Perry Link is absolutely right here (see article below), in his guide to how to read the Communist Party’s China. He just got one detail wrong: The regime actually abandoned the wet market theory after only a few months. It was never explained why, but probably because they realized it would soon become obvious that it could not be true (virus contagion was not just at the market, and this fact could not be concealed like the many other things and science data that have been successfully concealed). Since then, the regime has focused, Putin-like, on fabricating and spreading a cascade of disinformation and distractions, such as that Covid came from foreign frozen food, that it originated in Italy, and so on and so forth — the message clearly being: “Anywhere but the lab!” –Which actually supports Perry Link’s position even more.
Even more so with the just-released Chinese film from the Wuhan lab) which shows its camera system, until now a secret, monitoring lab accidents and their handling. It also shows the bats bred at the lab … also news. And, it shows the lionizing of the brave Wuhan lab researchers going to caves and fearlessly and recklessly expose themselves to grave virus dangers. It’s like the earlier cave-researcher hero movie “Youth in the Wild” which, believe it or not, is STILL up on YouTube, showing how the researchers endanger themselves, and the rest of us. As Alina Chan has said all along, the virus route to the city of Wuhan may have been riding on such researchers. She includes this scenario in the range of lab leak/research related hypothesis — I say, think of this possibility as a version of the recent global frog-killer fungus spreading around the world, where it turned out one major vehicle of the spread was … well-meaning but careless globetrotting frog researchers who brought the fungus on their boots! The flagrant recklessness of the Chinese researchers on display here, and in the new lab video, is comparable.
Sincerely, Magnus Fiskesjö, nf42@cornell.edu
Source: Wall Street Journal (6/14/21)
Beijing Protests a Lab Leak Too Much
By Perry Link
I am as eager as anyone to follow the world’s virologists as they try to determine how Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan, China. But as a longtime student of Chinese Communist political language, I will need considerable persuading that the disease came from bats or a wet market. The linguistic evidence is overwhelming that Chinese leaders believe the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source.
Many years ago a distinguished Chinese writer, Wu Zuxiang, explained to me that there is truth in Communist Party pronouncements, but you have to read them “upside down.” If a newspaper says “the Party has made great strides against corruption in Henan,” then you know that corruption has recently been especially bad in Henan. If you read about the heroic rescue of eight miners somewhere, you can guess that a mine collapse might have killed hundreds who aren’t mentioned. Read upside-down, there is a sense in which the official press never lies. It cannot lie. It has to tell you what the party wants you to believe, and if you can figure out the party’s motive — which always exists — then you have a sense of the truth. Continue reading →
