My mom is traveling to Hawaii through LAX this Saturday.
I should a) convince her to wear a mask or b) stop overreacting?
convince her to stay home! wtf hawaii? lax??? do you WANT her to die?
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Only tell her to wear a mask if it helps her remember not to touch her face. Drink water, wash your hands, don’t touch your face. She’ll be fine.
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The death of Li Wenliang is a disaster for CCP.
Obviously people know very little and are aware they know very little, but there is all sorts of speculation that he was punished in a manner that made his death more likely (punishment for something like whistleblowing is generally hidden).
The death of beloved figures is very sensitive in China because of people’s demands for a public funeral that have an element of anti-government protest to them. I can’t say we are on the verge of a revolution, but when/if this virus goes away and Wuhan returns to whatever degree of normalcy I’d be incredibly surprised if there aren’t many people taking to the streets there and maybe in other cities as well.
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So you‘re saying we‘re in the „Lamarque is dead“ phase of the plot of Les Mizerables here? Seems like public protest in China would end similarly to the June Rebellion of 1832.
How does the saying go? „History Never repeats itself, but sometimes it rhymes.“
There were protests in Wuhan this past Summer but it was over a proposed waste treatment facility, so not particularly sensitive.
Protests in China are actually more common then people think, they just frequently occur outside major population centers and get no press.
The protests had already begun but the death of Hu Yaobang was a major event a few months before the massacre in Beijing in 1989 that galvanized support for the democracy movement.
He was viewed as one of only a few major officials that wasn’t corrupt.
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Single point of failure
On the other hand, I presume his story wouldn’t have got out without some level of the Chinese state allowing it, and so they’d be idiots to now want him dead precisely because of this speculation.
Not saying you’re wrong, but–I apologize for repeating myself–these are the same geniuses that didn’t foresee the consequences of attempting to push through a law that would allow Hong Kong residents to be kidnapped and disappeared by CCP just months before a pivotal Taiwan election.
If you think the US government is full of morons who can’t think things through, imagine how much more moronic they’d be if the amount of transparency went to zero.
Yeah, I don’t think that argument is obviously correct, just wanted to post the other side. It does seem extra special stupidity to have chosen to make him a hero and to then kill him, but I readily accept people do dumb stuff all the time.
Easily could’ve missed it but I haven’t seen the government make him into a hero, but to the extent they did I’d imagine that’s damage control from Beijing throwing local government under the bus.
I lazily figured they’d have the control of Chinese social media to have not let it get out if they didn’t want it to. At least to the extent of it being widely seen and something that international media pick up on and report on. But that’s definitely just from an idiot’s imagining about how they operate in censoring that stuff, and I’d welcome correction.
This is sort of a strange time in that you have tens or even potentially hundreds of millions of terrified and angry people with nothing to do all day but post who typically are busy with work etc… They’ve stepped up the censorship but there’s only so much the censors can accomplish in this situation.
In China there’s a huge class of people who aren’t ignorant to the nature of the government but simply have a combination of stress and successes that they simply can’t be bothered to be pissed off at the government to the extent we’d think we all would be. Now in much of the country these people have nothing on their minds but this whole ordeal.
This has also been sort of a coming out moment for independent media in China, particularly Caixin, which has done incredible reporting and is responsible for a lot of info that isn’t from propagandists.
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The Chinese government’s ability to censor information would fail but for the fact that the overwhelming attitude among Chinese people to “sensitive issues” is one of ambivalence. Yes there are hardcore nationalists who want to have Hong Kong protestors all hanged etc… as well as liberals who do what they can to speak out in favor of more openness but the overwhelming sentiment is “why should I care about these things when I can do nothing about them”.
Now that there’s a situation where everyone is angry and terrified in large parts of the country, censoring social media to the extent that it usually is censored becomes an impossible task.
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Ugh. I’m still in the “not very worried” camp, but I don’t like the ‘unknown origin’ aspect of this. Not a good sign for efforts to keep this contained.
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Good posting Mendoza!
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