Today's Denunciation: The CCP
Also: When is the cure worse than the curse?
The Daily Denunciation
Today I propose to denounce the Chinese Communist Party.
A British journalist, George Knowles, has reported in the Daily Mail that China has reopened its wildlife markets.
Only a few weeks ago, the the Politburo Standing Committee issued this glorious statement. (If you think listening to Donald Trump’s press conferences is going to make you lose your mind, imagine listening to this all day.)
… The meeting emphasized the need to do a good job of propaganda, education, and public opinion guidance, to coordinate online and offline, domestic and international, major events and small matters, to better strengthen confidence, warm people’s hearts, and gather people’s hearts. We must thoroughly publicize the major decision-making arrangements of the Party Central Committee, fully report on the effectiveness of the joint prevention and control measures in various regions and departments, vividly tell the touching stories of the frontline of epidemic prevention and epidemic prevention, tell the story of China’s fight against the epidemic, and show the Chinese people’s spirit of unity and togetherness, gather the powerful forces of fighting against the epidemic. It is necessary to increase publicity and education of the law on the prevention and control of infectious diseases, and guide the whole society to act and behave in accordance with the law. It is necessary to face up to existing problems, release authoritative information in a timely manner, respond to the concerns of the masses, enhance timeliness, pertinence, and professionalism, and guide the masses to strengthen their confidence. It is necessary to carry out targeted spiritual civilization education, strengthen publicity and education on health concepts and knowledge on the prevention and control of infectious diseases, and educate and guide the broad masses of the people to improve the quality of civilization and the ability to protect themselves. It is necessary to strengthen the management and control of online media, and promote the implementation of the main responsibility, supervisor responsibility, and supervision responsibility. We must continue to do a good job of communication and coordination with the World Health Organization, relevant countries and regions, and promote the sharing of epidemic information and coordination of prevention and control strategies.
It continues in this vein for quite some time. But finally we get to this:
In response to the shortcomings and deficiencies exposed in the response to this epidemic … It is necessary to thoroughly investigate and rectify the public health environment and make up for shortcomings in public health. It is necessary to strengthen market supervision, resolutely ban and severely crack down on illegal wildlife markets and trade, and control major public health risks from the source. It is necessary to strengthen the construction of the rule of law and strengthen the guarantee of the rule of law in public health.
(NB: Behold, again, the miracle of Google Translate. That’s exactly the way it translated Xinhua’s report of the meeting. Not one sentence was unclear.)
Upon hearing this proclamation, the world sighed with relief and declared this was “a big step in the right direction.”
Daniel Challender, a researcher at the University of Oxford who has studied the pangolin trade, said the new decision made clear that China was “going to clamp down on pangolin meat.”
If Knowles’ report is accurate, it made nothing clear whatsoever.
But first, let’s ask if it is.
I can’t find any other article reporting this. That doesn’t mean it’s not true—absolutely not—only that this is strange, given the importance of the story.
The way the article is written is puzzling. I don’t see a dateline, so I don’t know if Knowles himself is in China. From Muckrack, I see that he often reports from Asia, so it’s certainly possible. But the article seems to be written deliberately to obscure the answer to that question:
Terrified dogs and cats crammed into rusty cages. Bats and scorpions offered for sale as traditional medicine. Rabbits and ducks slaughtered and skinned side by side on a stone floor covered with blood, filth, and animal remains.
Those were the deeply troubling scenes yesterday as China celebrated its 'victory' over the coronavirus by reopening squalid meat markets of the type that started the pandemic three months ago, with no apparent attempt to raise hygiene standards to prevent a future outbreak. …
As the pandemic that began in Wuhan forced countries worldwide to go into lockdown, a Mail on Sunday correspondent yesterday watched as thousands of customers flocked to a sprawling indoor market in Guilin, south-west China.
Here cages of different species were piled on top of each other. In another meat market in Dongguan, southern China, another correspondent photographed a medicine seller returning to business on Thursday with a billboard advertising bats – thought to be the cause of the initial Wuhan outbreak – along with scorpions and other creatures.
The Daily Mail tends to be a sensationalistic rag with low journalistic standards. It’s possible this article was written or edited to suggest Knowles had seen this for himself, even though, perhaps, he has not.
To judge from Knowles’ reporting, he is—as I am—appalled by cruelty to animals. Many of his previous articles focus upon animals around the world who have been tortured, abused, or otherwise unspeakably exploited. They’re almost unbearable to read. He’s probably had an eye on these markets for a long time, which might explain why only he thought it worth remarking that they’d been re-opened.
Or perhaps there are just so few Western journalists left in China—and those who remain are so cowed—that he was the only one who saw this, or he was the only one who thought it worth inflaming the government to report it.
Why did he send this story to the Daily Mail, rather than one of the highbrow papers for which he occasionally reports? Perhaps he’s signed an exclusive contract with the Daily Mail?
Or perhaps the Daily Mail pays better. In fact, I know it does.
Still, there are some stories of such significance that if I were the one reporting them, I’d try to get them into a newspaper that’s taken more seriously.
The article refers to “a Mail on Sunday correspondent” in the third-person. That might mean Knowles himself did not see the open markets. Since his name is on the piece, it doesn’t seem plausible that he used this strange phrasing because he’s in China, wary of aggravating the authorities, and wishes to stay anonymous.
So perhaps Knowles has not seen this himself. Perhaps he’s receiving emails and photographs from trusted contacts there.
Or this may just be badly written.
Perhaps Knowles is, indeed, in China, and wants some kind of distance from the article should Chinese officials interrogate him or decide to throw him out—as they recently did American journalists working for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.
I’ve looked everywhere for confirmation, but the Daily Mail seems to be the only original source—though the story was quickly picked up and recycled by a range of mostly right-leaning media outlets and in the Indian media. I also found this article in Al Jazeera, which does a good job of explaining why the CCP might be unable to get control of this.
Did no one else think this worth reporting? Or was no one else able to report it?
So, if the article is correct, China’s gone right back to selling pangolins and bats—as well as dogs and cats, the photos of which I find unbearable.
These markets aren’t just inherently disgusting. (The West anyway hasn’t got a leg to stand on when it comes to deploring cruelty to animals. We make an exception for dogs and cats, but otherwise, we are mightily cruel. That our standards of slaughter are more hygienic means nothing to the vast number of animals we slaughter.)
But these markets are a global menace to humans. The news they’ve reopened them is highly significant.
What does it mean? Does the CCP not believe the virus emerged from a wet market? If so, where do they think it came from? If they do, do they think it was just an unfortunate fluke, even though one deadly zoonotic disease after another has emerged from them? Are they unable to keep people from re-opening them? I don’t understand this at all.
If this story is accurate—on balance, I’d bet it is—why aren’t we unleashing our bot armies to make sure the whole world knows what they’re doing? However many millions of tons of medical supplies they fly to Europe and Africa, and however many bots they unleash on the Internet, surely it couldn’t be enough to the overcome the revulsion and fury people would feel if they realized that after all this, China just started chowing down on the pangolins again as if none of this has happened?
This is fake. It never happened:
Europe—and Italy especially—is saturated in Chinese propaganda. Russian propaganda, too, but I think I’m only allowed to denounce one of them at a time.
The Chinese Bot Army is working round the clock Almost half of the tweets published between March 11 and 23 with the hashtag #forzaCinaeItalia—Go China, go Italy—and more than 37 percent with the hashtag #grazieCina—thank you China—came from bots.
We are losing the world’s most winnable battle for hearts and minds. No one wants to like the Chinese Communist Party, for God’s sake. But we’ve made ourselves so absent and spiteful—and they’ve made themselves so ubiquitous and reassuring—that this now represents the views of millions of citizens in allied countries:
Now, the answer to the question—“Why would you choose to ban Huawei to please Donald Trump”—is that if you don’t, you’ll hand all your citizens’ data to this country that gave you this pandemic.”
But it doesn’t matter: We don’t live in a rational world. We don’t live in a fair one, either. This is what the world sees:
This is what we should be doing, but we will do none of it.
That’s the right prescription for repelling China’s bid for global hegemony. But the article has a fantasy quality: “This is what the United States would do if it were still the normal United States.” Who’s the intended audience for this article? It’s a thought exercise. None of this, none, will be done by this Administration.
It appals me. The world is locked down, dying of a mutant virus, and terrified—all because of a monumental failure of Chinese governance. How could it be that the message this terrified world is taking from this is, “China to the rescue?” How could they be thinking, “This shows the wisdom of giving all of our data to Huawei?”
And no, don’t tell yourself this is because the world isn’t good enough for America. This is because presidents matter, and we elected a cretin. We will pay for this, and pay for it, and pay for it again. We may never recover. Note that I say “may.” We may also recover, eventually. But the amount of pain, loss, sacrifice, and global misery the world will endure because of this folly will be incalculable. Historians won’t be kind to us for this debacle.
The Unusual Question of the Day
The reason you didn’t see that story in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post is because China threw their journalists out. The foreign journalists who remain are under intense pressure to shut up.
An authoritarian curtain has descended around the world. The free world is shrinking by the way. This raises a dilemma for American journalists. If they fail to defer to the local regime’s sensibilities, they’re likely to be thrown out of the country, or worse. If they’re thrown out, they’ll be unable to report any story at all.
Newspaper editors face a choice: Should they run stories that may be perfectly accurate, but which—by failing to report the obvious—function as propaganda for authoritarian regimes? Should they run no stories at all because they have no reporters on the ground? Should they run stories none of their reporters have verified firsthand?
Americans will instinctively say, “Journalists should not serve the ends of a brutal, authoritarian regime—especially not when it’s an American adversary—and they should not lie by omission to their readers.”
Tablet recently ran a piece by Peter Theroux excoriating Thomas Erdbrink and The New York Times because Erdbrink has gone silent in Iran and the Times hasn’t explained why. Theroux believes Erdbrink is being blackmailed—it sure sounds like it—and his point is that by failing to say this forthrightly, the Times is doing the regime’s dirty work.
But might half the truth be better than none? We really do need to know whether those wet markets are open, after all. Our fates are bound up in the fate of those wet markets.
Our policy makers need to know that sort of thing, too. Upon reading the article in the Mail, Lindsey Graham called upon China to shut down its “absolutely disgusting” markets: “I’m going to write a letter to the Chinese ambassador,” he said on Fox, “saying if you don’t shut those wet markets down, our trading relationship is going to change.”
A US Senator should not have to rely on the Daily Mail for news about China that may shape his policy approach.
So I don’t know if this is an open-and-shut moral decision at all.
But whatever newspaper editors decide—and of course, journalists do pull their punches to preserve access, all the time, both abroad and at home—wouldn’t it be best to publish every single story with a link, right by the dateline, that says this?
“There are restrictions on speech in this country. Find out more.”
Suppose that link took readers to a detailed article explaining the nature of formal and informal restrictions on speech in that country. This statement by the China Foreign Correspondents’ Club—in response to the expulsion of our journalists—would serve well, for example:
Foreign correspondents working in China are subject to surveillance and government pressure, in an environment of extreme hostility toward the types of factual reporting Chinese authorities claim to welcome. Such conduct is as unacceptable as it is longstanding.
In “Control, Halt, Delete,” the FCCC’s report on working conditions in 2019, 82 percent of surveyed correspondents said they experienced interference, harassment or violence while reporting; 70 percent reported the cancellation or withdrawal of interviews, which they know or believe to be due to actions taken by Chinese authorities; 25 percent were aware of sources being harassed, detained, called in for questioning, or otherwise suffering negative consequences for interacting with a foreign journalist; and 51 percent said they were obstructed at least once by police or other officials. Of those who reported from China’s north-western Xinjiang region, 65 percent were prevented from accessing locations by what they believe to be staged traffic accidents or road blockages.
You’d not only see that link above every story datelined, “Beijing,” “Moscow,” or “Saudi Arabia,” you’d see it above stories datelined “London,” or “Washington, D.C.”
If newspapers did this with every country, describing both formal, legal restrictions and other motivations journalists might have to censor themselves—“Journalists in this country often die in improbable accidents,” say, or, “Citizens of this country form mobs on Twitter and pressure editors to fire journalists, often successfully”—it would resolve this moral problem. It would serve other useful purposes, too. It would allow readers to understand that the story they’re reading has been, in some way, censored. It would repeatedly draw readers’ attention to the curtain of darkness that has descended the world around. It would illustrate how laws abridging speech are apt to be used. If this was done routinely, as part of the dateline on every story, no one country could complain they’ve been hypocritically singled-out.
What do you think? Good idea?
The Personal Anecdote
I don’t really have a good one. I haven’t left my apartment in so long I’ve sort of forgotten what that’s like.
The Country
Today’s country is any given country x.
When does the cure become worse than the curse?
Not for a long, long time, the AEI concludes. (And this is the AEI, which is not exactly ideologically disposed toward trying to find a reason to keep the economy shut.)
We investigate the optimal duration of the COVID-19 suppression policy. We find that absent extensive suppression measures, the economic cost of the virus will total over $9 trillion, which represents 43 percent of annual GDP. The optimal duration of the suppression policy crucially depends on the policy’s effectiveness in reducing the rate of the virus transmission. We use three different assumptions for the suppression policy effectiveness, measured by the R0 that it can achieve (R0 indicates the number of people an infected person infects on average at the start of the outbreak). Using the assumption that the suppression policy can achieve R0 = 1, we assess that it should be kept in place between 30 and 34 weeks. If suppression can achieve a lower R0 = 0.7, the policy should be in place between 11 and 12 weeks. Finally, for the most optimistic assumption that the suppression policy can achieve an even lower R0 of 0.5, we estimate that it should last between seven and eight weeks. We further show that stopping the suppression policy before six weeks does not produce any meaningful improvements in the pandemic outcome.
All of these models are models, meaning they’re only as good as the initial assumptions, which are for now, necessarily, are based on untidy data. Some of their assumptions seem off to me, for example, that 90 percent of infected people will develop symptoms that would need to be treated with medications, missed work, medical visits, or hospitalizations. I don’t think we have any basis to assume it’s that high yet. But this wouldn’t really change the conclusions that radically. It’s a solid paper, to the extent anything can be right now.
You can also think of it theoretically. The more harsh the quarantine, the lower R-naught. The lower R-naught, the shorter the quarantine. Since the United States is highly unlikely to go full Wuhan, this means it’s up to individual Americans to decide how long they want this to last.
So you can now hate everyone who’s lax about the quarantine for another reason: Not only are they endangering everyone else, they’re prolonging the quarantine and destroying the economy.
Chart of the Day
This section is stupid. I didn’t see a chart worth posting here today. I declare this section a failure.
A Question for my Readers
What do you think. Is this more digestible? I feel as if I just crammed the usual newsletter into artificial headings, and it didn’t quite work.
Dear Claire, I have an interesting chart for you which shows how government’s reactions and trustworthiness is perceived in different countries. Check out https://covid19-survey.org/results.html Kind regards, Edouard
Please go back to your 'normal' way of writing, which was just fine.