Stacks of Urns in Wuhan Prompt New Questions of Virus’s Toll

Ah no from what I have read the information and warnings were given by the intelligence community but were ignored. A country ruthlessly quarantined a city of 20 million. At the same time it stopped movement of people inside the whole country. Western countries ignored it Asian countries did not and were faster to put restrictions. Now politicians in the west are trying to use China to deflect from the fact that they were caught with their pants down.

given the fact there were 400 to 900, I wouldn't be surprised at any of those videos. have I missed something?

If China stayed on the curve the USA is currently on, they would now need about 1.5M urns. The article mentions stacks of 3,500.

To put 3,500 into perspective, article says there are 56,000 cremations per year in Wuhan alone. That's 4,700 a month. Every normal year 9M people die in China.

I'm not sure western media is eager to portray China's doom, but i do think they tend to blow stories out of proportion.

On this topic: when a city of 10 million people has been locked down for 2 months, even with no coronavirus at all they'd be backed up with 10000+ bodies, so it's not surprising to see a bunch of urns.

On a more general note, i think western media does tend to run with not particularly well-sourced China stories. That includes both stories like this one that could be interpreted negatively, but it also includes reprinting unvetted party propaganda.

The problem is that the CPC does not allow very many western journalists into China, and the ones it does allow it doesn't give the same kind of freedom of movement and freedom to report on things that we have come to expect in the west. So, as a result, the news that makes it out is often fairly flimsy and suggestive rather than heavily researched. This is deliberate - it's how the CPC can keep control of the narrative. As someone who lives here, it's extremely frustrating, because it's impossible to really know what's going on anywhere except right outside my front door.

No urns outside my front door, btw.

This story was reported by reputable Chinese media first: http://photos.caixin.com/2020-03-26/101534542_6.html?NOJP#pi...

Bloomberg is just aggregating and translating here.

On the flip side, China has a long tradition of lying to international community. I know it actively and persistently misrepresents its economic data.

> but I get the feeling that they are managing the outbreak and the economy far more effectively than their western counterparts.

If they weren't, how would anyone know? The Chinese are vigorous in suppressing that sort of bad news.

It's been like this as long as I can remember. At least one major newspaper would have an article a week about how China's on the verge of economic collapse and there are a billion obvious signs. People still gobble it up. It's impossible to convince people that it's BS. It's people passing off their hopes that their rival is a total mess as truth.

China's striking back now by "allowing" (promoting) conspiracy theories on social media that the US military created the virus and tried to use it to take down China.

COVID-19 started as a chat group screenshot, then a picture of an government document. Both were leaked and could be classified as rumors at the time.

Many of them can be fake, but it's the way infos flow, because can you trust their official reports? The world was told that this virus doesn't transmit between humans.

> ...they are managing the outbreak and the economy far more effectively than their western counterparts.

And Mussolini got the trains to run on time!

> I say this as someone who is neither Chinese or American. But I just notice the eagerness of western media to portray chinas doom and incompetence.

Mid-European media generally say that Chinas and south Koreas big data approach to takle the problem was for great benefit. It raises concerns that regulations which have been taken there and which are considered in Europe as well, might become standard once the crises is over, severly restricting freedom rights.

I do not wittness discussions of incompetence dealing with the crisis in China.

I do see discussions of acting much to late in the UK and the US. Might all be my information bubble.

well, China failed and we're suffering unimaginable consequences. If they have the ability to imprison and isolate millions of Muslims, why didn't they isolate patient zero to patient xxx? Is not like they don't have the manpower, or laws for that.

Once you lie for the millionth time and thing, people might just not believe you anymore. In other words, China's Social Credit Score is zero.

> ... I get the feeling that they are managing the outbreak and the economy far more effectively than their western counterparts.

What gave you that impression?

Why would you trust data coming form the country that is putting over 2+ million people into concentration, er... 're-education' camps, and it was denying it....

Propaganda is a strong tool of dictatorial regimes, and in cases of existential crises it is essential.

On the other side of the border, another communist regime (North Korea), still claims that has 0 cases of Covid-19, yet the indication is that deaths are incresed.... Iran, until recently it was denying it had a problem, and their numbers are just not trusted.....

In any regime where 1) Free speech is suppressed with extreme measures (people disappearing) 2) There is strong incentive from that regime to mask numbers.... They probably did, unless there were independent verifiers that could verify those numbers....

I lived under a communist regime, and absolutely don't trust the numbers coming out of China... This is even worse than Chernobyl, which true numbers of victims of the after-math cleanup efforts are not known even today:

"Since the 1990s—when the declassification of selected liquidator records prompted some direct participants to speak publicly—some with direct involvement in the liquidators' cleanup efforts have asserted that several thousand liquidators died as a result of the cleanup.[18] Other organizations claim that total liquidator deaths as a result of the cleanup operation may number at least 6,000.[19]"

Are you blaming people for not believing a dictatorial régime that has been lying consistently about many things? Are you forgetting that they persecuted whistleblowers at the start of the epidemic, or is that propaganda too?

After watching this personal account of a British YouTuber, I can absolutely believe that the Chinese have the spread of infection under control by leveraging their extreme surveillance capabilities: https://youtu.be/0W0B2Qg3r2k

>based on this sketchy evidence we got

>but I get the feeling

Folks, we need to understand that there is a real-life war going on in front of us, in the form of a trade war mostly but also a so-called 'cyberwar'. This is precisely the event that we've been predicting in the hacker community for decades, and the very important thing to realise is that "Truth" is not what it seems, any more.

Duplicity is the order of the day among all the governments of the world - those in power know the real truth, gleaned from their statistics machines - but those of us on the other side of the propaganda mirror are well and truly scheduled to be the victims of this battle.

NONE of the worlds' leading countries are being truthful about their circumstances. Beware the media dependency we've all been kettled into having. Seek alternative sources, always, for the information you think you need in order to survive this war. There are, literally, NO trustworthy mainstream media sources any more - they've all be usurped by the military industrial pharmaceutical complex, period.

On some level it's a battle between two ways of running a country. One could expect nothing less than dirt and lies being flung about.

> Don't get me wrong, China's attacks on free speech and persecution of muslims is a terrible terrible thing, but I get the feeling that they are managing the outbreak and the economy far more effectively than their western counterparts.

Of course it's "effective" to shut off an entire city, patrolling the streets and arresting everyone with an elevated temperature, putting them into detainment camps with no protection from each other whatsoever.

And that's without fudging the numbers.

What would've been even more effective: Not lying about the outbreak, not suppressing information for two months, not downplaying the risk and keeping everything running as usual, just to save face. Until shit hits the fan, at which point local government becomes the scapegoat.

Seriously, if you want to look at effective management, look at Hong Kong, Singapore or South Korea, but even that was only possible because they had procedures in place due to the earlier SARS outbreak.

Mainland China has started this, has completely mismanaged the initial outbreak, and now blames it on foreigners.

In Europe, you can see a clear pattern between liberalism and authoritarianism: Those countries that espouse liberal virtues, that didn't want to instate border controls, that were wary of taking away people's freedoms - those were hit harder. Authoritarians, on the other hand, have been strengthened.

Recognize the trade-off.

This crisis has been eye opening for me, the American propaganda machine is working more than ever. It's just sad to look at from the outside. You can't make it go away by throwing money at it or calling the army, all you need is a structured government and a solid health/social system, which is exactly what the US lack.

China's been demonized for a while, and more often than not for good reasons, but the US seems to be completely blind and deaf about their own issues. Trump daily conferences about covid19 will be taught in school textbooks in 50 years as a prime example of propaganda. "We're the best" "We have the best experts" "the chinese virus" "the invisible enemy" "wartime president" "nobody has done anything like that before" "we have the biggest [cargo plane] in the world" while literally showing a picture of it [0], what is this, a dick size contest ? "I don't take responsibility at all", "it's going to disappear one day, it's like a miracle" "we're doing great, it's gonna be so good" "our country is doing so great", answer to "what is your message to student blocked at home": "You are a citizen of the greatest country of all time, and we are attacked ... we're winning the battle and we're going to win the war". The icing on the cake is blaming china saying they hid the infection (every experts knew by the end of december that shit was about to hit the fan) as a reason why they didn't take any actions before mid march. "Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion", besides the hundreds of experts who're telling exactly that for months now while at the same time saying "I’ve felt that it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic"

Compare that to all the other countries, especially in Europe, that are basically saying "this is bad, it's just the beginning, it'll get worst". I wish luck to all americans, especially the ones at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/fkm07Xd.png

Yes. I've said in similar threads the existential threat to the party here is economic ruin and failure to protect the people: the belief all things in China are lies is false hope for anti communists, the Chinese communist party needs this problem solved just as much as the west does.