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This is only true if you believe in conspiracy theories that the PRC is 1) hiding millions of COVID-19 deaths and simultaneously 2) remained the only growing ec

This is only true if you believe in conspiracy theories that the PRC is 1) hiding millions of COVID-19 deaths and simultaneously 2) remained the only growing economy in 2020. Or you reject 2) and include the entire global economy in the conspiracy. Otherwise, the PRC (CCP = world's largest bureaucracy) has clearly had the most successful response to the pandemic due to its decisive measures, which goes against your conclusion that less governance is needed to effectively combat pandemics.

Kinrany 5y ago
Why is it a conspiracy theory? Is it that they wouldn't want to fake the numbers, or is it that they couldn't?
- pphysch 5y ago
  It's a theory that there's a broad conspiracy to cover up how bad the pandemic hit China. This would require many parties (millions of people inside and out of China) to closely conspire on a singular manufactured narrative and prevent any leaks of the "truth". It's a textbook conspiracy theory.
  - jgod 5y ago
    Yeah people never work in secrecy (or in the open) together and lie due to common interests. Especially millions of people. It would be impossible to coordinate them! - Signed, Santa Claus, coming to deliver presents to children worldwide soon.
    - epgui 5y ago
      It’s a cute answer, but the difference is that there is more credible evidence that Santa Claus doesn’t exist than that he does.
  - epgui 5y ago
    This is a good example of how the anti-China rhetoric presents with a blind spot for the West (I am a westerner). Rather than learning from what they did right, folks in my country just shrug and say “you can’t trust their stats”. That may be so, and sure, there may have been a large number of specific problems and areas for improvement, but there’s no universe in which China did not display strong overall competency. You can see that even if you take most official figures with a grain of salt.
    - harry8 5y ago
      I rather thought mostly people looked how China achieved whatever success it achieved and said, "Yeah, we don't do that. Don't care how effective it is at one thing the price is too high." Also can their stats be trusted? How would you know? Yes the west is following some very repressive and revolting media policies "Hi Julian!" But still a long way behind the PRC so stuff tends to come out eventually. Hunter Biden's laptop emails were real, not "russian disinformation" and we are now aware of that censorship which troubles us regardless of who we voted for. Most chinese in China have never heard of or seen this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man Still some 3 decades later. These things are related, similar but their magnitude is (at least at this stage) not remotely comparable.
      - pphysch 5y ago
        What is so significant about "tank man", and how do you know that no one in China has seen it?
        wewtyflakes 5y ago
        Because of methodical actions like this: https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Entertainment/wireStory/tiananmen-massacre-statue-barricaded-hong-kong-university-81898333 https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Entertainmen... There is deliberate effort by that government to erase that history. Do you think they are not effective in doing so in their own house?
- ArnoVW 5y ago
  The fact that the Chinese numbers are fake is at this momement only at question for the extremely gullible. Supposedly they have not had a single covid-death since March 2020, and have had 100 new cases this week, with a country that has 1400 million inhabitants. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/
kingkawn 5y ago
It is starting to look like the reason Omicron appears to be less severe is because so much of the populace around the world has been infected with some form of covid already, and with reinfections complication rates are far lower. If that is the case China’s successful control of previous strains will become a devastating liability with this strain.
- carlmr 5y ago
  >If that is the case China’s successful control of previous strains will become a devastating liability with this strain. I've been wondering about this as well, the extreme example of this would have been the European invasion of the Americas, and the thousands of years of disease evolution of common viruses around the world that the natives missed out on, which killed most without weapons. There's a certain value in letting your population's immune systems adapt as the viruses come, instead of letting it be overwhelmed after long isolation. We're in a constant natural arms race with viruses, isolation isn't sustainable.
roenxi 5y ago
China's COVID numbers are transparently fabricated. They make no sense given the size and diversity of the provinces they control, and are far to low for even a good response considering the population involved. Especially since they didn't know that they were being hit by a pandemic in the early stages of the virus in Wuhan, and would have had a delayed response even compared to the countries that handled this well. China's statistics are a case of some combination of lying and ignorance, not of success. They aren't telling us what is happening on the ground in China.
- pphysch 5y ago
  Was this conclusion informed by primary evidence (please link), or from decades of ideological conditioning by Western establishment media?
  - roenxi 5y ago
    Yeah it is based on evidence. There is no way they can have achieved the outcome the stats are claiming. Wikipedia says they have 100k cases in a population of 1.4 billion, or 0.007% of the population caught the coronavirus. That compares to New Zealand - a tiny, wealthy, well organised island nation with a near perfect border quarantine and easy conditions for contract tracing - where 0.2% of the country is known to have caught the coronavirus. China did not have 1-2 orders of magnitude less cases than New Zealand (which is already going to be an outlier). The country is large and COVID is hard to control. Their stats are impossible. Having facial recognition tech and being willing to use it can't get the result the numbers claim. They got hit by a novel virus in the middle of Chinese New Year and they are having the same problem with outbreaks as literally everyone else. Plus we know they aren't trying to publish accurate stats because they vaccinated most of the country in a few day according to the data that filtered back into the western media. They may not necessarily be malicious but the Chinese are certainly not accurate and timely with their statistics.
    - pphysch 5y ago
      > Their stats are impossible. Here is the ideological conditioning coming into play. You have been conditioned to believing that it is impossible for the Chinese to do things better than the West. If they do, they must be cheating/stealing IP/fudging the numbers.
cal5k 5y ago
You're basically arguing that authoritarian governments are great at wielding their absolute power towards their policy objectives, which is not a particularly controversial statement. To suggest this means that large bureaucracies are inherently good or efficient is very strange.

Kinrany 5y ago

Why is it a conspiracy theory? Is it that they wouldn't want to fake the numbers, or is it that they couldn't?

pphysch 5y ago
It's a theory that there's a broad conspiracy to cover up how bad the pandemic hit China. This would require many parties (millions of people inside and out of China) to closely conspire on a singular manufactured narrative and prevent any leaks of the "truth". It's a textbook conspiracy theory.
- jgod 5y ago
  Yeah people never work in secrecy (or in the open) together and lie due to common interests. Especially millions of people. It would be impossible to coordinate them! - Signed, Santa Claus, coming to deliver presents to children worldwide soon.
  - epgui 5y ago
    It’s a cute answer, but the difference is that there is more credible evidence that Santa Claus doesn’t exist than that he does.
- epgui 5y ago
  This is a good example of how the anti-China rhetoric presents with a blind spot for the West (I am a westerner). Rather than learning from what they did right, folks in my country just shrug and say “you can’t trust their stats”. That may be so, and sure, there may have been a large number of specific problems and areas for improvement, but there’s no universe in which China did not display strong overall competency. You can see that even if you take most official figures with a grain of salt.
  - harry8 5y ago
    I rather thought mostly people looked how China achieved whatever success it achieved and said, "Yeah, we don't do that. Don't care how effective it is at one thing the price is too high." Also can their stats be trusted? How would you know? Yes the west is following some very repressive and revolting media policies "Hi Julian!" But still a long way behind the PRC so stuff tends to come out eventually. Hunter Biden's laptop emails were real, not "russian disinformation" and we are now aware of that censorship which troubles us regardless of who we voted for. Most chinese in China have never heard of or seen this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man Still some 3 decades later. These things are related, similar but their magnitude is (at least at this stage) not remotely comparable.
    - pphysch 5y ago
      What is so significant about "tank man", and how do you know that no one in China has seen it?
      - wewtyflakes 5y ago
        Because of methodical actions like this: https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Entertainment/wireStory/tiananmen-massacre-statue-barricaded-hong-kong-university-81898333 https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Entertainmen... There is deliberate effort by that government to erase that history. Do you think they are not effective in doing so in their own house?
ArnoVW 5y ago
The fact that the Chinese numbers are fake is at this momement only at question for the extremely gullible. Supposedly they have not had a single covid-death since March 2020, and have had 100 new cases this week, with a country that has 1400 million inhabitants. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/

kingkawn 5y ago

It is starting to look like the reason Omicron appears to be less severe is because so much of the populace around the world has been infected with some form of covid already, and with reinfections complication rates are far lower. If that is the case China’s successful control of previous strains will become a devastating liability with this strain.

carlmr 5y ago
>If that is the case China’s successful control of previous strains will become a devastating liability with this strain. I've been wondering about this as well, the extreme example of this would have been the European invasion of the Americas, and the thousands of years of disease evolution of common viruses around the world that the natives missed out on, which killed most without weapons. There's a certain value in letting your population's immune systems adapt as the viruses come, instead of letting it be overwhelmed after long isolation. We're in a constant natural arms race with viruses, isolation isn't sustainable.

roenxi 5y ago

China's COVID numbers are transparently fabricated. They make no sense given the size and diversity of the provinces they control, and are far to low for even a good response considering the population involved. Especially since they didn't know that they were being hit by a pandemic in the early stages of the virus in Wuhan, and would have had a delayed response even compared to the countries that handled this well. China's statistics are a case of some combination of lying and ignorance, not of success. They aren't telling us what is happening on the ground in China.

pphysch 5y ago
Was this conclusion informed by primary evidence (please link), or from decades of ideological conditioning by Western establishment media?
- roenxi 5y ago
  Yeah it is based on evidence. There is no way they can have achieved the outcome the stats are claiming. Wikipedia says they have 100k cases in a population of 1.4 billion, or 0.007% of the population caught the coronavirus. That compares to New Zealand - a tiny, wealthy, well organised island nation with a near perfect border quarantine and easy conditions for contract tracing - where 0.2% of the country is known to have caught the coronavirus. China did not have 1-2 orders of magnitude less cases than New Zealand (which is already going to be an outlier). The country is large and COVID is hard to control. Their stats are impossible. Having facial recognition tech and being willing to use it can't get the result the numbers claim. They got hit by a novel virus in the middle of Chinese New Year and they are having the same problem with outbreaks as literally everyone else. Plus we know they aren't trying to publish accurate stats because they vaccinated most of the country in a few day according to the data that filtered back into the western media. They may not necessarily be malicious but the Chinese are certainly not accurate and timely with their statistics.
  - pphysch 5y ago
    > Their stats are impossible. Here is the ideological conditioning coming into play. You have been conditioned to believing that it is impossible for the Chinese to do things better than the West. If they do, they must be cheating/stealing IP/fudging the numbers.

cal5k 5y ago

You're basically arguing that authoritarian governments are great at wielding their absolute power towards their policy objectives, which is not a particularly controversial statement. To suggest this means that large bureaucracies are inherently good or efficient is very strange.