Weblog with daily updates of the news on a frugal, fair and beautiful China, from the perspective of internet entrepreneur, new media advisor and president of the China Speakers Bureau Fons Tuinstra
How will people remember the Wuhan lockdown, two years ago at the start of the global coronavirus crisis, asks CFR-scholar Ian Johnson in a debate at the NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge on the book “The Wuhan Lockdown”, by Yang Guobin. How successful has the state been in suppressing the knowledge of this hiccup in communist rule in Wuhan, Ian Johnson asks the author.
Journalist and academic Ian Johnson reviews a documentary of artist Ai Weiwei with hidden footage of the coronavirus crisis in Wuhan for Plataformamedia. “The public needs to understand that this film is about China,” Weiwei said in a telephone interview with Ian Johnson. “Yes, it is about the coronavirus lockdown, but it is an effort to reflect what ordinary Chinese have experienced.”
Ian Johnson:
In January of this year, the Chinese city of Wuhan became the first in the world to enter a lockdown to combat the coronavirus pandemic. This crucial period remains in many ways a mystery. Few images have escaped the censors’ control.
A new film by Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has come to help fill some of this missing story. Although he is now living in Europe, Weiwei, working remotely, has directed dozens of volunteers in China to create “Coronation”, a portrait of the draconian lockdown imposed on Wuhan – of a country capable of mobilizing enormous resources, at a very high human cost.
“The public needs to understand that this film is about China,” Weiwei said in a telephone interview. “Yes, it is about the coronavirus lockdown, but it is an effort to reflect what ordinary Chinese have experienced.”
Despite its initial mistakes, China has managed to control the pandemic better than many other countries, having had 4,700 deaths, compared with more than 177,000 in the United States. The Communist Party has done everything it can to suppress expressions of sadness or revolt, but its efforts still have broad public support.
Dutch PM Mark Rutte (left) after he announced handshakes would be off-limits.
The medical magazine The Lancet was one of the first Western media to point out the rest of the world could learn from the way China had dealt with the corona crisis. The severe lock-down of Wuhan and Hubei province, and the extended deployment of medics from the rest of China, was then still seen as too draconian to be used on other parts of the world.
Now Italy is in a lock-down and medical care in Northern parts are in crisis, while the rest of Europe looks surprised. "They are in a crisis," said a shaken Dutch doctor on Dutch TV last night, after he made a phone call to a colleague in Milan to ask how they were doing. Displaying confidence in your own capabilities sometimes becomes a handicap.
Virologists in China now admit Wuhan was too late to take their drastic measure and would have saved halved the number of corona patients and related deaths if they had locked down the city five days earlier. But despite those experiences in China, the rest of the world is complacent about the arrival of the virus and resist measures that would stop the virus from spreading.
"Do not shake hands," is the most drastic solution of the rest of Europe, while there is no sign medics of the rest of Europe are rushing to help Italy to contain the current crisis. It might be too little, too late. Learning from China could have been a good idea.
China, with the exception of Hubei province, might be getting back to normal, the rest of the world is still bracing for a further outbreak of the coronavirus. Northern Italy shows remarkable similarities with the early weeks of the crisis in Wuhan: cramped medical facilities, expanding quarantine measure to stop the spread of the virus, and much uncertainty in countries and regions that still try to control the crisis. In China numbers of new patients are dropping, so - unless you might distrust those figures - its heavy-handed approach seems to be working at this list. But global stress on international economic relations seem far from over.
With all the justified criticism on the way China dealt the with coronavirus in the early weeks, the country did make some right choices later in the crisis as containment of the health issues was more important than keeping up the economy. More surprising it is that countries with a more developed health care system like Italy seem utterly unprepared for a major outbreak of the virus. Even a very solid country like Switzerland sees the number of coronavirus patients going up fast.
Other European countries and the US seem to be bracing for the march of the coronavirus and still have to prove they can follow the lead of China, who was able to limit the major outbreak to one province.
We did get some messages from some of our speakers who suggest their expertise in this field could generate some demand from clients outside China, but to be honest, those insights might be too late for countries and companies who have not yet been taking precautions for a major outbreak of the virus in their region or industry.
And while the delayed containers from China have started their journey to the rest of the world, it is still unclear what situation they might meet at the receiving end of their ride. Airline companies seem to have no plan to resume cancelled flights, as demand is still very low.
China's Hubei province shocked the world as the number of confirmed covid-19 patients spiked because it started to use different way to diagnose patients. Political analyst Victor Shih sees it as a proof that the government is using different sets of tools to manipulate the number of patients and deaths, he tells to Reuters.
Reuters:
The sudden jump in new cases raises questions about China’s commitment to transparency, said Victor Shih, a specialist in Chinese politics at the School of Global Policy & Strategy at UC San Diego.
“The adjustment of the data today proved without doubt that they have had two sets of numbers for confirmed infected all along,” he said. “If that were not the case, the government could not have added so many new cases in one day.”
“A very disturbing aspect of today’s new numbers is that the vast majority of new cases accrued to Wuhan, but what if the rest of Hubei Province still did not adjust their reporting methods?”
Hubei had previously only allowed infection to be confirmed by RNA tests, which can take days to process and delay treatment. RNA, or ribonucleic acid, carries genetic information allowing for identification of organisms like viruses.
Using CT scans that reveal lung infection would help patients receive treatment as soon as possible and improve their chances of recovery, the commission said.
At the China Speakers Bureau we have started to explore WeChat Work as a social platform, next to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Are you interesting in following us on this journey? Check out our instructions here.
Under normal circumstances the China Speakers Bureau would now slowly move out of the hibernation of the lunar festival activities. But the coronavirus has made 2020 all different from normal. The virus is still spreading, large parts of China have come to a standstill and this week many of the rail and flight connections have been cancelled or limited at best.
Meetings have been cancelled, relocated and - to stay close to our core business - rosters for speakers have been rescheduled. While the effects of the virus are still developing, many expect the effects to be felt at least till April, and perhaps longer.
Apple, and its supplier Foxconn, are in the middle of revolts by workers in Beijing, Shenzhen, Wuhan and Wukan, who are standing up for their rights. Former factory worker Zhang Lijia supports their actions, and hope China's government will continue to support those workers, she writes in The Guardian.
Zhang Lijia
I felt the pain of my fellow workers because I, too, slaved for 10 years at a factory and endured its strict rules. The restrictions at my state-owned factory, however, paled in comparison to those of cold-hearted capitalism. There is labour law that forbids a 16-hour working day, among other malpractices, but it is not forcefully implemented by the local authority. After all, the private or foreign-invested enterprises bring revenues.
I was very pleased to see the migrant workers beginning to resist. Shortly after Foxconn's suicides, workers from several Japanese-owned Honda factories revolted. They went on strike until their demands for better pay and working conditions were met. In chatrooms on the internet, several Honda workers argued that it would be better to put up a fight than to take one's life. Compared with their fathers, the young workers are savvy about the internet, better educated, more worldly and far more aware of the law and their rights...
I was relieved and delighted by the approach the authorities have taken in both the Wukan and Wuhan cases: they have clearly recognisednongmin's rising demands for rights and equality. But a soft approach alone isn't enough. I hope China's leaders will really listen to the farmers, opening up more channels for them to express their grievances, and allowing some kind of independent labour union or at least a collective bargaining mechanism to ease the conflicts. And ultimately, they'll have to grant the same rights to those who make gadgets such as the Xbox and iPhone as those who use them.
Singapore Technologies (ST) Engineering's marine arm, ST Marine, has incorporated a wholly owned subsidiary, ST Marine (Wuhan) Engineering Design Consultancy, in Hubei Province, China, writes defense analyst Wendell Minnickin Defense News.
Wendell Minnick:
The new subsidiary will strengthen ST Marine's engineering team in Singapore and "leverage the latter's well-established naval design capability and engineering expertise," the release stated.
I was not yet that far: professor Fang is a very easy target, although the current career of the student could well be at jeopardy. Not many would follow him, how much they might be against the nuisance of the internet filters. But since then the fallout has been tremendous. Not only among foreign media (an overview at the tail of this), but also on the Chinese internet.
Seagull Reference gives a nice overview with some telling details from the room at the Wuhan university, after the incident:
Fang was obviously furious after having dodged the egg but being hit by the shoe. Fang asked the host in Wuhan University why they didn't prepare for such event since there had been public discussions on the Internet, particularly on Twitter. Some online community had posted varies rewards (including hugs from hot girls, new shoes and iPad2, etc.) for anyone to hit shoe at Fang. Professors of Wuhan University replied the campus was blocked from accessing the Twitter, so they could not have known.
The new-born internet hero got himself a nice list of gifts from a cheering online community in China, enough to distract him from an academic career. (A summery at the Seagull Reference).
Nice humor too:
Fang's seminar today was arranged in Room 404, a page user often see when the website is blocked by Fang's GFW.
Hard to say how deep the sentiment goes and whether it will persist. Enough to have some fun today.
