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Comment by quercusgrisea | Hacker News Reader

That they've eradicated coronavirus in Wuhan? The photos are pretty self-evident. If there was a government cover-up and people were still getting sick then we wouldn't see people putting themselves at risk to go to a music festival.

>AFAIK they have kicked out all non-Chinese journalists so that they have sole control over the truth.

I'm not able to find a source to confirm that, but I do see some news articles from earlier this year abiut China revoking press credentials for journalists from 3 US news outlets. AFAICT from searching, journalists from other countries and news outlets are not affected.

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wouldn't see people putting themselves at risk to go to a music festival.

Aren't music festivals exactly the place you would expect high levels of risk taking around crowds?

If there was a government cover-up and people were still getting sick then we wouldn't see people putting themselves at risk to go to a music festival.

I disagree with the conclusion here by looking at what people are willing to do locally.

> If there was a government cover-up and people were still getting sick then we wouldn't see people putting themselves at risk to go to a music festival.

A tad misleading, if people cannot communicate publicly about people getting sick or hear this from media, why wouldn't they go to a music festival? They wouldn't know. Interested to hear your thoughts

I made a mistake and did not quote the line properly. The comment is not mine, but a quote from the poster I replied to.

And for context, the 13 journalist ban that was in direct response to the US initiated banning of 60 Chinese journalists one month earlier.

>If there was a government cover-up and people were still getting sick then we wouldn't see people putting themselves at risk to go to a music festival.

If the coverup was effective why wouldn’t they? We know the Chinese government is extremely good at propagandizing their own citizens.

The Chinese government is not "extremely good" at propagandizing their own citizen. Many Chinese know that there's censorship, and they take their media with a grain of salt. Chinese propaganda is also extremely crude, simple and straightforward. If you watch Chinese propaganda for a while, you will notice this. Especially many of those who have been overseas know that western propaganda is much, much more sophisticated and harder to detect compared to Chinese propaganda.

Don't we have evidence from other countries that some people will, in fact, put themselves at risk when the virus is spreading? It's certainly not the Chinese government's official position that the virus is gone forever and everyone's safe now.

> That they've eradicated coronavirus in Wuhan? The photos are pretty self-evident. If there was a government cover-up and people were still getting sick then we wouldn't see people putting themselves at risk to go to a music festival.

I think you underestimate the power of government propaganda.

If Chinese citizens are told by their government that covid is no longer a risk to the general population and that western media outlets are fear mongering to damage China, they will believe it regardless of the truth. The CCP is the truth in China.

It's not like covid is the black plague, bodies don't pile up in the streets no matter how bad it gets. Some elderly die here and there and life moves on (and plus it doesn't spread all that fast because mask usage is a cultural thing there anyway).

I just have a hard time believing that a country with as much corruption, pollution, and just general lack of sanitation as China does has "completely eradicated" the virus, meanwhile South Korea is taking containment measures for its latest wave.

I think more it's more likely China just put on a dog and pony show for the world, but really they haven't eradicated covid at all and the citizens are just kept in ignorance. This is, of course, gross speculation with no evidence to back it up. But in my mind it's like "the most populous country on the planet claims they've only had 4,634 deaths total due to covid, hmm..." and I start to think I'm being lied to by a country that wants to save face on the world stage.

Then again, maybe this is a scenario where having a dictator is advantageous to having an inefficient collection of bumbling democracies. When you have a god king that can force 11 million people to take a medical test within 14 days (or else?), you have an upper hand over countries where stuff like "due process" and "deliberation" slow down policy making.

>If Chinese citizens are told by their government that covid is no longer a risk to the general population and that western media outlets are fear mongering to damage China, they will believe it regardless of the truth. The CCP is the truth in China.

Nonsense. Chinese people aren't an unthinking monolith. Like anywhere else, some people believe whatever the government tells them, some people believe any old nonsense on social media and some are savvy and sceptical.

The only thing more effective than Chinese censorship of the internet is the efforts of Chinese citizens to satirise and subvert it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/asia/12beast.html

Ya their satirizing is so effective you have to go back 10 years for an article about it but their social credit system would have downgraded you for reading that article.

I think the level of naivete on your part shows someone who doesn't worry about getting called for tea.

China has been releasing padded GDP numbers for the past 15 years. Many have doubted the true economic growth. Yet now magically they're the top economic competitor to the United States and being taken seriously as a threat to global leadership?

There is clear evidence of the virus being taken care of, so I'm pretty sure if numbers are off, they're off in the same way GDP is padded, and not orders of magnitude off.

> this is a scenario where having a dictator is advantageous to having an inefficient collection of bumbling democracies

Yes, and I'd go further and say it's not just democracies and dictatorships but cultures of individualism and collectivism. It's no coincidence that east asia has done so well (South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, Singapore) compared to the US and much of Europe.

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