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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting to think about how such a counterproductive attitude could develop. I imagine that the Party saw a problem, suppressed some people who were impacted by it, and saw the problem go away (at least for them). The they saw another problem, suppressed some people, and saw that problem go away too. After doing this for several decades, their default reflex upon seeing a problem was to suppress whoever was complaining about it. This strategy worked for small problems that would stay about the same size over time, because they could tell the sufferers to suck it up and at most a few people would become discontent. Eventually the strategy became a habit, and the habit became an integral cultural component of their way of governing.

Then, one day, they saw a problem, suppressed some people... and discovered that the small problem would not stay small and suppressible after all.

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This is pure speculation without one spec of proof:

My guess is that the regional government covered up the problem. But once the national disease authorities learned of the issue, they did the right thing because of their experience with diseases over the last decade.

I can't see the whole article. It might have some information which supports or refutes my guess.

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Edit. From the full article: "on January 3, the National Health Commission, China’s top medical authority, issued its own gagging orders"

It is not really possible for outsiders to tell how orders are being moved around within the party mechanism. China's message is that the regional government is at fault, but that's what they always say when there is an expression of discontent among their people. It is not "kosher" for the central government to take the blame for anything, so you can never really believe it when someone else takes the blame. Maybe the CIA knows, but anyone who isn't tapping internal communications is not likely to get beyond speculation.

In any case, a culture of honesty has to start at the top, and it is likely that the local government "knew what not to report." There are many situations where the claim that no official report was given to the central government would be true, while at the same time the central government played a role in the suppression. So as for speculation, I would say that there are many possibilities where the central government had a role to play in the suppression (even if it was played over years before), but only one possibility where the local authority went off and did something totally out of line.

Edit:

>The laboratory findings were relayed to officials in Beijing at the Centre for Disease Control (CDC). The information should have alerted national health chiefs to a looming crisis, but on January 3, the National Health Commission, China’s top medical authority, issued its own gagging orders. Laboratories were told not to release any information and to hand over or destroy the samples.

Well, it looks like the local government didn't know what not to report after all. (Thanks to makomk's comment for pointing this out.)

A fish rots from the head down after all.

According to the article, this came from the top: the national medical authorities were directly telling the labs to destroy the samples and keep it a secret.

This behavior reminds me of what happened with the Chernobyl power plant.

The fall of the USSR is attributed in part to the Chernobyl accident in Mikhail Gorbachev's memoirs.

I'm not saying the CCP's days are numbered, but maybe, just maybe they will live in interesting times.

Of course their days are numbered, no regime lasts forever.

Midway through HBO’s Chernobyl it struck me: this was the start of the fall of the USSR. I guess that’s obvious, but the dominant narrative growing up was that the US outspent them militarily and it bankrupted them.

But it was so eloquently shown in the miniseries that it was really about the facade coming down — the illusion of the all-knowing regime crumbling into that vast, hellish pit at the center of the reactor.

You could watch Adam Curtis' HyperNormalisation documentary for further insight into this. It's about the current political elite but comoares the current situation with the one in the USSR before the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Another think the US likes to look at differently:

US: Marchal plan was self-less help.

Reality: Marchal plan was mostly self-help, preventing a economical collaps of the US and securing strong longterm influence in the EU/Germany to make sure the EU/Germany won't side with communism in the future. Also allowing them "secure/safe/accepted" military presence in the EU/Germany "just on the border to their enemy". Etc. (Don't get me wrong. It was still awesome and I'm still grateful. Just don't go around stating the EU/Germany owns the USA and should do thinks which would harm itself to support the USA, especially given that currently the US is slightly falling from grace.).

To someone in the USSR at around the same time it might as well have looked that AIDS epidemic is going to put the US in serious trouble. The US authorities were not admitting it as a serious problem until many thousands had died.

I would discount much of the insinuations that the HBO series is making, it was made without any inputs from Russians/Ukrainians which should be a serious argument against its authenticity of sentiment.

A theory is that the collapse of the USSR was not any grassroots uprising or the expression of people longing for democracy, it was just mostly a few higher-ups like Yeltsin figuring out that they can hold and exercise greater power and authority by dissolving the Union than keeping it. I view the claim that Chernobyl had much to do with the end of the USSR as a naive and unrealistic analysis.

You're also right. One thing led to the other. Also the Russo-Afghan war.

https://unherd.com/2019/06/chernobyl-and-the-meltdown-of-the...

The part with "poor quailty Soviet tech" is of course bullshit. The VVER reactor fleet works fine without any major incidents. The RBMK by contrast was an irresponsible design pushed by a politically connected engineer. Otherwise most of the article also applies to China.

> A theory is that the collapse of the USSR was not any grassroots uprising or the expression of people longing for democracy, it was just mostly a few higher-ups like Yeltsin figuring out that they can hold and exercise greater power and authority by dissolving the Union than keeping it.

This theory must've been dreamt up by someone with next to no knowledge about the USSR. The Soviet Union collapsed through its republics (puppet states) declaring self-government, followed by declarations of independence later on.

Day by day, general disillusionment from Afghan war, disasters like Chernobyl and massacres like those in Tbilisi and Vilnius eroded authority of the central government until Gorbachev was commanding phantom armies like Hitler in his bunker in the final days of WWII. The conspiracy theory of KGB-led (or whoever else) coup ignores the decade of events leading up to the 1991 and Kremlin's increasingly desperate attempts to maintain control, all of which are extremely well documented, with direct participants of all levels still alive today.

I would place it on the same level as suggesting that the whole Vietnam-era peace movement and 1960s cultural revolution was a KGB plot and not a genuine grassroots movement.

The sentiment in Chernobyl is spot-on.

There seems to be much misinformation, as per one translation of sources, the Chinese CDC only asked that the samples which are kept in unsecured conditions/facilities be destroyed.

The way things work in governments around the world, that detail doesn't really tell us anything. The interpretation of "unsecured condition/facility" would be completely up to what the local government thought the central government was implying.

OTOH preventing unsecured facilities from holding such samples seems a valid thing to do.

The point the being the highly charged political divide on this issue makes it impossible to trust sources on either side of this and similar matters.

Well, we do know that the local government was suppressing things, because both sides claim that.

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