I've never used it actually, but if you click the username there is an ignore button
Yup.
In time I be using that on Southernsky.
I am on page 505 .
My morbid and puerile curiosity compells me to read until pag 508 before he
be discarded to wear his cone of silence and shame.
Yup.
In time I be using that on Southernsky.
I am on page 505 .
My morbid and puerile curiosity compells me to read until pag 508 before he
be discarded to wear his cone of silence and shame.
Done
On long articles, the link is just normally given.
As I will do with this.
However, since it capsulated much of what we been talking about here, I make an exception to extract
and print that in full as well.
Tried but was not done as article exceeded the 10,000 characters speed limit bump set here.
So only a portion below as hors d'oeuvre . Go into the link to read that in full
This week’s note is from George Yeo, Brunswick Geopolitical Principal and former Singapore Cabinet member for Health (1994–97), Trade and Industry (1999–2004) and Foreign Affairs (2004–11). This article represents his own personal views.
At 10am on Saturday April 4, which was Qing Ming or China’s All Souls Day, sirens rang across the country for three minutes. The entire country paused to mourn all those who succumbed to COVID-19. It was a moment of national solidarity after a terrifying experience which seared the collective memory. According to official figures, over 3,300 Chinese died out of a total of over 83,000 infected. A few western reports have cast doubt on these numbers much to the indignation of Chinese authorities. Even if there were significantly more infections and deaths, it does not change the overall picture.
China’s leaders took the fateful decision of locking down Wuhan, a city of eleven million people on January 23, two days before Chinese New Year. All modes of public transportation suddenly ceased operating - airport, train station, metro, river ports. By the afternoon, highways leading out of Wuhan were sealed off. Within a few days, the sixteen cities of Hubei Province with a population of almost sixty million people came under quarantine. By confining the main epidemic to Hubei province, China was able to prevent other major outbreaks of the epidemic in the country. For two months, the people of Hubei endured varying degrees of hardship, Wuhan the worst. Help poured in from the rest of the country. Within ten days, two special hospitals were built with a total of 2500 beds. Tens of thousands of healthcare personnel were dispatched from other provinces and the People’s Liberation Army to reinforce a public healthcare system that would otherwise have collapsed from the sudden increase of critically ill patients. The Central Government ensured that every city in Hubei had a major province to lean on for general support. In gratitude, Hubei residents came out to the streets in large numbers to send off these ‘foreign’ contingents when they finally left Wuhan and other cities a few weeks ago.
Imagine if China’s Central Government had dithered. The internal debate must have been ferocious. Wuhan is a major hub in China for air, rail, road and riverine transport. During the war against Japan, Wuhan was Chiang Kai-shek’s temporary HQ after Nanjing fell. Great battles were fought to defend Wuhan while Chiang evacuated his administration to Chongqing which was upstream of the Yangtze River gorges and therefore much less accessible. Perhaps no other city is as well-connected to all of China than Wuhan. It has the biggest student population of any city in China with large numbers from other provinces. During the week-long Chinese New Year holidays, Chinese people go back to their hometowns for family reunions. The annual Spring migration in China is the biggest movement of human beings on earth.
Looking back, if Beijing had not taken this decision to confine Wuhan, the COVID-19 epidemic would have spread to all corners of China within a week. The World Health Organisation described the action as ‘unprecedented’ in the history of public health. There could easily have been fifty Wuhan outbreaks and the Chinese Communist Party would have been shaken to its core. At that time in late January, the nature of COVID-19 was still poorly understood and even today is still not well understood. Chinese authorities made serious mistakes in December and January including the persecution of whistleblowers by local officials. (Key provincial leaders involved in the early coverup have since been removed including the Party Secretaries of Hubei Province and Wuhan City.) But, on the most critical decision, China’s Central Government made the right call. That saved China and bought the world precious weeks which unfortunately were not put to good use despite repeated alarms by the World Health Organisation.
For a few weeks, many people thought in their hearts that COVID-19 was a virus that mostly affected Chinese people and other East Asians, like SARS. That fueled conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus. As the number of infections and deaths rose day by day in China, the reaction of the external world was mixed. Some showed sympathy and extended help. Others sneered. Anti-China and anti-Chinese sentiments infected large parts of the world affecting not only Mainland Chinese but East Asians generally. Beijing took careful note of these different reactions. When the Wall Street Journal described China as ‘the real sick man of Asia’, it caused considerable offense among ordinary Chinese. In contrast, the modest donation of masks by the Vatican was applauded.
China, which once had to appeal for supplies from the rest of the world to supplement its own inadequate production, is now the principal supplier of such lifesaving material to the world.
Since then, the tables have turned dramatically. China has succeeded in bringing down the number of new cases to less than a hundred a day, the majority of them imported. The country remains dead scared of an epidemic rebound and has put in place comprehensive safeguards. Instead of the world locking in China, China is now locking out the world. Particular care is taken to protect Beijing. International flights to Beijing must first land in one of twelve provincial cities so that every incoming passenger is carefully checked and quarantined if necessary. At the same time, the Central Government has progressively relaxed controls on normal economic activities. All indicators (highway traffic, consumption of luxury goods, housing sales, coal consumption, air pollution etc.) show the economy quickly reviving. China’s GDP is likely to register positive growth this year. The export sector remains badly affected of course but China’s dependence on it is not as large as before because of the size of its internal market. China is the most vertically integrated economy in the world. Last July, McKinsey published a report that while the world’s economic exposure to China is growing, China’s exposure to the rest of the world is reducing.
In the meantime, COVID-19 has spread with a vengeance to the rest of the world on a scale much bigger than that which affected China. The economies of US and the EU are almost in free fall as priority is rightly placed on measures to control what has become a pandemic. Unemployment rates have shot up and national governments are spending trillions of dollars to help struggling businesses and individuals stay afloat. Masks, protective clothing and respirators are in woefully short supply. In some cities in Lombardy and Spain, a system of heart-wrenching triage was in place to decide who were more deserving of lifesaving treatment. China, which once had to appeal for supplies from the rest of the world to supplement its own inadequate production, is now the principal supplier of such lifesaving material to the world. China’s factories operating 24/7 now make 200 million masks a day, much of which for export.
We do not know how long it will take for Europe and the US to get out of the current situation. COVID-19 is such a contagious virus, no country is safe until all countries are safe. Even after Europe and the US have contained the virus, its spread to other parts of the world (Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America) will make it a recurrent threat to everyone until good vaccines are found to inoculate entire populations. What China has done, no other country can do. China’s uniquely centralized system has deep roots in Chinese history and is not peculiar to the People’s Republic. For over two thousand years, the ideal in the minds of ordinary people is of a well-functioning centralized system with good and wise leaders at the top. Great walls are repeatedly built to protect the country from baleful external influence. This is China’s great strength but also its great weakness.
