Bloomberg: "The central bank said Sunday it will use reverse repurchase agreements to supply 1.2 trillion yuan of liquidity on Monday, with the figure coming to 150 billion yuan ($21.7 billion) on a net basis, according to Bloomberg calculations."
One needs to look at this on a seasonal basis. Typically they inject a large amount of cash before the Chinese new year and start draining it afterwards. So the effect is larger than the net amount though maybe less than the gross number.
They already extended the holidays and I know a lot of manufacturers rely on pre and post Lunar production cycles. We are going to find out what happens when China goes offline which is not going to be pretty. I fully expect some products to run short and prices to double within days.
I also think the Chinese govt is trying to throw money at this problem. They got caught mismanaging the epidemic and injecting money into the market isn’t going to calm public panic. It will do the exact opposite.
At this point, small foreign business operating in China will go out of business due to supply chain shutdown and illiquidity. Mid sized businesses will have a huge one time cost/write off moving operations out of China. Large multinationals will move more parts of Chinese supplies to other countries.
>Large multinationals will move more parts of Chinese supplies to other countries.
The joke is, there is perhaps no point in the next 2 weeks. If the virus so far is as virulent as it seems, there's going to be alot more shutdown countries coming once the incubation periods run down.
My wife asked me at breakfast why the new virus is such a big deal: hundreds dying vs. the 5K to 10K babies and infants who die everyday in the world from dehydration and/or starvation.
My response was exponential growth of viruses and mutation into something very deadly.
China is taking the outbreak seriously, locking down large and high population regions. I wondered if some of that is PR since after a previous outbreak they were accused of covering up (if I remember correctly).
The most important thing to remember here is that we have ZERO idea how many people are truly infected in China.
The Chinese gov't is publishing totally unreliable numbers on "confirmed". ...but the fact that confirmed cases are popping up all around the world, there is ZERO chance that the true number of infected people is 15,000 in China.
The healthcare system in Wuhan is overwhelmed. The hospital are turning away patients with symptoms without evening screening unless their deathly ill due to a lack of resources:
"Coronavirus Pummels Wuhan, a City Short of Supplies and Overwhelmed" https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/02/world/asia/china-coronavi...
which means that the statistics are going to badly off at this point.
It’s the potential for exponential growth. The flu and world hunger are mostly known, contained quantities. While there’s a low probability that the coronavirus will become a pandemic, there is an extremely high downside if that happens. The danger comes not from the probability of the event but from the payoff.
Uncertainty and economic fallout. There's a non-zero probability this outbreak will not be contained, and if so would spell disaster for contemporary globalism.
The problem is that the numbers we have are those published by the Communist Party of China. They're taking the outbreak seriously ... now ... but they were putting whistleblowers in jail at the start of the epidemic.
Having lived in Beijing for 9 years, I’m glad I’m not there right now. Not because of a fear of getting sick, but of the sheer boredom of being stuck in my apartment, nowhere to eat, drink, or even walk without an appropriate face mask. Heck, even going to the office is probably off limits right now.
White collar workers are working from home in Guangdong. The police have also locked down all the urban villages - local residence (via ID card) and temperature checks are mandatory. I cannot even get back into my own apartment without a temperature check. Some restaurants are open, but it's such a pain to get to them it's not really worth the effort. Definitely not a fun way to bring in the new year.
> being stuck in my apartment, nowhere to eat, drink, or even walk without an appropriate face mask
As someone who never been there (or in China for that matter), is "face mask" a synonym for something or you mean literally a face mask? Don't think it's mandatory to wear face masks, just that a lot of people do it, right?
No, literally a face mask, so that people know that you aren't going to give them the virus. I don't know if it's mandatory to wear a face mask.
But it doesn't seem like it would be too different from what always happens in Chinese New Year in Beijing. All the shopkeepers aren't from Beijing originally, so they close shop for two weeks and go back to their hometown. There's pretty much no restaurants open, except maybe chains. And people are shooting off fireworks all day, so the air is just as polluted as always (generally well above the level of an airport smoking lounge in the winter), so you want to be wearing an N95 mask anyway. (Generally if you can't see the mountains around Beijing, you should consider wearing an N95 mask)
There is usually something open, and the main closures are just for a couple of days during the thick of it, and then afterwards there are lots of CNY sales going on. But that isn’t the point: we usually get out for a few days anyways during CNY, but we are more than a week after CNY-eve, so things should be returning to normal.
In general Beijingers have a higher income while running a shop pays low income, so migrant workers are the ones that mainly fill demand for such labor (including shop keepers, waitresses, cooks, etc...).
Consider that Beijing has 21 million residents but less than 14 million hukou holders, there is a lot of migrant labor to go around.
It's your official place of residence paperwork. It can be used to limit internal migration as many official government activities like voting or paying taxes or whatever have to be done in the area for which your hukou is for. Housing is also suppose to verify you have a hukou for the place you are trying to buy/rent....that sort of thing.
There really is no call for this sort of vitriol, especially when it isn't really paired with any information that we might learn from what you said. If you gave some actually tangible examples, perhaps this anger could at least be intellectually interesting.
I'm not angry. As they say in America, "I have no dog in this fight."
It does not bother me in any way that the government in China gets to decide whether and where people can travel or work or live.
I'm glad they don't do it where I live, but I am sure the average Chinese citizen is glad they don't have to suffer many indignities and strange quirks of western life.
I cannot, for instance, let my child play with a water gun at the public park for fear he will be shot and killed by a police officer. I do not need to pretend that's unquestionably good. It is certainly not the way I would prefer to live. It is just a fact of life.
I'm never going to understand why people love bagels. It's not even the second best bread my people have made. Laffa and Malawach both kick bagel bottom.
1) Beigels don't have as much variety here, and I've only found them on Brick Lane or Chapel Market. Presumably there are some more places in Tottenham.
Synonym is the wrong word here. A synonym means another word that means exactly the same thing. So the synonym of a face mask would, by definition, also have to be a literal face mask.
You mean to ask if this is slang for something else.
Which, in this case, it is not. It's a mask over your face which is extremely common in China.
Not only did your response fail to capture the actual definition of synonym, but you also ignored any nuances. It is most certainly _not_ used linguistically for words with _exactly_ identical meanings.
Here's the definition from Merriam Webster: "one of two or more words or expressions of the same language that have the same or nearly the same meaning in some or all senses."
But, even more importantly, words can have nuances! Here's a nuance: "a word or phrase that by association is held to embody something (such as a concept or quality)."
In both cases, the notion of identical meaning is absent. It would also completely vitiate its common usage. Synonym is best thought as simply a similarity in meaning.
Is it fake? I don't think being posted to tiktok tells me whether it's real or fake.
Even if it is fake, @globaltimesnews is run by the Communist party, so either they actually are sending drones out to tell you to put on a mask, or they want you to think they're sending drones out to tell you to put on a mask.
I was there for a week in November (from NE USA) and our group had respiratory issues with the air there. Shanghai later in the trip was much better. I know it used to be worse, but it still isn't what I'd call good.
Some cities it is required right now (eg Guangzhou). I’m not sure about Beijing, but I could imagine them doing that. The problem is that in those same places face masks are sold out, and you’d have to go out and buy one even if they weren’t. Not only that, but given their scarcity people aren’t probably replacing their face masks as much as they should be, making them actually more unsanitary.
No one will shoot you if you go out without a face mask. However, people will think you are being rude, you might get a lot of stink eye.
I would not be surprised how quickly things might turn from "mandatory home quarantine strongly recommended" to "mandatory home quarantine enforced by military force". This is China after all. If you decide to stay, be prepared.
At this point this is just vacuous propaganda being repeated while adding very little of value. Give us some examples, why do you think this? While you are reconsidering your message, perhaps you can recognise why repeating the ideological messages of your own government overseas might not be the right move for humanity as a whole.
People are downvoting the parent, but he/she is correct. So many people misunderstand these masks.
Surgical masks protect other people from your coughing / breathing -- they do nothing for you.
N95 masks are notoriously difficult to actually fit correctly. A mask with a filter needs to be completely sealed around your face. You should not be able to get any airflow in from the sides. The elastic is usually too weak, the masks themselves are too lightweight, and they rarely have anything but paper touching your face, so you're not going to be able to get any sort of seal with them.
The only mask that has any hope of protecting the wearer against inhaling airborne particles is a 3M-style cartridge respirator that's fitted properly. The mask should be heavy, the part around your face should be silicone or rubber, and you should be sweating enough to lubricate the mask so that it acts like a suction cup around your face.
As I understood it their primary purpose was to get the wearer to not absent-mindedly touch their face, which is a much higher vector of infection than airborne inhalation of disease.
I agree with you, but if people in China are spending hours in line trying to get a mask, they're almost certainly not altruistically trying to improve the public health situation -- they've been misinformed about what the mask is going to do for them.
Let's be realistic here -- when the public is in a panic, their behavior gets worse, not better.
Isn't there also a shortage of masks because everyone's snapping them up and hoarding them? If people who're actually ill can't get a hold of any because of that then I'd argue they aren't even doing the right thing period.
"Surgical masks protect other people from your coughing / breathing -- they do nothing for you."
But the mandate to wear masks in crowded public places is to protect others from the wearer. Note there have been few if any reported cases of transmission on long flights from China. This may have something to do with mask wearing by carriers of the disease.
The parent is wrong. I understand why they might think that since the popular media is spreading misinformation by writing stories to discourage people from hording masks and in the process saying they aren't effective but that is false. The masks aren't a fool proof solution by themselves but in conjunction with other common sense hygiene they do reduce risk greatly.
not in medicine / physics, but wouldn't they still reduce airflow and so, while not entirely blocking things, still reduce dispersal / inhalation range?
agree people should not deceive themselves, however.
This is false. If used right along with other common sense measures like washing your hands regularly and not touching your eyes / nose / mouth they reduce your risk of catching and spreading infection. [0]
> We performed a systematic review of both clinical and surrogate exposure data comparing N95 respirators and surgical masks for the prevention of transmissible acute respiratory infections.
That it didn't find a difference between N95 and plain surgical masks isn't surprising:
> Participants in clinical studies were health care workers in a health care setting. We defined health care worker as any worker in a health care setting who might be exposed to a patient with an acute respiratory infection. [...] Acute respiratory infections may have been acquired during the study from community exposures rather than nosocomial exposure.
It's not obvious (and wasn't discussed) that such a broad definition of 'health care workers' identifies people who are exposed to categorically more respiratory infections than, say, elementary school teachers. Indeed, one of the studies was actually halted due to the H1N1 outbreak in 2009.
So... of the people in the study who did get sick, we don't know how many of them caught it from their kids at home or on the bus to work when they weren't wearing .
Interestingly, one of the two randomized studies they looked at, having by far with the largest number of participants (1669), concludes:
> Continuous use of N95 respirators was more efficacious against CRI than intermittent use of N95 or medical masks.
(The other study with 1441 participants concludes that N95 respirators are more effective in preventing multiple simultaneous infections.)
A more specialized mask, known as an N95 respirator, can protect against the new coronavirus, also called 2019-nCoV. The respirator is thicker than a surgical mask
Actually, there is a whole class of face masks that "work". N95, N99 and N100 are statistically effective against 95%, 99% and 100% of dust particles, respectively. Assuming proper fit.
Then you have P95, P99 and P100 that look exactly the same but also work against oil-based aerosols (e.g. if you're spraying paint). These are frequently what you get from a hardware store.
Now all these are actually filtration efficiency classes. So you can get a P100 mask that looks like this [1] or one that looks like this [2]. Obviously [2] gives better protection, even though they are the same class.
For the big full face or half face respirators, you can also get rectangular multi-gas filters (e.g. for organic vapors, acid gases etc) that you can also get pink rectangular aerosol filters for.
Edit: forgot to mention that all these are US NIOSH class numbers. In Europe you'll find mostly-equivalent ratings to P95/P99/P100 specified as P1/P2/P3 (or FFP1 etc.).
The NIH study I linked says that they found "no significance difference" between N95 Respirators and surgical masks. LiveScience.com looks like some kind of popsci website. Not sure I would take their word over a study published in a medical journal.
Edit: For the unfamiliar N95 is a NIOSH standard that dictates the percentage of particulates that are filtered and if the filter is rated for environments with presence of oil. The letter which can be N, R, or P tells you if the filter is good in the presence of oil. N=Not Oil Rated, R=Oil Resistant, P=Oil Proof. The number following the letter tells you the percentage of particulates filtered and typically come in 95, 99, or 100. Both surgical style masks and respirators can be N95 rated.
According to my wife, the medical professional, surgical masks do protect you - if you change them every few hours. Wearing the same one all day, much less for days in a row, is worse than no mask at all, when it comes to protecting you. Of course, wearing a mask protects other people from you.
A friend of mine is leaving HK today - he lives there, so this is not a casual trip abroad. He said the level of fear is making it impossible to live there as a single person. The shops and restaurants are closed. Even his own employer shut its doors indefinitely - and they’re just a video production company.
The virus won’t be what ruins China. It’s the panic itself.
Interesting, China's absolute control of media within the country turns into a double edged sword, people don't trust what they're being told on the subject and go with the worst possible scenario's instead.
It's not bad at all. CNN showed its incompetence again with headlines like "Hong Kong turned into a ghost town".
And then I went out and people are playing in the park, doing sports, going shopping, eating at restaurants - all the same except the horrifying crowds of tourists, which are gone.
We do work from home though, something that a Hong Kong employer wouldn't usually allow.
>The real number of coronavirus cases is more than 75,000, according to a scientific model that says the outbreak will double in size every 6.4 days (businessweek)
Doubling every 6.4 days gets big fast. If it kept up that rate, which it won't, the world's population would all have it within 4 months. While it won't be that bad it has the potential to quickly run amok and kill many millions.
The protests died out as soon as the as outbreak started. Protesters avoid congregating to avoid transmission, and the news cycle has moved on. Carrie Lam must be breathing a sigh of relief.
Quite the opposite regarding Carrie Lam. There is a lot of anger towards the government over how they are handling the virus, specifically the insufficient mask supplies and not closing the border with China. Even the pro-Beijing supporters are angry with the government, and pro-Beijing parties are criticising the government in order to gain support in time for the September LegCo elections.
The "normal" stuff, HK Government continues to give benefits to all Mainland Chinese, sending all the Face Mask reserve to China instead of giving it to Hong Kong people, ( Or only giving it to its own supporter in HK), refuse to shut its border with China.
If you bought a bunch before it was sold out. You can certainly resell some for a large multiple of what you bought them. Shops themselves started doubling price before they sold out.
I’m saying HK is not on mandatory lockdown. People are going outside and there are shops that are open. I’m sure there are some closures but it’s not government mandated.
Why would that panic be limited to China? They are the world’s second largest economy, there’s no way to isolate the economic impact. Can’t quarantine dollars.
I have a friend in China right now who wants to leave but can't due to not having a reasonable way to make it to the airport. Apparently they're not allowing anyone to leave the city atm.
> The virus won’t be what ruins China. It’s the panic itself.
We should be so lucky. Prior to this I feared the only thing capable of such a halt would be something like WW3, but if the Corona Virus makes an China incapable of being a Human Right violating power, than all the better.
I can cope with less trinkets and cheap products from there, I already by used or repair most of what I use that made me reliant on China. Everything else I have or want comes from Japan and to a lesser extent (that isn't food/water/housing related) US/EU/Korea.
What is the typical return date for Chinese living in Europe and the US regarding CNY?
It is my understanding that the CNY was not cancelled and many will have gone back to visit family in China, at least outside the highly affected areas.
The Chinese government's response to this situation (after some initial dithering) has been to move swiftly with big moves. I suspect that the force that overcame the initial delays in local response were powerful central government actors who could some in and simply shut cities and entire areas down and not fool around. There appears to be at least one emergency prefab hospital with about 1600 beds under construction and foreign disease experts have been invited in to help with the situation. And now large liquidity injections into the markets.
Compare this to the previous recent epidemics that came from China, SARS, H7N9, some variants of Swine Flu and so on. This response feels very different.
I work near some people who are providing some analysis of the disease and the evaluation from that community seems to be that the Chinese government has been doing a really strong job in their response and it seems to reflect a turning point in how the government deals with these things.
In the past it appears that even having a rampant disease epidemic was considered so embarrassing that it was everything that could be done to hide it. Now it appears that hiding it and acting like its not happening is so embarrassing that a muscular response is warranted. I suppose that's an improvement.
What people also should realize is that China is likely the only country of this size and might in the world that is even able to pull off a response like this anymore -- perhaps Russia could also be a candidate -- just in terms of handling the population. The same approach would likely fail in Western democracies starting with logistics and then individuals being too much out of line.
I suspect the fear comes from the fact that the response in the past was so poor...
While the central government likes / makes grand gestures... they've proven to be reactionary only, slow, and can't be trusted to be honest, and to some extent the local government isn't honest with the central government.
The track record is well established and I don't see much reason to believe that they've changed / the incentives for everyone are all wrong / aren't likely to change quickly in a non transparent system.
This kind of analysis I'm seeing everywhere is so misguided. The reason the local government didn't report on the situation accurately and even punished some journalists for speaking about it is a flaw of how their country is run and how their command structure incentives are poorly set up. This isn't a new problem and it's why we have converged to a different system in most of the West.
The government coming in later after the situation is already out of control and responding aggressively is only a sign of their failure, given that it wouldn't be necessary for this to happen in a country that wasn't so authoritarian. This should be a wake up call to people in the West who think that banning "fake news" and "misinformation" is a good idea, given that the local government used this exact same excuse to punish journalists speaking about the outbreak early, when it could have been controlled properly.
I actually don't disagree with you. But I'm of the opinion that the authoritarian nature of the Chinese central government is both a blessing and a curse. As you've correctly pointed out, central authoritarian governments seem to end up with local administrations that are fairly incompetent and corrupt as their measure of success if not in good local governance, but by pleasing the central authority. On the flip side, when the proverbial "Eye of Sauron" of a central government decides to do something without reservation, this style of governance can get a lot of stuff done very quickly.
Ultimately the problem for these series of epidemics is the poor conditions and practices of many Chinese citizens that results in unsanitary conditions, especially around food animals. It's easy to look at China as a whole, take a point sampling for a given location and time, and come to a negative evaluation of the entire place. What's harder to do is to recognize that in absolute terms, China today is in much better shape than it was before the '78 reforms. China today is in much better shape than it was before 2000!
The structural problem within China, with respect to how local governing happens, is most certainly a problem. However, I think it's very easy to lob complaints across the Ocean when the West is certainly not in a present state of good order at the moment.
While I'm not saying you're wrong, I think it's worth pointing out that the reason the 1918 flupandemic was called the "Spanish flu" for many years, was that Spain was the first nation to admit that there was a problem. They weren't the first, or even second or third nation to get it, just the first to admit it. So the problem of not admitting the seriousness of the situation, is not a new one.
Which is not to say that it's not a bad thing, just that it's not in any way unique to China, or even to non-democracies.
You're right, it's not an argument, it was a thing to point out, that this problem is not specific to non-democracies. The reason the example is from 100 years ago, is that we haven't really seen as serious a threat as that since then.
The closest we've had in the western world since then, was AIDS in the 80's, and I don't think the response was all that top-notch in the first few years. But then, the disease speed of mortality was much slower. We haven't really seen what a western democracy would do in a case like this, since 1918.
"it is a flaw of how their country is run" and "it's why we have converged to a different system in most of the West."
The parent is making some kind of argument that China is uniquely susceptible to this kind of situation. Saying "no this isnt unique" isnt whataboutism, its refuting the claim being made.
I am noticing a trend where people claim whataboutism any time a counter example or analogy are used, despite them being directly relevant to the premise.
> Which is not to say that it's not a bad thing, just that it's not in any way unique to China, or even to non-democracies.
You would have a point if the debate was about the relative moral standing of China. It's not, as much as the Communist Party wants to call opponents racist or anti-Chinese which is pure deflection. From an objective point of view, Communist China's authoritarianism is putting the whole world at risk.
Shortsighted politicians exist everywhere, but the political system determines what their short-term goals focus on.
In a centralized top-down system like China's, politicians advance their career by currying favor with their superiors by demonstrating plan fulfillment, and if they fail they'll try to fake the numbers to make it look like they succeeded. This affects mostly nationally visible metrics like GDP, poverty rate etc. I guess epidemics also fall into that category.
In a localized bottom-up system, politicians advance their career by currying favor with voters by distributing handouts, like farming subsidies, tax cuts or artificially low prices. The Flint water crisis was at least partially caused by politicians not wanting to improve the infrastructure, because the cost would have to be recouped by raising the water price, which would have been unpopular.
That's true, but my point is that the "Emperor is far away" problems can be found in any type of governing model. Some may limit it, but even then, there are tradeoffs.
One advantage of a centralized top-down system is that when an issue becomes sufficiently prioritized at the top, everyone below falls in line. The primary advantage here is speed and the ability to see through long-term plans. You see this in China's rapid rise in certain industries/technologies, and of course, in their response to the 2019-nCoV epidemic.
> In a localized bottom-up system, politicians advance their career by currying favor with voters by distributing handouts, like farming subsidies, tax cuts or artificially low prices.
I agree with this statement, generally, but there are many exceptions. Speaking only about politicians the US, at a certain level, further career advancement is also very dependent on currying favor with superiors (sometimes, even more so than currying favor with constituents, especially if one has national and not just local ambitions). This is equally true at the national level--see: the internal politicking within the DNC and RNC in terms of fundraising, toeing the party line, etc. to receive endorsement and campaign funds--as it is at the local level--see: "machine" politics like in Chicago, where advancement is equally, if not more, predicated on currying favor with your local party leadership and senior city politicians than it is with voters. Or course, this problem (in the US, at least) might also just be the results of our two-party dominated system, where party-endorsements trumps almost everything else when it comes to getting votes. To your point though, this can be overcome if you curry enough favor with the local voters (Trump himself vis-a-vis the RNC is a good example of this).
You're getting knee-jerk downvotes, but I think your reply is more thoughtful than some are giving you credit for. My original comment more or less agrees with you. However, I'd also temper it by saying that one of the downsides of a highly central government is that it falls prey to the negatives of the "Eye of Sauron". This means that where the relatively few people at the top can focus, and for however long they can focus, incredible things can be accomplished -- sometimes far in excess of what might otherwise be expected.
But due to the lack of a distributed or delegated authority, it greatly limits how many important topics can be focused on at once as the apparatus of government is designed around pleasing the core power holders, who can only focus on a few things at a time. This results in massive efforts like raising armies or building spaceships or whatnot being possible, but efforts that aren't worth the time of the central power keepers (e.g. minding hobbits) fall entirely off the radar.
If the Chinese government can ever arrive at a good solution to local, delegated authority (and I'm not hopeful it will), these smaller issues can be attended to. But as a practical matter they simply get ignored until they become national problems with national priorities.
> But due to the lack of a distributed or delegated authority, it greatly limits how many important topics can be focused on at once as the apparatus of government is designed around pleasing the core power holders, who can only focus on a few things at a time.
A little off-topic, but this is an interesting point. Made me wonder if our corporations fall prey to the same problem as well, since they're basically authoritarian states in structure. But I guess it's because they have such one-dimensional goals that this structure is so effective, as you said.
> If the Chinese government can ever arrive at a good solution to local, delegated authority (and I'm not hopeful it will), these smaller issues can be attended to
Do you think it's possible for delegated authority to exist under an authoritarian system at all?
Maybe? I think military systems are interesting to look at when thinking about this question. The German military was famously centralized in WW2 leading to all sorts of chain of command issues while many of the Allied militaries like to push decision making authority down to more local units while providing overall strategic direction.
However, in governance, its much harder to measure "effectiveness" -- and every measure ends up becoming a target/goal of those being measured. Is it GDP? Sentiment analysis of social media for indicators of social discord? I don't really know, and neither does anybody else.
So some authority simply sets some desired set of strategic goals (2% GDP growth, 3% increase in high school graduations, average household income up by 2.3%, etc.) and then works to create conditions such that those are met.
But with more of a diversity of goals seems to require a diversity of executors of those goals since human attention is limited. This implies again an ability to delegate and so on and I'm not really sure if authoritarian governments can spare the attention to make sure each of the delegated executors can work on such a plethora of goals.
In business, the number of direct reports to the CEO, COO, VP and so on seems to indicate the number of strategic goals an organization can pursue at once. In most companies it seems to be only a handful as the ability of the CEO to direct many reports diminishes as there are more of them.
In the U.S. this need to spread focus works in the executive branch by appointing department heads (cabinet secretaries) who basically have a single overriding raison d'être for their existence (e.g. commerce, housing, transportation, etc.) with a set of strategic goals that those executives can focus on. In the U.S. that's something like 15 departments (plus a very large number of independent "establishments and corporations) which are more or less treated like a company might treat a subsidiary rather than a department. [1]
China also has a complex system as well, much more complicated than I think outsiders give it credit for. It's not a surprise though, the ancient Chinese practically invented the idea of a bureaucracy [2]. I think the primary structural problem for China is not the simple notion of authoritarianism per se, but the parallel bureaucracy of the party structure.
> In a localized bottom-up system, politicians advance their career by currying favor with voters by distributing handouts, like farming subsidies, tax cuts or artificially low prices. The Flint water crisis was at least partially caused by politicians not wanting to improve the infrastructure, because the cost would have to be recouped by raising the water price, which would have been unpopular.
The flint water crises was caused by state emergency powers being abused to take the action of switching to a more acidic water source. The corrosion inhibitors the state-appointed emergency manager neglected to install were necessary because of the lower quality of the new water source. If the water source hadn't been changed, I don't know of any evidence that the corrosion inhibitors would have even been needed.
In other words, your counterexample to a centralized top-down system is in fact centralized top-down corruption of a localized bottom-up system.
It’s not a matter of uniqueness, but scale and frequency. People are still people in any system, and no system is perfect, but that doesn’t mean some systems aren’t clearly far, far better than others.
Let’s take the Australian bush fires. The response of the PM has been widely criticised and the fire chief and regional governments have taken the lead and been very effective, even heroic in their efforts.
In an authoritarian system it would be impossible for the most effective and organised arms if government to push in and get things done, even if I’n theory they lack the ultimate authority. Competence and public support matter. In an authoritarian system the only thing that matters is authority. Competence doesn’t even get you a seat at the table.
Great point. The Original Comment seems to have forgotten that journalists were getting locked up for spreading "rumors" less than 2 weeks ago during a vital time in the spread.
It seems to me that China can only make wrong in your eyes.
If it takes time to act it is because the system causes this failure.
If the government acts swiftly, it is because they are in panic.
If it does not solve the situation, of course because they have a terrible oppressive culture.
If the problem is fixed. Of course, because these are one of the few advantages of having an authoritarian system.
No matter what China does, you will say something bad.
I know this makes me sound like CCP shill, but I am not. I only want to read an assessment made with the same level of rigour and sympathy, if, instead of China was Denmark or Australia.
This is the first comment I've made on this forum about China, so whoever you're speaking to is clearly not me but a collective "you" instead. Responding as myself, I simply added balance to the comment above me. Many people are making the exact same argument the person I responded to is making, and while that argument isn't false, it's clearly misleading.
China does get credit for responding to the situation as they did after the central government got involved. However, we must remember that the situation would likely not have occurred in the first place if the people speaking out about it early on weren't punished, which wouldn't happen in most western countries as local governments have way less power and way less incentives to make that kind of thing happen. This situation is a good example of the problems of their authoritarian system, and a good reminder of why we value (or why we should value) the things we value in the West, like free speech.
> However, we must remember that the situation would likely not have occurred in the first place if the people speaking out about it early on weren't punished, which wouldn't happen in most western countries as local governments have way less power and way less incentives to make that kind of thing happen.
I'm not saying the Chinese government doesn't have problems, nor am I saying free speech is bad, but I have no idea how you could come to this conclusion that free speech would somehow limit the spread of this disease. We have free speech in the US and that's literally led to the rise of anti inoculation advocacy.
Restricted spread of information caused about of month of delay for proper action, as facts were concealed and suppressed by local authorities. If proper action could have been taken in mid-December instead of mid-January, then the spread of the infection could be heavily limited back before it had grown to such large scale as it has now.
Exactly. I read on twitter around Dec 31 that there was such a virus spreading in Wuhan. Around Jan 1, the Wuhan police dep publicly condemned 8 person (the origin of the twitter news) for spreading this information and called it a rumour. Then the gov did everything to hide info and did nothing to prevent its spreading before around Jan 2x. They behaved even like they want to spread it as much as possible because just about two to five days before they made the announcement of the virus outbreak, the Wuhan gov organized a so called 40k family new year banquet -- around 40k Wuhan local families were concentrated together to have a banquet to celebrate the coming Chinese new year. All the events I cited here can be found on China's own newspaper and tv recordings.
Anti-vaccination advocacy exists because some kids do get problems from vaccines. I'm not an anti-vaxxer but it's an inherent feature of how vaccines work that a very small percentage of kids will have some serious things happen as a result of being vaccinated. When you have a big population and the Internet, this small percentage of parents will logically come together to cope with their problems. The fact that those people exist and they can talk about it is evidence that our system is working, not that it isn't.
That is a very charitable portrait of the anti-vaccination movement. No, they aren't parents of vaccine-allergic children banding together "to cope with their problems". They are people spreading serious misinformation about vaccines, advocating that they are risky and best forgone, and causing real damage by doing so. I think silencing these people is wrong, but that doesn't change the fact that their speech is clearly making the world a worse place.
> I'm not saying the Chinese government doesn't have problems, nor am I saying free speech is bad, but I have no idea how you could come to this conclusion that free speech would somehow limit the spread of this disease.
In this particular instance, early warning would have gained precious days if not weeks to study and respond to the disease. In an emergency, every second counts, but the saving face mentality of the Communist Party cost weeks.
> We have free speech in the US and that's literally led to the rise of anti inoculation advocacy.
Even if you were right, that would have absolutely no bearing on the situation at hand.
... and also the widely held belief that anti-vaxing is quackery. I’d argue that free speech actually combats this type of mindset, rather than encourage it. Maybe the Chinese govt. can use it’s authoritarian tools to dispel the bullshit beliefs behind traditional medicine and bizarre “bush-meat” consumption in China that likely caused this mess.
How would the situation have played out in the west? The symptoms are flu-like. Would the situation have been contained on the theory that people will self-diagnose after watching the evening news or hearing about it over Facebook?
Also, if any situation explodes, would the west be as capable in quarantining a huge urban population or building a quick hospital?
Would emergency aid be tossed around like a political game?
Considering the rapid efficient response to Katrina in New Orleans and the Hurricane Dorian in Puerto Rico (catastrophes which, unlike a new virus, are completely unpredictable in their timing of appearance and scope of impact) it's pretty clear that the US would have rapidly deployed infrastructure and supplies exactly where they needed to prevent any casualties.
I think the point is that the Chinese government didn't act swiftly, arrested people who initially spread information about the disease in Wuhan, failed to contain the situation, and has now allowed it to become a global problem.
Due to the way China's government has lied in the past, I am hesitant to believe their numbers or their narrative until it can be confirmed by outside parties.
Then does the fact that they're responding much more quickly and much more heavily this time mean nothing at all?
You say "didn't act swiftly". What is swift to you? A month went by since the first case before they started getting their act together, true, but how quickly do you think other nations could have acted? Compared to SARS, where it took them months, 1 month is a major improvement. It's still not good enough because the virus is that ruthless, but Rome isn't built in one day. I have reason to believe that they've learned a great deal from how SARS was handled, and that they'll respond even better in a future outbreak event.
Are there any government whose narrative you trust? It seems to me that never trusting anything a governments because they have once [0] lied is a little extreme. In fact, I'm not sure I can name a country whose government hasn't lied in recent times.
This would then extend to academia as well, since most research is in some way funded by the state.
[0]: I know they have lied more than once. I'm not sure what a more appropriate word would have been.
I would trust the CDC’s numbers because I know of no incentive for them to lie and their numbers have generally been truthful in the past. In addition, any doctor at the CDC is free to say “these numbers are fraudulent” publicly without worrying they will be arrested.
I would not trust a political party’s economy numbers without external verification, however, because a party has an incentive to lie.
So it is the US Gov bribing the CDC to "hurt" China? No. While the CDC is tarnished by the events surrounding the 2015 scandals, and the US is in opposition to many Chinese initiatives, these things are not related. Hurting China via misinformation about a legitimate contagion hurts the world. There are levels of trust and Chinese officials are about as reliable as US candidates running for office (ie I have 0 trust).
> Are there any government whose narrative you trust?
I can only speak for my country (France), but the precedent of the AIDS epidemic and particularly that of contaminated blood transfusion makes it pretty clear that any government official caught having lied in such a situation would be in deep trouble. And I'm pretty sure they're all keenly aware of that.
> because they have once [0] lied is a little extreme
But it is not that they have once lied that it is a problem. It is instead, that just right now, a couple weeks ago, china was arresting journalists for this stuff.
If you want to say that we should ignore bad behavior from 20 years ago, because it is no longer relevant, thats fine. But we are not talking about stuff from 20 years ago. We are instead talking about behavior that china does all the time, right now.
The reason people don't trust governments is because of a constant, never-ending stream of lies. They didn't lie once. They hardly ever not lie. This applies to China, the US, and other governments. A more appropriate phrase is "continually lying" rather than "once lied." The difference is huge enough that you don't even have an argument to stand on. And for the record, I wouldn't trust then even if they did literally only lie once. And neither would most people as most people value trust. One lie or a million, either way the trust is broken. The insane thing is that so many people trust governments even when they continuously prove over and over and over again that they can't be trusted. Lying continuously is only one of many ways they do that. Trusting governments is illogical, unreasonable, and frankly bordering on insane. What other person or entity that constantly lies and breaks trust would be trusted?
Denmark is nothing like china besides being a country. If china wants to be compared favorably to other contries, the need to act favorible to most countries. Full stop.
This sort of what-about-ism doesn't address the core point. That top-down command and control systems are vulnerable to precisely this type of outcome. Providing a single western example of a much milder localized circumstance doesn't address anything except deflect attention from the main point.
Flint was a local event. This is consuming all of China.
"Wuhan's Communist Party chief Ma Guoqiang acknowledged that before mid-January, samples had to be sent to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) in Beijing. From mid-January, Wuhan was able to test about 300 cases a day"
Think about that one, does this sound like taking it seriously? "test about 300 cases a day" is a good way to doctor the number of infections.
Liquid injection needs to happen but the hard part is knowing where. Micro injections around the whole economy would be better than huge injections into one-door banks. Bailouts do more for citizens directly than for corporations, as is shown time and time again. Liquid injection is basically another name for bailout, no? And where is this money going? Probably not to the best node where it will make the most travel
> U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said last week that the virus could force companies to re-evaluate their supply chains, potentially returning some jobs to the United States.
The outbreak comes at a time of high vulnerability for the Chinese economy. This is almost certainly just the start of a very aggressive money pumping episode.
This whole disease and infection comes down to a fundamental breakdown of sanitary practices of a society. Things like 1) cutting up and selling wild animal meat with your bare hands, 2) not washing your hands, 3) eating uncooked meat from wild animals like frogs, cats, rats, mice, "bat soup", 4) having open air "squat toilets" like latrines where when someone shoots their diarrhea, it turns into a mist and everyone in the room gets infected... If these conditions were improved, these viral outbreaks either wouldn't happen or wouldn't happen as often as it does in China. All I know is if you try to get away with that kind of stuff in the U.S., you will have the health department, dept of agriculture, the cops would all show up and shut you down and/or get arrested for it.
it can prevent flash crash which can rollover everywhere, and instead levels will be lowered gradually until fresh news can spread everywhere and prevent panic
For anyone wanting an accurate perspective on the risks of This virus I'd highly recommend watching the Youtube videos MedCram is doing. Their first two esp explain the basics and they have been putting out a daily update.
Citing the fatality rate really buries the lead. The issue is that in a high percentage of cases (~29%), including perfectly healthy people, the virus causes ARDS which is a serious condition that requires hospitalization and putting the patient on a ventilator. Combine that with the highly contagious nature and it isn't hard to imagine a scenario where the number of people that require intensive care overwhelms the healthcare system. There are also other concerning factors like people being contagious for several days before the onset of noticeable symptoms and this could be very serious if not taken seriously.
Given what appears to be exponential growth, the calculation seems to ignore potential future deaths in the currently known cases. Pardon the morbidity and cynicism, but maybe some of these 14628 people haven't had the time to die yet?
Wouldn't it be more appropriate to compare deaths (305) to the number of people successfully recovered (348 as per the same page)? This gives the survivability rate of 53%, which does sound scary (and I'd love to be proven wrong here).
In addition to recovery taking much longer, there are likely far more than 15k people who have been infected but haven't been to the hospital since the majority of cases aren't serious.
Now, it's too early to say if survivability rate is as high, but here's an observation:
In the rest of China, D/C count is 40/10000, however, in Wuhan, it is 240/4000. Which essentially means Wuhan patients are 12 times as likely to die. A simpler explanation would be Wuhan hospitals has been overwhelmed and there are actually ~12 times as many patients there.
It depends. NB there are only 300 confirmed recoveries as yet, and figures from China are likely underestimates. It’s probably too early to tell mortality in the initial wave and often viruses mutate as they spread and become more virulent.
Still, hopefully mortality will be low and this will pass quickly, we are quite good at dealing with epidemics now. I suspect the economic impact may be important though if things worsen even a little and the lockdown continues.
People don't die or survive at the time of infection confirmation, you need to put the time dimension into your calculations. From 14628 conformed cases, we only know that 305 died and 443 survived. For the 13880 people, the outcome is undefined.
I have made a little reactive app to illustrate the fact that those curves number don't allow to infer much about the virus parameters, because there are quite a lot of freedom in other parameters we don't have good prior about.
My interpretation would be that the rate of survival is 53%; 348/(305+348). People don't die immediately, the ones currently infected can go either to the "Recovered" figure or the "Deaths" figure.
From the link above:
14628 are currently infected(?)
305 were infected and died
348 were infected and recovered
If you look at the case study of the first patient in the US from New England Journal of Medicine the patient didn’t get to a poor condition until day 11 of the illness https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001191 at which point they tried an experimental antiviral and he recovered. 11 days ago, there were 527 cases. Patient in study didn’t come in until 2 days after having the sickness so if you look at -9 days infected was at 943. Currently at 305 deceased and 443 recovered, total of 748, so it seems like the infected between 9 and 11 days ago are the ones recovering or dying. The number of infected goes up rapidly from that point (now we are at over 16x number of infected from 9 days ago), so we’ll see the numbers get more accurate soon. Although number of cases rapidly increases, the antiviral treatments seem to help dramatically and they have just begun to start experimenting with them. Currently sitting at 40% mortality using D/D+R, but I imagine we’ll see more recoveries as antivirals are used.
Keep in mind, this is a self-selected group of people. There could be 10x more asymptomatic, or low impact cases who thought they had the flu, but didn't feel bad enough to go to the hospital. Imagine if I tried to capture the survival rate of the flu, but chose my population of patients from the ICU. Would the numbers be right?
I think this is born out by the really small number of children showing up in the mortality numbers. Proportionally, kids usually over-represent transmission, I think, from kid-level hygiene and being crowded into small classrooms. They seem under-represented in the study population, which makes me think there could be a lot of selection bias being captured.
Additionally, the standard for recovery is really high and is built in a way that it will severely lag deaths (which have no waiting period). I think it was something like total clearance of the virus, not "feels good, now surfs reddit all day."
There could also be many X more cases that haven’t been confirmed because they can’t get access to transportation to a hospital, or because the hospitals are overwhelmed, or because they are running low on test kits or behind the schedule on testing. I wouldn’t assume that the unreported numbers are strictly positive.
I appreciate you linking this - I've read at least a books worth of panicked news coverage over the past week and had not seen a single story about potentially successful application of antivirals. I guess fear sells better.
The number of cases is growing exponentially. If it takes a few weeks for the disease to kill a person, then the low number of deaths relative to the number of infections is indicative of that lag time.
You might do better to compare the number of deaths to the number of infected from a few weeks ago, which was a much lower number than today.
>there would already be much more deaths than there is now
Why? People can be sick for quite some time (in this case, a month, maybe?) and then ultimately die from the disease, this is actually like ... the most common scenario ...
I have been unpleasantly surprised by how much people struggle to understand this simple concept. Recovered / (recovered+death) is how you do it. It's common sense, come on ...
Since we are in early days and it probably takes longer to recover than to die of it, and the reporting of infections and recoveries and deaths coming out of China is likely undercounting all three due to different systematic factors, I think it's too early for the results of that formula to be taken at face value.
In the end, when everything is tallied up, sure. But in the meantime, in the presence of so much uncertainty, "common sense" is only going to lead you astray.
> I have been unpleasantly surprised by how much people struggle to understand this simple concept. Recovered / (recovered+death) is how you do it.
The mistake that you are making in your "simple math equation" is as follows. It is easier to count the number of deaths than it is to count the number of recovered. This messes up your math.
If you miscount a large amount on your recovered numbers, then this will make the death rate look worse than it actually is.
> People can be sick for quite some time (in this case, a month, maybe?) and then ultimately die from the disease
Usually, not from a viral infection. The usual scenario from a viral infection is that if you are not dead in 2 weeks, you will almost certainly recover.
There are exceptions, but nothing I've read about this virus leads to the conclusion that it is one of those.
Well, that delays things from the infection point. But doesn't change anything from the point where people notice they are sick.
Anyway, this is a disease that spreads very widely very quickly. We are arguing about the known numbers when the most likely scenario is that it is already everywhere but not reported, so the known numbers are only noise.
This outbreak just started in earnest weeks ago. It has a 2 week incubation period and the illness may take 1-2 weeks before recovery or death. That's why you must look at dead/recovered. I agree that 53% for the general population is pessimistic because as usual there is a selection bias towards those with weakened immune systems, not by as much as you may think.
As a thought experiment, if you infected an entire city with the flu, the ones to show up at the hospital are the worst cases, and if you just built your data from those people, you'd get a really really skewed perspective.
Infections are doubling every few days, so yes most infections occurred very recently. If it takes a month from initial infection to declare someone "disease-free", then there might only be ~300 people to that point.
Thank you. I simply do not understand how calm and relaxed everyone is. The correct mortality rate is terrifying. People should be stocking up on more than just masks.
I'm not trying to fearmonger and I realize this is potentially in the same league as screaming fire in a very crowded theater. But we all are aware of the numbers, and even ignoring the fact that they're underreported, the current correctly calculated mortality rate is grave.
Now, given that this is still unfolding, it's possible that only those with weakened immune systems are dying, as usual. But even then at this point dead/recovered is a severe indicator. Plus rumor is R0 1-4 and it is likely more contagious than SARS - hell, look at what we do know about China's response; far more comprehensive and restricted than outbreaks past.
It's early for panic, but not too early to prepare. As soon as the public heard catches wind of just how significant this is, I guarantee stores will empty overnight.
I submitted an Ask: HN to propose designing an open source ventilator. It was invisi-modded.
From watching videos from inside wuhan, there seem to be hints that this thing is somewhat similar to the flu and I think it is possible, even likely, that there is a massive swath of unregistered infected, and the hospital based study is an extremely self selected group of people--as in there is a high mortality rate and ventilator usage among people who felt bad enough to check themselves in, and were bad enough to admit.
These data are likely a product of garbage in / garbage out.
Hospitals are turning away patients - most patients aren't having samples sent for DNA verification - many patients are too afraid to go to the hospital - etc...
We likely will not have a clear picture of survivability for some time.
Even assuming the numbers are right and the virus does not evolve, survival may be that high for people who can benefit from intensive care. What happens when the healthcare system is overflowing with patients?
I'd like to see some more granular status e.g. out of 15k cases 1000 are 25-35 years old males that were healthy. The survivability rate is X for that group.
When economic activity is temporarily unexpectedly reduced, companies start running out of cash / working capital.
Injecting extra liquidity means that companies are able to get short-term loans to cover expenses and continue functioning, instead of going bankrupt during the chaos (which would also facilitate bankrupting their suppliers and creditors).
It's standard Keynesian monetary policy. There's bound to be some impact on the economy from the coronavirus, but sudden shocks to the system cause the economy to overreact, and far more people get thrown out of work. If the government overstimulates, then you get inflation, but in a crisis unemployment is a bigger problem.
Adding liquidity (aka printing money) just kicks the can down the road. Supposedly the US GDP last year was up close to 4%, but they failed to account for the 6% increase in the money supply, which means an actual 2% contraction instead which is a huge difference. In the US at least this has been ongoing since 2009. In the long run it causes more losses to the people overall while creating/propping up the upper echelons of a monetary cast system. An analogy could be getting hit on the hand with a hammer. It might be scarier to get a single hard blow but repeated medium energy blows are overall going to cause a lot more damage.
If US or China stock market was to go down, govt will immediately infuse such massive cash that things would be back up in no time. I'm wondering this is why there had been no recession past the entire decade and very likely none ahead. Somehow we have arrived at economic prosperity level where enough wealth is "buffered" to smooth out downturns.
> I'm wondering this is why there had been no recession past the entire decade and very likely none ahead.
I'm taking your "we've solved the business cycle!" comment as my sell signal. Everything is rosy until it isn't. I have a very opposite, pessimistic view, that this great fear of even the slightest downtown means we're just putting off the day of reckoning until it really comes crashing down.
The fact is the prosperity of the past 10 years has come with huge and growing imbalances that can't continue ad infinitum. Deficits are gigantic, and at some point all this money we've been lending will require higher interest rates for people to buy our bonds. When that happens, watch out.
You're absolutely right. You don't have to believe me but I called the last recession. It's not bad news that's frightening. It's a disproportionate government and market reaction. Governments making a lot of noise to protect weak hands. There are a lot of weak hands, many created since we "survived" the last scare, and it's not going to take much to bust them. Stay safe everybody and enjoy living history as usual.
I think the biggest counter-argument to this is the problem of "mal-investment". In a lot of ways the business cycle operates as an explore-exploit optimizer.
During boom periods, credit conditions are loose. Which allows for a large degree of innovation with new and speculative business models. This is important because as conditions and technologies change, the frontier space of what's viable needs to be explored. Tomorrow's economic titans are today's wild-eyed entrepreneurs.
However most of these crazy ideas turn out to be just that. That's where the importance of recessions come in. Credit crunches and market downturns impose economic and efficiency disciplines. Firms that were coasting by on good conditions without delivering real productivity gains are culled by the downturn.
The entire phase of the cycle is important to maintain a healthy economic ecosystem. My fear is that if we banish recessions to the dustbin of history, we'll find ourselves increasingly burdened with bad investments as a larger and larger share of the capital base. Instead of getting written off during a downturn, jubilant markets will just keep throwing good money after bad managers, broken business models and overhyped vaporware.
This is like an argument that we need epidemics like plagues once in a while to shake out the weaklings. It turns out that epidemics are neither effective and also they take out strong as well as weak just like recession kills many good longer-term startups.
On a broader view, the amount of cash that governments like US and China able to infuse in the system at moment's notice is unparalleled. The big 5 tech alone harbors cash of $0.5T and capable to weather any storms. If you think of US or China as one organism, they have achieved enough of collective wealth and enough cash just sloshing around that any new recession can be absorbed away.
Fantastically put! Just as periodic wildfires are necessary to clear the flammable brush and enable new growth, recessions will trim the fat and close down our least successful businesses. This creates more resources to pour into stable, or at least more promising, companies.
Ask HN: Should I be worried about the PANIC around the current situations, will they act as a rescission trigger? Can I assume a proportional impact on crypto-currency market as well?
More importantly, I'm considering a move from a Bn$ organization to a safety concerned mobile-app product startup, How to access whether a start-up can survive if the situation end-up on the negative side, in the next 6 months.
People have been saying they expect a recession in the next 2 years for the last 2 years and now is no different. If it was easy to predict when the least risky time is to make a risky decision, then it wouldn't be risky, gambling wouldn't be a thing, and life would be forever boring.
2016 was supposed to be the year the bubble crashes. "They" also said their would be a double dip in 2012. I've heard so many doom and gloom predictions in the past - but the one thing they all have in common is a complete lack of specifics.
WHAT is going to cause the crash? Which industry has a fundamental imbalance? It's always just some vague notion that "something" isn't right.
A black swan, like coronavirus shutting down China.
>Which industry has a fundamental imbalance?
Consumer debt and financial services.
How has our economic output been growing without much inflation or wage growth? How did we sell 17 million vehicles domestically last year when the average American has less than $1k in the bank? How are people buying phones for $600-700 every two years?
Debt. Lots of it. And what's going to happen when consumer prices get driven up? Are people going to make their payments?
You think a $600 phone every 2 years is a big purchase? People used to buy desktop computers every few years, now they don’t. The mobile phone generates such a great improvement in efficiency (no more getting lost, always available GPS), instant information access (no need to go to a library or spend time finding it in leaflets/books/traditional sources).
$600 every 2 years is an absolute steal for the most economically beneficial piece of personal technology ever created.
If you don't make enough money to have any savings, any purchase of $600 at any time is "big."
Like yea I can afford it because I make 3x what my friends and family do outside the Bay Area tech bubble, but I don't pretend that I'm not special because throwing a few hundred around doesn't cause me any stress about next month's rent, or credit card, or car payment, or health insurance bill.
So is paying for food and rent. You have to balance the alternatives of not paying. Not having a capable smartphone in today's world will cost you far more than the price of the device.
You're not wrong, but considering other indicators, yield curve in particular, this could be a viable trigger. Depending on how this virus plays out, the only question is not if or when but how long the Chinese industrial complex will be suppressed. Those are the raw and finished manufacturing goods that power a substantial proportion of the world economy, and there will be cascading effects.
Wilbur Ross's comments come off as a little callous but whatever.
Anyway, these repo operations are meant to stabilize the markets in the event of a flash crash where there is a major dislocation on the price of equities, due to the coronavirus. Still might be a major downside move, but it should stave any long term move downwards.
China is a major manufacturing partner and it is Wilbur Ross's job to identify and discuss weaknesses in that setup. What do you expect him to do, quietly put his head in the sand?
Repo gives liquidity to banks, which may prevent them from selling other assets in order to maintain operations and meet any balance sheet requirements they may have. It doesn't automatically support equities. China's government may also buy equities when markets open, but that would be kind of foolish because they could simply wait and buy lower, where they probably would have more price impact.
China has historically had major issues with liquidity and balance sheet. Look up the 2013 Liquidity Crisis and you'll see what I mean. Not to mention that many banks participate in risky practices like meeting balance sheet requirements only on disclosure deadlines and dealing in loans secured with ghost collateral.
Yes, this not about equities. I've been through a couple market disruptions on the corporate side. Our revenue is from retail, our expenses are to other businesses. During a natural disaster, people are preoccupied in paying the bills and are late paying. Meanwhile, my corp had contractual obligations to other businesses to pay on specific dates. With less revenue and same expenses, we borrow from the banks. If all corps are going through the same natural disaster, we're all borrowing from the banks. Those banks run out of cash and borrow it from the gov't.
The emergency repo operations were required long before the coronavirus, we have liquidity issues in the US. Economy will start to collapse shortly... Fed can't expand the balance sheet without exacerbating the problems.
In the US, cost of money for institutions is already so low that effective interest rates could absorb a lot of demand without going haywire. It might actually be healthy for the economy.
I do agree that the Fed has been unwise in buying debt just to bolster Donald's bull market.
The entire world has been doing it for the last decade, and there’s been another uptick recently. The US recently resumed buying treasuries. This is not isolated to China.
You might be surprised to learn why there's excess housing. Young men who are courting a lady need two or three houses to have any chance of winning her hand:
That's a gross misrepresentation. China has a female shortage, so some males will not get mates, regardless of how much housing is built. The extra houses aren't convincing women to turn from lesbian/asexual to heterosexual.
I don't really understand your comment. A female shortage is compatible with men buying many houses to attract women. Men wouldn't be trying to turn lesbian women heterosexual with houses. Men would be trying to attract women away from other men with houses. The men would be fighting each other.
The article is about injecting liquidity into markets. The US has done a huge amount of this in the last decade, in fact almost every major power has. Here is the latest US resumption of buying their own debt:
I don't understand this obsession with "artificial" stimulus. If the economy naturally grows at 2% a year, but "artificial" stimulus causes it to grow at 3% a year, why wouldn't you do it? It's like refusing to get vaccines because they are unnatural.
Because ultimately it's likely we build unneeded infrastructure that is wasted, including useless companies. Then you still have to pay off those loans slowing growth afterwards. That might be companies that fail or banks with almost failing loans, retarding growth like in Japan for now decades, as well as governments having to reduce spending (or not stimulate) in the recession period because they had so much stimulous during "good times".
In the us it's extremely likely when the next recession comes, Republicans will rediscover their belief in avoiding deficit spending when they are no longer in power. We also will have less things to do to stimulate then in new ways because we already had been doing them. So many political groups want austerity when the economy is hurting instead of stimulous in recession.
This explanation doesn't really fit the evidence. China engaged in a giant stimulus in 2008-2009, and was rewarded with avoiding most of the impact of the financial crisis.
I'm sure China builds some unneeded infrastructure, but they build needed infrastructure that's now beyond the ability of Western governments. New York can't even finish the Second Avenue Subway after 50 years.
You're arguing with an incomplete explanation of how many economists believe stimulus spending works. I'm no economist, but a Keynesian would, I think, say that government stimulus is fine when the economy and demand are lagging. Doing it when the economy is strong encourages capital misallocation and the problems OP mentioned.
The Uber vs Lyft market share wars are a great example of this misallocation. Due to all of the VC money sloshing around both companies are forced to raise and spend ungodly amounts of money in order to fight for market share. In a more rational monetary environment raising money would be more difficult and both companies would be more focused on profitability instead of market share.
The primary risk of this misallocation is that if/when a recession hits, revenues are likely to drop (or grow more slowly), VC money will probably dry up, and raising prices will become more difficult. So the only way to survive will probably be to cut back on expenses (basically fire a ton of employees). And this of course would just compound the recession.
So your solution to the Uber versus Lyft market share wars is unemployment? People in unrelated industries should be unemployed because you find cutthroat competition backed by VCs to be unseemly?
In a way you’re assuming no inflation which has been the case for the past decade. BUT. What happens when China goes offline and takes low cost labor with it? For the record, I believe this situation will resolve within the month but it will certainly reveal global over-reliance on China (this is meant as a positive comment that China has been the single driving force behind economic recovery which they don’t get enough credit for).
Globalization kept inflation at bay. Instead of upping prices due to increased production costs, enterprises in advanced economies moved production to China & co.
This is not necessarily a bad thing of course, as China catches up and the ‘free’ markets work efficiently. Meanwhile the middle-class in the developped countries gets hurt, thus their economies see little inflation.
Another argument for this would be that everything not outsource-able saw rather higher inflation than the CPI numbers. (Housing, education etc.)
Inflation was low because of China. Production cost could easily triple in other parts of the world at the same quality and quantity even if we can move them instantaneously.
> But I guess each one of us is a victim of a propaganda machine
I would say the enormous difference is that you are aware of it, while the vast majority of Americas are utterly clueless. In fact they often take extreme offence at the very mention their media contains propaganda.
You've crossed back into nationalistic flamebait repeatedly in this thread, which we just recently asked you not to do.
Would you please just stop posting generalized pejoratives about $NATION and $PEOPLE? In your case it's America and Americans, but it doesn't matter which particular nation someone has an issue with—it inevitably leads to increasingly low-quality and nasty internet discussion, which is just what we don't want here.
I know you're not doing this intentionally, but it's always many times more obvious to readers than it is to the commenter. Multiply the possible effects of such a comment by 100x and you'll get a more accurate picture of how this sounds.
I personally found is fascinating that a person from the USSR (famous for propaganda) had the insight and self awareness to say they're very aware that every country is a propaganda machine, though while I was in the US for 5 months last year I met many people who had no idea they're in one too.
I would say the same is true in Australia, and Canada (the other countries I've lived in)
At no point was I trying to say America is crap (like many people assumed) and I tried to say that on two separate occasions, but all the other comments just jumped back to "American isn't as bad as china" (which is unrelated to my insight above).
Imagine reading a comment about how 'interesting' it is that other countries have 'insight and self-awareness' while yours doesn't. It's not hard to see how that would land as a slight.
"You're in a propaganda machine" is one hop from "Wake up sheeple". That's a cliché of internet fulmination because it never works. Posting like this is pushing a button that generates angry responses. It's your responsibility not to push the button. (Not that that's always easy, since we usually do it inadvertently.)
> Imagine reading a comment about how 'interesting' it is that other countries have 'insight and self-awareness' while yours doesn't. It's not hard to see how that would land as a slight.
"You're in a propaganda machine" is one hop from "Wake up sheeple". That's a cliché of internet fulmination because it never works. Posting like this is pushing a button that generates angry responses. It's your responsibility not to push the button. (Not that that's always easy, since we usually do it inadvertently.)
But when it's true, we need to have the perspective to realize that, just like the other commentor from the USSR. Just because it pushes people's buttons doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about it - especially when it's true.
I'm originally from Australia, and yes, 100% without a doubt it is a propaganda machine. It does annoy me, and that's a good thing because it means I'm motivated to do something about changing it.
We can't simply not talk about things that might push people's buttons. Then we'd be just always talking about surface stuff, and never getting to the heart of anything, and - even worse - we'd never improve anything.
But sure, I'll stop. I'll stick to easy topics on HN. Sorry to use up your precious time again.
I lived under the USSR, American and European propaganda machine, they are all the same. You get tired of them as you get to my age.
I'm pretty sure that rayiner's comment exists mirrored on a random Chinese forum. Someone being offended by a comparison of China and US (implying China is better). We're all the same.
Is this about numbers? Or the fact that both countries did something horrific?
How about how many wars the Americans started? How many people killed, left without homes? How about the fact that Americans bombed the Japanese? Why can't people accept that bad is bad no matter who does it or how many times they do it.
This is not you vs. me, democrats vs. republicans, conservative vs. liberals, Russia vs. US, it's not the divide and conquer of the American propaganda.
I'm not defending the USSR, Europe or US. I'm saying all are bad and all of them have done horrifying things, the only thing we can do is to hope that we can become better. And this can only be done if we stop saying "oh but he did it worse/first, mom" but understand that we need to do better.
Killing one person is not as bad as killing one hundred people. Saying "both countries did something horrific" is denying your ability to draw distinctions between things which is the same thing as denying your ability to think. I don't know why you would voluntarily give up your ability to think.
> How about how many wars the Americans started? How many people killed, left without homes? How about the fact that Americans bombed the Japanese? Why can't people accept that bad is bad no matter who does it or how many times they do it.
No one is arguing that Americans never do anything wrong.
> I'm not defending the USSR, Europe or US. I'm saying all are bad and all of them have done horrifying things, the only thing we can do is to hope that we can become better. And this can only be done if we stop saying "oh but he did it worse/first, mom" but understand that we need to do better.
Saying that all countries have done horrifying things is facile. The idea that, in order to "do better," we have to first convince ourselves that killing millions of people by forced labor is the same as kidnapping 3000 people and torturing them is bizarre. It's all-or-nothing nonsense. The fact that no country is perfect does not mean that no country is better than any other country.
This argument didn't start because someone said "rendition was okay because the gulags were worse". It started because you objected to the statement that the USSR was much worse than the US.
I see that I have made you upset, you started attacking me, it was not my intention.
I'm a bit confused about your comments, since it would be comfortable to think that you are "trolling", but the fact that you are upset is clearly a sign that you believe in what you are saying.
My guess is that you are young and above average intelligence, I'm sure that you can look things up on Wikipedia, I'm old and not so sharp anymore, so I'll also look things up, hopefully we can all get better educated on what all these countries did.
Writing in English is hard at this time of the night, so I'll sign off, I wish you the best.
There's a huge difference between "manufacture of consent" type propaganda, in which the citizenry is complicit in its own indoctrination, and Soviet-style propaganda where there was no free press and people were killed and jailed for criticizing the government.
Wondering aloud if the Soviet system might not be better "because at least people were aware of it" is shocking and cruel.
The “everybody is the same” rhetoric lacks basic credibility. We’ve lived through three years of the media calling the chief executive a nazi, racist white supremacist, foreign agent, the harbinger of the downfall of the country. Can you imagine that happening in Russia or China?
Im not an American but it can be argued the US was not built from the same social situations Russia, China or any post colonial emerging power was built from.
US for almost all practical purpose for most of its existence is an extended Britain. And for the remaining part the best result of European colonialism. The US is basically Europe. There are now differences of course, but the bigger story is this.
By and large Russia and China are the result of revolutions, that were attained in the climate of what was then the dominant political and economic narrative of the time.
The fact that countries like China and Russia have done whatever they have done what it took Europe and its colonies centuries to do is in itself a huge proof of success, if you want to measure it that way.
> There's a huge difference between "manufacture of consent" type propaganda, in which the citizenry is complicit in its own indoctrination
“manfactured consent” is top-down, elite-driven propaganda that the general citizenry isn't any more complicit in than is the case with authoritarian propaganda.
It's different than authoritarian propaganda in that it isn't centrally directed by the state, per se, (on the other hand since it is elite-directed by the same elites to whom the state apparatua is subservient, that difference is less significant than it might appear at first.)
It's also different in that while there is a significant degree of commonality, the elites that it serves have competing interests which results in diversity and conflicts in the propaganda.
You misunderstood. I'm not saying the Soviet system was better or anything like that.
I'm saying it's interesting to realize that everyone on all sides are fed propaganda. As 'siracusa23' points out, he is very aware that both Americans and Soviets continue to be fed propaganda.
What I said was that today, the vast majority of Americans have no idea they are constantly being fed propaganda, and they openly take offence if you say as much.
The reason why Americans deny that they are fed propaganda is because the kind of propaganda that exists in America is subtle. It doesn't involve jailing or killing dissidents. Your post (and the parent post) omitted that distinction. My argument is that this distinction matters.
We have huge problems with policing in this country, no doubt. This is simply not comparable to the systemic oppression and persecution of political and ethnic undesirables in places like China.
Note that millions of us Americans who are disgusted with systemic racism and authoritarian overreach in our country are free to discuss it openly, assemble in opposition, and vote our conscience. Do you imagine a person in China is likewise free to engage in a public discussion about Uyghur concentration camps?
In the US (and most open democracies, probably) - propagandists are warring with other propagandists, in a perpetual contest for influence and power. Nearly everyone is aware that there are tremendous amounts of misinformation and propaganda being thrown at them every day. And its not just Democrats vs Republicans. Its also corporations, activists, advertisers, or even other nation states, etc.
People are quite good at recognizing the propaganda from other bubbles that aren't their own (hence everyone on the left seeing Fox News for what is... and everyone on the right seeing CNN/MSNBC for what they are). Many of the resources within each bubble are dedicated to exposing the propaganda of other bubbles. A bubble's inhabitants do less well at recognizing and acknowledging the propaganda of their own bubble, however.
Democracies are basically (thought) bubble blowing contests.
Its not quite the market place of ideas we wanted or hoped for... but its what we have today, and its still preferable to the alternative, where there's only one despot-controlled bubble - and so we don't even realize that bubbles exist at all - or if we do, we don't mention it out loud, if we know whats "good" for us.
No, that's not the only point you've been arguing. In response to the assertion that American dissidents are not jailed or killed as a matter of policy, you responded with this:
> Plenty of people were jailed in the occupy wall street peaceful demonstrations. Open your eyes.
My argument is that this is a bullshit, apples-to-oranges distraction. I'm sorry to be so blunt.
> Americans have no idea they are being fed propaganda.
What "Americans" are you talking about? You're talking to an American right now. There are millions of us fully aware that we're swimming in spin, biased reporting, and government misinformation. If anything, seeing propaganda everywhere we look has become a bit of an American pastime. Regardless, look around at this forum; I can't count how many heated debates we've had on HN about the dark, rotten corners of this country's past and present. Everything from the genocide of the Native Americans to the Lost Cause, the Iraq War, Snowden, what have you.
It's bizarre that you can invoke the deaths of American protesters at the hands of the police, and then condemn Americans' collective gullibility and disinterest as though it's somehow comparable, in any fucking way whatsoever, to things like the Great Firewall. They are not comparable.
You and I agree on more things than not. But on some topics like this, I really think you get carried away with sweeping and reactionary generalizations that don't help your case.
All of this is widely talked about in the United States where we debate the legitimacy of drone warfare, the history and legacy of racism, and the missteps of American foreign policy. We read Howard Zinn in my (public) High School history class.
You appear to want to debate "whether America is evil" or something but I'm talking about a distinction between manufacture-of-consent propaganda and state control of speech and dissidence, which does not exist in the United States.
> You appear to want to debate "whether America is evil" or something
No. I have no interest in saying that at all. I have not said that anywhere in this comment thread.
All I started out saying, and am continuing to say is that the major difference with propaganda in the USA is that the vast majority of Americans have no idea they are subjected to it, and would get angry if it was pointed out to them.
That's all.
> state control of speech and dissidence, which does not exist in the United States
> All I started out saying, and am continuing to say is that the major difference with propaganda in the USA is that the vast majority of Americans have no idea they are subjected to it, and would get angry if it was pointed out to them.
This just doesn’t jive with my experience growing up in what was (at the time) a fairly conventional somewhat conservative state (Virginia). We were exposed to Zinn and Manufacturing Consent in our public school. We learned about slavery, Indian extermination, Jim Crow, McCarthyism, etc. We learned about our interventions in Latin America and Iran. Socialism and the labor movement was taught very sympathetically. For example, we were taught that Upton Sinclair’s “the Jungle” was muckraking journalism. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned that the novel was intended to be socialist propaganda. We certainly were never we exposed to the contemporaneous criticism of Sinclair: https://fee.org/articles/29-upton-sinclairs-the-jungle-prove...
If anything, I’d argue the propaganda was in the other direction. America was almost always painted in a bad light, except for two things: the founding, and WWII. (Although, teachers are already trying to delegitimize our founding by incorporating material from the 1619 project.) We never learned all the bad things about the Soviet Union, or socialism as tried in Latin America.
We are among the top in terms of college education rates: On other measures, the US does great. It has long been among the top countries for college attainment: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cac.asp
There are some indicators where the US doesn’t do as well. For example, life expectancy at age 65 is on the lower end, six months less than the UK and about the same as Denmark and Poland: https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/life-expectancy-at-65.htm. Though the fact that Denmark and Poland are the same should indicate that the measure is highly sensitive to demographic and cultural factors. (Sweden, Germany, and the UK are closer to the US than they are to France or Spain.)
> Plenty of people were jailed in the occupy wall street peaceful demonstrations.
Occupy Wall Street protestors were not all “peaceful.” They sometimes got violent or destructive, and they were arrested, but that‘s not a bad thing. It’s happening in France too: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/04/france-scores-yellow-.... There is a huge difference between arresting rowdy protestors and imprisoning political dissidents.
> Also includes executing American citizens without trial
By that you mean ordering a military attack on an American citizen who was waging war against the US on foreign soil. Again, huge difference between that and executing citizens on US soil for political offenses.
> testing on huamns against their consent
Yes, that was bad. But not as bad as experiments in collective farming killing tens of millions of people!
> overthrowing democratically elected leaders
Not clear that this is bad.
> I could go on and on.
The fact you're inside it, and being subjected to it, means you can't see it clearly.
You can go on and on, but can you present any examples that are actually equivalent? Your examples, presumably the best ones you have, are utterly superficial. What’s the equivalency you’re hoping to draw between taking military action against a terrorist on foreign soil, who happens to have US citizenship, and massive political purges? It’s not even just a matter of “both are bad, but one involves more instances of the bad thing.” The moral calculus is completely different. How are you supposed to even handle a US citizen who wages terrorist attacks on the US from abroad. It’s not like you can send police to arrest them. Whether it’s ultimately “bad” or not, the ethical calculation is completely different.
> That's why I said it's interesting 'siracusa23' can. He/she has more perspective than you (and I'm willing to bet the majority of Americans)
There are millions of Americans who have first hand experience with socialism and communism, and many are among the most fervent defenders of the American way. There are 1.5 million Cuban Americans in Florida, and Donald Trump won a majority of their vote: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/100-republ.... These are people for whom the distant memory of communism is so powerful that they’ll hold their nose and vote for the Republican candidate regardless of the odious things he’s said about immigrants. Nationwide, a supermajority of Hispanics (60-20) said they wouldn’t vote for someone who called themselves a “socialist”: https://www.latinorebels.com/2019/11/07/telemundopoll. These are people who have (or their families have) experience with the dismal failures of socialism in Latin America.
By all the measures that actually indicate how life is for the average person on the street, not just the ones about how much stuff you use up.
The US is at or very near the worst among OECD countries in: infant mortality, child poverty, child health and safety, life expectancy at birth, healthy life expectancy, rate of obesity, disability-adjusted life years, doctors per 1000 people, deaths from treatable conditions, rate of mental health disorders, rate of drug abuse, rate of prescription drug use, incarceration rate, rate of assaults, rate of homicides, income inequality, wealth inequality, and economic mobility.
In many of those, it's 2x to 5x worse than other countries.
How much stuff they can buy and how big their house is is a big part of what the average person on the street considers to be relevant metrics of prosperity. I wouldn’t trade an extra 6 months of life expectancy like in the UK for a house half the size like in the UK, and I suspect most other Americans wouldn’t either.
As to your other indicators, are you really talking about the “average person” or the poorest people? Because there is a big difference, and in the US we have deliberately chosen to optimize for lower taxes on the middle class at the expense of weaker safety nets for the lowest class. Take, for example, income mobility. For the top 80% it’s similar between the US and Denmark: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012.... Someone born in the second to lowest quantile, for example, has a similar shot at rising to the top quantile in the US and Denmark.
As to health indicators it’s similar, although also complicated by demographic and diet differences. Asian Americans have the longest life expectancy of pretty much anyone in the world, including people in Hong Kong, Singapore, or Japan. It’s not because there is an alternate, Asian only health system. It’s because Asian Americans are largely outside the bottom quantile, and a lot of the things that drag down the US in the overall average are a function of very bad results in the bottom quantile.
Not quite, many are happy to accept that what the media of the opposing view is doing is propaganda. "MSM" vs FOX and OANN. And quite frankly both sides are right.
Stongly disagree. The relevant (and enormous) difference is that Americans are empowered to learn of and discuss their sordid affairs, without fear of punishment by their government. Just like we're doing right now, with me using my real name.
In contrast, people in countries like China and the old USSR are empowered only to learn of and share state-approved knowledge, in a state-approved manner. Stepping too far outside these boundaries often leads to imprisonment or worse.
Yes, we were afraid of repercussions, but "imprisonment or worse" seems like the same stereotype we had with Americans all walking with guns on the street like it's a western movie, smoking Malboro and listening to rock music.
The repercussions were social mostly, your boss would not promote you anymore, your neighbours would avoid you. Only in cases of high-treason, such as Assange from WikiLeaks, you would get "imprisonment or worse". Think to how PC culture works in the US. If you're misoginistic, your friends will start avoiding you, you might even get fired.
And no, people did not learn through state-approved knowledge, we had conspiracy theories, we had friends, uncles and friends having friends working inside the government.
> Only in cases of high-treason, such as Assange from WikiLeaks, you would get "imprisonment or worse".
So, "high-treason" must have included religious offenses, attempting to leave the USSR, independent journalism, cultural and literary nonconformism, activism of any almost any kind, and any other sort of activity deemed undesirable to the state. Is that right?
> And no, people did not learn through state-approved knowledge, we had conspiracy theories, we had friends, uncles and friends having friends working inside the government.
Conspiracy theories and rumors are not comparable to the robust freedom of expression we enjoy in the West -- a freedom that we take advantage of on this very forum, where we are free to share information and criticize our Western governments however we please, anonymously or not.
If you're interested in learning about the USSR's treatment of people who spoke against the state, the accounts of the dissidents themselves makes excellent reading. There are entire libraries dedicated to preserving the experience of people imprisoned and killed for crimes of expression in the USSR and its satellites, written in their own words.
I don't know if you really intended to compare the imprisonment and murder of people for crimes of expression, religion, or ethnicity under authoritarian states to the PC movement in the West, but if you are, I have to question whether you actually experienced the former.
Gorbachev used to say that Chernobyl was where the USSR really started to crumble. The disaster made clear how morally bankrupt and technically incompetent the system really was, wiping out any remaining goodwill or trust. Similarly, Katrina was where the semi-fascist US consensus under GW Bush went to pieces.
I suspect China will experience a similar moment at some point. This might well be it.
This might be similar, but I see zero chance of Xi's power taking a hit. For as long as party's institutes are intact, he will be there.
Some people began to speculate that Xi wasn't seen for the last 3 days, and sudden activity of "party elders," but I bet this is just an enormous amounts of wishful thinking showing up.
Xi's "system" has an expiration date attached, but it's not tomorrow.
Following on that Gorbachev analogy, the Unior really started to crumble during late Breznev for reasons well documented by historians.
Basically, after Brenzhen loyalists, who mostly were his contemporaries (frail 70-80 and even 90 year olds,) started to drop like flies, a whole truckload of political adventurists, with rogue 3 letter services in particular, took advantage of that to grab power. This in a few years term led to the Union turning ungovernable, and ultimately falling apart.
The ultimate proof to that is that pretty much all across the former union, the power went to ex-KGB or men from other 3 letter services.
Even as early as Gorbachev's first year, there were officials who were publicly disobeying his direct orders. The last generation of Union's leadership was hamstrung even before the power was formally passed to it.
> there were officials who were publicly disobeying his direct orders.
Gorbachev's point was more about public opinion than political machinery or party hierarchies.
Infighting factions had been a fact of life in the USSR since foundation, but the public as a whole still operated on the presumption that the State existed and was working with some degree of competency and some degree of shared purpose (if inscrutable or stupid most of the time).
Chernobyl laid bare that the social contract was effectively broken and the State could not guarantee the most basic protection even from itself. The system as a whole was effectively deligitimized at a very basic level, and it soon became "every man for himself". This is why subsequent attempts to solve matters among hierarchies in the traditional way (coups and so on) just failed - the public had moved on.
I remember reading in some article, right before the Arab Spring, the entire Egyptian society had become a society of pretense. Every one was pretending to be, and to be doing things which they were not. There was mind boggling amount of lies on which the society ran.
Eventual Arab Spring was also in some way the society maxing out the amount of lies that can be told to each other and continue without bigger consequences. Some day things like hunger, illiteracy, jobs, living standards, economy all catch up you and your reality. And that's the day reality itself gives you a brutal appraisal of the situation.
Taubman noted that the disaster marked "a turning point for Gorbachev and the Soviet regime".[217] Several days after it occurred, he gave a televised report to the nation.[218] He cited the disaster as evidence for what he regarded as widespread problems in Soviet society, such as shoddy workmanship and workplace inertia.[219] Gorbachev later described the incident as one which made him appreciate the scale of incompetence and cover-ups in the Soviet Union.[217] From April to the end of the year, Gorbachev became increasingly open in his criticism of the Soviet system, including food production, state bureaucracy, the military draft, and the large size of the prison population.[220]
Gorbachev might not have the man who messed it all up, but he was the last man to see through the end of this. Basically this kind of rot is long set in motion, and eventually leads to a black swan disaster event, then every one wakes up to the deep truth they knew all along, but chose bury and move on with their daily lives instead.
The job of leadership on the basic level is to give this brutal self appraisal to themselves, before these disaster big black swan events and do what it takes to fix them.
As an Indian reading this is scary enough as it is. India has been on this disastrous path for long now. Every now and then there is some respite from this. But deep down everyone knows the society is broken, there is mind boggling amount of corruption(Like you said "every man for himself"), and other standard set of problems have long plagued the country.
I hope there won't be a black swan disaster event. But given the history of the world and inevitability of these things, I wonder if one comes along, what could that be?
It's worth remembering that Chernobyl wasn't the only disaster driving public distrust. Chernobyl is just the most known and mythologized one in the West, but there were three in relatively quick succession during that period: Chernobyl (1986), Spitak earthquake (1988), and Ufa train disaster (1989). All three (and the government response to them) had huge resonance among Soviet population, with Spitak surpassing Chernobyl.
How stable is the power that Xi has consolidated? How would the party and the public respond if there were leaks about his private life and behavior? I wonder what his skeletons in the closet are...
I've also wondered how receptive the Chinese people would be to a series of documentaries or dramas that point out the inequality and unfairness in their system. A film that highlights how the government treats humans and families as cattle during national emergencies and disasters. Even the great firewall can't keep that out.
> How stable is the power that Xi has consolidated?
Very stable. Basically nothing besides something coming from withing the party itself can shake him, and he took down all of those threats to him from within the party. Not even Mao ever managed to cleanse all of his detractors from the party up until his death.
Saying this, you should not be confusing that "people are throwing looks into his back," and quiet whispers of dissatisfaction with genuine resistance.
> How would the party and the public respond if there were leaks about his private life and behavior? I wonder what his skeletons in the closet are...
If you can write Chinese, google those skeletons, they are up to everybody to see. Even taxi drivers here know of Xi's billionaire sister, but... taxi drivers and other general public can't do anything about that.
> I've also wondered how receptive the Chinese people would be to a series of documentaries or dramas that point out the inequality and unfairness in their system.
People can see that every day out of their windows, not TVs. They don't need to watch any documentaries to know that.
There is the reason people use name of Dong Zhuo as an euphemism for Xi. Take a look at this video, the scene from Chang An says it all about the current political atmosphere in CPC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj_VMvsG7G0
Commoners resent him for disturbing a relative peace of Hu's years that they were just getting taste of, by starting a new political upheaval. CPC elders do not only see him as a threat to Jiang, but they clearly think that they themselves are his next target. His unilateral ambitions on the international stage are no match for the discontent world. And yes, the rank and file ordinary officials can't be more freaked out now.
However... you also don't forget when Xi was thought to stand for reforms, it were the masses themselves who invited his ambitions to move on the supreme power. And that those who were benefiting from status quo were hit by that the most.
> If you can write Chinese, google those skeletons, they are up to everybody to see. Even taxi drivers here know of Xi's billionaire sister, but... taxi drivers and other general public can't do anything about that.
Why would I need to read Chinese to find out about this? The Chinese state isn't able to censor content in Chinese, but has got the Western internet under its thumb?
Hypothetically speaking, would you rather read about the recent US impeachment proceedings in Korean or in English? You know, the language most widely spoken in the US?
>Hypothetically speaking, would you rather read about the recent US impeachment proceedings in Korean or in English? You know, the language most widely spoken in the US?
So, I mean, I agree with your point. but as an aside, I think it would be really interesting to see the perspective of a Spanish historian on the recent events in my country
I don't think it is particularly surprising that the best sources of Chinese rumours is in Chinese. I don't think this about censorship (in-fact it's the opposite).
>I've also wondered how receptive the Chinese people would be to a series of documentaries or dramas that point out the inequality and unfairness in their system.
1. Not Very receptive, as it will be seen as someone ( Foreign Intervention )trying to attack them. Something which may be hard to comprehend for most people.
2. Vastly underestimated the power of CCP.
I think these sort of thoughts are precisely why the West has failed to understand China for decades.
As a native Chinese, I agree with both. for 1) IMO Many documentaries from the west failed to tell the story in a way that is optimized for Chinese audiences. I think a root cause of that is the general public doesn’t have a great awareness of core democracy values like fairness and human rights.
Based on the videos I've seen coming out of Wuhan these documentaries may be Chinese made. Beneath the surface is bubbling a mass discontent with the CCP.
Sounds like a fan of House of Cards talking. I don't doubt that Xi may have "skeletons", but probably not like that. He wasn't born President. If there were any "skeleton" of that kind of political significance, do you not think his political enemies would already have discovered those after all those decades he has been a politician?
> If there were any "skeleton" of that kind of political significance, do you not think his political enemies would already have discovered those after all those decades he has been a politician?
I think they already did, and to no effect. Panama papers would've made China to explode under Hu, but nothing happened this time.
If you believe the rumours, Meng (Interpol guy) was rounded up on the slightest suspicion of indiscretion, despite him pleading fealty to Xi god knows how many times.
Gu Zhuoheng's "revelations" also seem to have not resulted in anything
> This might be similar, but I see zero chance of Xi's power taking a hit
Xi's behavior does not strike me as that of someone who is as confident as you. Consider how he throws a tantrum at the mere suggestion that Taiwan may be an independent country.
By "our government" do you just mean the Federal government? Or do you mean all levels of government? The mayor of New Orleans had parking lots full of empty school buses and claimed he had no way to evacuate citizens. The governor of Louisiana whined and wrung her hands instead of doing anything. The Federal response was far from perfect but it was much more effective than the state or local response.
> parking lots full of empty school buses and claimed he had no way to evacuate citizens
That just sounds like a sensational headline lacking in context and details. For example, with Hurricane Harvey in Houston they had to weigh calling mass evacuation against the ability of the road system to handle that much traffic. It doesn't matter how many buses you have in a parking lot if they can't leave the city. I'm not saying that was the case in New Orleans, but I'm certainly not going to assume the worst from "parking lots full of empty school buses".
Honestly, is there even a known good example of how the response to Katrina should have been? Most people's complaints about it seem so shallow in their analysis as to appear a projection of their distaste for the Bush administration or the local politicians; nearly 15 years later.
Edit: Could you imagine an NTSB report on an airplane crash: "Air traffic control had three empty runways but said they had no way to land the plane! If they hadn't just whined and wrung their hands, perhaps everybody would have survived that flight.."
A teenager stole one of those buses, drove it around his neighborhood, picking up people who had no way to evacuate, and then drove them out of town. He was legally in the wrong on many accounts but from a practical point of view, he did what needed to be done to save at least one bus load of people.
The federal response should have been just that, a response afterwards. The efforts before Katrina hit should have been mostly the responsibility of the local and state governments with the feds helping out with the logistics of the evacuees once they were out of the path of the storm.
That they had a bunch of school buses sitting around? Did they also have a bunch of bus drivers, or other qualified people with CDLs, sitting around on call? Because most of them are usually part time employees with second or third jobs and probably also had their own families and problems to solve.
> Did they also have a bunch of bus drivers, or other qualified people with CDLs, sitting around on call?
You unwittingly demonstrate the cruelty of bearaucratic thinking that is inconsequential in the face of real human disaster, ultimately leading to tragedy.
> That they had a bunch of school buses sitting around?
That they had an obvious resource which with proper planning (which would, of course, include lining up drivers) could have been used to evacuate large numbers of people, but which was not used at all, and was not even considered in what little prior planning the city and the state did do.
> most of them are usually part time employees with second or third jobs and probably also had their own families and problems to solve.
Um, put the drivers' families on the bus they're driving?
Again, this is the sort of thing proper advance planning will obviously take into account.
A category 4 hurricane would level most buildings and kill damn near everyone wherever the eye actually lands (luckily Katrina lost power very fast when it hit land and the eye was miles from downtown). So there's really no option but to evacuate, besides just pray it turns away.
Houston is way bigger than New Orleans, but either way you obviously can't evacuate a major city in one day. Their first obvious mistake was waiting way too long to call it (of course a very easy thing to say after the fact). As I recall, Bush was calling on the mayor and governor to evacuate for a couple days before they finally did. Then there was confusion about which govt was in charge with the gov finally taking over the city then Bush taking over the state. In the mayor's defense, he never really had much power to being with, and cops were abandoning their posts so I don't know who he could have called on to get things done. And as you say, once it become national politics, it's impossible to get much objective analysis.
As for examples, the comparison was made to Cuba. A small city in a small country with an absolute dictator calling the shots. I get the impression that the previous poster wanted to criticize Bush as being dictatorial, which is ironic, since it's ultimately a lack of federal domination that everyone complains about in Katrina.
Don’t forget William “cold cash” Jefferson, who commandeered national guard time take him back in the flood zone to get $90,0000 he had hidden in his freezer.
Intesting. Hubei provincial and Wuhan city governments are being bashed hard for covering up and ineffectiveness in handling the crisis and China’s central government is being praised.
I’m specifically talking about when it was obvious that state and local authorities had failed/were overwhelmed, the days and days and weeks before a useful federal response came. I’m imagining how it would go down if not one city but dozens to hundreds were affected by an asteroid or nuclear attack. I imagine total chaos.
exactly, USA is _united_ states, crisis like Katrina really should be dealt by the local governments first-hand, with federal help on its way. it's very different from China's system, where everyone has to get approvals from the central government.
It’s not just the federal system, but the basic nature of disaster response. Even if the EU had jurisdiction over levees in the Netherlands, it would be ridiculous to expect an EU agency to be the front line response to flooding in Amsterdam. It’s the local government that actually knows where the risks and the resources to deal with those are. The federal government can help with money, say ensuring that poor cities have the financial resources to prepare a disaster response. But the actual response has to be local.
Katrina was when I realized how silly it is to think our government would ever deal effectively with a major disaster and how vulnerable we are.
Having been through three major hurricanes and 9/11, I'm not as skeptical as you. Everything is local. If the local authorities are prepared, things will go better. The feds are backup for when things get too big to handle.
Looking back, after the initial shock wore off, the on-the-street response in the hours after 9/11 was very interesting. It was clear that NYC and its neighbors have many layers of plans for major emergencies. Do they have everything covered? Probably not, which is only logical since you can't plan for the unknown. But a good deal of faith was earned that day.
"Katrina was when I realized how silly it is to think our government would ever deal effectively with a major disaster"
It's funny because the very idea that 'the government will save us from a big disaster' is a fairly new concept.
Some governments are 'kind of' prepared for some kinds of problems - i.e. the Swiss are prepared for some kinds of invasions, surely the Dutch have preparations for floods.
But for unforeseen disasters (the levy breach in New Orleans), it's harder and we're mostly on our own.
New Orleans is also very poor and is socially dysfunctional along a whole other set of vectors, I'll bet $100 it's pretty correlated with dealing with disaster. If it were some well run mid-sized city in New England it would have been another story. (Plus the possibility of racism which is to vague to consider in a paragraph).
> for unforeseen disasters (the levy breach in New Orleans)
Credible sources, including FEMA, predicted that one years in advance.
Check out the October 2004 issue of National Geographic:
> The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.
> Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.
> When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.
I remember watching the New Orleans breach in TV in Ireland where I was at the time and it was a bit odd - the only US news we had pretty much was CNN and that had been going on about the levys being likely to be breached about every 20 mins for the 24 to 48 hours previously. And then they breached. And then the president came on saying no one could have predicted they would be breached. Which was odd - I guess no one unless they'd turned on TV anywhere on the planet...
Pedantically, Bush may have actually been correct: the levees failed by collapsing under the water load, whereas the concern was entirely on failing by being overtopped. In colloquial terms, people will use the term "breach" to refer to both failure modes, but these failure modes are actually quite different, and apparently the Army Corps of Engineers reserved "breach" to mean only the first one.
On the other hand, I'm not really willing to give Bush much credit here. The middle of a disaster is not the right time for pedantry.
Yes, but with the levees, the cost is massive. It's one thing to say 'there will be a big earthquake' and put together operational plans, do some practice runs. With the levees it might be many billions in upgrades for a 'risk', meaning, it gets postponed until it gets politically untenable to do nothing.
In fact the levees were designed to survive a Katrina-sized storm, but of course never had to prove they could, until they failed. What's also funny is for a bunch of engineers and software developers to expect the govt to enact a system that is impossible to really test, and just have it work smoothly when needed.
Rich cities in california were also a dysfunctional mess dealing with fires. It was only when the same problem happened in the same places in subsequent years that they had a reasonably solid plan together and working.
In fact the levees were designed to survive a Katrina-sized storm, but of course never had to prove they could, until they failed.
They were not, and the fact was well-known in advance. Their limit was a category 3 hurricane and there had been years of passing the buck about upgrading the levees to give the city a shot.
Then Katrina happened and everyone who had passed the buck claimed that it wasn't their fault.
Katrina was actually weakened to category 3 when it hit new Orleans. They should have lucked out (yet again) if the levees performed as they were supposed to.
It's pretty silly to think any government can deal effectively with a major disaster. At the end of the day, the best way to address a major disaster is with both a government response and a prepared citizenry. Centralized support to a decentralized response is way more effective.
There isn't much centralized support can do when it is overwhelmed and the citizens at a local level are helpless/useless.
Learn first aid skills. Learn amateur radio for communication. Have backup water, food and fuel.
1.) internal political war between xi jing ping of the old guards and the moderates. Check sinoinsider if you wish to know more.
2.) internal provincial wars with Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong.
3.) conflicts with immediate neighbors over the south sea and other illegitimate claims, including Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Philippines.
4.) trade wars with South Korea, japan, US, and Europe. More and more factories are shutting down in China in favor of other countries
5.) debt war to derisk 400 percent Debt to GDP in consumer, corporate and government debts. This economic shutdown will at a minimum take 3% off of China’s proclaimed 6% gdp growth
6.) globalism vs populism as Americans realized they have lost 1.6 million jobs to China since 1990.
7.) health wars with the recent pig flu, Wuhan flu and now bird flu
One must realize that China is losing ALL of these wars currently. The finances, social fabrics, and public anger (check Chinese netizens fight over Wuhan) are stretched to the limit. It’s only a matter of time
8.) They're in the beginning stage of a huge demographic bomb. China's birth rate is plunging rapidly, consequence of the (now defunct) one child policy and better standards of living. China's population is aging rapidly, and there is no immigration to sustain the labor pool, like in Western countries.
Immigration is not panacea to it, just delaying the inevitable. One way or another developed societies need to come up with a way to sustain 2.1 child rate. Immigration will prolong time we have to figure it out but it will not fix it.
In many ways perhaps it is better to face the reckoning earlier rather then later as Japan, Korea and soon PRC will have to do
I assume the poster is talking about the post 9/11 climate, where the country was solidly behind President Bush, while the federal government was busy ramping up Guantanamo, the patriot act, water boarding, etc. in the name of fighting terrorism.
... a one-party state, Homeland security, Judith Miller, two wars of aggression on foreign soil (one completely illegal), the President choosing not to enforce laws he didn't like, every critical voice being labelled "unpatriotic", every media channel bleeding nationalism 24-7... the sort of thing that in other countries we'd call "a regime".
A regime of 4 "good" years maybe, before it started getting real blowback for all of its excesses. In regimes more properly called regimes - those good years last for decades, or the lifetimes of their supreme leaders. So.. at least we got that going for us.
Absolutely, the two-terms limit held up and anyway Katrina had broken the wave for good.
There is an alternative timeline where Katrina doesn't happen and GWB forces a reform of two-terms "to get the job done in Iraq, we need to stay the course", or something else to that effect (like Putin swapping jobs to get around term limits). That would have been very scary.
My initial reaction to the article was that it doesn't sound like the cash injection has much to do with the corona virus. Isn't the reaction to the virus somewhat overblown?
> adding the total liquidity in the banking system will be 900 billion yuan higher than the same period in 2019 after the injection
In other words, 300 billion yuan less without the cash injection. I may be wrong, as I don't see the reaction to the outbreak first hand, but it sounds like this is not just about the virus.
The Chinese financial system is weak, as borrowers come under stress from a lack of business and can't pay and lenders pull back, the government will need to inject more and more liquidity into the system to get everyone to chill.
The direct linkages to the economy aren't the killer, it's that it's hitting at a time when the system's credit (immune) system is already not at it's strongest that worries policymakers.
How do we know that CCP and Xi will NOT survive this? Maybe the system they adopt there, just maybe, is the best system handle situation like this? With all the digital surveillance, AI, and all those new technologies, an authoritarian regime may now have the tools to outperformed the western counterpart?
That would be pretty frightening. There is a hypothesis out there that climate change might ignite an authoritarian regime geared toward counting climate change. Seeing that a mass surveillance program the size of whatever China has cooked up works to contain a biological outbreak and counter a catastrophe might help ignite such a thing.
Current China is not the USSR for sure, still I wonder if this will not shift people away from cheap chinese products long term. You know with the end of globalization this might give a little more push towards local/safer productions.
not decline per se, but it used to be the de facto gold standard of economic structure. The one that had the most weight and momentum and was mostly unstoppable. Now people speak a lot more about bringing some industries back, and some are even starting local brands again (due to climate, jobs, quality concerns).
The comparison to 80s/late-90s USSR is poor. I think this epidemic is showing the opposite, at least in terms of technical competence. The response from the central authorities has been massive and relatively well executed.
The comparison is also off because the day-to-day living situation on the ground (for the average citizen) is totally different from _both_ a political and economic perspective.
The response might not have needed to be as massive if the initial reaction of the Chinese authorities hadn't been to send the police after the doctors who discovered the problem[1] and try to hush it up.
The comparison fits in that a tendency to hide bad news (i.e. swallow errors and suppress warnings) erodes trust in (edit: and effectiveness of) the system.
Well, if we are to nitpick.... apples and oranges are both round!
Yes, there are certainly similarities between the USSR and China. But if we are to be objective and fact-oriented here, comparing China today to the USSR in the 80s and its response to this epidemic to the USSR's in Chernobyl, is a big stretch.
> Yes, there are certainly similarities between the USSR and China.
You are reading my comment in a shortsighted way. Note how the second part of the sentence mentions the US under GWBush - obviously I'm not arguing 2000s US and 2020s China are similar in political or economic structure. The point is how political consensus with fascist characteristics, that had looked unbreakable until then, can quickly be upended by crisis when the system is shown as uncapable to guarantee personal safety.
Understanding the exponential fiction is key here. You can do 50x times as much effort with great technical ability and execution a month and a half later, it will barely be as effective as telling people to be careful a month and a half earlier.
There’s no question that China does not have many of the catastrophic dysfunctions seen in the USSR. There did seem to be some attempt at a coverup or miscommunication early on, which no doubt made things much worse - but the response since has been at a level that would be quite hard to achieve in most other countries. This is an example of a case where centralized control really shines.
Dude, they built a massive hospital complex in just a few days. We have a... dumb f---ing wall that gets blown over by wind and has to have major stretches of it wide open during the monsoon season to avoid flooding.
> The disaster made clear how morally bankrupt and technically incompetent the system really was, wiping out any remaining goodwill or trust.
I genuinely wonder if the current impeachment process will have the same effect. Will people move on from it thinking it's just a thing with the GOP, or will they take it as a greater systemic failure and give up on the government.
> Similarly, Katrina was where the semi-fascist US consensus under GW Bush went to pieces.
Leaving aside the offensive comparison of the US to the USSR, you overlook that after GWB, we doubled down on the “US consensus” by electing Barack “drone strike” Obama. (I think Obama was a great President, but he was also very little different than George Bush except in his oration.)
> Leaving aside the offensive comparison of the US to the USSR
My argument is that you could see the turning point in public opinion breaking a political arrangement that had looked untouchable (and downright tyrannical, with journalists being ostracized and people getting marginalized as "unpatriotic") just a few months earlier. Katrina is when even Republicans decided the regime they had supported since 2001 was not fit for purpose anymore.
> you overlook that after GWB, we doubled down on the “US consensus”
That's hindsight after a decade. Obama ran on a campaign of dramatic change; at the time he was seen as a massive disruption of the status-quo, way to the left of the Clintons - let alone of Cheney. Whether he then delivered on his original promises, and in which areas, is irrelevant to why he was voted in the first time.
It is certainly not a popular opinion. But as diametrically opposed as they appear, there are plenty of problematic issues under Obama that Dems (and Republicans) conveniently ignore. My biggest disappointment at the time: Obama kept all of Bush's economic team intact when he came into office. Yes, the same people who enabled the housing crisis and had strong ties to Goldman Sachs. Probably it should have been the biggest issue of the election but the dialogue was (and is) dominated by identity politics.
The underlying issue is that Obama was beholden to the exact same corporate influences as Bush. You don't rise through Chicago politics that fast without some deals in place. This isn't a condemnation of Obama, by the way, but recognition of the system's vulnerability.
I grew up during the Clinton/Blair/Merkel era. I thought socialism was defeated in 1991. Everyone understood that markets and the private sector, with some levels of “nudges” as necessary, were the solution to everything. “Politics” was about how much you thought we should nudge in various directions, and whether you thought kids should learn about condoms or abstinence in school. So when Obama initially ran for office, I didn’t perceive Obama’s fundamentally neo-liberal capitalist world view as being a profound similarity between him and Bush. It wasn’t until people like Sanders and Corbyn started getting substantial traction that I realized we weren’t yet at the end of history and a commitment to the current economic world order was actually not universal.
It’s in the hindsight of history that the differences that seemed significant at the time proved to not be. On the economy, both were mainstream neo-liberals. The best example is TARP. Obama inherited and continued TARP, but it’s also what he would’ve done anyway. Obama extended the Bush tax cuts for everyone earning below $400,000. On foreign relations, both were aggressive on terrorism. On immigration, their policies and rhetoric were similar, with Bush possibly being more liberal. (Bush strongly supported the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007, which would have given everyone illegally present in the US on January 1, 2010, a permanent visa and pathway to citizenship.)
The two had different rhetoric on guns, religion, and abortion, but very carefully preserved the detante on these social issues by not proposing any significant legislation affecting them. On energy policy, both supported fracking and coal. (Obama had some last minute 2015 environmental regulations, which were quickly rolled back by Trump, but they clearly aren’t a priority seeing as how he waited until the last year of his presidency to act.) On healthcare, both had significant measures to expand coverage. (Bush’s Medicare Part D was a $50 billion/year program, while ACA was estimated to be $95 billion/year.)
It's interesting to see the American side of the story: "offensive comparison of the US to the USSR"
I grew up during the fall of the Iron Curtain in an Eastern European country, building Russian Spectrum (Z80) clones for the bloc, the USSR had positive and negative impacts in our lives. I still live in the apartment that I received during the communist era through my work.
However the intervention of the Americans through CIA operations, after the fall of the Iron Courtain, were mostly negative, and we're still suffering because of them.
Not everything is black or white in life and the story is much more complicated than the "Russia bad" the media portrays in America. But I guess each one of us is a victim of a propaganda machine.
You could describe communism as “semi-fascist”. Or any political ideology for that matter. All your doing is spreading FUD. Please expand your vocabulary or be more descriptive in your criticisms.
Meta: 185 top comment replies, 278 comments total. The redditfication of this place continues. China articles are essentially broken and there's no point trying to advance the discussion or have healthy debate.
Someone should make an extension that collapses all replies and only shows top level comments, think it might be a lot healthier for online discourse.
Also, about half of the comments are "(China/America/government in general) is evil, because (some superficial observation already known by 99% of visitors here and not directly relevant to the current situation)", or some form of generic refutation.
I'm also frequently guilty of the same thing, but this is getting out of hand...
I'm also drawn in by it, really need to actively remind myself to step back.
Not long ago there was a massive r/space thread with thousands of top comments about govt funding + puns and hidden down the bottom after clicking "more" was a JPL engineer who worked directly on the project linked with incredibly insightful commentary on the inner workings of the satellite. These things should be valued more and not hidden from the world.
Metafilter has maintained reasonably high levels of discussion and civility. Part of this is active mods, the other part is that an account costs some money to open.
Not surprisingly, not everyone is an expert on Rust, but everyone is an expert on shit happening on the other side of the planet. /s
At least the technical discussions (aside from Google evil, Apple walled garden, new Microsoft/same old Microsoft, etc. etc.) are on average higher quality than elsewhere.
“Some superficial observation” well I think this is where you miss it. The state of the US is so bad in the eyes of many outsiders that yes many see it simply as China/America government bad. I mean since Snowden it is very clear that the American government is actively spying on everyone not just foreigners but basically everyone. That sounds bad and is definitely hostile if you are an American but not unexpected as a foreigner however. Next we have recent examples of China and the US detaining certain populations. That looks like a massive human rights violation in both countries. Also the state of American politics looks very corrupt from an outsiders perspective. Daily accusation of a corrupt government that the media obviously wants portrayed as an incompetent failure of a leader and the people to scared or powerless to change it demonstrating the political system is a sham. It was even in the news recently other heads of states at NATO laughing at the President. I can not picture that happening with any other President. The world has “gone to shit” for a lot of people and these superficial issues are not so superficial to others and their voice is growing louder every year with the ever decaying state of affairs.
I wouldn't clump all of those together in the same bucket of this phenomenon. Housing and UBI are both highly political. PHP is a tech-related technical topic.
And personally I would clump the Google one as an actual "movement" that is awakening which needs critical mass to actually move forward. Not only that, but there is an element of powerlessness when it comes to such a topic and repeating things helps solidify and project the opinions to a greater audience. I.e. I feel those behaviors need to be known so I'll repeat them wherever I can.
To use another analogy: We've been doing a global search and we've found a reasonably good local-optima and now we need to explore the local search space for everything we can find on the topic. If not to find a perfect solution but at least to enumerate every single piece of info and nuance we can find.
Reddit has a solution to this problem, and HN should steal it: randomize top-level comment order. This keeps the highest ranked comment from becoming a top-heavy attractor for all further discussion. I agree this is a real problem for discourse on HN these days!
Maybe an option, but I like that the top comment is usually above the average quality for that thread. Maybe something like a multi-arm bandit could work, where the nth top comment 'slot' on the page has an 80% chance of being the nth most upvoted comment, and a 20% chance of being a randomly selected comment?
Think I've seen this in a few subs as default? Randomised comments for each unique client, even with some weighting perhaps might bring some balance back.
Reddit's "best" filter isn't their "top" filter and does exactly what the parent says, explanation[0] ; it does this by default unless the sub moderators choose to default to a different view.
For reference, the Hong Kong Hang Seng Index, which opened earlier and also where many mainland Chinese companies are listed, was at ~ 29,000 points on 17th Jan, and now it is at ~26000, which is a drop of ~ 10%.
Shanghai Composite, which only opened today, was ~ 3000 points on 17th Jan and now dropped to ~ 2700
So it's mostly aligned in that sense.
The Hang Seng Index is at least not dropping further (slight up as of this morning) so the liquidity news is at least 1 positive factor helping the market.
The discussion I’m seeing seems to have a healthy amount of variety of opinion.
Why is quantity alone a sign of unhealthy discourse?
Other people probably find their (differing) general comments relevant even if you don’t. Let them talk it out. Tell them why you think they are off topic or off their rockers; or don’t participate. It’s your choice.
I’ve been suggesting the comment collapse idea for a while? Where can we put up a PR for this? Collapsing comments for HN’s comment scale is damn near required at this point.
Not even from a community management standpoint, but more so just from a UX standpoint. As a HN reader, I don't just wanna read the top 5 or so parents (which is all I can read without scrolling for 2 mins, _especially_ on mobile). I want to read all the parents, and have the option to go into the thread should I so chose. Just me though
I have warned many times that CCP is an evil regime and will cause big disaster for whole human society. Whoever in the free world still trying to make some profits collaborating with CCP, just remember: dance with the devil, just wait for the music to stop.
> I mean it’s not like a viral epidemic can’t originate from other countries.
In authoritative countries the messenger of bad news tends to be 'disciplined', and so bad news is not delivered. It still exists, but no one wants to be the individual that creates the (negative) feedback loop that may be contrary to the diktat that came down from on high.
Of course hiding bad news happens in less authoritative countries as well (being the "tall poppy", Law of Jante, 「出る杭は打たれる」), but the consequences may be less severe.
There was all sorts of secrecy with SARS many years ago, and it seems that China has still not completely broken that 'habit':
I wonder if there isn’t a certain element of hindsight bias here. Now it’s clear that more action should’ve been taken earlier. But knowing the panic this has caused, not to mention the economic, global logistics and travel impacts I don’t know if it was such an obvious situation at the time. Especially when the vitality, severity and mechanism of transmission etc weren’t clear. CCP policy and behavioral patterns aside, I can see the local official in charge wanting to avoid being the guy that caused a bunch of public panic over nothing.
Imagine if things went the other way. Big announcements of a new virus, people panic and hoard food and supplies. Travel gets restricted and Wuhan gets quarantined. And not much happens. A few people get sick and quickly recover. I’m not sure if the guy will get praises for acting swiftly.
I can understand also the need to prevent public panic. But I can not understand the motivation of organizing big public activities when knowing a dangerous virus is in the ran. I am referring to the so called "40k family banquet" （https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kft21UdBFI）. Permit me copy my other comment here to explain what it is:
I read on twitter around Dec 31 that there was such a virus spreading in Wuhan. Around Jan 1, the Wuhan police dep publicly condemned 8 person (the origin of the twitter news) for spreading this information and called it a rumour. Then the gov did everything to hide info and did nothing to prevent its spreading before around Jan 2x. They behaved even like they want to spread it as much as possible because just about two to five days before they made the announcement of the virus outbreak, the Wuhan gov organized a so called 40k family new year banquet -- around 40k Wuhan local families were concentrated together to have a banquet to celebrate the coming Chinese new year. All the events I cited here can be found on China's own newspaper and tv recordings.
At this point it’s undeniable that the government tried to keep things quiet in the beginning and that’s not a good thing. But slow reaction to new diseases isn’t uncommon. I recall when mad cow was going around a while ago the reaction in Canada was slow as well. The desire to down play things happen at multiple levels of an organization for all sorts of reasons.
I’m not dismissing the initial attempt at cover up here and the Chinese government should seriously examine their priorities. I just think it’s a bit of an exaggeration to link this event to causing a “big disaster for whole human society”.
Well, I wouldn't go it as far as saying "a big disaster", but I can say with confidence that a lot infections (and possibly deaths) could have been spared if the Party had chosen not to put its head in the sand.
I would just like to point out that this is exactly, almost word for word and certainly in spirit, how anti-Americanism is expressed e.g. in Europe (where I grew up, born 1982).
It's crossing a line where one's ethnocentrism paints the other not just as "different" but fundamentally "lesser": e.g. many Europeans consider the USA to be "ethically behind" comparably rich countries for its arguable lack of reverence for human life (comparative differences like death penalty, no generalized health care, weak labor and family protection, a certain love for the harshness of capitalism, scientifically flawed sex ed, etc). From this view to qualifying the "lesser" as "evil", there is but one step that some don't hesitate to cross.
It's always been somewhat painful to me, because knowing both sides of the pond, culturally, I just know that the grass isn't that much greener on either side; it's really a matter of perpective, and Europe also has ethically grey values (think history, think apathy).
So today, whenever I hear a blanket qualification of 1.5 billion people (or their regime), especially in absolute terms like "evil", I roll my eyes first, and then I'm afraid. Dehumanizing others, believing that they're lesser than us, is but the first step down a very dark path.
Don't forget that for all our cultural differences, you might be closer genetically to a Chinese person of the other gender than you are with your own neighbor who otherwise looks and thinks just like you.
The OP's criticism was directed at the CCP, not the nationals of the PRC. You can dislike a government without having a negative opinion of its people.
This is precisely one of the assumptions that I am, humbly, questioning. It's more complex than that. Are the French so unlike all their governments and regimes? Are Americans that much unlike their leaders and political system? Is any society, really, thus separable in parts, beyond the abstraction of analysis? And what happens to ideas formed abstractly, in a vacuum, as they land in reality?
I mean, you can make the factual, scientific category; you may reason about it and build models that work to some extent; but reality is never clear cut, it's always hyper-complex in comparison of any short statement (hence why it's hard to meaningfully discuss such concepts in less than articles, ideally books). That's one my take-aways from a few years of sociology. Some things you just can't condense, even if it makes for a witty and intuitive proposition. Rigid values, as opposed to starting from relativity, really is the enemy of the thinker in a complex/chaotic environment such as those attemptedly described by the social sciences.
Just my 2cts. Claiming that "politicians are A, but the people are B!" is already a dubious proposition that lacks substance beneath its romantic appeal; but generalized to a massively distributed yet pyramidal political system of 1.5 billion people, it's sociologically nonsensical.
Most (perhaps all) of the comments for this post are nonsense.
As reported for decades, rural China has a problem with small-time farmers living in proximity with livestock, especially pigs. Thus you get the annual "swine flu" as genetically we're very similar, so can pass viruses back and forth and amplify them.
So if you want to understand this flu season, just google for past years, especially SARS. This corona virus appears to be an even more communicable analog to SARS, which nations struggled to contain last time.
I wish western world central banks were as competent. In a situation of sudden supply constraints, prices are supposed to adjust up. This is basic supply and demand.
Western world central banks tend to pressure prices down during economic shocks by withholding liquidity. This puts private markets in a gridlock and causes untold amount of damage to people's careers.
They kept them super high at 0%, up to 4% higher than the equilibrium estimate, which caused inflation to perpetually undershoot and people's careers to be stunted. On top of that, they started giving out interest on reserves which further contracted liquidity.
The growth in excess reserves happened because money being made artificially too good at retaining value compared to private assets, caused people, businesses and banks to hoard it. If central banks would have been sufficiently aggressive at giving it out, they would ironically have given out a lot less because people would not have event wanted that much and instead would have continued keeping their savings in better functioning private markets.
For a large part of history, negative real returns on stores of value were the norm. Before financial systems existed, almost all investments had negative returns if you didn’t put work and energy into them. To store value, you had to accumulate stuff, buildings or land. Most options either had high maintenance costs, were subject to risk of damage from natural causes and theft, were very volatile or required hard labor to get production out of.
The government creating paper assets that have an above market return, puts a gridlock in the private markets and destroys people's lives.
The gold standard was a disaster that lead to the great depression, but that was government manipulated gold.
Gold in a free market would tend to self adjust.
Buying gold as an asset when there is a "flight to safety" and then selling it in better times when there are enough other good assets available such as stocks with good dividends would mean buying gold when gold prices are high and selling it when prices are low thus resulting in negative returns.
Negative real returns happen in free markets. Blocking them causes huge problems.
The real natural rate should be in line with the private markets with regards to safe, liquid short term assets. There is an issue when you hit 0% nominal, called the zero lower bound problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_lower_bound). Mechanically you can solve that by keeping inflation high enough that you don't reach negative nominal rates even when you have negative real rates.
"I wish western world central banks were as competent."
Well...
"Western world central banks tend to pressure prices down during economic shocks by withholding liquidity."
Well, we have seen gigantic quantitative easing in the US and the EU and also in China. Inflation - I assume that is what you mean by "pressure prices down" - keeps elusive. Japan has tried for decades to create inflation.
The only thing that the central banks in the world have managed is to create a gigantic asset bubble, via the so called "asset price inflation". They basically build a cash pipeline to all the asset holders. Make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Well, you failed. Interest rates are historically low. We have seen a gigantic amount of liquidity injected over the last decades.
"The poor are much much more hurt by overly tight money."
What is the most expensive acquisition in their life for the majority of the people? Real Estate. Prices are through the roof thanks to the central banks. Young people are just getting priced out of the market.
Prices of houses may be high but affordability is not because of cheap financing. Payments could have been made lower with easier money and even cheaper financing. Asset prices are bounded by the cost of producing new houses and also, high house prices create good jobs for house builders.
"Prices of houses may be high but affordability is not because of cheap financing."
A 7 fig house still costs 7 figures. In many countries you can not lock in the interest rates for 30 years but they get re-adjusted after 10 or 15 years. Could be a bad awakening for some.
"Asset prices are bounded by the cost of producing new houses"
1. "asset prices" are not only houses. But also Stocks for example
2. The most expensive thing is most of the time not the house but the land. "Buy land, they stopped making it! - Mark Twain"
The cost of owning a house includes the cost of financing, you can't get around that.
Stocks can also be created.
Land is a hard one. We have no choice but to share it somehow. But overly tight money is really really not the way to make land affordable. Reducing land prices through overly tight money is basically price control through making people too unemployed and too poor to have demand for land. It's an exceptionally destructive approach.
according to various models the infection rate should shift from exponential growth to an s-curve function where growth rapidly falls off, the first stage of containment, somewhere around the 15th. the 17th is the monday after that, so many schools and business and cities are planning for everyone to just stay home until the 17th (at least).
>according to various models the infection rate should shift from exponential growth to an s-curve function where growth rapidly falls off
I'm sort of skeptical of such models because the quality of their output is entirely dependent on the data coming in. There were anecdotal accounts of hospitals in China running out of test kits. Limited test kits -> limited diagnosis -> underreported infection numbers -> misleading models. Garbage in, garbage out.
Infections are increasing approximately 20% per day.
When you see the new daily infection rate drop to 10% or less then that's a pretty good signal that we're reaching the top of the S-curve and nearing containment.
The big question is if that will happen before healthcare and quarantine capacity is exceeded.
Couldn't that thinking be flawed, though? I mean, it's only not exponential now because of effective containment. You have to maintain containment until the disease no longer exists. If you don't do that, and the disease exists, then the virus will spread exponentially as soon as containment stops.
It seems to me that the "various models" assume the non-existence of containment attempts. In that case, you have to be careful you're not drawing the wrong conclusions.
The number of deaths is growing exponentially. As of January 25th, there were 41 deaths total [1]. By January 26th that number had risen to 56 [2]. Now, on February 2nd the number is 304, an increase of 45 over the past 24 hours [3].
More people have died from this virus in the past 24 hours than all of 2019 and the 3 weeks in January prior to the 25th, combined. Now do you see why there is reason for alarm? There were only 1320 confirmed cases just over a week and a half ago, globally. Now the number has increased by 2604 in the past day!
China has implemented drastic containment measures and many foreign companies have sharply cut business they do in China.
Emergency braking of Chinese commerce will hit the global economy hard, no matter how low the death rate is believed to be, because fatalities aren't the driver of the economic impact.
According to this link there was 14451 cases in China, even if statistically insignificant (something like 0.001%) it's a bit much for my taste, especially if we consider that the Chinese authorities could have massively downplayed the number of infected persons.
A virus with R0 of 2 and a mortality rate of 2% would kill 1% of the world population if no containment measures are taken. That would be 75 million people.
Thanks, TIL. For those like me who paused at R₀ (r-naught), quote from wiki[1]:
> R-naught is the average number of people infected from one other person, for example, Ebola has an r-naught of two, so on average, a person who has Ebola will pass it on to two other people.
See “Limitations of R₀” too: when solely derived from math models, “values [of R₀] should be used with caution” and “this severely limits its usefulness.”.
As I understand, take it for what it is: model not gospel.
Yes, quarantines and public awareness will reduce the spread quite significantly. Hopefully to the point that less than one person gets infected per sick individual.
Chinese CDC reported that there were only 144 flu-caused deaths in 2018 (https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1177725.shtml). So if we are to trust China's numbers, then the Wuhan virus has already caused twice as many deaths as the flu did in an entire year.
deaths are absolutely the wrong metric to focus on at this point.
as you said, the normal flu is plenty deadly. even if we assumed that variable was break-even, what matters now is the rate of infection transmission and growth.
right now it is still exponential. we can only hope for the bend in a sigmoid curve to come soon, but we haven't seen it yet.
now on top of the fact that it is still exponential is the greatest crackdown on freedom of movement we've ever seen. a side affect of china's massive population is basically anything new they do becomes the biggest X we've ever seen. dozens of cities that are tens of times larger than most american cities on various levels of lockdown/quarantine. this is already historic.
> what matters now is the rate of infection transmission and growth
I don't think it's the right metric to focus either.
The survivability rate once infected is probably the most important.
I believe that medias business model (pay per click) force them to jump on and exaggerate any threat so as to get more views. It's not the first time and sadly not the last that we see such a thing.
I could be wrong but I don't think it's the end of the world ;-)
Survivability is important but I believe it's a component of what is important, not the only or even most important factor. You must also consider the infectivity rate.
If one infected person infects, on average, less than one other person, the disease will dwindle and die. It could kill 100% of infected people, but it would kill only a small and decreasing number over time.
Conversely, an infectious disease, where one infected person will infect three others on average, will spread quickly. Even if this disease has a more modest fatality rate, suppose it kills only 5% of infected, it could wind up killing tens of millions, if not more.
In this case, I think the mainstream media is actually understating the danger, by comparing it to the flu to suggest it's not so bad, pointing out how SARS was worse, or claiming that concerns over nCoV are inspired by xenophobia. The academic and medical sources I've been reading tell of high infectivity rates, that it's contagious while asymptomatic, that China is underreporting infections and death, and so on.
You're right that this is probably not the end of the world. This is probably not going to be a major epidemic like The Spanish Flu. However, most potential risks don't materialize. If, for any potential risk, you assume it won't happen, you'll usually be right, but, because of the huge downside of being wrong, that's not a great pattern to follow.
This is a somewhat different argument than the parent comment. The parent comment, as I read it, says that news of the virus is sensationalized. This says it's below your current threshold to act.
When you should take actions to mitigate risks depends on where you are and what resources you have available and what else you are dealing with. Where I am, we have had one case of the virus and I expect we have an above average amount of people recently in China.
I find it quite comforting to read about the virus so I can understand it and take steps to mitigate what I think are the likely risks. Reading the advice of medical experts has helped me take what I hope are sensible precautions and develop a good strategy for what to do if something bad happens with my family.
I have gathered enough food for my household to eat for a month, some water, stocked our medicine cabinet with things that are useful for dealing with the symptoms of the virus, a couple boxes of N95 surgical masks, and, maybe a bit more out there - I've got a pulse oximeter and a stethoscope and I've practiced listening to normal lung sounds and made sure I can use the oximeter.
If the virus sets in where I am, my household will shelter in place and stay inside. If we get sick we will stay home, since I know hospitals can't do more than treat the symptoms and going to hospitals will expose you to other pathogens including pneumonia which seems to kill many people with the virus. I will use the oximeter to detect a drop in blood oxygen of any sick person which is an indicator of pneumonia as a signal that home care is insufficient and then we'll strap on our masks and safety goggles and go to the hospital.
If the viruses doesn't materialize then we'll eat the food in the stockpile and I'll have spent only a small sum on things that aren't likely to be useful.
Providing up to date news about an epidemic is one of the most valuable services of the media. Calling this type of news 'clickbait' is quite bizarre in my opinion. The sources I've been reading haven't been sensationalistic.
the context of the thread, the post you were replying to, is about the economic impacts of most of china staying "on vacation" for a few more weeks.
your twice now trying to catastophize that into a deathtoll or "the end of the world" constitutes either a double-mis-reading or an active attempt at trolling. you want to blame the media, but you are the person introducing the false extremes to this conversation.
people don't have to die from a disease to not want to get it.
Maybe this is demonstrates an immediate consequence of having a people (mainland China, not necessarily HK) that is governed primarily by fear: reactions of extreme subordination, which keep things running "smoothly" under normal conditions, can threaten the whole system to collapse under abnormal conditions.
HK has a dozen confirmed cases. Shenzhen, the city bordering HK, has a hundred confirmed cases.
HK had experienced SARS, and the magnitude of the epidemic, in terms of number of infected globally, has already exceeded that of SARS. Together with government's inaction (HK government is refusing to close down its border where 60s country or so are now blocking entry from China).
HK's medical system is overwhelmed by mainland patients. The nurses and doctors are orchestrrating a strike to urge government closing down its border before the epidemic go out of control. Last strike from medical professionals were 30 years ago to fight for better wage. This time for public good
The estimate of likely infected people in China was somewhere between 37k and 130k as of January 25, and it is expected that the number of infected people will double roughly every six days, so assuming there has been no appreciable change to the pattern of spread, we can maybe back-of-the-napkin that somewhere around 75,000-280,000 people are probably infected.
The WHO map is very slow and does not list cases outside of China reliably in either the tables or the map, it also has functional errors in the source table which cause it to lack labels on some datapoints.
The Johns Hopkins map can be made more similar by switching to the terrain map layer with the icon in the upper right hand corner of the map widget.
Interesting, I'd not played with ArcGIS that much. The most legible option I found was the "light grey canvas" map. Personally I find all the extra detail on these map layers unwanted and distracting for a chloropleth.
This is what I've come up with from scraping the JHU aggregation:
Crucially, this lists the confirmed cases, different from the actual cases.
P.S. for those who are clearly disagreeing with me here, I would love to hear what you have to say, rather than just having my text become slightly grey.
SARS is important, I know someone who bought 300 face masks for their family and is trying to get more.
For anyone who hasn't visited, years after SARS they still had (or still have? It's been a few years) signs in public places detailing how often the escalator railings and lift buttons are wiped down with disinfectant (every hour usually). They take that stuff seriously.
Maybe outside of China we see it as "ruled by fear", but that's really not the case in China, at least for the majority: China doesn't try to make it's citizens afraid. Quite the opposite. Their modus operandi is "move along, nothing to see here, everything is fine." Indeed, that was their initial message to the public for this virus. So, the problem and partial cause of panic is when there is a problem that is very definitely not "nothing to see here", and the government is demonstrably, extremely wrong and perhaps incompetent. When so much is seen to be controlled by the government, a flaw in that armor is all the more worrying.
"move along, nothing to see here, everything is fine."
Because, what is the alternative? To blow the whistle? Surely most would be too afraid to do that, so naturally the safest bet is to play the "everything is fine" game.
They have a but more latitude than that. Grumble a bit and criticize, fine. Get too big and get too much attention, that's a problem. I understand they have a sort of warning system though, so it's not all "that dude said Jinping is a tyrant, get the black bags and duct tape!" I mean, it's bad, but not that bad. In part because by and large the government propoganda fulfills it's purpose.
China is a place where you can be locked to a chair and interrogated by police for social media comments critical of the state. Don't try to tell me it isn't a government ruled through fear.
Okay? And the US is a place where I can get brutalized, shot, and killed by the police based on.. nothing. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of Chinese citizens are living lives thinking and worrying about the same kinds of things we do. Not cowering in fear bemoaning their lack of freedoms.
Yes, the vast majority of US citizens aren't getting brutalized by the police. Similarly, the vast majority of Chinese citizens are not being jailed or re-educated. You can't just compare the US population at large to the subset of Chinese people who speak out against the government.
The claim was that people in China live in a state of fear, and I refuted it. Let's not conflate things.
>The claim was that people in China live in a state of fear, and I refuted it
That wasn't the claim, so you refuted a strawman. The claim was that China governs through fear, not that Chinese live in fear. When people disappear and are "re-educated" against their will for speaking out about the government, as an official policy of your government, you are governing through fear. Refute that.
I refute it by pointing out that if the people are not afraid, they are not ruled by fear. The vast majority are no more afraid of their government than the average person in the U.S. is. Sure, some people have reason to fear-- there's the ever present problem of racial discrimination. And I don't mean this to say the U.S. is just as bad. I mean that people caught up in the badness in either country are outliers. So few in number as to make the issue seem too abstract, even if it is much worse in China. They just don't see their restrictions on freedoms through the same lens as folks in the Western world.
If you can't watch this video[0] and see a level of fear in people to acknowledge the date June 4th 1989 on camera, then I just don't believe you are arguing in good faith. You seem to grossly underestimate what "disappearing" people for speaking out does to a society. You seem to think that Chinese citizens are ok with it, because they don't protest it, as if they are even allowed to speak out about it without serious repercussions. Just look at how HK reacted to the extradition laws. But I guess HK has become too westernized to understand that it's actually ok to disappear people.
I'm fully aware of China's awful human rights history, the awful things they have done to their people. I've seen the videos. It was in fact a minor obsession of mine for a time. And yet the very video you post supports my point: The people questions about Tianmen Square don't react in horror or fear, they react in ignorance. Because the propaganda works".
And so what I'm saying is that you fail to understand that it's people do not, as a majority, have that view of their government. You are applying an outsider's horror of their actions in your thinking and assuming it's people are 1) fully aware of it and 2) would look on it poorly when in fact they tend to view such things as the government's protection of them from harmful influences. They have a fundamentally different view of free speech, they do not view it as a an unqualified right, they view it through a lens of "speech that harms social harmony is wrong."
You simply do not understand the extent to which China's propaganda to it's people actually works. As a result the people are not afraid. They feel protects. Because it works, there's also a high degree of self censorship. Not because they fear the consequences, but because they actually believe they are acting in their society's best interests. I have actually had someone say to me, "Even if I thought the government did something wrong, I would not talk too much about it because it would be harmful to social harmony."
China gave them the blue pill, and they took it, often not knowing the red one exists. There is no need to live in fear when you have been convinced the awful things your government does are in your best interest.
I am not just guessing on this matter. I have, first hand, had conversations on the topic with Chinese nationals. And it's infuriating, because it's much like the conversation you and I are having now: It seems obvious to us that they should be afraid, that they should look on their government with skepticism, cynicism, and fear. But they do not.* The propaganda works. The dissidents are an extremely, vanishingly small group and yes, I'm sure they live in fear. But you cannot extrapolate from that to the billion+ people who have little direct knowledge of such things, for whom such things are vague abstractions, and wouldn't care much if they knew a bit more because the propaganda works. They see someone jailed, and they think "He/she must have done something wrong." *The propaganda works."
That is not common fear for the billion+ people living there. I have worked alongside many workers from China, and had a few student workers work for me. They do not view they their government as overly oppressive. They view it as working in the best interests of the people, protecting people from harmful things, like internet content through the firewall: in that case it may be they can circumvent it with some effort, but they view the initiative as coming from a place of wanting to take care of their people.
You are bringing an outsider's view to this, and I'm telling you, it's not how the Chinese people feel, for the most part. I understand how that's confusing. One person was kind enough to indulge me in two hours of conversation on the topic, and it took that and shorter conversations with a number of people to realize that, Yes, the Chinese people have swallowed the blue pill offered by their government. Not that they're particularly unique in that respect, but, well, there it is. They do not live in fear in the way you think.
Stated with a western perspective here, but I wouldn't be surprised if anybody who lived under an oppressive regime would openly admit they fear it, for fear of the repercussion. Can you meaningfully distinguish those who genuinely don't feel any fear (because they're bold, or ignorant, or possibly both), and those who superficially state they don't fear their government?
A U.S. citizen that migrated from China has very little reason to self-censor or dissemble on this topic. After encountering this beguiling attitude in conversations with others, I sought out such a person, an acquaintance who was a Professor of linguistics, who became a U.S. citizen decades earlier and still had close contact. He confirmed it all. This topic has also been a minor obsession for me, and the reading I've done further confirms it. Even when the people might be aware of something their government has done, they feel protected, that the government is acting in their best interests. And that awareness of incidents is rare. I showed a video of Tianmen Square to a Chinese student I knew. Not only hadn't they known about the incident, but their response was, "oh, those people (protestors) shouldn't have been doing that."
I think HN would be a more productive environment if downvoting required a responding comment to address the disagreement. In this case, I provide detailed personal experience with individuals that confirm the points I'm making, and it's downvoted. Certainly improper, unproductive, snarky, flame-ish comments are often downvoted, but all too often I see comments downvoted that are simply making reasonable points that someone finds convenient to ignore and downvoted rather than engage in meaningful discussion. I would implorer readers to always downvote and respond when they disagree, and only blindly downvote when the content is in some way counter to the community guidelines. And heck, even then a brief explanation would sometimes be useful to help the commenter understand where they went wrong.
> Indeed, that was their initial message to the public for this virus.
You're going to have to source that because I have a friend who lives in China and he was telling me from the start that China was surprisingly open about all of it.
It appeared they were being pretty open about it, 10 days ago it was very "only a few hundred cases, and it doesn't spread easily from person to person." One first-hand account said they were telling people there hadn't been any new cases in a few days, so all was safe, go out and celebrate the new year. Now, they have the equivalent of double the population of Texas on lockdown.
It's also important to realize that the Chinese government isn't quite so monolithic and in lockstep with itself as you might think. It's entirely possible that in one smaller region the local government was being open, while the wider message was the "nothing to see." That's speculation though, just mentioning it as a way they could have been both open on one level and misleading on another.
It's not governed by fear, especially not hong kong.
It's more of a cultural reaction that many went to the shop to gather food, detergent, face masks and more for the next month(s) so the shops have run out of things (plus many businesses and transports have closed). The panic wasn't driven by government decision but by people acting individually in concert.
It's hard to tell if the same would happen in the US or Europe if and when the first few people will get infected by the virus.
I should say the first dozen(s) of cases in the same city. Hong Kong is past ten. I don't think any city in the EU or US is approaching that.
Noting the Chinese population doesn't believe their government and estimates the numbers of infected to be at least 10 times whatever is reported.
Also noting, Hong Kong was already in civil war right before the epidemic, remember it was being annexed by China. That's regular protests, transports/tubes/airports periodically closed and shops unable to resupply, so not everything is attributable to the virus.
> Also noting, Hong Kong was already in civil war right before the epidemic, remember it was being annexed by China.
I've been in countries at civil war (or coming out of a civil war). Hong Kong is not (yet) in a state of civil war. There's widespread civil unrest, which is often a precursor to civil war, but it's not there yet, by a long shot.
Also, Hong Kong was annexed by China back in 1997. Understandably, Hong Kong is chafing under some of the laws China is imposing, and requirements for extradition to the mainland, but the annexation was done several decades ago.
It’s mostly due to laws that make all police blotters (records of arrests and other incidents) in Florida open to the public immediately (and thus easy for journalists to mine for interesting stories).
Couple that with a huge population and something weird will happen most days.
As a 48 year old native Floridian who has traveled to less crazy states and countries, I do not believe our open records policies entirely explain the documented weirdness. The native born are a minority. Most of our population came here from somewhere else. I have been to the kinds of places from which they emigrate. To survive and thrive in places where it snows for a good chunk of the year requires a certain amount of keeping-your-shit-togetherness. In my experience, many immigrate to Florida or stay here because one can live relatively cheaply without ever planning ahead. This tilts our demographics toward the kinds of people who end up in Florida Man stories.
That and also things like rehab facilities placing themselves in Florida because people can pretend to be going on vacation when they go to rehab.
The ones who don't succeed in rehab get kicked out and the result is that addicts for various things (including alcohol, meth and opioids) wind up migrating the Florida and then getting stuck there.
Bloomberg: "The central bank said Sunday it will use reverse repurchase agreements to supply 1.2 trillion yuan of liquidity on Monday, with the figure coming to 150 billion yuan ($21.7 billion) on a net basis, according to Bloomberg calculations."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-02/china-s-2...