+

"Outlets as diverse as business analysis company Gartner ('How Chinese Companies Successfully Adapted to Covid-19'), NBC ('As Covid-19 runs riot across the world, China controls the pandemic'), The New Yorker ('How China Controlled the Coronavirus'), Wired ('How China Crushed Coronavirus'), and even The New York Review of Books ('How Did China Beat Its Covid Crisis?') pursued the storyline that China had beaten the virus not in spite of the authoritarian state, but because of it. In one representative piece, 'Power, Patriotism and 1.4 Billion People: How China Beat the Virus and Roared Back,' The New York Times reported on Feb. 5, 2021: In the year since the coronavirus began its march around the world, China has done what many other countries would not or could not do. With equal measures of coercion and persuasion, it has mobilized its vast Communist Party apparatus to reach deep into the private sector and the broader population, in what the country's leader, Xi Jinping, has called a 'people's war' against the pandemic—and won. Why the media, in its coverage of China's real and perceived successes, would go as far as to declare the fight against the pandemic essentially over, and that China 'won,' when the country is still seeing outbreaks and refuses to release real national health data (if it exists) is unclear." Ashley Rindsberg   "His all-time favorite nation? China during the Cultural Revolution. Visiting his Xanadu, Galtung concluded that the Chinese loved life under Mao: after all, they were all 'nice and smiling.' While 'repressive in a certain liberal sense,' he wrote, Mao's China was 'endlessly liberating when seen from many other perspectives that liberal theory has never understood.' Why, China showed that 'the whole theory about what an 'open society' is must be rewritten, probably also the theory of 'democracy'—and it will take a long time before the West will be willing to view China as a master teacher in such subjects.'" Bruce Bawer   "As I have said repeatedly since my return from Beijing, the Chinese government is to be congratulated for the extraordinary measures it has taken to contain the outbreak, despite the severe social and economic impact those measures are having on the Chinese people. We would have seen many more cases outside China by now—and probably deaths—if it were not for the government's efforts, and the progress they have made to protect their own people and the people of the world. The speed with which China detected the outbreak, isolated the virus, sequenced the genome and shared it with WHO and the world are very impressive, and beyond words. So is China’s commitment to transparency and to supporting other countries. In many ways, China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response. It's not an exaggeration." Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus   "When the British first confronted the Iroquois on the east coast of North America, the mental and material resources at the disposal of these two races were by no means confined to what they had each developed themselves. The British had been able to navigate across the Atlantic, in the first place, by using the compass invented in China, doing mathematical calculations with a numbering system from India, steering with rudders invented in China, writing on paper invented in China, using letters created by the Romans, and ultimately prevailing in combat using gunpowder, also invented in China. The Iroquois had no comparably wide cultural universe." Thomas Sowell   "In April, the Nation wrote: 'It's chastening to note that whereas China under Xi has suppressed the latest coronavirus at the human cost of three lives per million population, the United States under Trump is still struggling to overpower it, having already sacrificed 145 of every million Americans.' In June, two public-health experts co-authored a Time op-ed titled 'U.S. Response to Covid-19 Is Worse than China's. 100 Times Worse.' 'China orchestrated a massive lockdown with school and office closures and strict stay-at-home orders centered around Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, where the outbreak emerged, even as many around the world decried the actions as draconian,' they argued. But 'the U.S., on the other hand, continues to waste valuable time.' In October, a Reuters analysis compared the American and Chinese pandemic responses and found the former's wanting: 'About 11 months after the Wuhan outbreak, China's official GDP numbers this week show not only that the economy is growing, up 4.9% for the third quarter from a year earlier, but also that the Chinese are confident enough the virus has been vanquished to go shopping, dine and spend with gusto,' the outlet reported. In the U.S., on the other hand, '221,000 people are dead from Covid-19 after a delayed federal response, partisan battles over mask-wearing and lockdowns, and plenty of public events that do not follow public health guidelines.'" Nate Hochman   "In the 1990s, when the Chinese Communist Party grew concerned about the waning of communist ideology and the demands for greater democracy, which had led to the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, they called in Chinese history. In 1994, a member of the Politburo, the central body of the Party, attended a memorial for the Yellow Emperor, a probably mythical figure from five thousand years ago who was said to be the father of all ethnic Chinese. It looked suspiciously like ancestor worship, one of the many traditional practices the Communists had condemned. The following year the authorities allowed a major conference on Confucius. Twenty years earlier under the approving eyes of Mao, Red Guards had burned the great Confucian classics and done their best to destroy the sage's tomb. The Party also sponsored a major campaign for Patriotic Education, which emphasized, as the official directive put it, 'the Chinese people's patriotism and brave patriotic deeds.' The Great Wall, which had in previous decades been condemned for its cost in ordinary Chinese lives, now became the symbol of the Chinese will to survive and triumph. Very little was said about the joys of socialism, but China's past achievements were neatly linked to Communist Party rule: 'Patriotism is a historical concept, which has different specific connotations in different stages and periods of social development. In contemporary China, patriotism is in essence identical to socialism.' In other words, being loyal to China means being loyal to the Party. Chinese history was presented as the story of the centuries-old struggle of the Chinese people to unite and to progress in the face of determined interference and oppression from outside. China's failure to get the 2000 Olympic games, the Opium Wars of the early nineteenth century, foreigners condemning the brutal crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and the Japanese invasion in the twentieth century were all wrapped up into one uninterrupted imperialist design to destroy the Chinese nation." Margaret MacMillan   "Bluntly stated, there was no conception of a degree-granting institution of higher learning outside the national bureaucracy. Even more remarkable is the fact that there was only one organizational unit of higher education in all of China (with some 120 million people) that had status enough to be (misleadingly) called a university. By way of contrast, Europe from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, with half the population of China, had at least eighty-nine universities, not to mention hundreds of colleges with more autonomy than existed anywhere in China." Toby Huff   "China's efforts to contain the outbreak at the epicentre have been essential for preventing the further spread of the virus. China identified the pathogen in record time and shared it immediately, which led to the rapid development of diagnostic tools. They are completely committed to transparency both internally and externally and they have agreed to work with other countries who need their support." Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus   "No country that wishes to become developed today can pursue closed-door policies. We have tasted this bitter experience and our ancestors have tasted it. In the early Ming Dynasty in the reign of Yong Le when Zheng He sailed the Western Ocean, our country was open. After Yong Le died the dynasty went into decline. China was invaded. Counting from the middle of the Ming Dynasty to the opium wars, through 300 years of isolation China was made poor, and became backward and mired in darkness and ignorance." Deng Xiaoping   "China's health reforms show it's possible to implement far-reaching, quality transformations in a short time. Its success in providing 95% of its population with access to health insurance is a model for other countries in how to make our world fairer, healthier and safer. We can all learn something from China." Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus   "The importance of printing—or, rather, of the inexpensive book—to the subsequent history of Europe cannot be exaggerated. Printing alone, as we know from the history of China, isn't enough. China had an educated elite, inventive craftsmen, and even an age of exploration in the fifteenth century. But the mandarinate's tight control over printing prevented it from ever becoming a vehicle for independent expression. In Europe, on the other hand, printing was, from its very beginning, an enterprise undertaken to make money by selling books directly to the general public. This allowed, really for the first time, the direct exchange of ideas among the people of a whole continent. Theologians, philosophers, poets, and pornographers could reach their audiences over the heads (or behind the backs) of the authorities. The writings of Luther and Calvin swept like a fire storm across Europe in the 1520s and 1530s. In a few decades, half of Europe had ceased its obedience to the pope, breaking Rome's monopoly on religious doctrine. Now a book banned by the authorities in one country might find acceptance in another: Copernicus's great work was published in Leipzig after Luther personally objected to its publication in Nuremberg." Alan Cromer   "Today the dogs and the flies are gone, rows of poplars and electric lines march across the flat North China landscape, electric pumps supply new irrigation ditches, and crops in the big fields are diversified and interplanted. The people seem healthy, well fed and articulate about their role as citizens of Chairman Mao's new China. Compared with 40 years ago the change in the countryside is miraculous, a revolution probably on the largest scale of all time." John Fairbank   "Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, wrote in 2017 that, after Xi Jinping had stated that Marxism is to be the foundation for a healthy China, 'medicine has a great deal to learn from Marx.' This was shortly after receiving a Friendship Award from the Chinese government. 'China has a socialist, collective system (whatever criticisms people may have),' tweeted Susan Michie, now a senior adviser to the World Health Organisation, 'not an individualistic, consumer-oriented, profit-driven society badly damaged by 20 years of failed neoliberal economic policies. #LearntLessons.'" Matt Ridley   "In 1820 something like 85 percent of the world's population were living on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. By 1950 that figure had fallen to about 50 percent and by 1980 to 31 percent. According to World Bank figures, absolute poverty has fallen since 1980 from 31 to 20 percent (a figure of 24 percent is often mentioned, meaning 24 percent of the population of the developing countries). The radical reduction of the past 20 years is unique in that not only the proportion but also the total number of people living in absolute poverty has declined—for the first time in world history. During these two decades the world's population has grown by a billion and a half, and yet the number of absolute poor has fallen by about 200 million. That decrease is connected with economic growth. In places where prosperity has grown fastest, poverty has been most effectively combated. In East Asia (China excluded), absolute poverty has fallen from 15 to just over 9 percent, in China from 32 to 17 percent. Six Asians in 10 were absolutely poor in 1975. Today's figure, according to the World Bank, is fewer than 2 out of 10." Johan Norberg   "This was the same century in which the Mongols were exterminating every Russian, Muslim and Chinese person that they could get their hands on, sometimes slaughtering over 100,000 men, women and children at a go in some of history's worst blood orgies. Instead, we find in Columbus's journals a general sense of curiosity, of wonder even, and a genuine desire at many points to communicate and trade with natives, whose help Columbus realised he would need if his little expeditions were going to be successful. Let's remember that Columbus was first and foremost a merchant. His main purpose was to open a trade route to China. Europeans realised that China had better stuff. Like expert businessmen everywhere, Genoese merchants had long since realised that attacking the people you want to trade with is counterproductive." Jeff Fynn-Paul   "People in the U.S. seem able to recognize that China's censorship of the internet is bad. They say: 'It's so authoritarian, tyrannical, terrible, a human rights violation.' Everyone sees that, but then when it happens to us, here, we say, 'Oh, but it's a private company doing it.' What people don't realize is the majority of censorship in China is being carried out by private companies." Matt Orfalea   "Early one morning in the summer of 1972, John King Fairbank, my senior colleague among Harvard's East Asia faculty at the time, phoned to ask if I would look over a draft article for Foreign Affairs summing up his first trip to China since the 1940s. The piece was fairly indulgent toward Mao's regime. Over lunch that day, I said to Fairbank, 'This trip to China must have been moving.' He nodded and said, 'Well, you know, I've been on their side ever since 1943.' In Fairbank's draft I queried the sentence: 'The Maoist revolution is on the whole the best thing that has happened to the Chinese people in many centuries.' The dean of American Sinology, to whom I owe much, stuck with it. But he added the words: 'At least, most Chinese seem now to believe so, and it will be hard to prove otherwise.'" Ross Terrill   "One billion Chinese were rescued from totalitarian misery, and a billion Indians sort-of-rescued from British-style license-Raj socialism. These are wonderful events for human progress as well as, incidentally, for global inequality. Sure, these countries have many political and economic problems left, but the 'it's all getting worse' story just ain't so. China and India did not start growing by confiscatory taxation of income and wealth, and increasing state intervention in markets. Exactly the opposite. And the parts of the world left or falling behind—parts of the Middle East, Latin America (think Venezuela), parts of Africa—have just nothing to do with the private-jet purchases of U.S. hedge fund billionaires." John Cochrane   "Few carbon offsets actually reduce carbon emissions. Many are scams. Some pay landowners to not cut down trees they were never going to log. Others pay renewable energy developers who were already going to build wind and solar projects. Most solar panels and electric car batteries are made in Xinjiang, China by incarcerated Uyghur Muslims. Solar projects require 300-600 times more land than nuclear or natural gas plants and are devastating fragile desert environments. And there is no waste disposal solution for used solar panels, a hazardous waste, which means they will be sent to landfills or dumped on poor nations." Michael Shellenberger   "The domestic turkey of Mesoamerica never reached South America, or the eastern United States. While alphabets of Middle Eastern origin eventually spread out across the Old World, as far as Indonesia, the writing systems of Mesoamerica never reached the Andes. Most important of all, perhaps, 'The wheels invented in Mesoamerica as parts of toys never met the llamas domesticated in the Andes.' The Romans grew peach and citrus fruits from China, cucumbers and sesame from India, hemp and onions from Central Asia, while in the New World the sunflowers of North America never spread to the Andes." Peter Watson