At the risk of being impudent, yet feeling compelled to state what I'd hope should be painfully obvious: No sensible person would trust any statistic from China. Need I remind you this is an authoritarian regime? As such a skeptic should view any data at all, even if were a report on the nation's athletes, as what it most likely is: Pure disinformation geared to support a partisan viewpoint. This doesn't preclude an occasional true admission. These will be repeated if they suit the ruling party's interests, or sometimes the slip past the censors.
In brief: anything purporting to be scientific or statistical data cannot be believed. The analysis for other nations, to include your own, isn't much different.
We've always been at war with East Asia. Or was it Eurasia?
Yes, I realize that many Americans think they can't trust any information that comes from the Chinese government. I addressed this in the body of the article. I found the Chinese government's figure on COVID deaths more credible than OurWorldInData (from Johns Hopkins University). I have caught our own CDC in egregious distortions of data, for example https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/cdc-proportional-reporting-ratio-covid-vaccine-harm/
John Williams has made his career printing true statistics at ShadowStats.com to correct the politicized numbers released by the US Dept of Commerce and Bureau of Labor Statistics.
So I do the best I can to judge which data sources are credible on a case-by-case basis. I believe that the broad outline of this story about COVID in China will stand up to scrutiny.
Always a consistently illuminating read; thank-you. As an interesting aside, I paid a visit to an acupuncturist in January 2020. Obviously well-versed in Chinese lore, after the treatment she casually mentioned that 2020 is the year of the metal rat, the year when everything stops, 'like a knife through butter' she put it, and a new cycle begins. I didn't pay much attention until March 2020, when everything DID stop. The previous year of the metal rat was 1960, the year of the disastrous '4 pests' campaign, when millions in China died from famine. Curious.
My first reaction as I began reading this was, well, that was just one single informant who painted such a rosy picture of life after Covid. Surely there was psychic damage done, given the hard, long lockdown. How could a whole population simply agree to these anti human measures, then simply set them aside and go on their merry way as if nothing has happened? I wonder, dd the Chinese authorities mandate that people take their vaccine?
When I look around me and see people still wearing masks, outside or indoors, I see them as psychologically wounded. But the image your informant paints is of a seemingly resilient people who were fine with lockdowns or not. As Chick Hearn used to say (he was the voice of the LA Lakers for many years), “No harm, no foul.” For my part, I’m pleased with my newfound independence from the collective hive, a natural reaction to the covid authoritarianism we’ve witnessed, but I wonder how much it’s about baseline perspective, whether a baseline of western freedoms or a baseline of Chinese collectivism.
I hope I didn't convey the sense that everyone was fine with the lockdowns. It's a big country, and lockdowns were irrelevant to a large number of people. There was another large segment of the population that lost their freedom, lost the ability to travel and conduct business and see their family, and they were angry enough to protest in a country where protesting is dangerous.
No, you didn't. But the sense that your informant gave was that everything was back to normal, which gave my the impression that the lockdowns came and went with ease, no bruising. I did get the sense from you that their culture/history somehow allowed them to be more accepting of the lockdowns than I, and many others like me, had experienced here in the US.
At the risk of being impudent, yet feeling compelled to state what I'd hope should be painfully obvious: No sensible person would trust any statistic from China. Need I remind you this is an authoritarian regime? As such a skeptic should view any data at all, even if were a report on the nation's athletes, as what it most likely is: Pure disinformation geared to support a partisan viewpoint. This doesn't preclude an occasional true admission. These will be repeated if they suit the ruling party's interests, or sometimes the slip past the censors.
In brief: anything purporting to be scientific or statistical data cannot be believed. The analysis for other nations, to include your own, isn't much different.
We've always been at war with East Asia. Or was it Eurasia?
Yes, I realize that many Americans think they can't trust any information that comes from the Chinese government. I addressed this in the body of the article. I found the Chinese government's figure on COVID deaths more credible than OurWorldInData (from Johns Hopkins University). I have caught our own CDC in egregious distortions of data, for example https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/cdc-proportional-reporting-ratio-covid-vaccine-harm/
John Williams has made his career printing true statistics at ShadowStats.com to correct the politicized numbers released by the US Dept of Commerce and Bureau of Labor Statistics.
So I do the best I can to judge which data sources are credible on a case-by-case basis. I believe that the broad outline of this story about COVID in China will stand up to scrutiny.
Always a consistently illuminating read; thank-you. As an interesting aside, I paid a visit to an acupuncturist in January 2020. Obviously well-versed in Chinese lore, after the treatment she casually mentioned that 2020 is the year of the metal rat, the year when everything stops, 'like a knife through butter' she put it, and a new cycle begins. I didn't pay much attention until March 2020, when everything DID stop. The previous year of the metal rat was 1960, the year of the disastrous '4 pests' campaign, when millions in China died from famine. Curious.
My first reaction as I began reading this was, well, that was just one single informant who painted such a rosy picture of life after Covid. Surely there was psychic damage done, given the hard, long lockdown. How could a whole population simply agree to these anti human measures, then simply set them aside and go on their merry way as if nothing has happened? I wonder, dd the Chinese authorities mandate that people take their vaccine?
When I look around me and see people still wearing masks, outside or indoors, I see them as psychologically wounded. But the image your informant paints is of a seemingly resilient people who were fine with lockdowns or not. As Chick Hearn used to say (he was the voice of the LA Lakers for many years), “No harm, no foul.” For my part, I’m pleased with my newfound independence from the collective hive, a natural reaction to the covid authoritarianism we’ve witnessed, but I wonder how much it’s about baseline perspective, whether a baseline of western freedoms or a baseline of Chinese collectivism.
Your article has helped to widen my perspective .
I hope I didn't convey the sense that everyone was fine with the lockdowns. It's a big country, and lockdowns were irrelevant to a large number of people. There was another large segment of the population that lost their freedom, lost the ability to travel and conduct business and see their family, and they were angry enough to protest in a country where protesting is dangerous.
No, you didn't. But the sense that your informant gave was that everything was back to normal, which gave my the impression that the lockdowns came and went with ease, no bruising. I did get the sense from you that their culture/history somehow allowed them to be more accepting of the lockdowns than I, and many others like me, had experienced here in the US.