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Comment by demarq | Hacker News Reader

I'm I the only one who notices a strong pattern of "China is failing, based on this sketchy evidence we got" type articles in American media.

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.

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.

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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.

> I'm not sure western media is eager to portray China's doom

Then you definitely don't know how the world functions. There are allocated funds exactly with this purposes. There are the whole groups of people whose main agenda and work description is doing exactly that. But it will be often wrapped in some different wording like "responding to the propaganda" or something, even if the "response" is actual new propaganda being created and then published in the most media.

Could you elaborate on who some of these groups are?

There are many aspects of this, and what can be presently proven is always an extremely small tip of the iceberg. I've read a lot of different historical accounts and it is practically a given that all these mechanisms or even institutions and practices which existed up to recently aren't magically dismantled in the present moment. For the start, read about the practice of "embedding" journalists or about:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...

Then consider (if you are old enough) about what the public perception of such coverage was, at the given point of time. Basically, with enough distance in time, we can easily read about the huge distortions, and just shrug and say "yes it was so" but somehow too many people assume that the present moment is somehow, by some magic, "clean."

My favorite example is the

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier

"a 2003 briefing document for the British prime minister Tony Blair's Labour Party government. It was issued to journalists on 3 February 2003 by Alastair Campbell, Blair's Director of Communications and Strategy, and concerned Iraq and weapons of mass destruction."

An apparent "proof" turned out to be "plagiarised from various unattributed sources including a 13-year-old thesis produced by a student at California State University."

If something that obvious (after the fact) was used as a proof for many nations to go to war, and readily repeated by all the media, what do you expect from the rest of the coverage? I personally remember the coverage from that times, it was considered "patriotic" to not even try to point to the better verified facts.

Being surprised about the fact that the direct agendas are behind most of the "news" production is just like being surprised that "there are exactly that much important news in the world per day to fit the front page of the newspaper."

Regarding "embedding" I remember reading different articles about the journalists and editors being directly enlisted by some agencies to "independently" provide "patriotic" coverage, even while operating in the mainland, not in some foreign war zones. Maybe somebody saved some such link, I haven't, and Google is not helping me.

The current state is not different, to paraphrase James Mickens, even now these players could without problem claim "we are not doing this" while at the same time wearing the t-shirts "we are totally doing this" and... only the first part will be in the titles.

Certainly there are plenty of institutions hoping to influence the media to report stories in a particular way. However, that fact doesn't address the suggestion of the original poster, which was that the media as a whole is deliberately trying to find stories of Chinese doom and gloom. I don't think that's true.

Putting aside the fact that in countries with a free press it's hard to ascribe any one outlook to the media as a whole, my feeling is that most media organizations do honestly hope to inform their readers. But there is lots of information out there, and there are editorial decisions to be made around what makes the cut or how deep to dig on a story. There is no objective way to make those decisions, although presumably the interests of the readers are considered.

Of course, it's no big secret that editors and reporters are biased, or that they can be influenced. Fortunately in countries where there is freedom of speech, people have the freedom to report on that too.

The thing about China specifically is that people in other countries are hungry for information on China because it is a rising global superpower. So it makes sense that the media wants to jump on any China story they can get. Unfortunately, due to the circumstances i mentioned before, good stories on China are thin on the ground. As a result i think there is probably too much hearsay and propaganda (from whatever side) seeping into the reporting. I don't think that's deliberate on the media's behalf, i think it's more just a result of them being hobbled by a regime that is actively hostile to press freedom.

> I don't think that's deliberate on the media's behalf

And I'm sure it is deliberate. Like I've said, not only the editors deliberately select the news, what will be covered and how it will be covered, there are agencies producing the news that the media "just covers" but having established preferences of how the coverage is supposed to be.

I was also ignorant about the phenomenon until I was directly in the location being covered. Then I've discovered that it is known that "the news are correct, except about the stuff I'm being directly involved with."

I'm just reading the front page of one local newspaper of one European country which spends almost no ink on coronavirus topic (and I know more than one president or prime minister was also doing the same until only a few days ago). Even avoiding to mention some facts is an editorial policy. In the cases of misinformation about China, repeating unproven information or even giving it any attention at all, and especially using that for titles is as a deliberate act as any other is.

There's nothing "accidental" there.

Can't believe official numbers from governments, can't trust journalists to provide accurate accounts (either because of bias or lack of access)...

How did we reach here? This just sucks

When could you believe numbers from authoritarian governments? We never left that station. Very few governments on global scale can be sort of trusted to not lie too much.

Could you, for example, trust Western journalists to provide accurate accounts from USSR? Or believe USSR official numbers?

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.

Just something I noticed when I posted something critical of China. If it was factual it could get a bunch of upvotes then magically a bunch of downvotes to push it back to 1 or 2 points positive. As it got a few more +1's then a few more -1's would appear to keep it just afloat, but no more. The oscillations were... interesting.

This doesn't have to be China either.

Mis-information has a lot of value to many countries atm. It's election year ramped up to the max.

Downvoting might just be to raise other comments.

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

Long as in centuries long.

It's been an ongoing problem.

Honest question, do they even see it as we do, as lying, or something else? Or perhaps they see it as lying but it doesn't carry the negativity there that we here do. Or perhaps such behaviour so reflexive that truth/falsity doesn't even come into decisions. Genuinely curious for real insight.

Rather than waiting for answers from HN, you can easily google literature which tackles this question, including libraries. Short answer - they do see it differently.

Like the other comment said, it is a difference in cultural perspective.

I personally think it comes from the massive population. As an individual, you MUST present yourself as being the absolute best. If you're "just okay" you blend into the crowd and will never advance beyond your station.

So every minor achievement is talked up as something grander than it is.

And every major shortcoming is either ignored, or mitigated as a minor flaw.

But the Chinese culture is used to this and knows how much is legitimate and how much is BS. Us Westerns don't get it because we generally tell a less exaggerated version of the truth (not the whole truth, just less hyperbolic).

So when we realize a statement out of China is fanciful BS, we assume they're maliciously lying, when they're probably not, they just have a different cultural take on the bullshit multiplier.

But it goes the other way too.

I've had a miscommunication before because I told someone who grew up in China that something was "alright". Which as an American I meant "it's really fucking good, but I'm not ballsy enough to say so because there might be something I don't know about which will make it look like a toy". But the person I was speaking to actually thought I meant it was actually "just alright" as in very average.

> 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!

> And Mussolini got the trains to run on time!

More then that. Some of Mussolini era laws benefit Italy to this day.

he did not get trains to run on time.

And also some of the Nazi laws in Germany. So what? Even a broken clock is correct twice a day.

In the meantime he implemented racial laws in 1938 and dragged us into war alongside Germany. For both of those things (among others) the fascist regime is responsible for the death of millions of Italians (not to count people in Albania Ethiopia and Eritrea or in the allied armies), yet you choose to repeat this propaganda which is also in many cases factually incorrect: most of the "good things Fascism did" were actually started a couple of decades early.

nope he did not.

But that's the thing ... either he did or did not.

Either way is cause to ponder.

> 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.

The Mid-European political scene isn't as conducive to freedom/human rights issue, as say .. the USA and its coalition used to be.

There is definitely a swing towards less-free societies in the world today. We're getting our rights eroded daily, it seems.

Here in Austria, it has been enlightening to witness the general publics' resistance to the practical actions being enacted by its government to protect citizens from the pandemic. On the one hand, I'm quite proud of my distrusting-of-government associates, inasmuch as I don't really believe we should slavishly obey our rulers without question, but on the other hand I'm quite concerned that the mob mentality/collectivity is ruinous to our survival as a culture in the long run.

It seems we are weeks away from disaster, unless something effective is done - and in the meantime the very strong Viennese anarchist/neo-Marxist caricature truly seems to be more willing to pitch us all into the abyss in order to wreck it all, for future refactoring, rather than help a majority survive.

Time will tell how productive these sociological phenomena will treat us all.

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]"

I take note of these in my comment, but no where do I say I trust the Chinese.

Not trusting western media on Chinese coverage does not equal trusting the Chinese government.

I think you may have missed the subtlety here.

my comment relates specifically to articles on western media regarding china's handling of the outbreak and it's economic outlook.

there is a sublety here that is getting lost

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

no context here

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.

> those in power know the real truth, gleaned from their statistics machines

I honestly fear even those in force do not know as they have to rely on what their experts tell them.

Many poltical agenda might now been pushed through, officialy to fight against corona while preparing a new world order.

Oh, we are well and truly on the route to a new world order.

It'll be whoever wins this war.

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.

> 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.

It's hard to tell whether you are talking about the US, UK or China

> It's hard to tell whether you are talking about the US, UK or China

It isn't, if you have read the paragraphs immediately preceding the one you cited. To be specific, I'm talking about the one government that:

- had the initial outbreak

- arrested the people who were first warning the public about the outbreak for "spreading rumors"

- banned researchers from genetic sequencing of the virus and have them destroy the samples

- banned people from discussing the disease in public

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932...

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

> 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.

All the best to the US citizens to go through the crisis. I sadly feel once it will be over some more will understand that social health care is something everybody is affected and how many lifes (effective) obamacare would have saved.

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.

I'd say the same things are afflicting all world leaders right now, especially trump

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