The CCP's mind tricks are working better on the West than on China right now

Found on Twitter from user AlexTheBullet (I don't know the origin of the image)

Chinese people: The Chinese government has been thoroughly incompetent at handling coronavirus!

The Chinese Communist Party: We are doing an excellent job.

The rest of the world, including the WHO: You are doing an excellent job, also these are not the droids we’re looking for

Watching the coronavirus horror unfold in China, I’m acutely aware that I’m close by geographically but worlds away politically and in terms of public health and safety - and those differences are the only thing keeping those of us in Taiwan safe.

It also means that in Taiwan, people generally have access to what’s going on in both China and the West. Information from the latter is freely available and increasingly accessible. At the same time, many Taiwanese have friends or family in China, many of whom are currently waylaid in Taiwan. Speaking a mutually intelligible language (mostly), they have a better idea of what is going on in China than most Westerners, for whom ‘China’ is much further away geographically, historically, relationally and linguistically. 

It should be obvious that Taiwan, alongside Hong Kong, is one of the most informative places from which to observe the nexus of knowledge, belief and awareness in both China and abroad. 

And what I am seeing now is truly astounding. 

Alongside the unfolding of a national tragedy, China is also experiencing a brief window in which freedom of speech is somewhat possible. And if you listen, what you hear is a furious outcry - the howl of a nation. 

From my Wechat Moments:

"现在你我都知道了，杀死我们的并不是蝙蝠。“

"Now we all understand, it's not the bats that are killing us."#2019nCoV

— Frankie Huang 🐯 (@ourobororoboruo) February 6, 2020

And this:

Checking my Wechat Moments (the equivalent of a Facebook feed in China) this morning: It's almost entirely posts about Li Wenliang, the whistleblow Wuhan doctor who died of coronavirus. This appears over and over:

"A healthy society should not have only one voice." pic.twitter.com/X9vOqzP5JJ

— Anna Fifield (@annafifield) February 7, 2020

People in China - many of them, anyway - know that the coronavirus epidemic has been mishandled from the top down and is still not being handled well, that their leaders (whom they never chose) are throwing each other under the bus, that that Xi Jinping is missing in action and that the initial outbreak was mishandled and covered up so spectacularly that it (at least partially) exacerbated the spread of the disease. They are fully aware that Li Wenliang - who was not a dissident - was reprimanded for warning a private WeChat group of his fellow medical school alumni about the danger, and that he can be credited as one of the early voices to speak out about the disease.  Li recently died, and the government (so it seems) half-heartedly attempted to cover it up - and it’s causing an absolute meltdown on Chinese social media.

The replies demanded of Dr. Li when he was reprimanded - that he "was clear" and "could" follow the government's orders - have been given life as a form of protest:

你能做到吗？你听明白了吗？ https://t.co/c1h1Z7MCOB

— 桃味冬日饺子 (@ViolaInJuly) February 7, 2020

They also know that the government data on the disease can’t be trusted. 

And they know this because so many of them have known all their lives that the CCP is built on repression and lies, but have chosen until now to survive and endure rather than speaking out and going to jail, or worse. 

Compare that to what I’m seeing from the rest of the world, especially the West. It’s like some sort of Jedi - well, I suppose Sith - mind trick. 

Despite the international news reporting on the death of Li Wenliang, the consensus seems to be that the CCP is doing “everything they can” to stop the epidemic and that their response has been “great” and “transparent”. The WHO has praised China's response, as well. In China, people know that when you officially reprimand those who issue early warnings, that’s not transparency. Some are even saying that criticism of the Chinese government response is Sinophobic or anti-China. While there have been racist incidents against Chinese people - and that is obviously wrong - it is not Sinophobic to criticize a government.

This is despite international media (finally) starting to report on how badly they are actually doing:

This wonder at China’s logistical prowess is symptomatic of a recurrent trope among western commentators. We might call it the “if we could just be China for a day” view....

But when it comes to a public health epidemic, there are worrying limits to the Chinese Communist party’s control. To maintain authority, the Chinese Communist party (CCP) must convince the public that everything is going to plan. This hampers its ability to respond to epidemics....

People are praising the “hospital built in 10 days” (which I suspect plenty of Chinese people realize is a cross between a farce and a death camp - you wouldn't need to build a hospital that fast if you had dealt with the outbreak appropriately in the first place). All the old cliches are coming out: they sure know how to get things done (except for initial containment of the outbreak, I suppose), they’re taking such decisive action (which they hadn’t done before). From the link above, this guy is quoted in the BBC:

"China has a record of getting things done fast even for monumental projects like this," says Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations....

"The engineering work is what China is good at. They have records of building skyscrapers at speed. This is very hard for westerners to imagine. It can be done," he added.

I see numerous comments echoing this trash online.

They’re praising China’s health care system (this is just one example), even though it’s failing, and spectacularly, too. It seems a fair number of Westerners have believed for some time that China had universal or accessible public health care” simply because China calls itself “communist”. It does not.

They are talking about that ridiculous Bloomberg article about how “China sacrificed a province to save the world” as though it was some sort of heroic act and not the tragic consequences of endemic incompetence and corruption in a government ill-prepared to deal with this crisis. And if you think public figures aren’t quoting that nonsense, oh, they are: 

The fatality rate in Wuhan is 4 percent; outside Hubei province it’s .17 percent.

Without any democratic input China sacrificed the 50 million residents of one province in order to save the rest of the rest of the world. What a decision https://t.co/tDa9DGe5e7 pic.twitter.com/aRLRrnIHWZ

— Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo) February 6, 2020

To be fair I think he meant this to be somewhat critical? It's unclear.

Of course, while one might be able to try and justify the locking down of the epicenter, this is what Chinese social media is asking - and the West apparently is not: if the government has been doing such an excellent job, how did it get to the point that they needed to lock down several other cities and put a huge chunk of the economy essentially on hold? Was it necessary, or is it a massive overreaction? We have no idea which it is - and isn’t that even scarier?

Worse still, the international media is taking government data as gospel, which people in China know right now not to do. We don’t know what the fatality rate is because nobody knows how many people died before being diagnosed because they couldn’t get care. China keeps reporting “2.1%”, a number I don’t think anyone in China believes. We have no idea how contagious it is, either. We know nothing.

神奇的病毒，还是个数学高手
1月30日：170死/确诊7821=2.1%，
1月31日：213死/确诊9800=2.1%，
2月1日：259死/确诊11880=2.1%，
2月2日：304死/确诊14401=2.1%，
2月3日：361死/确诊17238=2.1%，
2月4日：429死/确诊20471=2.1%，
2月5日：493死/确诊24441=2.1%
2月6日：564死/确诊28605=2.1%

— 李隽 (@juanli324) February 6, 2020

If the CCP is doing such an excellent job, how is it that China-watchers in Asia are openly wondering if this will be the crisis - not just of public health, but of public fury - that brings down the CCP?

CCP's persecutions, lack of transparency, and its management of the #coronavirus could be the last straw to break the camel's back. The oppression & anger people have felt for decades is coming to the fore. Please, may change come for the good of China.https://t.co/G67g5Fhh4p

— Roy Ngerng (@royngerng) February 7, 2020

It’s like some sort of demented hypnosis. The media is waking up, but I'm shocked that the commentary has been so...so...tankie.

How did the CCP manage to dupe so many people abroad, when their own citizens after years of forced indoctrination seem to (mostly) know better? How is it that people outside China seem more susceptible to authoritarian propaganda than the people educated since birth to support that system? How is it that the rest of the world seems to put faith in Chinese state media - which is known for spouting government lines rather than the truth  - while being completely oblivious to - or simply ignoring - a billion furious people?

It's like they all read and believe this junk rather than actually listening to people in China who have a brief flicker of an opportunity to speak out.

And those same Westerners are probably patting themselves on the back for being aware of the crisis in China and sympathetic to the Chinese people - whose voices they ignore in favor of state-peddled lies. I don’t think they realize the level of vitriolic, potentially incendiary outrage brewing in China against the very government they praise from a distance.

Truly, it amazes me. 

In China and the region, we know that the biggest danger isn’t coronavirus, or isn’t only that. Far scarier is knowing that we can’t trust the government tasked with combating the epidemic. At all.

As Chinese citizens are showing the world that they don't buy the CCP's crap when it comes to coronavirus, the world seems to be saying "more crap, please!" The death of Dr. Li might turn that tide, but with the WHO expressing condolences, after praising the government that silenced him and not seeing the irony of it all, and then backtracking to say they "had no information" (!!!), I'm not sure.

I wish the rest of the world would realize it too. 

The consequences of Taiwan's exclusion in international affairs are not abstract

Screenshot from the South Park episode where Randy kills Winnie the Pooh in China

Years ago I was having a one-on-one class with an adult student who - athough we didn't talk about politics much - seemed to lean pro-KMT, and had a strong enough identification with the ROC for me to have noticed it. Although generally we avoided the topic - I think she knew where I stood, it's not hard to tell - we did once talk about whether it mattered if Taiwan were a UN member nation. I said it did.

She disagreed, saying it didn't really make a difference as membership in such organizations confers abstract benefits at best. I mentioned the data-sharing of organizations like the WHO, and she pointed out that Taiwan handled SARS just fine without them (I'm not so sure about that, but...whatever). To her, these organizations conducted endless meetings and discussed an awful lot, but didn't actually do much of anything, and had no real political power, so it was not only fine not to participate, but preferable to stay locked out as the Republic of China, rather than be allowed in as Taiwan, because the ROC still mattered on some level.

Yeah, well, you can see why we didn't talk about politics that much. Anyway. 

In the past two days, a number of countries have banned entry to non-citizens traveling from China, or suspended flights from/to China. Italy banned incoming flights, Vietnam halted all air travel, Australia, the US and Israel are denying non-citizens coming from China entry, and Qatar Airways has suspended flights. This is of course all thanks to the panic about the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus.

All of this happened despte the fact that the World Health Organization (WHO)  did not recommend suspending flights (source: above link). And yet, two of these countries - Italy and Vietnam - included Taiwan or Taiwan's flagship airline in their bans. 

It's worth noting that Taiwan's flagship airline is very confusingly named China Airlines. 

Vietnam has since reversed its ban on air travel to and from Taiwan, but Italy has not. 

And this is why my student was wrong. While it's true that "health statistics" and "information sharing" and "taking part in discussions" all seem very abstract, air travel is concrete and real. 

When international organizations like the WHO, Interpol and International China Asskissers Organization International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) exclude Taiwan - and in ICAO's case, blocks anyone who questions this exclusion on social media, myself included - it gives national governments the cover to follow suit and just treat Taiwan as a part of China.

This has real-world, concrete effects. When flights to and from your country are at risk of being suspended because some dingbat decided your country should be included in a China travel ban as "a part of China", that's not abstract. That's real canceled flights on real airplanes, real lost business, real travelers with real suitcases stuck in real airports. That's real people who are trapped in a place and can't get home (it's unclear to me if travelers from Taiwan would have been able to circumvent the Italian and Vietnamese bans by flying through another country, however, changing a ticket that way costs real money from real bank accounts). 

Yes, I was blocked. By the way, ahem, did you know you can follow Lao Ren Cha on Facebook? 

I want to be very clear here: I don't think the dingbats who made these decisions actually believe Taiwan is a part of China. At best it's highly unlikely. Consider the cultural, economic and geographic ties between Vietnam and Taiwan, as well as a fair amount of well-publicized controversy surrounding these ties. There's just no way that Vietnamese policymakers don't know that Taiwan is a thing.

More likely, the airhead bureaucrat who made these decisions either simply doesn't care, or is perfectly aware that Taiwan is separate from China with a separate (and more effective) healthcare system and far fewer confirmed coronavirus cases, but doesn't want to anger China. So they use this exclusion from international organizations and their own country's lack of official recognition as cover for their bad decisions, thinking they're doing the right thing by keeping China happy. 

My student was just a person with an opinion rather than a politician, lobbyist, writer or policy analyst. However, it's also fairly common for people with more influence to try and soften the way Taiwan's current situation looks. For example, one might say it is acceptable for Taiwan to just have observer status. While an improvement, no, that would not be "okay", it would be a pittance - begging for scraps when we deserve a full seat at the table.

Others say that "unofficial" ties with other countries are good enough. Often, they are, but I'd contend this is still not good enough. 

It's true that Taiwan's formal diplomatic relations are not necessarily our friends or allies. Though some of them do speak up in support of Taiwan in those international organizations, for the most part they are the result of 'checkbook diplomacy' and thus offer little benefit, while being fairly easily lured away. In the meantime, countries that do not officially recognize Taiwan show support regardless - recently, the US, Canada and Japan have all said Taiwan deserves some sort of status at the WHO. 

However, I'd still contend that it does matter - if your country does not recognize Taiwan, it's easier for your lazier or more malevolent, China-fearing bureaucrats to just lump it in with China. Then Taiwan has to "scramble" through unofficial channels to essentially beg - like a starving orphan - not to be hurt in very concrete ways by being included in China policy. 

And all this happens despite the fact that Taiwan is not a starving orphan. It's a wealthy heir to human rights and democratic norms in Asia. 

We deserve better - full recognition and a full seat at the table, and we deserve not to have to beg for it in a whisper from the back door, like a hungry maid creeping from the servant's quarters, asking the master's less-cruel son whether she can have a scrap of extra bread after dinner. 

And the benefits of a fairer arrangement are not 'abstract' at all.