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Campaign to 'thank' Xi Jinping flatly rejected by Wuhan citizens
- duxup 7y ago> a "gratitude education campaign," under which Wuhan citizens would be taught to express their thanks to Xi and the party for their efforts in tackling the illness. Man you're not just expected to thank him, you're going to be "taught" to do so too ... ?
- baryphonic 7y agoIt's a grand system. As long as you're Xi.
- jacquesm 7y agoReminiscent of the Jean Michel-Jarre concerts in China. "Ladies and Gentlemen, the artist has finished. Please applaud."
- allovernow 7y agoPeople are still out here downvoting me for suggesting that China is an authoritarian propaganda infested shithole. This is how things work in a communist inspired regime. It was the same bullshit in the Soviet Union. You are told what to think and who to like and what to report by the government. You either tow the line or are admonished and/or disappeared. Especially in times of crisis. Such governments prioritize optics above all else because without respect and/or fear from the people, they cannot rule. Nothing out of China right now can be trusted - and we have a mountain of evidence that much of the official narrative is false, despite the government's best efforts at damage control. This virus should be a wake-up call to the millions of Americans who think life around the world is anything like the relative freedom and comfort that we enjoy here. You people need to understand something. China is a third world country which has modernized in less than a generation. The vast majority of rural Chinese are living in poverty with little to no education. It takes decades to bring a country with a billion people into the first world. These are people who do not know freedom of speech and most of them don't even use the internet. This is a totally different world and their government is taking full advantage of the ignorance of the commons. You all read about these things in history books - they exist in modern day in North Korea and to a slightly lesser extent in China. For fuck's sake this is a regime that has imprisoned more than a million ethnic muslims on a whim. Wake up. This is not a statement against the Chinese people, and your visceral, oversocialized reaction, that gut instinct to dismiss me as "racist" or "xenophobic" is inappropriate and dangerously counterproductive. Differences in culture cannot be overstated. The Soviet Union only broke up some 30 years ago - none of this is far-fetched.
- trenchgun 7y agoYou are not wrong.
- trhway 7y agoSuch wide and powerful statements like yours would benefit from being factually correct. >most of them don't even use the internet China internet penetration is 61% according to here https://www.chinainternetwatch.com/statistics/china-internet-users/ https://www.chinainternetwatch.com/statistics/china-internet... and similar numbers are shown elsewhere.
- nradov 7y agoThat depends on how you define "Internet". If the Chinese national TCP/IP infrastructure is largely isolated from the rest of the world by the Great Firewall then can we legitimately call it part of the Internet?
- trhway 7y agoIt is like saying that USSR didn't have TV/radio because foreign stations weren't rebroadcasted and were jammed. Technical infrastructure and censorship are 2 different things, and effective censorship in highly technical society emphasizes and illustrates the scale and capabilities of the authoritative power oppressing the population.
- allovernow 7y agoTV and radio are broadcasted top down, and their power does not depend on users being able to access the rest of the world. Functionally for our intents and purposes there is little difference between having no internet and having a national intranet which is cut off from the rest of the world and literally policed by the government. Technically the walled garden FB wanted to set up in India was "internet" too. Plus as we've determined, the internet has spread to 60% of Chinese at best, and majority urban areas.
- allovernow 7y ago
- Leary 7y agoEach day people don't take action against the virus costs ~20% more lives. Wuhan knows this. Lombardy knows this.
- krustyburger 7y agoI think more everyday people in China would be ready to thank him if he would share just some of that delicious Hunny he keeps all to himself.
- jsjddbbwj 7y agoWhat an article full of generalisations. Is this author really talking for 11 million Wuhan citizens? Over what, social media posts?
- baybal2 7y agoI think not only Wuhan. For the last 2 months straight, the internet in China was one big erupting volcano. I think that it is only now that people in Zhongnanhai understood that by walling off Chinese internet from the rest of the world, they got themselves a pressure cooker. A single propaganda mistake in a time of crisis is instantly amplified hundredfold because people just don't have anything else to read and be angry about.
- baryphonic 7y agoChernobyl was one of the key events that led to Perestroika and Glasnost, which itself led to the collapse of the Soviet Union (alongside the economic hardships brought on partly by an inability to compete with NATO/US military budgets and the flaws of the Soviet command economy and millions of small or minuscule issues). I imagine the CCP is aware of the similarities, and so we will see a further clamping down and maybe even a purge of "disloyal" party members/scapegoats.
- scilro 7y agoBut this is kind of the opposite of Chernobyl, right? As you laid out, Chernobyl revealed the weakness of the Soviet Union and played some part in its collapse. COVID19 has laid bare the superiority of the Chinese model in terms of quick mass mobilization. The entire world saw how quickly and drastically China acted and how slowly the US is acting. And now they're sending masks and respirators to the rest of the developing world.
- ajmurmann 7y agoThat's only half of what happened though. Initially China was pretending nothing was happening and arresting researchers who talked about it. If their initial response had been open, the more extreme measures (that worked really well) might not have been necessary.
- duxup 7y agoDepends on how the locals feel, if they feel saved, or if they feel oppressed.
- simonh 7y agoThe Chinese government utterly and completely dropped the ball for the first two whole months of the crisis. They censored and punished doctors trying to raise awareness, and suppressed news of the outbreak allowing mass gatherings to go ahead for political reasons. After that the severe crackdown came after the virus had been spread internationally, and has precipitated a humanitarian crisis which, again, they are covering up and suppressing. The Chinese people have been fantastic. They've put up with appalling hardships and suffered greatly for the incompetence and heavy handed ness of their leaders.
- xiaodai 7y agoThis reads like one of those unsubstantiated news from the west. At least some one of the deleted tweets but none. Just a bunch of words.
- gentleman11 7y agoIn a climate of massive semi-automated censorship, it’s hard to document situations like this
- jijji 7y agothank you for unleashing a biological weapon on the world.
- ftheccp 7y agoThey're already trying to pin it on the US: https://www.thedailybeast.com/china-launches-a-fake-news-campaign-to-blame-the-us-for-coronavirus https://www.thedailybeast.com/china-launches-a-fake-news-cam... But I doubt this will be successful, especially given how bad the epidemic is shaping up to be here. Our economy is now in a recession, and our stock market (which Trump loved to boast of), has cratered, even with the Fed injecting trillions.
- ftheccp 7y agoDon't forget to thank Shi Zhengli, deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, for her pioneering research, which includes engineering bat coronavirus strains to utilize human pulmonary ACE2 receptors (like COVID-19 does): http://archive.is/M9IRO http://archive.is/M9IRO In this study, a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-based pseudovirus system was employed to address these issues. Our results indicated that the SL-CoV S protein is unable to use ACE2 proteins of different species for cell entry and that SARS-CoV S protein also failed to bind the ACE2 molecule of the horseshoe bat, Rhinolophus pearsonii. However, when the RBD of SL-CoV S was replaced with that from the SARS-CoV S, the hybrid S protein was able to use the huACE2 for cell entry, implying that the SL-CoV S proteins are structurally and functionally very similar to the SARS-CoV S. These results suggest that although the SL-CoVs discovered in bats so far are unlikely to infect humans using ACE2 as a receptor, it remains to be seen whether they are able to use other surface molecules of certain human cell types to gain entry. It is also conceivable that these viruses may become infectious to humans if they undergo N-terminal sequence variation, for example, through recombination with other CoVs, which in turn might lead to a productive interaction with ACE2 or other surface proteins on human cells.
- marvin 7y agoIs your implication here that SARS-CoV 2 was engineered and released in some sort of containment accident, and reteroactively blamed on a bat?
- ftheccp 7y agoThat, or some tech stole infected animals and sold them at the wet market. (They've accidentally leaked SARS and other dangerous pathogens before.) It's also possible they intentionally released it, then knowingly sent infected citizens abroad to cause a global pandemic and economic collapse to mask their own economic problems, but I doubt it. However, this would explain why they covered it up initially, and pressured other countries to not institute travel bans.
- euix 7y agoThe way you take down a powerful leader is not by criticizing which will bring down his wrath but by excessive and ridiculous praise. Credit him with godly powers and set him up for the fall when things inevitably go bad. During the cultural revolution and before who was leading the cult of personality behind Mao? It was Lin Biao. Those who want the crown will be the biggest sycophants.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- foogazi 7y ago> Sun, a female member of the powerful Politburo, was being shown around a residential area in Wuhan that had been cleaned up before the visit and made to appear as if plenty of food was being delivered to the residents. If they lie about that what else could they be lying about?
- adultSwim 7y agoWe are seeing inter-country information warfare.