Let's talk about China

[skyscraper101]

Did he have much of a public profile? I had a look on twitter and there's some suspicions around his death

If you look at any of the shots of him recently during state occasions alongside Xi he practically had to be propped up by aides. I didn't think he'd have long TBH.

 

[Thesaint]

JimW I am presuming you're in china now or at least was recently? What do people know about Beijing's policy? Do they know that even countries like Australia ended up with loads of cases despite keeping covid out of the country initially and that might be China's inevitably fate? Are people aware much of the west has opened up now?

 

[JimW]

JimW I am presuming you're in china now or at least was recently? What do people know about Beijing's policy? Do they know that even countries like Australia ended up with loads of cases despite keeping covid out of the country initially and that might be China's inevitably fate? Are people aware much of the west has opened up now?

I'd say only a small sub-set really give much thought to how it's been done in other countries (as you don't) other than hearing (by osmosis at least) the old official boasting about how much better China was doing. Think that's why the sight of World Cup crowds was said to have had such an impact - widely watched and clear evidence it's different over there. But the small sub-set is the social media types and it's been widely debated there I believe.

 

[frogwoman]

I'd say only a small sub-set really give much thought to how it's been done in other countries (as you don't) other than hearing (by osmosis at least) the old official boasting about how much better China was doing. Think that's why the sight of World Cup crowds was said to have had such an impact - widely watched and clear evidence it's different over there. But the small sub-set is the social media types and it's been widely debated there I believe.

How easy is it to access foreign social media etc? I know Twitter was blocked but I've seen a few people on there with VPNs etc

 

[elbows]

Why is China persisting with its strict zero-COVID policy? Here you are elbows

I agree lifting all restrictions suddenly would probably be ill advised and that the Chinese government seem to have handled covid better than the UK etc in the early stages but I don't really think it ie even about covid now for Xi Jinping etc.. You need a negative test to even get near a hospital according to a lot of the things I've read. And obviously people are going to try and game the system, there are reportedly papers that some people have been able to sign to pass them off as having negative tests etc

Thanks I will watch it later.

Its always about both in my book - when politicians, 'leaders', regimes and political parties get hold of an issue it becomes about more than just the actual issue, it becomes about prestige etc etc. Buts its still very much about covid too. Its a big mess of all of these things intertwined.

Here is a reasonable recent article from the health perspective:

With no exit strategy from 'zero Covid' policy, China could face tsunami in cases, experts fear

As the world watches the rare spectacle of protesters challenging China’s authoritarian leadership over its increasingly perplexing zero Covid policy, people who study the disease see threats ahead for China — and beyond.

www.statnews.com

eg:

The zero Covid policy, which has kept cases and deaths in China to negligible numbers throughout the pandemic, seems doomed to fail in the face of the highly transmissible Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, they believe. But the Chinese leadership does not appear to be mapping a path to a safe exit ramp, leaving experts worried the country could see a tsunami of cases that would swamp its health care system if the national containment effort collapses.

“I think they’re very poorly prepared and based on what we have seen in Hong Kong — which is probably the best proxy for what might happen in China — this could be fairly devastating,” Francois Balloux, director of the University College London’s Genetics Institute, told STAT in an interview.

and

“If it’s not stopped, we’ll see a lot of infections in those cities that have outbreaks. It will be like Hong Kong’s experience earlier this year, where we had half the population infected within the space of about a month or two,” he said.

“I wanted to ask: How much would you pay for zero Covid? Because the price tag is going up and up and up,” Cowling said. “A year ago it made a lot of sense. I think it was a very cost-effective strategy in China, just as it was in Singapore. But … it gets more and more difficult to sustain, and there’s got to be a point where you start thinking the cost is no longer justified, or you run out of money to pay for it.”

And in regards the immunity picture there:

Amplifying the concern of people like Koopmans is the state of immunity in the Chinese population. The country rapidly developed a number of vaccines, though it has leaned predominantly on inactivated vaccines, which use all or parts of killed viruses to trigger an immune response. These vaccines work, but are not thought to be as potent as the messenger RNA vaccines most Western countries have relied on.

Cowling said three doses of the inactivated vaccines — made by Sinovac and Sinopharm — protect pretty well against severe infection and death. But while a high percentage of people have had a primary series, which consists of two shots, only about half the country is estimated to have had a third. Booster shot uptake in older adults is low and many who have received a third shot did so nine months or a year ago, which suggests their protection may be waning, Balloux said.

And paradoxically, the very fact that Chinese authorities protected their people from Covid for so long now renders them more vulnerable to the disease.

Plenty of other interesting bits in that article but I quoted too much already.

 

[JimW]

How easy is it to access foreign social media etc? I know Twitter was blocked but I've seen a few people on there with VPNs etc

Can be done and you see Chinese comments rating all the VPN browser extensions etc but again, still a very small sub-set of the social media user base which is still not everyone.

 

[elbows]

I think all this was kicked off from reports in China's media that they were going to loosen some restrictions, but the lockdowns ended up getting worse due to rising infections. And the current Chinese strategy clearly isn't working because the numbers of cases and deaths are rising.

Its also fucked up in multiple directions, in that dodgy attempts to manage specific outbreaks, and attempts to announce relaxation of previous measures, caused new forms of rumour and fear to spread in some places.

For example coverage of one of the Foxxcon incidents included this sort of thing:

Take a 21-year-old Foxconn worker who had been hearing the rumours for a while. The more the stories and speculation continued, the more extreme they were becoming.

It didn't help that her immediate bosses at Foxconn were saying that there were no Covid infections in the factory while the company was telling the media that there were no "symptomatic" infections. And yet there were plenty of known examples of staff who had tested positive.

Hundreds of thousands of staff had been ordered not to leave this huge industrial complex. After workers were confined to only the worker dormitories and other parts of the factory, the rumour mill stepped up another gear.

This young factory worker heard that the army was going to come in and take control so as to enforce a type of giant "living with Covid" experiment which involved allowing everyone in that part of Zhengzhou city to get sick.

According to these rumours, the plan was to see how many of them would die. Then, if the carnage wasn't too bad, this would provide a guide as to whether the rest of China could open up or not.

Sentiments were spreading on their chat groups like: "Foxconn is going to take my life."

That was from early in November China Covid: Panic and fear drove iPhone factory breakout

And a November 11th article about some easing of certain curbs:

China Covid: Beijing eases some curbs despite rising cases

Mandatory quarantine is slightly reduced as public resentment bubbles away over the strict rules.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[frogwoman]

Can be done and you see Chinese comments rating all the VPN browser extensions etc but again, still a very small sub-set of the social media user base which is still not everyone.

What's your impression as to how people feel about Xi - although im guessing thats very difficult to assess? When I was in Russia Putin was still very popular although a lot of people seemed to feel he was the best of a bad bunch.

 

[frogwoman]

Its also fucked up in multiple directions, in that dodgy attempts to manage specific outbreaks, and attempts to announce relaxation of previous measures, caused new forms of rumour and fear to spread in some places.

For example coverage of one of the Foxxcon incidents included this sort of thing:





That was from early in November China Covid: Panic and fear drove iPhone factory breakout

And a November 11th article about some easing of certain curbs:

China Covid: Beijing eases some curbs despite rising cases

Mandatory quarantine is slightly reduced as public resentment bubbles away over the strict rules.

www.bbc.co.uk

Yeah there have been odd articles from time to time in Chinese state run websites about people who had Covid and were fine.

 

[frogwoman]

Can be done and you see Chinese comments rating all the VPN browser extensions etc but again, still a very small sub-set of the social media user base which is still not everyone.

I thought WeChat and Weibo were pretty ubiquitous there, certainly among younger people - although they might not be looking up anything political tbf

 

[elbows]

Yeah there have been odd articles from time to time in Chinese state run websites about people who had Covid and were fine.

Again its a big mess of contradictions. In this country and many others we've had our own form of downplaying certain risks and ignoring certain concerns in the name of learning to live with covid. People struggle at the best of times to form highly accurate pictures of personal risk, and mixed messages dont help. It doesnt sound like the strong link between age and risk from covid has been properly acknowledged in China, and their covid fears havent been moulded in the same way as ours over time. But then again BBC coverage of China has tended to illuminate both their own regimes attitudes and propaganda but also end up saying something about our own.

eg in that BBC Foxxconn article I just linked to, there is stuff like:

A key problem has been widespread ignorance about the nature of the illness. In much of China, people are as terrified of catching the virus as if it were cancer.

The Chinese government has done little to alter these misunderstandings and, in fact, has often made them worse.

The narrative from those in charge here has been that elsewhere, Covid has been cutting a swathe through the population, but Chinese people should consider themselves lucky because they have the Communist Party to protect them with the zero-Covid approach.

But then followed by:

It is true that this strategy has stopped the country's hospitals from being swamped and it is true that Covid has resulted in a tragic loss of lives.

However, it is also true that - for the vast majority of infected people who have been vaccinated - catching the virus means a few days sick at home and nothing more.

This last point is something that many in China are completely unaware of.

Our own approach and framing relies on concepts like 'the vast majority' which doesnt really do risk subjects involving long covid and longer term health risks full justice. The covid realities lurk somewhere between these two extremes, and a case can be made that neither population is being served well by either form of extreme framing. The naunces matter, and they are largely absent. But the stakes in China at this stage are different to our own, we face a slow grinding pressure from Covid these days, and the political heat has gone from the subject for now, would only return if things took a dramatic turn for the worse that required new restrictions. In China the situation is pretty much the inverse of our own.

Much of the focus from a health perspective is on how big Chinas wave could be, how many hospitalisations and deaths it could lead to. But in countries like ours there is an under-acknowledged issue with the amount of long-term sickness and workforce depletion. If someone tries to do the sums in regards what would happen to Chinas workforce if they have a huge wave, I expect the numbers involved would be rather large, and I expect their regime are aware of that too. They've backed themselves into a corner by not letting all sorts of pressures play out gradually.

 

[JimW]

I thought WeChat and Weibo were pretty ubiquitous there, certainly among younger people - although they might not be looking up anything political tbf

WeChat is but it's not a broadcast social thing in quite the same way (though you can livestream), not so much WeiBo, that's pretty white-collar; mass consumption it's more Tiktok local version Douyin and the like, Kuaishou. You do get stuff that would be censored quicker out in the wild shared in WeChat groups though, but if the big clan one I'm in with my in-laws is anything to go by, rumours are more local interest.

 

[frogwoman]

Thread by @catecadell on Thread Reader App

@catecadell: A thread here for those who don't understand why the China protests over the weekend protests are so shockingly rare. Surveillance. In. China. Is. Extreme. Think you could evade Chinese police? Let's wa...…

threadreaderapp.com

 

[Thesaint]

How much were people in china aware of western experiences of it back in 2020/21? Or at least how western media relayed the experience.

 

[Sasaferrato]

Thread by @catecadell on Thread Reader App

@catecadell: A thread here for those who don't understand why the China protests over the weekend protests are so shockingly rare. Surveillance. In. China. Is. Extreme. Think you could evade Chinese police? Let's wa...…

threadreaderapp.com

Bloody hell. I'm a bit uneasy at the level of surveillance in the UK, but this is magnitudes beyond that.

 

[Thesaint]

Bloody hell. I'm a bit uneasy at the level of surveillance in the UK, but this is magnitudes beyond that.

It probably won't make you feel much better, but the surveillance state has been creeping into more everyday life here too. The last few years have accelerated it and some members of the public welcomed it with open arms without thinking it through.

 

[Sasaferrato]

It probably won't make you feel much better, but the surveillance state has been creeping into more everyday life here too. The last few years have accelerated it and some members of the public welcomed it with open arms without thinking it through.

I've never seen the point with regard to crime prevention, it may show who stabbed you, but it doesn't stop you from being stabbed.

I remember reading of a huge number of cameras around George Orwell's house in London.

 

[JimW]

How much were people in china aware of western experiences of it back in 2020/21? Or at least how western media relayed the experience.

There was certainly a lot of barely concealed schadenfreude reporting of high death tolls and overwhelmed health systems.

 

[JimW]

I've never seen the point with regard to crime prevention, it may show who stabbed you, but it doesn't stop you from being stabbed.

I remember reading of a huge number of cameras around George Orwell's house in London.

It's also notable how ineffective this surveillance state seems to be against rogue property developers, labour law violators and environmental polluters etc. Almost as if some crimes count for more.

 

[Thesaint]

I've never seen the point with regard to crime prevention, it may show who stabbed you, but it doesn't stop you from being stabbed.

I remember reading of a huge number of cameras around George Orwell's house in London.

People forget the technology available in China is also available here, and if anyone raises this it's tempting to just dismiss it as conspiracy stuff as people aren't (presently) aware of how it's used - well abused- in China.
There was I think an episode of Black Mirror on Netflix that centred on a western version of a social credit score app but I wonder how many people who saw it considered how close it was.

 

[frogwoman]

It's also notable how ineffective this surveillance state seems to be against rogue property developers, labour law violators and environmental polluters etc. Almost as if some crimes count for more.

Unrelated to your point but I heard that some (a lot?) of the cameras don't work and are basically just to spread fear. They're resorting to manually checking people's phones in the tubes etc from videos I've watched

 

[elbows]

It probably won't make you feel much better, but the surveillance state has been creeping into more everyday life here too. The last few years have accelerated it and some members of the public welcomed it with open arms without thinking it through.

Be specific, especially since you probably want to make some point about what effect responses to the pandemic had on that in this country. A point that will fit with your wider attitude towards our pandemic response.

From my point of view there was actually not a big change in the amount of UK surveillance. There were some changes to the nature and purpose of certain forms of analysing the data. But the most obvious changes that some people latched onto were actually a change in whether the technology-enabled surveillance was overt or covert, not in whether it was already being done in the first place.

 

[mwgdrwg]

It probably won't make you feel much better, but the surveillance state has been creeping into more everyday life here too. The last few years have accelerated it and some members of the public welcomed it with open arms without thinking it through.

Urban 75 gladly welcoming electronic covid tracking and covid passports on their phones was a shocker to me I can tell ya!

 

[frogwoman]

Either in lockdown or preparing for lockdown: life amid zero-Covid in Beijing

Resident tells of days filled with health codes, constant threat of shutdowns and moments of hope

www.theguardian.com

This is an article saying that some of the health code stuff is often barely looked at or checked (until it's not), and there are a few limited ways to get round it sometimes

 

[Sasaferrato]

It's also notable how ineffective this surveillance state seems to be against rogue property developers, labour law violators and environmental polluters etc. Almost as if some crimes count for more.

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. Universal, innit?

 

[Thesaint]

Urban 75 gladly welcoming electronic covid tracking and covid passports on their phones was a shocker to me I can tell ya!

Why was it a shocker though? I saw plenty of people in the real world genuinely excited about these technologies, with little resentment or suspicion about them

 

[frogwoman]

 

[elbows]

Urban 75 gladly welcoming electronic covid tracking and covid passports on their phones was a shocker to me I can tell ya!

It didnt shock me because the context of the period in question was key - people were introduced to these ideas as a means by which we might be able escape certain heavy restrictions, restrictions that people had found pretty tough especially in the second lockdown over a winter period. When being sold along with the idea that we might reduce the number of deaths and reduce the chances that we would have to go into heavy lockdowns, its no surprise that plenty of people were able to focus on the potential upsides.

As it turned out the overall response and some of its flaws and the evolution of the virus, and various delays to doing the right thing at the right time, meant that test & trace was not sufficient to avoid a particular lockdown etc. And the high level of vaccine uptake coupled with less than perfect results in terms of preventing infections and mild disease meant that covid passports were not a part of the UK political scene for a very long time.

 

[elbows]

Why was it a shocker though? I saw plenty of people in the real world genuinely excited about these technologies, with little resentment or suspicion about them

Theres several different versions of that sort of sentiment:

There are people who are always in the 'if you've got nothing to hide then whats the problem?' camp anyway. And people who occasionally have one foot in that camp but not always, mixed feelings etc.

There are people who assume that there is so much overt and covert surveillance of this broad type already, so much data already, that a new overt form doesnt really change the equation.

There are the opposite of those, who may be a bit naive about what we already face, what data is already collected, and therefore react especially strongly against the suggestion of introducing any because they think of it as a brand new phenomenon.

There are people who will accept new overt forms of surveillance if the particular circumstances seem to justify it. Especially if its an opt-in system, seen as offering rewards for those choosing to 'do the right thing' etc.

There are those who will oppose on principal regardless of any particular details and justifications.

And probably plenty of people sort of wobbled between different combinations of the above over time, depending on factors such as how bad things were looking on the pandemic front at a particular moment, how much the government were over-promising at different moments, whether there had been any scandals about the use of the data, the people profiting from it etc.

There was a way in which we were able to test whether attitudes towards this stuff were affected more permanently by the pandemic. Even at a time when more people than we might normally expect were onboard with some of these things in response to the virus, attempts by the authorities to introduce a new system for sharing patient records with a broader set of entities including commercial ones still went down really quite badly and shit loads of people were opting out.

 

[Thesaint]

sharing patient records with a broader set of entities including commercial ones still went down really quite badly and shit loads of people were opting out.

I do wonder if this happened pre 2020 there would have been plenty of opting out as it could be seen as a backdoor way to privatising the nhs which many don't want.

its an opt-in system, seen as offering rewards for those choosing to 'do the right thing' etc

Would you consider the two apps (the vax pass and the check-in/out one - I can't remember their given names now) to be merely opt in? By the same token I presume people in China opt into the state app(s).
These apps though did cross the border between surveillance to a china like social score app.