disinfected the working area periodically, ensured that ventilators worked, and provided staff with protective equipment such as masks, goggles, hand lotion, and alcohol-based sanitizers).

Lockdown

A study in The Lancet by four epidemiologists from Hong Kong show that the lockdown of Wuhan in late January prevented the spread of infection outside Hubei Province; the major cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Wenzhou, they write, saw a collapse in numbers of infections within two weeks of the partial lockdown. However, the scholars write, as a consequence of the virulence of COVID-19 and the absence of herd immunity, the virus might have a second wave. This is something that worries the Chinese government, which continues to be vigilant about this novel coronavirus.

Nonetheless, the lights of celebration flashed across Wuhan as the lockdown was lifted. Medical personnel and volunteers breathed a sigh of relief. China had been able to use its considerable resources—its socialist culture and institutions—to swiftly break the chain.

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 18, 2020 1:23 pm

Life after the pandemic: a further documentary by Takeuchi Ryo in Nanjing
17 APRIL, 2020 ~ 1 COMMENT
The initial documentary by Takeuchi Ryo on life in Nanjing during the lockdown (here) was immensely popular in Japan and China, since it provided first-hand and accurate descriptions of how Nanjing dealt with the pandemic. Ryo lives in Nanjing with his family and has made more than 200 episodes about life in China for a Japanese expat. Called ‘The Reason I Live Here’, it is streamed by the Chinese platform, Bilibili. In March, he returned to Nanjing from a visit to Japan and the whole family underwent quarantine. Seeing how Nanjing dealt with the situation prompted the first documentary (see an earlier post here). To be clear, Nanjing was not an epicentre, with only 98 infections. But these were brought to 0 in short order through targeted epidemic control.

The second documentary shows how Nanjing is emerging in a post-epidemic situation. Given China’s wealth of experience, it gives us a sense of what life will be like before a vaccine is developed.



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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sun Apr 19, 2020 2:01 pm

Revised death toll shows Wuhan is moving on
China Daily | Updated: 2020-04-18 09:13


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An aerial photo shows vehicles waiting to leave Wuhan on April 8, 2020. [Photo by Ke Hao/for chinadaily.com.cn]

Tell the truth and be responsible. That is exactly what the authorities in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province and the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak in China, did on Friday by revising the data on the number of infections from 50,008 to 50,333, and the death toll from 2,579 to 3,869.

The revision also increased the countrywide death toll from 3,352 to 4,642.

But contrary to speculations, the lifting of the lockdown on Wuhan on April 8 provided the local authorities the opportunity to determine the scale of devastation in the city and accordingly revise the data.

That Wuhan now accounts for 83 percent of the deaths in China speaks volumes of the pain the city has suffered, particularly in the early days when test kits, hospital beds, ventilators and personal protective equipment were all in short supply, and the shortage of nucleic acid test kits meant some COVID-19 patients died before they could be diagnosed. Also, initially, the communication between some grassroots clinics and the public health emergency response team was not sound, so there was belated, missed and mistaken reporting of some deaths.

Conjectures, especially those of the devious kind, unfortunately, cannot be prevented in these truly troubled times. Yet without the sacrifice of Wuhan residents, especially during those 76 days of lockdown, the virus could have spread more rapidly across the country and beyond its borders-and claimed many more lives in China.

Despite being the first to feel the destructive force of the virus and overwhelmed, initially, China has tried every means possible to ensure its data on the epidemic are accurate. Which is important for not only other countries to devise as foolproof plans as possible to combat the epidemic, but also for China to use as reference for implementing effective pandemic-control measures.

The more accurate the data on the outbreak, the more effective would the country's measures to fight it be. And it is a measure of China's strong response to the outbreak that even after the revision of the data, the death rate remains one of the lowest among the worst-hit countries. China's relatively low fatality rate can also be attributed to the use of traditional Chinese medicine in treating COVID-19 patients. Hence the importance of China's role in the global fight against the virus.

Given that the novel coronavirus is highly contagious, no country's public health system alone is capable of coping with it. And since the world needs to combat this scourge together, stigmatization of any country, region or ethic group should be given a quiet burial.

We mourn every life lost to the outbreak. But deaths must not be used to create divides; instead they should bring countries and people closer, so we can defeat the common enemy.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20200 ... 171dc.html

******************************************************************

'Cover-up' claims from US are all sound and fury
By Ian Goodrum | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2020-04-18 13:36

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"There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics."

Mark Twain is often credited for this well-worn adage about the power of numbers to deceive. He didn't come up with it, but it sure sounds like something he'd say.

Some in the United States have studied this expression well, given their latest attacks on China. They've made it a little simpler, though: In the absence of statistics, all they have to throw around are lies.

The newest round of absurdities comes courtesy of a government and media struggling to find a scapegoat for their disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. As China emerges from lockdown after successful containment of the virus — though concern remains over a possible second wave — a furious US populace, with tens of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands infected, is demanding to know why those in charge did not act sooner. Rather than provide an apology or real solutions, some are alleging China deliberately undercounted its infections and deaths in an effort to "cover up" the scale of the outbreak and mislead the world.

This is, of course, an utter falsehood. Ask any of these people to substantiate their claims and they'll come up empty, maybe mumble something about their gut tells them they're right. At most, they will cite poorly sourced reports that should never have been published in the first place. One, which got play in major media outlets, relied on back-of-the-napkin estimates of cremations in Wuhan from anonymous social media accounts. Talk about due diligence! For this theory to even be entertained you have to assume people stop dying from other causes during an epidemic. Do these charlatans honestly believe heart disease is taking a break right now? Is cancer?

Another story, even more ludicrous than the last, contends that millions of mobile phone accounts deactivating during the outbreak indicates an astronomically larger death toll than what's been reported. Again, common sense flies in the face of such outrageous charges. Has it never occurred to the rumor-mongers that when a country of over a billion people is locked down, some of them might choose to rely on home internet? Many migrant workers have multiple SIM cards to take advantage of lower rates when traveling through provinces. These considerations were either ignored or brushed off — all to point the finger at a country that has minimized its people's suffering despite being the site of the first large-scale outbreak.

Friday's revision of Wuhan's death toll has thrown fuel on the conspiratorial fire. Already the hyenas in the Western press are salivating, drawing the worst possible conclusions from what would be commended if it happened in any other country. Now that the worst of the outbreak has passed, Wuhan has been able to take a breath and audit its data to ensure an accurate count. One would think this is the very behavior critics want to see. But since they're continuing to take potshots at China anyway, we can guess how genuine their commitment to transparency really is.

The uptick in numbers has several perfectly reasonable explanations. When the virus was at its apex, health systems were stretched to their absolute limits. This was remedied with the swift construction of temporary hospitals, but those Herculean efforts could not save everyone and some sadly passed away at home. Testing infrastructure also took time to catch up to the spread of the epidemic, meaning some who died of the virus were previously uncounted.Any increase in death tolls is cause for heartbreak, of course. But it’s better in the long run to have as precise as possible — and the 1,290 Wuhan revised yesterday is a far cry from the tens of thousands or millions some were twisting themselves into pretzels to make sound plausible.

Putting all that nonsense aside, basic arithmetic calls the whole "cover-up" thesis into question. Though it has a large urbanized population, China's proportional death rate falls well within a reasonable range; China's per-million rate falls below the Republic of Korea's and above Japan's, for instance. Strangely enough, no one is accusing Japan of falsifying its numbers. I'm sure its economic and strategic relationship with the US has nothing to do with that.

What appears to be the determining factor in whether a country can minimize infections and deaths is the level of its outbreak response, and how rapidly that response is implemented. Countries that acted quickly have seen exponential infection growth rates flatline; like a fire without oxygen, a virus with no new hosts is eventually snuffed out. Countries that dragged their feet, on the other hand, are seeing devastating consequences.

With that in mind, let's again review China's methods to see if the country passes muster. Days after sustained human-to-human transmission was confirmed, China enacted an unprecedented outbreak control regime. Among other measures, it included near-universal temperature checks, a leveled system of screening and clearly partitioned levels of quarantine. In particular, the centralized isolation of patients with mild symptoms away from home was singled out by the World Health Organization as the most effective method of curbing the spread of the virus — something the United States has yet to implement on a wide scale.

In China, testing and treatment were made free to all; meanwhile potential carriers in the US, where millions have lost their jobs and for-profit health insurance reigns supreme, are often avoiding the hospital and staying home. This can spread the virus to family members and other close contacts.

That's assuming they're not being made to work, of course. As there are no binding national-level guidelines on outbreak control or essential employment, states and localities have been given a great deal of latitude in how they are handling their epidemics. Some have adopted the necessary protocols to hamper infections. Others have dismissed concerns and voiced their desire to return to "business as usual". We will know soon enough which approach is the right one; some will pay dearly for this little federalist experiment.

There is no "cover-up" to blame for the relatively modest casualty count in China. We know exactly who is responsible: The Chinese people, who took the threat of the virus seriously and sacrificed personal comfort to comply with lockdowns, especially in Wuhan; the healthcare professionals who risked life and limb to battle the disease on the front lines; and the Chinese government, which acted decisively to blunt the contagion's spread.

That success was paid for with blood, and those who lost their lives should be venerated as martyrs in a struggle for the survival of the human race. Implying such a hard-won victory came about by fudging statistics or outright lying dishonors their memories. It's nothing more than a cheap dodge, meant to smother the wholly righteous anger radiating from those demanding answers from their government.

Instead of fabricating conspiracies from thin air, the US should be asking what it can learn from China's experience combating the epidemic. Maybe then it would see how the death rate has been kept so low.

The author is a US writer with China Daily.

The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not represent the views of China Daily and China Daily website.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20200 ... 17268.html
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 20, 2020 11:50 am

Pre-publication: Not Some Other -ism: Chinese Socialism without Foreign Labels
20 APRIL, 2020 ~ LEAVE A COMMENT
This is a pre-publication version of an article that is written with a colleague, Yan Ping. It is called ‘Not Some Other -ism: Chinese Socialism without Foreign Labels’.

If you are interested, you can download the article at this link (here).

https://stalinsmoustache.files.wordpres ... cation.pdf

And here is the abstract:

This study tackles four hypotheses concerning socialism with Chinese characteristics – particularly as it has developed with the Reform and Opening-Up – and finds them wanting. Each of them sets in opposition the economy and the state, with the former being seen as ‘capitalist’ (in some form) and the latter as variously ‘authoritarian’, ‘bureaucratic’ or simply as ‘interventionist’. In other words, the ‘Chinese characteristics’ designates – in their opinion – a distinct form of capitalism. While each hypothesis has its own distinct problems, they also have common problems: a voluntarist position on political decisions, which fails to provide any reason for a ‘capitalist turn’; the assumption that a ‘market economy’, wherever and whenever it appears, is by definition capitalist; the deployment of a Western ‘betrayal narrative’; and a systemic neglect of Chinese language research. Our primary focus is on the internal problems of these hypotheses, since it functions as clearing operation for a more sustained study of socialism with Chinese characteristics based on Chinese scholarship.
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Wed Apr 22, 2020 1:11 pm

The China Model: A scientific assessment of how to contain and then emerge from COVID-19
22 APRIL, 2020 ~ LEAVE A COMMENT
Of the many insights Domenico Losurdo has provided, one is particularly pertinent in the current situation. In his studies of Chinese Marxism and indeed other anti-colonial struggles for liberation, Losurdo points out that understandings of the state, science and development, and productive forces are seen in a very different way from Western Marxists. Instead of a liberal-tainted suspicion of the state, a strong state is necessary and trusted to enact necessary measures; instead of suspicions of developments in science and technology, these are seen as forces that enable a formerly colonised and poor country to develop; and instead of a suspicion of productive forces, these are regarded as the core feature of the construction of socialism and the road-map out of poverty.

With these thoughts in mind, I copy here a report from the People’s Daily (here) on an editorial in the Lancet (here). The editorial is an assessment, based on medical science, of China’s model in not only containing the COVID-19 pandemic, but also on enacting a strategy out of the lock-down.

The Lancet, an authoritative academic publication in the medical field, has published an editorial saying that the rapid containment of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic in China was impressive and set an encouraging example for other countries.

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Aggressive public health interventions in China, such as early detection of cases, contact tracing, and population behavioural change, have contributed enormously to containing the epidemic, according to the editorial.

In addition, the Fangcang shelter hospitals have also been crucial in relieving the huge pressure on the health-care system.

At present, China is gradually and cautiously resuming work and reopening schools. Implementing a science-based lockdown exit strategy is essential to sustain containment of COVID-19. China’s experience will be watched closely, as other countries start considering—and, in some cases, implementing— their own exit strategies, the editorial said.

The editorial also said that the over-riding public health priority for China is to closely monitor the instantaneous reproduction number (Rt) and confirmed case-fatality risk. Restrictions should be relaxed gradually so that the Rt does not exceed 1. Otherwise, cases would increase exponentially again, unleashing a second wave of infection.

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 24, 2020 1:38 pm

The story of Qin Hui, the traitor, and why it has relevance today
24 APRIL, 2020 ~ 2 COMMENTS
This story has particular relevance once again today.

During the period of the Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE), there was an imperial scholar and ‘chancellor’ called Qin Hui (1090-1155 CE). At the time that the Song Dynasty lost its northern parts to the Jin empire, Qin Hui was captured by the Jin. After a few years he suddenly appeared in the new southern capital of Hangzhou. Despite suspicions among some, he was soon elevated to the highest rank by Emperor Gaozong.

During a spike in the incessant wars between the Song and the Jin, the most illustrious general of the Song, Yue Fei, was on the verge of capturing the old Song capital of Kaifeng. At this moment, Qin Hui is said to have persuaded the emperor to recall the general. Upon return to Hangzhou, Yue Fei was imprisoned. Qin Hui was not finished: he arranged for trumped up charges to be brought against the general and the latter was executed.

For this act, Qin Hui has become the epitome of a traitor in China (even if the emperor himself was ultimately culpable – see here). Many are the stories that have grown up around this treachery, but let me give two examples.

After hard work by the grandson of Yue Fei, the former general was exonerated and given proper recognition by the Emperor Xiaozong. Over time, four statues were made, one of Qin Hui, one of his wife and one each of two accomplices. The statues kneel before the grave of Yue Fei and have their heads bowed. For centuries people would curse the statues, spit at them and so on.

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The origin of Youtiao (油条). These are long sticks of dough that are deep-fried briefly before being taken out of the oil before they become saturated. One must eat them freshly cooked, for otherwise they soon become tough. I have often witnessed lines of people in dining halls and breakfast eateries waiting patiently for a fresh batch before returning to their seats to eat them. Absolutely addictive. The story has it that originally they were made to recall the treachery of Qin Hui and his wife, Wang Shi. Thus, there are two strips of dough that are joined at some point. And what do you do with traitors? You boil them in oil! Hence another name for youtiao is youzhagui (油炸鬼), deep-fried ghosts or deep-fried devils.

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Why is the story of Qin Hui relevant once again?

A new traitor has arisen in China, with the name of Wang Fang. She is a writer and her pen name is Fang Fang, but why is she seen as a traitor? Coming from Wuhan, she has arranged to have a ‘diary’ from the former epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic published in English and German. Immediately, you will notice that it is not to be published in Chinese, and while it claims to be a ‘diary’, it is anything of the sort. Appearing originally in 60 instalments online, it draws on hearsay and rumour to paint a dystopian picture of ‘social injustice, corruption, abuse, and the systemic political problems which impeded the response to the epidemic’ – so the English promotion of the book has it.

I will come back to the ‘systemic’ issue in a moment. But as I write, more and more people see her as a traitor since she is pandering to the mindset of former colonisers (the ‘West’) in their efforts to smear China. Her ‘diary’ has none of the extraordinary effort to contain the outbreak of the epidemic, the 42,000 medics who rushed from around China to Wuhan, and the significant success achieved. And it turns out that she is quite anti-communist, speaking on her Sina-weibo account – in response to her many critics – of a ‘far-left ideological trend’ in China over recent years and the ‘crazy, evil and violent tendencies’ in governance and among the general public (see here and here). Increasingly, she is seen in terms of ‘you have a lot of room to improve in becoming a proper person’. You get the picture.

Do not get me wrong, there is plenty of criticism concerning the early response in Wuhan and Hubei province, which was chaotic, unprepared and inefficient. Indeed, the criticism is robust, more so than in Western countries. My own experience is that at all levels, criticism and self-criticism are far more direct and robust in China than in other parts of the world that I know. As one example among many, Ye Qing – deputy director of the statistics bureau in Hubei province – also kept a diary over the days of the Wuhan lockdown (see here). His diary is scathing of the bureaucratic blockages and formalism that hindered the early stages in Wuhan, until the central government took over and acted with alacrity.

All of this brings me back to the question of what is incidental and what is systemic. As noted earlier, Fang Fang suggests the problems encountered are systemic to China’s socialist system, while for Ye Qing they were incidental to Hubei and not systemic. I have encountered this distinction in my research on socialism with Chinese characteristics. One of the significant features of much non-Chinese scholarship is that it takes an incidental or cyclical problem – with great preference for the wild 1990s – and turns it into a systemic problem. The crucial question to ask in this case is: has the problem been addressed and resolved? (A deeper question that would take me too far from the current topic is: how should we approach incidental or cyclical problems in light of contradiction analysis?) As for Wuhan and indeed Hubei the answer is obvious. Not only were inefficient local officials carefully assessed by a discipline team promptly sent to Wuhan and dismissed where necessary, but China’s socialist system was able to recover from the initial mistakes in Wuhan and contain the epidemic to a small fraction of the population (0.000059 percent) with a 94 percent recovery rate. Not a few countries could learn from this example.

To conclude: apparently, a sculptor from Nanjing is said to be working on a sculpture with Fang Fang kneeling before the archetypal Chinese traitor, Qin Hui. The multiple allusions should be obvious.

https://stalinsmoustache.org/2020/04/24 ... nce-today/
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