Khorne posted:

That image should be in the op. Someone post it.

Grand Fromage posted:

What are China tankies?

Patrocclesiastes posted:

My company forbid all travel to China and strongly discourages any travel to asia right now at all.

Have there been any confirmed cases in Shanghai or Dalian?

Tarkus posted:

My girlfriend's mom calls waitresses 'Pretty Girl' in Cantonese when we eat at a Chinese place. Dunno if it's a Hong Kong thing or a general term for a woman who serves in a business.

quote:

CORONAVIRUS EXPOSES CORE FLAWS, AND FEW STRENGTHS, IN CHINA'S GOVERNANCE

While China can mobilize a huge national response to the outbreak, its response to the crisis is also a lesson in how the country’s political weak points can carry grave consequences for world health.


By Max Fisher
Jan. 25, 2020

It was the initial news reports that first suggested China’s political system might be getting in the way of its ability to confront the coronavirus outbreak.

The outbreak seemed to already be a full-blown crisis, infecting dozens in China and even some abroad, by the time it became widely reported.

This seeming delay was of a familiar pattern in China, one suggesting that local officials may have played down early warning signs or simply did not coordinate enough to see the problem’s scope.

While outsiders might suspect an attempted cover-up as the cause, experts see something much more worrying: weaknesses at the very heart of the Chinese system.

Its rigidly hierarchical bureaucracy discourages local officials from raising bad news with central bosses whose help they might need. And it silos those officials off from one another, making it harder to see, much less manage, the full scope of spiraling crises.

“That’s why you never really hear about problems emerging on a local scale in China,” said John Yasuda, who studies China’s approach to health crises at Indiana University. “By the time that we hear about it, and that the problem reaches the central government, it’s because it’s become a huge problem.”

While much remains unknown about the outbreak, a common theme is emerging.

Any political system is better at solving some problems than others. But the coronavirus, like other health crises before it, is bringing out some of the deepest flaws and contradictions in a Chinese system that, for all its historic feats, remains a work in progress.

Those flaws, which have long frustrated Chinese leaders, appear to have played a role in everything from the pace at which officials responded to the coronavirus outbreak, to China’s years-long inability to address the health risks that experts have long warned could lead to an outbreak just like this one.

While the country is now mobilizing a nationwide response — one of the system’s strengths — the incident is already a lesson in the political weak points that can bring grave consequences for China and, as infections spread, the world.



A System at Odds With Itself


“When you look at the coronavirus, it looks a lot like what happened with SARS. It involves a very similar template,” Mr. Yasuda said.

The SARS epidemic, which killed hundreds of people in 2002 and 2003, initially spread unchecked when local Chinese officials minimized early reports.

Their fear was not public unrest, it later emerged, but getting in trouble with the party bosses who controlled their careers.

Guan Yi, a professor of infectious diseases in Hong Kong who helped identify SARS, has accused Chinese authorities of once more delaying action, including by obstructing his own efforts to investigate the outbreak.

“This is a continuous theme in central-local relations in China. You do not want to be the one to bring bad news,” said Vivienne Shue, a prominent China scholar at Oxford University.

That gulf between central leaders in Beijing and local officials who run the country day-to-day, Ms. Shue said, is “the core conundrum in how that system works.”

It leads officials on both sides of the center-local divide “to do many counterproductive, irrational things,” she said, in their efforts to manage and manipulate one another.

That has included holding back reports of potential crises, in the hopes of solving things without the bosses finding out.

At the same time, China’s quasi-imperial system leaves the top party bosses in Beijing with little direct power over what happens in the provinces — policy proclamations are sometimes ignored or defied — other than promoting or punishing subordinates.

The two ends of the system are engaged in a constant push-pull dynamic, putting them occasionally at odds — particularly in moments of crisis, when each is looking to blame the other.

This has been an issue throughout China’s modern history, Ms. Shue said, with power fluctuating between the center and the periphery. Xi Jinping, China’s current leader, has sought to centralize power, setting up Beijing-based working groups to exert more control outside the capital.

But the system’s underlying contradiction remains. Mr. Xi’s tightening grip may make local leaders all the more wary of releasing information that could invite his wrath.

As China modernizes, integrating its once-disparate provinces and cities, local mistakes can become national crises before Beijing is even aware that something has happened, as may have happened with the coronavirus outbreak.

“As logistics and the distribution systems have expanded, you really see how the local and national have been linked together,” Mr. Yasuda said, referring to the hastening rate at which health, environmental and economic crises can now spread.

That is not all downside. The central government has enormous capacity to mobilize in a crisis, as it is doing now, locking down several major cities to slow the disease’s spread.

“Once a clear problem has emerged, it’s very good at diverting resources,” Mr. Yasuda said of China’s political system. “But it’s not good at dealing with emerging problems. So it’s built to be reactive instead of proactive.”



When China’s Strengths Become a Source of Peril


In some ways, China’s system has been a source of strength.

Party bosses set priorities, then reward the institutions and officials who best carry them out.

And since the days of Mao Zedong, China has operated under a system known as fragmented authoritarianism, in which even the most local leaders have near-absolute authority over their remit.

That has led to a culture of what Elizabeth J. Perry, a Harvard University scholar, has called “guerrilla governance,” in which results take precedence over procedure or accountability, and in which it is all leaders for themselves.

This approach is seen as crucial in having enabled China to lift hundreds of millions of citizens out of poverty and turn itself from global backwater into world power.

But it can be disastrous when it comes to managing health and environmental issues.

Disease and pollution don’t respect provincial or municipal borders. And because of the way they spread, it often takes a unified, nationwide policy to prevent or stop them — something for which guerrilla governance is ill-suited.

“It’s very difficult to come together to create a clear actionable plan,” Mr. Yasuda said, adding that, for any health or environmental regulation to work, “you want it to be standardized, you want it to be transparent, you want it to be accountable.”

But China’s system de-emphasizes those concerns, sometimes to disastrous effect.

In the mid-2000s, Beijing demanded a drastic increase in milk production. When factory farms were unable to meet their targets, officials conscripted vast numbers of rural farmers. Some of the farmers, struggling to meet their quotas, watered down their milk, then added an industrial chemical known as melamine to fool quality sensors. The tainted milk poisoned thousands of infants.

Experts fear a similar regulatory failure may have enabled the coronavirus outbreak: the longstanding inability to clean up so-called wet markets, which are stuffed with livestock living and dead, domesticated and wild. Though the outbreak’s cause is still being studied, Wuhan’s wet market is considered a prime suspect.

The markets have long been considered a major threat to public health, particularly as a vector for transmitting diseases from animals to humans. And they are a lesson in the perils of patchwork, decentralized regulations like China’s: While some markets are more carefully policed than others, all it takes is one to cause an outbreak.

In another echo of the tainted milk scandal, top-down political priorities provide an incentive to look the other way. Taking down the markets, which are popular, would risk a public outcry. Local officials had every reason to fear that their bosses, who have not made the markets a priority, would punish them for causing trouble.



Aligning With Public Good, Or Not


A foundational mission of any political system is to align its leaders’ incentives with the needs and desires of the wider public.

Democracies seek to do this through “the competition of interests,” Ms. Shue said, on the belief that inviting everyone to participate will naturally pull the system toward the common good. This system, like any, has flaws, for example by handing more power to those with more money.

Within China, Ms. Shue added, the common good “is seen as something that should be designed from above, like a watch being engineered to run perfectly.”

But sometimes the watch can be designed in ways that harm the public good.

In 2001, for instance, Beijing ordered provincial officials to reduce water pollution from factories. Many provinces simply moved the factories to their borders, ensuring pollutants would flow into the next district. Nationwide, water pollution worsened.

So far, the coronavirus outbreak seems to highlight both the strengths and perils of China’s model. Beijing, apparently having learned from the SARS epidemic, has pushed for faster and more drastic action.

But the same systemic problems, from gun-shy local officials to weak health regulations, appear to be recurring as well — a reminder that the system remains, Ms. Shue said, “a work in progress.”

Shumagorath posted:

你没有看到石墨。它不在那里

quote:

Jorge Guajardo, Mexico’s ambassador to China from 2007 to 2013, has recalled China’s response in the H1N1 flu outbreak, which originated in a herd of pigs in Mexico in 2009 before spreading to all four corners of the globe.

Now no longer a diplomat, Guajardo says Chinese officials were arbitrarily detaining just about anyone with a Mexican passport, regardless of where they had or hadn’t been in recent days. Unless he wore a hazmat suit, he would not be allowed to see any of them.

The officials only “pretend[ed] to do something” so as to be “seen in control”, having no regard for actual health protocols, he charged.

“They did what they do best, stonewalled,” he said. “They would literally hang up when they knew it was us calling.”

The incident caused a diplomatic spat between Mexico and China, with then Mexican president Felipe Calderon expressing dismay that “some countries or places are taking discriminatory measures because of ignorance and misinformation.”

quote:

I was summoned to MOFCOM for a meeting with a vice minister, no idea what it was about. He opened by asking what México needed to help contain the outbreak. I had no idea. I was not prepared for that question. He volunteered that they’d be sending the two planes.

This caught us so by surprise that, in gratitude, México’s president went to the airport, at midnight, to welcome the planes with the aid. We thought China was going to be an ally in this fight. We were wrong.

Immediately thereafter we started getting reports that “authorities” were knocking in the hotel rooms of Mexicans in China at night, asking them to come with them for a quick hospital check. Entire families, with children, were taken from their hotels to hospitals, and detained.

The criteria for rounding up Mexicans was the passport, not where they had been in the past days. They were detaining Mexicans who hadn’t been in Mexico for months, just because of their passport. We called the foreign ministry to find out what was going on, no one would answer.

We went to hospitals to try to assist Mexicans detained (Chinese called it a quarantine, it was detention), I was not allowed in unless I wore a hazmat suit, scaring the children. Inside the hospital were municipal authorities, with no protection whatsoever.

The big lesson is that this was all about pretending to do something about the potential pandemic, to be seen in control. It was never about actual health protocols. None of it made sense, but it made them look tough, and in control.

I went to see Mexicans detained at a hospital, after the Chinese realized that the detention of of our citizens had become a huge issue in Mexico, they did what they do best, stonewalled. They didn’t allow me in to see them (none of them were sick).

I remember the calls from my foreign ministry wanting to know about the Mexicans detained in China and they just wouldn’t believe me when I told them no one at the Chinese foreign ministry was picking up our calls. They would literally hang up when they knew it was us calling.

One of my experiences during H1N1 is that, even when WHO know that what China is doing is wrong or ill-advised, they’re reluctant to call them on it. They work on cooperation, not signaling or criticizing (or they fear China).

MetaJew posted:

May page 8 bring prosperity and good luck to the thread.

lilbeefer posted:

What is the best actual evidence that can be given to a tankie to show that whilst China isn't a bad country necessarily it's not all unicorn farts and mapo tofu

Stink Billyums posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/MFA_China/status/1223594051632369666

WarpedNaba posted:

Whoa jeez

Saw that gif on the Chinese pigs getting bulldozed into a ditch and getting napalm'd. While alive.

quote:

Wuhan Mayor Zhou Xianwang has so far shouldered much of the blame for the deadly coronavirus outbreak, blame that he recently shifted over to Beijing in a highly unusual move for a Chinese official.

Following a disastrous press conference on Sunday, Zhou was interviewed on Monday by CCTV. In the interview, he admitted to having failed to disclose information to the public in a timely manner during the preliminary stage of the virus outbreak.

However, Zhou charged that as a local official, he did not have the authority to reveal such information without first getting authorization from higher up, in what certainly appears to be a shot aimed straight at Beijing.

“As a local government official, after I have the information, I have to get approval before I can make it public,” Zhou said.

He noted that after China’s State Council held a meeting to recognize the coronavirus as a Class B infectious disease, his administration was quick to make decisive moves, including putting Wuhan in virtual lockdown.

After describing how his role in the crisis had been misunderstood, Zhou went on to portray himself as a sort of martyr, effectively offering up his own head to assuage public anger.

“Maybe we’ll go down in history with a bad reputation for locking down the city to keep the virus inside,” Zhou said. “But as long as it helps to contain the spread of the virus, Wuhan Party Secretary Ma Guoqiang and I are willing to take whatever responsibility, including resignation.”

At the end, Zhou deigned to give himself an 80 out of 100 for how he was handling the interview.

Many netizens were not happy with that grade, continuing to heap scorn on Zhou. It remains to be seen if Beijing will respond by handing him a failing grade or if he’ll continue to be kept around to throw underneath the bus.

quote:

Wuhan’s mayor blamed higher-ups. A senior disease control official blamed layers of bureaucracy. A top government expert blamed the public: The people, he said, simply didn’t understand what he told them.

As China grapples with a mysterious coronavirus outbreak that has killed at least 490 people and sickened thousands, the country’s 1.4 billion people are asking what went wrong. Senior officials are engaging in an unusually blunt display of finger pointing.

So many officials have denied responsibility that some online users joke that they are watching a passing-the-buck competition. (It’s “tossing the wok” in Chinese.)

The Chinese people are getting a rare glimpse of how China’s giant, opaque bureaucratic system works — or, rather, how it fails to work. Too many of its officials have become political apparatchiks, fearful of making decisions that anger their superiors and too removed and haughty when dealing with the public to admit mistakes and learn from them.

“The most important issue this outbreak exposed is the local government’s lack of action and fear of action,” said Xu Kaizhen, a best-selling author who is famous for his novels that explore the intricate workings of China’s bureaucratic politics.

“Under the high-pressure environment of an anticorruption campaign, most people, including senior government officials, only care about self-preservation,” Mr. Xu said. “They don’t want to be the first to speak up. They wait for their superiors to make decisions and are only accountable to their superiors instead of the people.”

The Chinese government appears to be aware of the problem. The Communist Party’s top leadership acknowledged in a meeting on Monday that the epidemic was “a major test of China’s system and capacity for governance.”

Growing numbers of people are questioning the government’s decisions as China enters a period of virtual shutdown. As the virus spread, officials in Wuhan and around the country withheld critical information, played down the threat and rebuked doctors who tried to raise the alarm. A reconstruction of the diseases’s spread by The New York Times showed that by not issuing earlier warnings, the Chinese government potentially lost the window to keep the disease from becoming an epidemic.

The outbreak has undermined the myth that the Chinese political elites win assignments and promotion purely on merit. China has sold this system as its own unique innovation. Developing countries have sent thousands of their government officials to China to learn its model of governance, a political system that offers security and growth in return for submission to authoritarian rule.

People in China are now questioning that premise. They are focusing much of their anger on Xi Jinping, China’s top leader and the person many blame for creating a culture of fear and subservience within the Chinese government.

Few people dare to question Mr. Xi openly, for fear of provoking censors or the police. But after Mr. Xi disappeared from public in recent days, some social media users began asking euphemistically, “Where is that person?” They are also posting online and sharing pictures of former leaders at the site of past crises.

Critics say quietly that, under Mr. Xi, the party began promoting loyal political cadres over technocrats — the experts and skilled administrators who were the backbone of China’s bureaucracy in 1990s and 2000s, when the country grew the fastest.

Those officials could often be corrupt, but even the party’s fiercest critics sometimes acknowledged that they got things done. Liu Zhijun, the former railway minister, is serving a lifetime sentence for taking bribes and abusing power. He also oversaw the creation of China’s high-speed rail system, which vastly improved life in the country[note: LOL].

The wok tossing in China stems in part from the tension between the technocrats, who hold a large number of positions with China’s provincial and national disease control centers, and the political cadres — the mayors, governors and the provincial party secretaries. The outbreak and lack of disclosure suggest that the political cadres are winning. In fact, even the technocrats are becoming cadres because none of them had the courage to tell the public what they knew about the virus.

Chinese officials are spending as much as one-third of their time on political studying sessions, a lot of which are about Mr. Xi’s speeches. Political loyalty weighs much more in performance evaluations than before. Now the rule of thumb in Chinese officialdom seems to be demonstrating loyalty as explicitly as possible, keeping everything else vague and evading responsibility at all costs when things go wrong.

The Chinese people may be paying the price. The failures span the system.

Zhou Xianwang, Wuhan’s mayor, said he didn’t disclose the scale and danger of the epidemic earlier because he needed the authorization from higher up. But he could have done something without sharing much information, including telling the residents to wear masks, wash hands frequently and stop big gatherings such as the potluck banquet attended by over 40,000 families just a few days before his city of 11 million was locked down.

When information began to dribble out, it was vague and misleading. In a series of online notices issued between Dec. 31 and Jan. 17, local officials disclosed they were treating pneumonia patients but didn't say when or how many.

The National Health Commission, the ministry with the authority to declare an epidemic emergency, didn’t issue its own notice about the outbreak until Jan. 19. But the notice essentially kicked blame back to the local authorities. The first sentence cited a rule that required the commission to work with local officials on epidemic prevention.

A top government health adviser, Wang Guangfa, who had reassured the public that the disease was controllable only to be sickened himself, said in an interview after he recovered that he had limited information at the time. He also defended his phrasing as a “misunderstanding” by the general public, saying most outbreaks of infectious diseases are controlled in the end.

Local officials don’t seem to have local people at the top of their list of priorities. In an interview with state television, Ma Guoqiang, the Communist Party secretary of Wuhan, acknowledged that Wuhan residents “are a little anxious and a little nervous” and said he would mobilize all party cells to comfort them.

“But the most important comfort,” he added, “came from Party Secretary Xi Jinping.”

Mr. Xu, the novelist, said Mr. Ma’s remarks demonstrated how officials had more concern for pleasing their bosses than taking care of the people they allegedly served.

“If they can rearrange the order in their hearts," Mr. Xu said, “we’ll see a very different governance style.”

As they try to contain the spread, local governments are showing that they are better at looking busy than they are at finding a solution. Many are now finding ways to track down and even expel residents from Hubei Province to keep the coronavirus from spreading. Tracking potential spreaders is sound policy, but punishing or persecuting them risks driving them underground, making it even harder to fight the outbreak.

Even outside the hardest hit areas, local officials are showing they don’t make rules with the well-being of the people in mind. A video that went viral across China showed a couple stuck on a bridge connecting Guizhou Province to the city of Chongqing. The two governments had halted travel between them, and the couple — she from Guizhou, he from Chongqing — had no place to go.

On social media, low-level cadres are complaining that they are receiving so many instructions from the higher-ups that they spend most of their time filling out spreadsheets instead of getting real work done. In a social media post headlined “The Formalism Under the Mask,” the author wrote, “Most people in the system don’t do things to solve problems. They do things to solve responsibilities.”

After the epidemic, the Chinese leadership will have to punish a few officials, even severely, to save face and win back some credibility. But for people who are suffering from the epidemic and the failure of governance, the Communist Party may have a hard time winning them back.

“I know before long this country will go back to being a peaceful, prosperous society. We will hear many people screaming how proud they are of its prosperity and power,” a Wuhan resident wrote on the social media site Weibo. “But after what I have witnessed, I refuse to watch the applause and commendation.”

quote:

Following the lockdown of Wenzhou on China’s east coast, Zhejiang province has now placed severe restrictions on the movement of people in Hangzhou, Taizhou and parts of Ningbo.

The province hit hardest by the novel coronavirus outside of Hubei, Zhejiang reported 829 confirmed cases as of Tuesday evening, including 340 in Wenzhou, 132 in Hangzhou, 115 in Taizhou and 102 in Ningbo.

Hangzhou, the provincial capital, is home to ten million people and e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, and Taizhou is home to another six million people.

Zhejiang is an economic powerhouse with a thriving private sector that boasts a GDP larger than that of Saudi Arabia.

Radical measures
According to ten-point directives issued by municipal authorities, only one person from each household is allowed to step outside every two days to purchase necessities.

Residents are now required to present their identity cards and to have their temperature taken when entering neighborhoods, villages, or companies.

Anyone who has been in Hubei in the last two weeks is required to report to the village or residents’ committee within the first hour of arrival in the city.

All public places offering non-essential services are to remain shut and markets, supermarkets and pharmacies disinfected regularly.

Courier and food delivery personnel are no longer allowed to deliver straight to the door.

As in Wenzhou, all gatherings, company dinners and the like have now been banned.

Lawson posted:

Hello, Chinese speakers. Crossposting myself from the PYF products thread out of sheer desperation:

Lawson posted:

Can anybody read this? This is green tea with a pleasant smoke aroma. It was given to me by somebody who traveled to China, but doesn't speak the language. I'd like to find it, or something similar so I can buy some more.

CIGNX posted:

Best I can tell from my crappy Chinese and my dad, it's Tuocha or Tuo tea. Googling says it's puerh tea that's been formed into a nest shape, and according to my dad's internet searchings, the name comes from the fact that Yunnan traders would sell that particular shape of tea along the Tuo river in Sichuan province. The package states that tea comes from Yunnan, so it seems to check out.

But you said it was a green tea? If it's puerh, the tea should be amber/orange color, like black tea. Also, I wouldn't say puerh has a smokey flavor, but it's definitely funkier than the usual Oolong or black teas.

quote:

The indictment portrays Huawei as orchestrating a steady, if not sophisticated, campaign to steal trade secrets. For instance, the indictment alleged that in 2004, a Huawei employee sneaked back to a Chicago trade show to steal a competitor’s technology. The employee “was discovered in the middle of the night after the show had closed for the day in the booth of a technology company” and was found “removing the cover from a networking device and taking photographs of the circuitry inside.” The individual wore a badge listing his employer as “Weihua” — an anagram of Huawei — according to the indictment.

d0s posted:

I always thought he was just putting food coloring in baiju to make the video look more interesting

twoday posted:

https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/1228676978737172480?s=19

Ogantai posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/IsChinar/status/1228665637985189888

BrigadierSensible posted:

Again, forgive me for forgetting the name of the awesomely sweet old lady.

etalian posted:

twoday posted:

https://twitter.com/Daniel12705565/status/1228845089805475840?s=20

Hadlock posted:

If having a credit crunch impacted the global economy in 2008, I can only imagine what restricting the movement of actual cash will do.

PHIZ KALIFA posted:

Hey, I was thinking about all the countries which historically used the Chinese writing system and eventually developed their own, which more closely aligned with their spoken grammar. Given the trends mobile computing is having on Chinese literacy, what would it take to develop something like Hangul but for Chinese? How closely integrated into Chinese language and thought is their alphabet?

Given all the conlangers online I imagine someone must have taken a crack at something like this.

Shaocaholica posted:

Why do white people put half a bottle of soy sauce on their already seasoned Chinese food? It’s not like white people food/palate is all that salty. If anything it’s less salty than baseline Chinese food.

Cheesemaster200 posted:

Why do people still want to invest money in China?

Grand Fromage posted:

It's really sad. One of the very few positive developments in China under the Party was a genuine and significant improvement in women's rights. After living in Korea for years it struck me right away how much more women in China are allowed to participate in society. The way things have been regressing over the past couple of decades sucks.

I guess that's general ccp.txt at this point though. It's not like it was ever great but there was a period where genuine reform and opening happened. Well, two actually, the real big one in the 80s and then the somewhat loose period from the late 90s to 2008. Long dead now.

Pharohman777 posted:

The wall street journal had an article today about the ongoing backlash against china by EU member states, and it ends up listing all the recent hissy-fits that the Chinese government has had there.

Nektu posted:

Could someone please provide a link for this?

d0s posted:

Why is Korea such a haven for weird cult poo poo? Moonies, the president having a personal shaman, Shincheonji, all of North Korea. A lot of it has a heavy emphasis on getting huge groups of people together do do things in sync for whatever reason like moonie weddings, mass games, the shincheonji services, and extreme conformity (apparently like 95% of South Korean cars are black, white, or silver; or the way plastic surgery to make you look like everyone else is the norm). Is there any sociological type thing to read about this, it's kind of interesting to me.

Blistex posted:

They have a "friendly" history with China, but I'm betting they very recently accepted a large donation from the CCP.

quote:

The Serbian government hopes that infrastructure deals will give a boost to country’s economy. It is expected by the IMF and central bank to grow by 3.5% this year, down from 4.4% a year earlier, and around 4% annually between 2020 and 2022.

“The state must start new investments if it wants continuous economic growth or we could have major problems,” said Mihajlovic who also serves as the Deputy Prime Minister in Ana Brnabic’s Cabinet.

To achieve that, Belgrade plans to invest up to 8 billion euros in the medium term in infrastructure, mainly through deals funded by China, but also Russia, Turkey and Azerbaijan, as part of a wider 10 billion euro development plan made public by President Aleksandar Vucic last month.

...

Over the past decade, Chinese companies bought Serbia’s sole copper mine, a steel plant and invested in power production. In 2017 Serbia and Hungary also started construction of a Chinese-funded rail link between Belgrade and Budapest.

Mihajlovic sought to dispel fears Serbia could overburden itself with debt levels similar to that of Montenegro which borrowed heavily from China to build its own highway.

“We did not start anything without being sure we could offer guarantees for it,” she said.

quote:

The flurry of government action came after an unusual outpouring of public sentiment against the trade of live animals. A campaign on Weibo, the social media platform, drew 45 million views with the hashtag #rejectgamemeat.

“Eating game does not cure impotence or have healing powers,” Jin Sichen, a television presenter in Nanjing, a city in southeastern China, wrote on his Weibo page on Wednesday. “Game not only doesn’t cure disease, it can also make you, your family, friends and even more people sick.”

“One must be mentally sick to eat game in order to show off and flaunt,” Mr. Jin added.

A group of 19 Chinese scholars also called on the government to do more to regulate the trade and the public to stop eating wild animals.

...

At the peak of the SARS outbreak in 2003, the authorities banned the sale of civets and culled the existing stocks, but within months they ended the ban and trade had resumed as before.

“It is driven by interests,” Qin Xiaona, president of the Capital Animal Welfare Association, an advocacy organization in Beijing, said of the current outbreak. “Many people profit from the wildlife trade today.”

bobjr posted:

https://twitter.com/Spilling_The_T/status/1240387988682571776?s=20

oohhboy posted:

Underlings if they want to advance, keep their jobs, not get jumped by a rival or find the police at their door will use the easiest ways to get good numbers. The easiest way to do it is to fake the numbers by miscounting, misclassification, paying people off or straight up lie. Healing people means you have to report the truth which puts your head on the chopping block.

quote:

When the central government became involved, local officials outwardly welcomed the expert investigators sent by Beijing. Officials described the infections as nothing too serious.

“They said that the illness was quite light, not much different from seasonal influenza, and there’d been no illnesses among hundreds of people with close contact,” Zeng Guang, a Chinese epidemiologist who visited Wuhan on Jan. 9, said of his talks there, according to the China Youth Daily. “They sounded very relaxed.”

Behind the scenes, officials in Wuhan mounted an effort to limit the number of infections counted as part of the outbreak, creating barriers against doctors filing cases.

A leaked report from Wuhan Central Hospital describes how in the first half of January local officials told doctors that cases had to be confirmed by bureaucratic overseers, above all, city and province health authorities.

An official from a district disease control center in Wuhan told the hospital doctor handling infection reports on Jan. 3 that “this was a special contagious disease and we should report only after superiors had notified us,” the leaked report said.

Starting on Jan. 3, Wuhan’s Health Commission set narrow criteria for confirming that a case was officially part of the outbreak, according to a copy of the diagnostic guide that was leaked to the Chinese media, possibly by a medical professional. The rules said patients could be counted if they had been to the market or had close contact with another patient who had. That excluded a growing number of likely cases with no clear link to the market.

For most of the first half of January, local officials maintained that there had been no new confirmed infections, even as doctors in Wuhan and visiting experts suspected that a dangerous contagion was spreading from person to person.

Sten Freak posted:

They found the virus in pangolins. Are they eaten in China, used for TCM or both?