My China

The virus might be a scourge but it has been the catalyst for horrendous racism. It was first the prompt for base reactions in fear and mockery of people with vaguely Oriental features by the hoi polloi. It was double-standard reporting by the media. It was "dog whistle" naming of it as the Chinese virus.

Now in China, with the global flow of the virus reversing, it's the shoe on the other foot. I have a friend who got removed from his apartment and dragged down to the police station for testing; Africans and Afro-Americans are now being targeted explicitly: Africans who make up many of the permanent residents have been evicted and even a McDonalds in Guangzhou has banned black people from entering. Why? Because foreign countries have Covid-19, so foreign people are a risk, even if they arrived well before the outbreak even began in Wuhan.

Both are atrocious an incomparably unfair. The politicisation of the virus might be a side-show but it's the thing that leaves me more disgusted than ever. I'm thankful to not be living in China right now. My best hopes for the civility of cosmopolitan Guangzhou is shattered. 

There is a lot of blaming still going on against the state of the Peoples Republic of China whether it be for the original sin of having wet markets with exotic animals where the first fateful animal-to-human infection occurred or their tardiness revealing the extent and data on the outbreak. 

The complaints of the cover-up by China annoy me a little bit, because it takes China as a monolith. From my limited view of the slowness to go public, it was actually the authorities in Wuhan who tried to deal with the outbreak without it going public, even keeping it from the central government. The mayor of Wuhan was sacked during the crisis for his handling. It is also easy to point fingers early on - to be clear, even with several months of international collaboration Covid-19 is still a relative unknown and statements made at one time are overturned with new evidence. Now we are much more aware of asymptomatic cases and methods for transmission, but even once public about it, there was still a lot to learn. I still think the audacious decision to lock down cities was a good one. The moves since were good, too. As I often mention, as soon as they sealed Wuhan and other cities in Hubei, I knew it must be even worse than it was actually shown to be. And it was presented as a monster virus. 

There was also a few articles recently expressing shock that "controversial" wet markets had re-opened. From a Chinese perspective, the controversy hasn't been on wet markets per se, but what was sold in wet markets. There was widespread condemnation at the time for the selling, use or consumption of exotic animals. Wet markets might take some time to disappear. They're still a key part of food distribution system in China and it'd take rather huge reform and structural change to move away from these. Is there still exotica available? Probably, and probably at a higher price and a much lower supply than before. Expecting it to disappear completely is as simple as ridding a country of illicit drugs from a country. When there is demand, there will be a market. 

The blame put on China by commentators and American political figure for the current situation in the States is ridiculous, however. Even if you don't trust China's words, you can trust their actions. They shut down the country for an outbreak largely centred on a single city. The Trump administration was the first to move to block Chinese travellers to the US, but effectively blocked one kind of passport coming into their country and did not implement much in the way of safety checks or isolation to their own returned people.(Compare that with New Zealand which implemented self-isolation.) 

Wuhan was finally unsealed in the last week but huge protection measures persist, which must be costly still to implement and have a slowing effect on the economy. Personally I was shocked how long the quarantine lasted for Hubei and especially Wuhan. The official numbers showed that it was just the long-term critically ill who were expiring with little sign of new infection. The official numbers might be a lie but you can take a lesson in reading the actions: take their slowness to open as a sign that it is very difficult to safely open even with an apparent lack of infection. I hadn't followed the province-by-province reports for a while since the international news had gone wild, but recent announcements make it clear that the asymptomatic transmission seems to be the main problem, that the unaware can carry it on, perhaps to another unaware until it lands in some fertile ground. Tomorrow I might translate a few as a general notice what's "officially" happening in China.