I work at an international business school. I try to stay up to day on world news. There was a paragraph written about “infectious pneumonia” in Time magazine or The Economist the last week of 2019 (so the issue published the first week of 2020, I think).
Returning to work a week later I mentioned it in class, because that year I had about 6 students from different parts of China.
They said, “it’s nothing, just a flu.”
The next week, as numbers started to be published they said, “no, it’s an exaggeration.”
The week after they were the first students to start wearing masks.
Week 4, they told us they hadn’t heard from their families in several days. This would have been February 2020.
I felt so horrible for those students that year. They were only 18 or 19 years old. Sent to France in January 2019 (they are required to come several months before classes start in order to learn French and pass some tests). They were locked down March 16th 2020 and forced to take lessons on Zoom. Unable to return home for the summer. Took another semester on Zoom, etc., etc.…
I think they finally managed to head home in the spring of 2021.
As I lay here on NYE with plans canceled because of covid and think back of the >$150,000 USD covid has cost me over these years from destroying my small business, I will never forgive or forget the PRCs role in this.
Funny you defend the PRC when there’s actually evidence of them suppressing knowledge of the outbreak, and disregard the lockdowns here and the vaccines. I worked on the mRNA technology with a lot of good scientists trying to help but people like you don’t care
I don’t think they’re defending PRC, just pointing out there are others also deserving of your anger. The US not only did terrible at responding to the ongoing pandemic, they convinced people they didn’t but if so to just blame PRC for it. Sure, be mad that they covered it up, but also be mad that our government mishandled things terribly too.
If you’re this angry, then by all means, please leave.
In the less developed world Covid was dubbed “rich man’s sickness” because only people who were affected were those who had the means to travel. But those few rich brought it back, and made it everyone’s problem. Am I angry with those people? No.
Most governments were not handing this well. Your anger towards only one country’s government is misguided.
So by your logic it’s not OK to criticize the CCP unless one also lists off all the other governments that failed to rise to the occasion? WTF is wrong with you? You are trying way too hard. It’s obvious that for whatever reason you can’t abide criticism of the CCP.
If they were critical of the US government’s response you and I know very well that you would never feel the need to comment about how the CCP also fucked up. You wouldn’t because you’re poisoned by an ideology that doesn’t allow you to see the world from an objective solutions-based perspective. Everything is black and white with you, either in keeping with your cornball little ideology, or not, in which case it’s evil.
It’s bullshit and people are getting sick of you and people like you. Grow the fuck up.
This place is swarming with idiots. I think it’s an age thing. There are a lot of young people on Lemmy and they tend to be very wedded to viewing the world in strictly ideological terms with little nuance and no real appreciation for how complex the real world actually is. As a result, it’s almost impossible to be critical of anything without being subjected to pointless and condescending whataboutism.
Hey, everyone was impacted and it was all personal. It doesn’t have to be about who was impacted more or which experiences are more legitimate than others. $150k is a lot to lose. I’m in that boat myself and, in some ways, we haven’t recovered from that. The timing of it caused a lot of changes in our lives and spoiled long term plans that were important to us and our kids. It took a while to pick up the pieces and pivot. There’s always going to be that “what if” feeling so there’s a real sense of loss.
It was one comment and you got 15 upvotes with no down lol. For the record I think it sucks that you lost your business, that is a tragedy, but my first thought was that it did sound pretty callous, like ignoring the hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.
I was in 12th grade and I remember my English teacher was weirdly prophetic about it. He told us that it would be the worst pandemic in decades, and this was before the US had its first case. Looking back, he was the only teacher I had who mentioned anything about it
China is stumbling towards an invasion the same way they stumbled their way into and through COVID. The consequences of this dangerous ineptness will be similar for the world.
I think Xi is counting on the west to be too distracted by Ukraine and Israel to effectively support Taiwan.
Also, speculation on my part - but this feels like the usual posturing/distraction playbook. China’s economy isn’t doing so hot and the government’s bungling of COVID is still fresh in everyone’s minds, so what better way to make people forget about that than to saber rattle?
@detectivemittens I may sound like a broken plate but I think it's precisely the situation in Ukraine that is giving them hopes. Had the US not put on hold that package for Ukraine, the Chinese could have simply taken a more moderate stance towards Taiwan. By doing what it did, yea, as you said, the US showed its weakness in providing its allies and partners with the required military help.
The arrangement with Taiwan is different though. A war between the two Chinas would see direct US involvement, not just the sending over of old weapons that are well past their expiration date.
People were saying the same about Russia before he invaded Ukraine. The moment we see a buildup of troops at the coast near Taiwan, the countdown to the invasion is ticking down. I do not think it’s a matter of if, but when. Could be this year already. I do not believe that the so-called PLA is even remotely capable of successfully conquering Taiwan, since they have zero experience with any kind of complex military operation (least of which any combined arms and naval landings, let alone the most challenging one in military history), but I think the end result will still be an enormous amount of destruction and suffering, as well as a major and long-lasting economic crisis.
Thankfully most signs are that the PLA is targeting having a force capable of credible cross strait operations in 2027, so we still have at least three years. Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and the US all know this and have been spending the last two plus years reshaping thier militaries to be capable of directly opposing such an act, and in doing so it is become pretty clear that any cross strait action is only going to end in a lot of CCP ships on the bottom and a good fiscal year for Lockheed Martin.
In doing so it makes it vanishingly unlikely that it will actually move beyond posturing in the first place. Unlike in Ukraine where the West has committed to supporting and resupplying the victim, many of the Asia Pacific Nations are committed to providing active military operations in defense of Taiwan.
That being said there is still to my knowledge no Asia Pacific equivalent to NATO Article 5 unfortunately, which may result in dangerous doubt in terms of credible deterrence, especially if the CCP believes it has friends that will quietly bow to it in Tokyo and Washington in 2027. For all of Trump’s shouting, most of his actual actions involvedo withdrawing the US from everything he could that China didn’t like.
While still unlikely, credible deterrence still requires the Chinese Intelligence both believe and be good enough at handling bad news to accurately report that up the chain of command, and as the FSB demonstrated in Ukraine that’s not necessarily a given. If there are enough yes men, then things could get very bad indeed.
Especially in China. That’s a place where it’s not uncommon for very high ranking members of the government/party/major companies and public figures disappearing for months on time if not indefinitely. If it can happen to those people, it can happen to bearers of bad news much further down the line. Not to mention, Xi has been busy purging anyone who even looks remotely competent/threatening (same thing, really) for a while now in the very old-fashioned sense of the word, which isn’t exactly conductive to a smooth running state either.
I mean, their vaccine is just saltwater and spit just like the Russian one. And they didn’t let anyone catch it at all (or at least they tried) wich means there isn’t a natural resistance either.
So in the end they completely fucked their economy (and the economy of other countries with it… But thats a different story) and just postponed the unavoidable outbreak of covid making it essentially worse than any other country. Oh and thanks to the new outbreaks covid has definitely mutated a lot…
Sure, it's inevitable. China is so great and prosperous that one day the people of Taiwan will see reason and enthusiastically petition to join it. This will obviously happen some day, so there's no need to do anything but sit back and wait for it, President Xi.
Cars were so uncommon to people outside of Beijing that they would pay to have their picture taken with a car as a memento or proof to others that they saw a car and they do exist. Motor vehicle production didn’t really pick up until the early 90’s. Before that, manufacturers were only making a couple hundred thousand cars per year in the entire country.
At least that’s how I interpreted it after reading about the Chinese auto market history on Wikipedia and combining it with my own personal history with computers while growing up in a rural town in the US.
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