This episode illustrates the value of filtered speech and the damage unfiltered speech can wreak in critical circumstances.
One example: at least 140,000 Wuhanese fled the city, fearful that SARS (far more lethal than Covid-19) had, as Dr. Li incorrectly stated in his tweet, 'returned'.
Chinese health authorities spent weeks tracking and tracing the absconders, a task that greatly added to the cost and time involved in containing the outbreak.
Or, looked at another way, NO information about the virus, however timely, did any good whatever for the 100,000 who have died in the USA and the hundreds of thousands elsewhere.
He can. Anytime he wishes. He may already be doing so since he doesn't need anyone's permission. The President simply invokes Executive Orders 10995 and 12472 and, lo! he controls all the information in the realm.
Better still, he can execute without trial American citizens who express unpopular ideas in public. In 2011 the President executed an American preacher, Anwar al Awlaki, along with his sixteen-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter, without trial or public demur.
Readings:
“The CIA and the Media: How America’s Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up.” Carl Bernstein. Rolling Stone, 1977.
Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought Journalists), Udo Ulfkotte. Kopp Verlag. 2014. The English language edition, Journalists For Hire: How The CIA Buys The News, has been suppressed.
Social Credit is off this topic but here's a thought for you: 90% of Chinese–who are smarter, better educated and more widely traveled than us–say SC is just what China needs.
If our media weren't misrepresenting everything about China, you'd probably support SC in our country, too, because it's 90% about consumer protection and the penalties are mild.
Consider “social credit” policies in China that punish social media users for sharing what the Chinese government considers misinformation.
Consider this: No matter how you slice it, China is the leading major power democracy. It's is a constitutional, elective, popular, procedural, operational, substantive and financial democracy that exercises popular oversight of policy, not personnel. In none of those senses is the US a democracy.
The consider this :you cannot have democracy without censorship, as Lee Kwan Yew explained, "The Philippines press enjoys all the freedoms of the US system but fails the people: a wildly partisan press helped Philippines politicians flood the marketplace of ideas with junk and confuse and befuddle the people so that they could not see what their vital interests were in a developing country. And, because vital issues like economic growth and equitable distribution were seldom discussed, they were never tackled and the democratic system malfunctioned. Look at Taiwan and South Korea: their free press runs rampant and corruption runs riot. The critic itself is corrupt yet the theory is, if you have a free press, corruption disappears. Now I'm telling you, that's not true. Freedom of the press, freedom of news critics, must be subordinated to the overriding needs of the integrity of Singapore and to the primacy of purpose of an elected government." A Third World Perspective on the Press. RH Lee Kwan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore. C-SPAN, APRIL 14, 1988
Finally, Social Credit is 90% directed towards government officials and corporations. It has little to do with censorship and mostly to do with making life easy for the 95% of people who are non-assholes.
how incredibly dangerous China's internet censorship has been during COVID-19 from China's results say otherwise: its Covid death rate is 1% of ours.
silencing medical professionals to Get over it. China told an ophthalmologist to stop tweeting about a SARS outbreak until the national lab (which had samples in hand) had finished analyzing its DNA. OF course, the idiot's tweets had already gone viral, causing 140,000 people to flee Wuhan before the lockdown and thus complicating the entire national effort.
hiding research results to No. China did not hide any research results. Jan. 30 –Dr Bruce Aylward, head of the WHO International Mission said, “In the face of a previously unknown disease, China has taken one of the most ancient approaches for infectious disease control and rolled out probably the most ambitious, and I would say, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history. China took old-fashioned measures, like the national approach to hand-washing, the mask-wearing, the social distancing, the universal temperature monitoring. But then very quickly, as it started to evolve, the response started to change . . . So they refined the strategy as they moved forward, and this is an important aspect as we look to how we might use this going forward. WHO has been here from the start of this crisis, an epidemic, working every single day with the government of China… WHO was here from the beginning and never left. What’s different about this mission is it’s complementing with a lot of other external experts.”
ignore Taiwan's success in fighting COVID-19 Taiwan's success was 100% dependent on China's experience.
Chinese internet censorship is literally killing people. Again, it's not. If we extrapolate American figures, Chinese internet censorship–assuming it has played a role in this drama–has saved 240,000 lives and counting.
China is evidently trying to erase certain aspects of the disease's history. In particular, it seeks to deny its likely role in acting as the breeding ground for COVID-19, and to downplay how it infected the rest of the world after the initial outbreak in Wuhan??
It's not China that's trying to rewrite history, it's us. Here's the scoop: The virus, like its predecessors, Spanish Flu and H1N1, probably first showed up in the good 'ol USA.
Covid's ancestry points to the USA, as a recent Cambridge University study attests: Phylogenetic network analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes. Peter Forster, Lucy Forster, Colin Renfrew, and View ORCID ProfileMichael Forster. PNAS first published April 8, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2004999117. Abstract: In a phylogenetic network analysis of 160 complete human severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-Cov-2) genomes, we find three central variants distinguished by amino acid changes, which we have named A, B, and C, with A being the ancestral type according to the bat outgroup coronavirus. The A and C types are found in significant proportions outside East Asia, that is, in Europeans and Americans. In contrast, the B type is the most common type in East Asia, and its ancestral genome appears not to have spread outside East Asia without first mutating into derived B types, pointing to founder effects or immunological or environmental resistance against this type outside Asia.
Anywhere BUT China, surprisingly. Researchers in France have carried out genetic analysis and found that the dominant types of the viral strains in the country did not come from China or Italy. The coronavirus outbreak in France was not caused by cases imported from China, but from a locally circulating strain of unknown origin, according to a new study by French scientists at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Some prominent scientists, including <b>Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health, said the virus might have been spreading quietly in humans for years, or even decades, without causing a detectable outbreak</b>. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3081959/coronavirus-outbreak-france-did-not-come-dir ectly-china-gene
Anecdotally, on April 17 CNN host Chris Cuomo said he believes there will be revelations showing the novel coronavirus was spreading in the United States as early as October. “The kids now anecdotally, Cristina believes, that at least two of them have had it in the last few months. Why? We don’t know, but atypically long-duration sinus, fever, lethargy. <b>I think we’re going to learn that coronavirus has been in this country since, like, October, that there have been cases,” Cuomo said. “And as you guys both know, and I hear all the time from all over the country, how many people do you hear saying, ‘I think I had it, I had this and this, I lost my sense of smell and this and that, but I never got tested’? Those cases are, like, abounding all over the country</b>,” he added.https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/chris-cuomo-predicts-evidence-will-show-coronavirus-wa s-spreading-in-us-since-october.
We're only midway through Act III. The fat lady hasn't sung yet.
"Never lie to the Chinese...they always discover the truth in the end, anyway." Henry Kissinger, Nixon's China Game.
CNN host Chris Cuomo said he believes there will be revelations showing the novel coronavirus was spreading in the United States as early as October. by Anthony Leonardi | April 17, 2020
While discussing his wife’s recent coronavirus diagnosis, the network host, who announced he tested positive for COVID-19 in a March 31 social media post, speculated that the virus may have begun spreading as early as fall 2019.
CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta started by asking, “You and Cristina both have tested positive. You’re both having symptoms. So, maybe I’m missing something, but you guys can’t be together now? … But if you both have it, why can’t you interact now?”
Cuomo then said officials don’t presently know if someone diagnosed and recovered from COVID-19 could become reinfected. “In the abundance of caution, I could get reinfected, so they want us to stay separated. We do have completely different symptoms, which is, again, part of the weirdness,” he said.
New York subway train cutback helped spread coronavirus: MIT study
However, the host speculated that the coronavirus may have been in the U.S. earlier than experts suggest.
“The kids now anecdotally, Cristina believes, that at least two of them have had it in the last few months. Why? We don’t know, but atypically long-duration sinus, fever, lethargy. I think we’re going to learn that coronavirus has been in this country since, like, October, that there have been cases,” Cuomo said.
“And as you guys both know, and I hear all the time from all over the country, how many people do you hear saying, ‘I think I had it, I had this and this, I lost my sense of smell and this and that, but I never got tested’? Those cases are, like, abounding all over the country,” he added.
The novel coronavirus pandemic is believed to have originated in Wuhan, China, late last year. The World Health Organization’s investigative report in February concluded that “early cases identified in Wuhan are believed to have acquired infection from a zoonotic source as many reported visiting or working in the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market.”
The first confirmed case of the coronavirus in the U.S. was reported in Washington state on Jan. 21.
Reports this week said U.S. officials are increasingly considering the possibility that the outbreak began in a Wuhan laboratory and not in a market.
Oh, riiiiight. The 2009 Urumqi religious riot that killed over 200 civilians and injured thousands more was coordinated through Facebook and, when the Government asked Facebook to cooperate with the Police, Facebook refused and has been blocked ever since.
The following year, on January 12, 2010 Google announced that it would no longer conform to China’s censorship laws, “We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.”
Twitter and Youtube, which took the same stance, were blocked.
P.S. YouTube, Facebook and Twitter removed accounts and content opposing the illegal assassination of Iranian General Suleimani.
Oddly enough, people's trust in media rises with government involvement.The unspoken assumption of this culturally tone-deaf piece is that everyone – especially, perhaps, the Chinese people – distrusts government control of media because government is bad. That may be true in the US (less so in the UK, where the BBC retains the trust of most Brits).
The Chinese are more trusting of government media censorship than the Brits. They overwhelmingly (85%) trust their government and media. They know they have censors and they trust the censors' common sense and good judgement. They also understand how the USA is destroying itself by allowing public information to be privately controlled.
Here in the US we have lost trust in our 'free' media. We know it's censored but we don't know who censors it or why. We've experienced it lying to us too many times. Only 18% of us now trust it.
The facts do not support the assumptions in this article nor, indeed, in any Western media regarding censorship in China. If forced to choose they won't swap their trustworthy censored media for our untrustworthy censored media.
Canada's CBC, the BBC and Australia's ABC are twice as trusted (60%) as their commercial counterparts.
Singapore's tightly government-controlled media is trusted by 72% of Singaporeans.
China's government-controlled media is trusted by 80% of Chinese.
America's media is trusted by 6% of Americans, according to the American Publishers Association's 2018 report.
China has censorship to keep our untrustworthy garbage out. It's a disinformation filter.
In addressing the NBA/Hong Kong issue, the author, Sarah McLaughlin preaches about "self-serving statements from people who were more interested in preserving their investments than speaking honestly about human rights in a country in which they have major financial interests" when she herself has a major financial interest in beating this dead horse. Hong Kong was never about human rights. Even our own Cato Institute ranked it #1 in the world for freedom. It was about jobs, homes, and self-respect.
But I digress... "The Associated Press reported this week that China’s top leadership became aware that COVID-19 would likely be a pandemic in mid-January. As early as December, China was censoring keywords about coronavirus on social media." Nobody knew that it would be a pandemic in mid-January. The world's leading epidemiologists, at the WHO said it would not. Only later did they change their minds. China, wanting a second opinion, asked Michael Levitt, a Nobel laureate and Stanford biophysicist. Three weeks later, Levitt told the China Daily News that the virus’ rate of growth had peaked. He predicted that the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in China would end up around 80,000, with about 3,250 deaths. As of March 16, China had counted a total of 80,298 cases and 3,245 deaths in a nation where 10 million die every year.
"Dr. Li Wenliang, who lost his life to coronavirus, has become a martyr in China". Dr. Li was an irresponsible man who saw a report to the Wuhan Health Department and told his friends on social media that 'SARS is back.' The result? 140,000 fled Wuhan and spread it further.
"According to Zhong Nanshan, “one of China’s most highly regarded epidemiology experts and the leader of the National Health Commission’s task force on the epidemic,” if China had taken appropriate action early on, rather than obfuscate and censor, “the number of sick would have been greatly reduced.”" Yes. The rule was, 'if you encounter three cases of pneumonia of unknown origin you must report it (with a simple mouse click) to the CCDC. Local officials delayed the report from December 16 to December 27. That doesn't sound like much but early detection makes a big difference.
"We should care about Uighur prison camps, forced disappearances, crackdowns in Hong Kong, suppression in Tibet, censorship of women’s rights activists, the Great Firewall, and mass surveillance simply because caring about human suffering is the right thing to do, regardless of its proximity to us." We should care about these things if they in fact exist. They don't. They are invented by the people who employ writers like Sarah McLaughlin to spread mischief. Sarah's employer, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE, receives substantial funding from conservative private donors, including $3.5 million from anonymous conservative donors through Donors Capital Fund and DonorsTrust, $1.3 million each from the right-wing Bradley Foundation and Sarah Scaife Foundation, and about $1 million between the Charles Koch Foundation and F.M. Kirby Foundation.
Sarah might use her time and talents better by reflecting on this: of the 30 human rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration, China leads the USA in 26.
"this all appears to be an effort to "control the narrative" especially regarding what now appears to be many early missteps by the Chinese government in dealing with the pandemic."
This DOES appears to be an effort to control the narrative, but a closer look is merited:
China believes (and distinguished researchers support its assumption) that Covid-19 originated in the USA.
The US refuses to reveal its index case and has held all discussions of Covid-19 in a secure room and labeled them Top Secret. Why permit Chinese researchers to unwittingly disclose information that might aid a declared enemy that has used bioweapons on China in the past?
China suspects that Covid-19 may have been a US bioweapon and the US committed an act of war. So wartime censorship is justified.
There is huge competition to develop a vaccine and the PRC, which is paying for the research, don't want to help the US side to win the race.
Otherwise, Chinese researchers and clinicians have published more about the virus than the rest of the world combined and I suspect that they will continue doing so.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Godfree.
this episode illustrates the value of unfiltered speech.?
This episode illustrates the value of filtered speech and the damage unfiltered speech can wreak in critical circumstances.
One example: at least 140,000 Wuhanese fled the city, fearful that SARS (far more lethal than Covid-19) had, as Dr. Li incorrectly stated in his tweet, 'returned'.
Chinese health authorities spent weeks tracking and tracing the absconders, a task that greatly added to the cost and time involved in containing the outbreak.
Or, looked at another way, NO information about the virus, however timely, did any good whatever for the 100,000 who have died in the USA and the hundreds of thousands elsewhere.
Information by itself is sterile.
Top Secret?
Why are NIH meetings on Covid-19 held in electronically secure facilities?
Why did the CDC forbid testing until March 3 and then release a useless test?
Why has the CDC refused to release details of its Patient Zero?
What's going on?
Re: Re: Tangential but relevant
He can. Anytime he wishes. He may already be doing so since he doesn't need anyone's permission. The President simply invokes Executive Orders 10995 and 12472 and, lo! he controls all the information in the realm.
Better still, he can execute without trial American citizens who express unpopular ideas in public. In 2011 the President executed an American preacher, Anwar al Awlaki, along with his sixteen-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter, without trial or public demur.
Readings:
“The CIA and the Media: How America’s Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up.” Carl Bernstein. Rolling Stone, 1977.
Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought Journalists), Udo Ulfkotte. Kopp Verlag. 2014. The English language edition, Journalists For Hire: How The CIA Buys The News, has been suppressed.
Re: Heya, Godfree!
Social Credit is off this topic but here's a thought for you: 90% of Chinese–who are smarter, better educated and more widely traveled than us–say SC is just what China needs.
If our media weren't misrepresenting everything about China, you'd probably support SC in our country, too, because it's 90% about consumer protection and the penalties are mild.
Thank God!
Thank God we don't do stuff like that....erm,
Censorship Continues. Facebook Permanently Deleted SouthFront’s Page
SouthFront TV 30.04.2020 -
Censorship and Social Credit
Consider “social credit” policies in China that punish social media users for sharing what the Chinese government considers misinformation.
Consider this: No matter how you slice it, China is the leading major power democracy. It's is a constitutional, elective, popular, procedural, operational, substantive and financial democracy that exercises popular oversight of policy, not personnel. In none of those senses is the US a democracy.
The consider this :you cannot have democracy without censorship, as Lee Kwan Yew explained, "The Philippines press enjoys all the freedoms of the US system but fails the people: a wildly partisan press helped Philippines politicians flood the marketplace of ideas with junk and confuse and befuddle the people so that they could not see what their vital interests were in a developing country. And, because vital issues like economic growth and equitable distribution were seldom discussed, they were never tackled and the democratic system malfunctioned. Look at Taiwan and South Korea: their free press runs rampant and corruption runs riot. The critic itself is corrupt yet the theory is, if you have a free press, corruption disappears. Now I'm telling you, that's not true. Freedom of the press, freedom of news critics, must be subordinated to the overriding needs of the integrity of Singapore and to the primacy of purpose of an elected government." A Third World Perspective on the Press. RH Lee Kwan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore. C-SPAN, APRIL 14, 1988
Finally, Social Credit is 90% directed towards government officials and corporations. It has little to do with censorship and mostly to do with making life easy for the 95% of people who are non-assholes.
Dangerous? Dangerous?
how incredibly dangerous China's internet censorship has been during COVID-19 from China's results say otherwise: its Covid death rate is 1% of ours.
silencing medical professionals to Get over it. China told an ophthalmologist to stop tweeting about a SARS outbreak until the national lab (which had samples in hand) had finished analyzing its DNA. OF course, the idiot's tweets had already gone viral, causing 140,000 people to flee Wuhan before the lockdown and thus complicating the entire national effort.
hiding research results to No. China did not hide any research results. Jan. 30 –Dr Bruce Aylward, head of the WHO International Mission said, “In the face of a previously unknown disease, China has taken one of the most ancient approaches for infectious disease control and rolled out probably the most ambitious, and I would say, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history. China took old-fashioned measures, like the national approach to hand-washing, the mask-wearing, the social distancing, the universal temperature monitoring. But then very quickly, as it started to evolve, the response started to change . . . So they refined the strategy as they moved forward, and this is an important aspect as we look to how we might use this going forward. WHO has been here from the start of this crisis, an epidemic, working every single day with the government of China… WHO was here from the beginning and never left. What’s different about this mission is it’s complementing with a lot of other external experts.”
ignore Taiwan's success in fighting COVID-19 Taiwan's success was 100% dependent on China's experience.
Chinese internet censorship is literally killing people. Again, it's not. If we extrapolate American figures, Chinese internet censorship–assuming it has played a role in this drama–has saved 240,000 lives and counting.
We have met the enemy..
China is evidently trying to erase certain aspects of the disease's history. In particular, it seeks to deny its likely role in acting as the breeding ground for COVID-19, and to downplay how it infected the rest of the world after the initial outbreak in Wuhan??
It's not China that's trying to rewrite history, it's us. Here's the scoop: The virus, like its predecessors, Spanish Flu and H1N1, probably first showed up in the good 'ol USA.
Covid's ancestry points to the USA, as a recent Cambridge University study attests: Phylogenetic network analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes. Peter Forster, Lucy Forster, Colin Renfrew, and View ORCID ProfileMichael Forster. PNAS first published April 8, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2004999117. Abstract: In a phylogenetic network analysis of 160 complete human severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-Cov-2) genomes, we find three central variants distinguished by amino acid changes, which we have named A, B, and C, with A being the ancestral type according to the bat outgroup coronavirus. The A and C types are found in significant proportions outside East Asia, that is, in Europeans and Americans. In contrast, the B type is the most common type in East Asia, and its ancestral genome appears not to have spread outside East Asia without first mutating into derived B types, pointing to founder effects or immunological or environmental resistance against this type outside Asia.
Anywhere BUT China, surprisingly. Researchers in France have carried out genetic analysis and found that the dominant types of the viral strains in the country did not come from China or Italy. The coronavirus outbreak in France was not caused by cases imported from China, but from a locally circulating strain of unknown origin, according to a new study by French scientists at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Some prominent scientists, including <b>Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health, said the virus might have been spreading quietly in humans for years, or even decades, without causing a detectable outbreak</b>. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3081959/coronavirus-outbreak-france-did-not-come-dir ectly-china-gene
Anecdotally, on April 17 CNN host Chris Cuomo said he believes there will be revelations showing the novel coronavirus was spreading in the United States as early as October. “The kids now anecdotally, Cristina believes, that at least two of them have had it in the last few months. Why? We don’t know, but atypically long-duration sinus, fever, lethargy. <b>I think we’re going to learn that coronavirus has been in this country since, like, October, that there have been cases,” Cuomo said. “And as you guys both know, and I hear all the time from all over the country, how many people do you hear saying, ‘I think I had it, I had this and this, I lost my sense of smell and this and that, but I never got tested’? Those cases are, like, abounding all over the country</b>,” he added.https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/chris-cuomo-predicts-evidence-will-show-coronavirus-wa s-spreading-in-us-since-october.
We're only midway through Act III. The fat lady hasn't sung yet.
"Never lie to the Chinese...they always discover the truth in the end, anyway." Henry Kissinger, Nixon's China Game.
Talk about controlling the message: Covid is home-grown
CNN host Chris Cuomo said he believes there will be revelations showing the novel coronavirus was spreading in the United States as early as October. by Anthony Leonardi | April 17, 2020
While discussing his wife’s recent coronavirus diagnosis, the network host, who announced he tested positive for COVID-19 in a March 31 social media post, speculated that the virus may have begun spreading as early as fall 2019.
CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta started by asking, “You and Cristina both have tested positive. You’re both having symptoms. So, maybe I’m missing something, but you guys can’t be together now? … But if you both have it, why can’t you interact now?”
Cuomo then said officials don’t presently know if someone diagnosed and recovered from COVID-19 could become reinfected. “In the abundance of caution, I could get reinfected, so they want us to stay separated. We do have completely different symptoms, which is, again, part of the weirdness,” he said.
New York subway train cutback helped spread coronavirus: MIT study
However, the host speculated that the coronavirus may have been in the U.S. earlier than experts suggest.
“The kids now anecdotally, Cristina believes, that at least two of them have had it in the last few months. Why? We don’t know, but atypically long-duration sinus, fever, lethargy. I think we’re going to learn that coronavirus has been in this country since, like, October, that there have been cases,” Cuomo said.
“And as you guys both know, and I hear all the time from all over the country, how many people do you hear saying, ‘I think I had it, I had this and this, I lost my sense of smell and this and that, but I never got tested’? Those cases are, like, abounding all over the country,” he added.
The novel coronavirus pandemic is believed to have originated in Wuhan, China, late last year. The World Health Organization’s investigative report in February concluded that “early cases identified in Wuhan are believed to have acquired infection from a zoonotic source as many reported visiting or working in the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market.”
The first confirmed case of the coronavirus in the U.S. was reported in Washington state on Jan. 21.
Reports this week said U.S. officials are increasingly considering the possibility that the outbreak began in a Wuhan laboratory and not in a market.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/chris-cuomo-predicts-evidence-will-show-coronavirus- was-spreading-in-us-since-october
Banned, blocked, whatever
Twitter itself is banned throughout China. Why?
Oh, riiiiight. The 2009 Urumqi religious riot that killed over 200 civilians and injured thousands more was coordinated through Facebook and, when the Government asked Facebook to cooperate with the Police, Facebook refused and has been blocked ever since.
The following year, on January 12, 2010 Google announced that it would no longer conform to China’s censorship laws, “We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.”
Twitter and Youtube, which took the same stance, were blocked.
P.S. YouTube, Facebook and Twitter removed accounts and content opposing the illegal assassination of Iranian General Suleimani.
Taiwan and the UN
Taiwan lost its UN seat many years ago.
It's a province of China to which a civil war thug fled and where his thuggish descendants are still holed up.
China represents it in the UN and its agencies. Get over it.
State-sponsored truth?
Oddly enough, people's trust in media rises with government involvement.The unspoken assumption of this culturally tone-deaf piece is that everyone – especially, perhaps, the Chinese people – distrusts government control of media because government is bad. That may be true in the US (less so in the UK, where the BBC retains the trust of most Brits).
The Chinese are more trusting of government media censorship than the Brits. They overwhelmingly (85%) trust their government and media. They know they have censors and they trust the censors' common sense and good judgement. They also understand how the USA is destroying itself by allowing public information to be privately controlled.
Here in the US we have lost trust in our 'free' media. We know it's censored but we don't know who censors it or why. We've experienced it lying to us too many times. Only 18% of us now trust it.
The facts do not support the assumptions in this article nor, indeed, in any Western media regarding censorship in China. If forced to choose they won't swap their trustworthy censored media for our untrustworthy censored media.
Canada's CBC, the BBC and Australia's ABC are twice as trusted (60%) as their commercial counterparts.
Singapore's tightly government-controlled media is trusted by 72% of Singaporeans.
China's government-controlled media is trusted by 80% of Chinese.
America's media is trusted by 6% of Americans, according to the American Publishers Association's 2018 report.
China has censorship to keep our untrustworthy garbage out. It's a disinformation filter.
Credible?
In addressing the NBA/Hong Kong issue, the author, Sarah McLaughlin preaches about "self-serving statements from people who were more interested in preserving their investments than speaking honestly about human rights in a country in which they have major financial interests" when she herself has a major financial interest in beating this dead horse. Hong Kong was never about human rights. Even our own Cato Institute ranked it #1 in the world for freedom. It was about jobs, homes, and self-respect.
But I digress... "The Associated Press reported this week that China’s top leadership became aware that COVID-19 would likely be a pandemic in mid-January. As early as December, China was censoring keywords about coronavirus on social media." Nobody knew that it would be a pandemic in mid-January. The world's leading epidemiologists, at the WHO said it would not. Only later did they change their minds. China, wanting a second opinion, asked Michael Levitt, a Nobel laureate and Stanford biophysicist. Three weeks later, Levitt told the China Daily News that the virus’ rate of growth had peaked. He predicted that the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in China would end up around 80,000, with about 3,250 deaths. As of March 16, China had counted a total of 80,298 cases and 3,245 deaths in a nation where 10 million die every year.
"Dr. Li Wenliang, who lost his life to coronavirus, has become a martyr in China". Dr. Li was an irresponsible man who saw a report to the Wuhan Health Department and told his friends on social media that 'SARS is back.' The result? 140,000 fled Wuhan and spread it further.
"According to Zhong Nanshan, “one of China’s most highly regarded epidemiology experts and the leader of the National Health Commission’s task force on the epidemic,” if China had taken appropriate action early on, rather than obfuscate and censor, “the number of sick would have been greatly reduced.”" Yes. The rule was, 'if you encounter three cases of pneumonia of unknown origin you must report it (with a simple mouse click) to the CCDC. Local officials delayed the report from December 16 to December 27. That doesn't sound like much but early detection makes a big difference.
"We should care about Uighur prison camps, forced disappearances, crackdowns in Hong Kong, suppression in Tibet, censorship of women’s rights activists, the Great Firewall, and mass surveillance simply because caring about human suffering is the right thing to do, regardless of its proximity to us." We should care about these things if they in fact exist. They don't. They are invented by the people who employ writers like Sarah McLaughlin to spread mischief. Sarah's employer, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE, receives substantial funding from conservative private donors, including $3.5 million from anonymous conservative donors through Donors Capital Fund and DonorsTrust, $1.3 million each from the right-wing Bradley Foundation and Sarah Scaife Foundation, and about $1 million between the Charles Koch Foundation and F.M. Kirby Foundation.
Sarah might use her time and talents better by reflecting on this: of the 30 human rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration, China leads the USA in 26.
Just sayin'.
Censorship–theirs and ours
"this all appears to be an effort to "control the narrative" especially regarding what now appears to be many early missteps by the Chinese government in dealing with the pandemic."
This DOES appears to be an effort to control the narrative, but a closer look is merited:
China believes (and distinguished researchers support its assumption) that Covid-19 originated in the USA.
The US refuses to reveal its index case and has held all discussions of Covid-19 in a secure room and labeled them Top Secret. Why permit Chinese researchers to unwittingly disclose information that might aid a declared enemy that has used bioweapons on China in the past?
China suspects that Covid-19 may have been a US bioweapon and the US committed an act of war. So wartime censorship is justified.
Otherwise, Chinese researchers and clinicians have published more about the virus than the rest of the world combined and I suspect that they will continue doing so.
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