> the middle class grows and starts asking questions and wanting a better quality of life and, you know, perhaps want no more autocratic regimes and less corruption
I think the Coronavirus disaster has shown that China can be more efficient than all democratic countries where it counts. A serious blow to the prestige of democracy vs autocracy.
> China can be more efficient than all democratic countries
Not all democratic countries. I live in Thailand, which is at least technically a democracy, and the virus has been completely extinguished here. The crackdown was harsh - a month of curfew! - but it worked, and the public was largely on board. Life is back to normal here, with the addition of masks, for which there is 100% compliance - I just don't understand how the US acts against its own interests in that regard. The virus has been crushed. And it's the same in Singapore, after a couple of hiccups. Hell, Thailand is re-opening to tourism!
China isn't 100% autocracy, anyway. There's a very very large gap between China and, say, North Korea, or even Soviet Russia. You can definitely make the case though that the "pure democracy free for all" model like the USA, with its totally unrestricted (and possibly harmful in the age of social media) free speech, has certainly lost if not prestige, then at least the status of the model of governance other countries should aspire to. I would say the USA's handling of COVID19 has been a big wake-up call to pretty much every other democracy of what can happen when "freedom" goes too far.
Calling Thailand and Singapore democracies, even if they like to call themselves that, is like calling Russia a democracy, or calling Saudi Arabia a positive agent for women's rights.
Yeah, LHL or Prayuth-chan Ocha actively subverting elections, hindering the opposition, preventing gatherings, sitting in bed with the military, all signs of a very healthy democracy in either country right?
Singapore can be as bad as Russia - it's just that if they were as bad, nobody would bother to stay along in that tiny island. Thailand is like Russia to Thai folks - recent protests are just evidence of that.
America isn't perfect, but at least you get to have an opposition. Last time the opposition found a reasonable and charismatic leader, we know what the king did in Thailand (it was his sister in the opposition).
Hey, I'm not disagreeing. I'm just saying that at least journalists don't have mysterious "accidents" and opposition don't get frigging nerve agents in their drinks. It's not Russia.
Check out the 60 Minutes video "Whistleblowers silenced by China could have stopped global coronavirus spread" [0], and then see if you still feel that way.
This isn't accurate. It wasn't "China" who silenced people, it was a local official who eventually got removed and punished. The now deceased doctor, who wanted to report it, got officially apologized.
I clearly remember back when this whole thing started and how pretty much all of the western countries bashed on china endlessly for no actually sane reason. It's what made me start digging into it. This whole mess, we live in now, wouldn't be a thing if china-bashing wasn't the norm in western countries and if they, the respective governments, instead had acted in the interest of their respective people. Which they didn't.
The world got plenty of notice and the countries listening acted successfully.
Even the US enacted travel bans which - if they had followed up and kept working towards suppression of the virus - would have been a great start. Instead the US sacrificed it's gains to political games and now is seeing what happens.
The whistleblowers in China shouldn't have been suppressed. But there was plenty of notice early enough to act.
China confirmed human-to-human transmission on Jan 20[1].
China shutdown Wuhan on 23 January[2] (notice this was after human-to-human transmission was confirmed). Wuhan airport was closed[2], and Chinese did stop all travel out of Wuhan[3]. There are many reports of people escaping the lockdown that night, but it doesn't seem this was some Chinese policy - more that events were moving fast.
It's your country's responsibility who enters its borders. The Trump administration moved fairly quickly and closed borders to Wuhan by Feb 2, which was earlier than South Korea (but later than many countries).
I don't think many would fault that part of the US response, but it isn't exactly clear what people think China was hiding in this period - remember this was the time when people were seeing pictures of the lockdown in Wuhan. Countries can make their own judgement about the severity.
> The extent to which the Chinese system causes the severity to be downplayed matters a lot.
They were welding doors shut to keep people inside. It's difficult to argue they downplayed it.
There is (fair) criticism of the regional authorities in Wuhan downplaying it in early January. But the central government didn't seem do anything to try to hide things.
BTW, if you didn't already know these dates and thought the Chinese gov was hiding things, you might want to re-examine the source of your information.
I don’t think it’s possible to claim that you have the ‘correct’ source of information.
I’m not saying that your sources are worth nothing, but there is reason to doubt that they tell the whole story.
Claiming the central government didn’t seem to do anything to try to hide things, and blaming it on the regular government seems rather blithe.
It is well reported m that a doctor who identified the virus early on was forced to lie and claim he was mistaken.
In an environment where forcing lies is a normal part of government operation, we just can’t know how many other doctors were prevented from speaking out.
We also know that the CCP was spreading the story that the virus was planted by the US military.
Are you really so certain that your timeline is accurate?
> I don’t think it’s possible to claim that you have the ‘correct’ source of information.
What does this mean? I read the WHO reports at the time, and they are still the same. They are "incorrect" in the sense they didn't know things at the start, but they are a correct historical record.
> It is well reported that a doctor who identified the virus early on was forced to lie and claim he was mistaken.
Indeed. And look what happened to the officials who forced him to do that.
> Are you really so certain that your timeline is accurate?
Yes, absolutely - which is why I'm so surprised at the "blame China" narrative.
I'd be quite interested to understand why you think it could be wrong? It was less than a year ago, and the information is all publicly accessible.
I was following Covid from early and ordered masks in late January. The WHO started publishing daily updates at[2] from Jan 21 and prior to that on[3]. People knew and were making preparations for a SARS type epidemic - I'd suggest you read some to see how much people knew and how seriously they were taking it.
Their update on Jan 21 reports:
Additional investigations are needed to determine how the patients were infected, the extent of human-to-human transmission, the clinical spectrum of disease, and the geographic range of infection. [4] (note the human-to-human transmission bit)
I think the Coronavirus disaster has shown that China can be more efficient than all democratic countries where it counts. A serious blow to the prestige of democracy vs autocracy.