Society

news and reports on contemporary social issues in Greater China

US intelligence concludes China misrepresented coronavirus deaths (3)

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In discussions about government accountability on these pages, mention of state actors other than the Chinese one is rare, so Wendy Larson’s comment is much welcome, akin to letting much needed air into the room. Her bringing the U.S. into the discussion, while still limited, at least moves us a little closer to an appreciation of our very complex (global) realities.

Given that China — what it is, how it acts, etc. — as a political entity  is constantly shaped by its relational interactions with the rest of the world, one wonders how such a neglect of others can have persisted for so long. I realize that this is a China-studies list but, surely, our disciplinary-area specialisms should not define us — or our concerns — so narrowly, lest we become that proverbial frog-in-the-well?

What seems to be sorely needed on these pages are richer, more internationalist, and, hence, more balanced perspectives. Otherwise this blog risks becoming at best a bastion of academic provincialism; at worst, an academic echo-chamber of the China-bashing industry of which the ‘free’ Western corporate media now specialises, and duly profits from. Cultural monotheists may not like it but comparative and contextualised studies are actually needed to make sense of human complexities. Even more so going into the future, I suspect. Continue reading US intelligence concludes China misrepresented coronavirus deaths (3) →

Quiet burials

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Source: NYT (4/3/20)
China Pushes for Quiet Burials as Coronavirus Death Toll Is Questioned
Officials are ​trying to curb expressions of grief and control the narrative​ amid doubts about the official number of deaths in China.
By Amy Qin and Cao Li

Workers in protective suits screened visitors to the Biandanshan Cemetery in Wuhan on Tuesday. Credit…Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Liu Pei’en held the small wooden box that contained his father’s remains. Only two months ago, he had helplessly clutched his father’s frail hand as the elderly man took his last breath, and the pain was still raw. He wept.

But there was little time, or space, for Mr. Liu to grieve. He said officials in the central Chinese city of Wuhan had insisted on accompanying him to the funeral home and were waiting anxiously nearby. Later, they followed him to the cemetery where they watched him bury his father, he said. Mr. Liu saw one of his minders taking photos of the funeral, which was over in 20 minutes.

“My father devoted his whole life to serving the country and the party,” Mr. Liu, 44, who works in finance, said by phone. “Only to be surveilled after his death.” Continue reading Quiet burials →

US intelligence concludes China misrepresented coronavirus deaths (2)

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I wonder if Tung-yi Kho has been reading the news. For the last several months, mainstream American newspaper, blogs, and journals have appropriately heaped criticism on the coronavirus response in the US, singling out Donald Trump and his gutting of expertise at every level of government (as well as his nepotism, most recently putting his unqualified son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of virus response—Kushner’s first appearance has been widely criticized), the severely lacking health insurance system, the radical right’s rejection of scientific knowledge and their ability to influence the president, the failure to stockpile protective gear for hospitals and medical workers, the inability to test—which makes it very likely that the number of infected people are in fact much greater than those verified—and the overall incompetence and inability to take organized and concerted action. Every day I read twenty or so articles along these lines, in common publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and even the Wall Street Journal. They also come up on my google news feed with great regularity, and there I can see that even minor venues are publishing similar critiques. Articles on the coronavirus and the failures of the US government in addressing it are available free of charge at most major publications. In other words, no one is in the least distracted from the dire American response. Continue reading US intelligence concludes China misrepresented coronavirus deaths (2) →

Concerns grow over disappeared whistleblower

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Posted by: Magnus Fiskesjo <magnus.fiskesjo@cornell.edu>
Source: Radio Free Asia (3/30/20)
Concerns Grow Over Wuhan Doctor Amid Call For Return to Work
RFA

The front page of China's People magazine featuring Ai Fen (left, second from top), director of the Wuhan Central Hospital ER, as it initially appeared (L) and after it was deleted from its website and paper copies were removed from the shelves.

The front page of China’s People magazine featuring Ai Fen (left, second from top), director of the Wuhan Central Hospital ER, as it initially appeared (L) and after it was deleted from its website and paper copies were removed from the shelves.

Whistleblowing Wuhan doctor Ai Fen is currently incommunicado, believed detained after giving media interviews about her initial concerns over the coronavirus, according to an Australian media report.

“Just two weeks ago the head of Emergency at Wuhan Central Hospital went public, saying authorities had stopped her and her colleagues from warning the world,” flagship investigative show 60 Minutes Australia reported on Sunday.

“She has now disappeared, her whereabouts unknown,” the show reported, also tweeting photos of Ai. Continue reading Concerns grow over disappeared whistleblower →

US intelligence concludes China misrepresented coronavirus deaths (1)

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This is incredible and shameless and an attempt to distract from the fact that what’s happening now in the US represents a woeful failure of US intelligence, governance and public policy. It would be funny if the consequences weren’t so tragic.

The US administration had three whole months to prepare for what was to come, and did nothing. Now that the country has become the global epicenter of the pandemic, US intelligence accuses the Chinese government of falsifying numbers?

Charity, as they say, begins at home. Perhaps the discussion to be had (still) is why the US lacks public healthcare despite being the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation since the end of WWII.

Tung-yi Kho <kho.tungyi@yahoo.com>

sources on spring festival couplets?

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My name is Lesya, 爱丽丝 in Chinese. I live in Bologna, Italy where I’m finishing my studies. I’m attending graduate school, specializing in Far East Studies, so I’m also studying Chinese language and culture. The subject of my final thesis is 春联, Spring Festival Couplets. My purpose is to give a deep analysis of the couplets from a social and anthropological point of view. I want to focus on the evolution of the couplets in an urban area, such as Beijing or Shanghai, then offer a comparison with a more rural area, such as Hakka regions of Fujian province. Unfortunately, I have had problems finding a lot of information about this subject in English. So I wonder if list members could suggest scholarly articles, books, or websites about Chinese Spring Festival, Chinese New Year Couplets, and other important celebrations that would be helpful for my work. Please contact me off-list at the email below.

Lesya Uhrak <olesya.uhrak@gmail.com>

US intelligence concludes China misrepresented coronavirus deaths

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See also this report from Radio Free Asia cited in the article below: https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/wuhan-deaths-03272020182846.html–Kirk

Source: Business Insider (4/1/20)
The US intelligence community has reportedly concluded that China intentionally misrepresented its coronavirus numbers
By Sonam Sheth and Isaac Scher

xi jinping

Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, on November 2, 2018. Thomas Peter/Getty

  • The US intelligence community has determined that the Chinese government concealed the extent of its coronavirus outbreak and gave false statistics to other countries, Bloomberg News reported, citing three US officials.
  • Officials transmitted a classified report of their findings to the White House last week.
  • Bloomberg described its sources as saying that the report’s main conclusion was that China’s public reporting of coronavirus cases was “intentionally incomplete” and that its numbers were fake.
  • China was the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak until last week, when the US’s number of cases surpassed China’s.
  • US and other Western officials have repeatedly expressed skepticism about China’s numbers. Residents of Wuhan, where the outbreak originated, have also publicly doubted the government’s reporting.
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

The US intelligence community has determined that the Chinese government concealed the extent of its coronavirus outbreak and gave false numbers of cases and deaths in the country, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing three US officials. Continue reading US intelligence concludes China misrepresented coronavirus deaths →

Fail-safe system to track contagions failed

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Source: NYT (3/29/20)
China Created a Fail-Safe System to Track Contagions. It Failed.
After SARS, Chinese health officials built an infectious disease reporting system to evade political meddling. But when the coronavirus emerged, so did fears of upsetting Beijing.
阅读简体中文版 | 閱讀繁體中文版
By Steven Lee Myers

Medical staff checking on a coronavirus patient at the Red Cross hospital in Wuhan, China, in early March. Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The alarm system was ready. Scarred by the SARS epidemic that erupted in 2002, China had created an infectious disease reporting system that officials said was world-class: fast, thorough and, just as important, immune from meddling.

Hospitals could input patients’ details into a computer and instantly notify government health authorities in Beijing, where officers are trained to spot and smother contagious outbreaks before they spread.

After doctors in Wuhan began treating clusters of patients stricken with a mysterious pneumonia in December, the reporting was supposed to have been automatic. Instead, hospitals deferred to local health officials who, over a political aversion to sharing bad news, withheld information about cases from the national reporting system — keeping Beijing in the dark and delaying the response. Continue reading Fail-safe system to track contagions failed →

Being 21 during the Coronavirus

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Source: China Channel, LARB (3/21/20)
Being Twenty-One During Coronavirus
Advice for students out of school, from Shi Tiesheng’s celebrated essay
By Nick Admussen

Shi Tiesheng (china.org.cn)

Nick Admussen is an associate professor of Chinese Literature and Culture at Cornell University, where all classes were cancelled last Friday. He penned this letter, edited for publication, to his students before leaving his desk.

As cases of Covid-19 spread and we begin a period of social distancing, I want to give you my argument for continuing to do the two things university was designed for: to read and to write. Colleges often present themselves to students as a package excursion for youth: open quadrangles, energetic friends and lovers, deep conversation, light beer, live music, parties. It is that, and much more. Yet my colleagues and I didn’t become literature professors – we didn’t become literate – by going to class. We learned what we know in rooms that lacked conversation, friends, and open doors.

Today I’ve been rereading the Chinese writer Shi Tiesheng, a Beijing native who was assigned to rural labor during the Cultural Revolution, when at the age of 21 his spine was injured in an accident and he was rendered paraplegic. His 1991 essay ‘The Year of Being Twenty-One’, translated by Dave Haysom, records his struggles to come to terms with the new limits on his mobility and his future. In the essay, he watches carefully as the other patients in hospital respond to their own illnesses, and to the social and emotional sicknesses that constrain them. From his sickbed, Shi talks with a man with aphasia (“Bed Two”) who has lost all nouns. He remembers a seven-year old boy who fell off a truck and never walked again. And he tells of a pair of lovers pulled apart by an accident, and more. Their stories leap off the page, as if there is something bigger behind them, laboring to push its way through. Continue reading Being 21 during the Coronavirus →

Virus hits Europe harder than China (2)

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Agree. And the NYT also is wrong that China has sobered up. It writes that “While China stumbled in the early going … it then addressed the crisis seriously.” (BTW, this way of talking about China as “it” is a sign that reveals a writer has not sufficiently grasped the fundamental, key distinction between the selfish regime, and China the country, people, culture). It isn’t true. See inter alia this evidence that “China” the regime is not sobering up, but instead continues to spread the virus by political default. Magnus Fiskesjö < nf42@cornell.edu>

Source: Kyodo News (3/19/20)
Wuhan’s virus patient numbers manipulated for Xi visit: local doctor

BEIJING – The number of novel coronavirus patients in Wuhan, the epicenter of China’s virus outbreak, was manipulated in time for President Xi Jinping’s visit last week, a local doctor told Kyodo News Thursday.

A number of symptomatic patients were abruptly released from quarantine early while a portion of testing was suspended, the doctor said.

China’s health authorities on Thursday reported no new cases of coronavirus infection in Wuhan, marking the first time for the city to have no instances of local transmission since the viral epidemic began late last year. Continue reading Virus hits Europe harder than China (2) →

Interview with Guo Yuhua

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Source: China Channel, LARB (3/15/20)
Guo Yuhua: China’s Suffering Class
By Jonathan Chatwin
An anthropologist of China’s underclasses talks to Jonathan Chatwin

Guo Yuhua next to the Nujiang River (courtesy of the interviewee).

Guo Yuhua is Professor of Anthropology at Tsinghua University in Beijing. She has spent the majority of her career researching and writing about the lives of rural Chinese people. Her work The Narration of the Peasant: How Can ‘Suffering’ Become History? is based on oral histories collected during her research in Ji village in northern Shaanxi province. She has written: “one of the ways to defeat the hegemony of official texts and official discourse is to write the history of ordinary people, the history of the ‘sufferers’.”

Professor Guo is currently undertaking research on food safety and peasant workers suffering from pneumoconiosis, a lung disease which affects workers in coal mines, quarries and foundries. Guo’s books are banned in China. As part of the China Conversations series, Guo Yuhua spoke from Beijing with writer Jonathan Chatwin.

What is your memory of studying history at school?

My college life was in the 1980s, the era of reform and opening up; we were all enthusiastic that China had embarked on the road of modernization. My graduate major was folklore and social anthropology – studying culture and folk custom – and the relationship between tradition and modernity. I hoped to discover which factors affected the habits and mores in Chinese society, and why China had lagged behind the world for many years. That was the reason for my interest in history. Continue reading Interview with Guo Yuhua →

Virus hits Europe harder than China (1)

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In reply to the article from the NYT: While draconian measures in China like city-wide lockdowns may have controlled the spread of COVID-19, the government’s inability to trust medical professionals allowed the virus to spread and become what it is now. From flattenthecurve.com: ” Globally speaking, authoritarianism can limit pandemic control since it can limit the expertise and transparency required for good decisionmaking, to make the best use of resources, and to communicate status to the regional and global citizens.”

Anne Henochowicz <annemh2@gmail.com>

Virus hits Europe harder than China

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Source: NYT (3/19/20)
Virus Hits Europe Harder Than China. Is That the Price of an Open Society?
阅读简体中文版 | 閱讀繁體中文版
The epidemic is now bigger in Europe, where governments aren’t used to giving harsh orders, and citizens aren’t used to following them.
By Richard Pérez-Peña

Patients arriving at a newly opened Covid-19 hospital wing in Rome on Thursday. Credit…Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times

The macabre milestones keep coming. By Wednesday, Europe had recorded more coronavirus cases and fatalities than China. On Thursday, Italy — by itself — passed China in reported deaths.

While China claims to have lowered its rate of new cases essentially to zero, Europe’s numbers grow faster each day — about 100,000 confirmed infections and 5,000 deaths in all so far — suggesting that the worst is yet to come.

So how is it that the new disease, Covid-19, has hit harder in Europe, which had weeks of warning that the epidemic was coming, than in China, where the virus originated and where there are twice as many people? Continue reading Virus hits Europe harder than China →

Holding Beijing accountable is not racist

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This Johns Hopkins colleague nailed it! — fwd by Magnus Fiskesjö <magnus.fiskesjo@cornell.edu>

Source: The Journal of Political Risk 8, no. 3 (May 2020)
Holding Beijing Accountable For The Coronavirus Is Not Racist
By Ho-fung Hung, Johns Hopkins University

Digital generated image of macro view of the COVID-19 coronavirus. Getty Images/Andriy Onufriyenko

As the coronavirus global pandemic is unfolding and deteriorating, an age-old racial stereotype that associates contagious diseases with Asian/Chinese people reemerged. Reports about Asians being beaten up and accused of bringing the disease to the community are disheartening. The use of the phrase “sick man of Asia” in connection to the outbreak and calling the disease “Wuhan pneumonia” or “Chinese virus” invoked accusations of racism. We in higher education kept hearing episodes of Asian students harassed by comments from fellow students or faculty that associate them with the virus.

This racial association of contagious diseases often surfaces with epidemics in history. During the SARS epidemics of 2003, Western media was full of articles, images, and cartoons that explicitly characterized the diseases as an Asian one, as my research documented. In medieval Europe, the spread of epidemics like bubonic plagues often triggered harassment or even massacre of ethnic minorities such as Jewish people. Perennial as it is, this racial association is not only harmful but is also counterproductive to the effective containment of the disease. Epidemics know no ethnic boundary. They always spread beyond ethnic lines very quickly. The racial association of disease makes us overlook carriers who happen to be not among the stereotyped groups. We have to combat xenophobic racism at the time of an epidemic as hard as we can. Continue reading Holding Beijing accountable is not racist →

Propaganda machine fires up

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Source: Sup China (3/16/20)
Propaganda Machine Fires Up As COVID-19 ‘Passes Peak’ In China
By THE EDITORS

prop

SupChina illustration by Derek Zheng

Per the Economist (porous paywall), Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 “may find it hard to choose his moment to declare complete success. As people gradually get back to work, there is a risk that the virus may begin to spread more widely again in China.”

Nonetheless, the peak of the outbreak in China is “over,” according to China’s National Health Commission, Xinhua noted last Thursday (here in Chinese). Over the weekend, coronavirus infections and deaths outside of China began to outnumber those in China, according to official data, the Guardian reports.

The conspiracy theory that the virus did not originate in China — already encouraged by Chinese government officials, including top Chinese epidemiologist Zhōng Nánshān 钟南山, for more than a week now — is still being pushed. Continue reading Propaganda machine fires up →