Too many people are confusing the two. Whenever lemmy.ml or its devs do something stupid, people go “Lemmy is getting worse and worse,” or “I’m leaving Lemmy,” or worse, “I’m leaving for Beehaw.”
If you’re using Beehaw, then you’re using Lemmy. Lemmy is the software these instances run on. If you don’t like lemmy.ml, join another instances that have rules that match your philosophy. Some instance hosts authoritarian or fascist shit? Turn to another Lemmy instance. Lemmy.ml is not even the biggest instance. People who just joined and are unfamiliar with the platform will just think the entire Lemmyverse is run by autocratic admins if we don’t get our terminology right.
You seem to think that China is some kind of hive colony and that all dissent from the masses is crushed with zero hope for any sort of change ever happening. As if China has solved the human equation and can maintain perfect dominance despite internal contradictions.
I strongly disagree. It maybe appears that way because we’re entering a new Cold War, but in reality politics is still possible in China and people can still do things to force changes.
We actually saw this! China was set to maintain their zero COVID policy for as long as the virus was a threat, but internal protests drove them to follow the rest of the world into reopening. If you were right then zero COVID would have never ended.
Personally, I think zero COVID was a net positive and disagree with the protests, but I can at least recognize that people hated it and that China eventually listened to protesters as all governments eventually must. No government can maintain perfect domination. You are far too pessimistic about China.
Zero COVID was only lifted after it became clear that it dealt significant, undeniable damage to the Chinese economy and threatened growth prospects. If anything, it proves the uncompromising worldview of the forces driving China.
Sure, there were protests which carried on for an entire year (!), but nothing suggests that they were relevant to the decision. Growth and exports slowing down to a crawl due to the policy had a much greater effect than anything else. China’s state-backed capitalist class also complained, and their complaints have much greater reach within the CCP than any protests. Interestingly, protesters who criticized the policy were repressed, whereas the Foxconn CEO got away with it.
This pattern of behaviour isn’t specific to China, or to the new/old Cold War. Stalinist/Maoist totalitarianism in general always attempts to enforce self-destructive and frankly insane policies such as the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward long after the harmful effects become evident. Yes, the policies were lifted and the victims rehabilitated decades later, after an incredible social and human cost.
The nonsensical part of Zero COVID is that the policy itself wasn’t even necessary. The EU offered China free vaccines (in an attempt to bring trade flows back to normal), which was rebuffed by China for no logical reason.
Why would anyone be optimistic about the CCP in the light of all that? There is literally nothing optimistic about CCP-brand Maoism. If the CCP had embraced democratic socialism, or at least followed a more scientific approach, it would have itself more proponents. But as things stand, it’s no different than any other bourgeois nationalist regime that opposes the US.
China’s zero COVID policy saved countless lives, possibly millions, while Americans were marched to our deaths to make widgets as “essential workers”. That’s what the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie does - social murder.
How the hell could you look at that and then conclude “zero COVID was insane”? Or that it’s no different than bourgeois nationalism? They literally put the lives of workers above economic productivity! That’s clearly the behavior of a worker state.
The CCP initially denied the existence of COVID, then disappeared and jailed medical workers and journalists who dared even report on it. After the disease became undeniable, they switched gears to “zero COVID” and welding people’s doors shut in their residences. Is disappearing & jailing medical workers also the behaviour of a worker’s state? Or is that just specific to the CCP’s “worker state”?
Meanwhile, the rest of the world (including the West) followed a sensible policy of mass vaccination & localized lockdowns, which was proven right in the end: Vaccination rates were higher than 2/3 in most western countries by the end of 2021, whereas China was still attempting Zero COVID a year later, near the end of 2022. It is impossible anyway to determine exactly how ineffective the CCP’s COVID efforts were, since the figures the CCP reports are statistically and mathematically implausible.
It’s insane because it was ineffective and unnecessary. The CCP chose to continue pursuing lockdowns while fudging the numbers instead of mass vaccination, which is bad enough. But the worst of all is that they spread misinformation about clearly effective western vaccines and boxed themselves into a situation where they couldn’t accept them, while simultaneously adding wind to the sails of antivaxxer nutters worldwide.
Let’s just assume that the data you’re using here is trustworthy, since that makes this a very simple discussion.
According to that article, COVID may have resulted in a million deaths in China above the long-term trend line in the last 3 years. This is known as the excess mortality rate, which we can directly compare to other countries even if China lied about COVID mortality (and hey, maybe they did - it would be in their own interests so it’s plausible)
According to this article, since the pandemic began the US’s excess deaths have also sparked sharply even as the COVID mortality rate falls in official government data (sound familiar?) FTA: Since the pandemic began, excess deaths are up by more than 1.25 million in the U.S., about 15% higher than in the pre-pandemic years. That’s worse even when you don’t take populations into account!
Now we can do excess deaths per capita to compare these two policies:
China’s population is notoriously huge, with currently 1.412 billion people living in China. 1 million excess deaths among 1.412 billion people gives us an excess death rate of ~0.07%
America is a much smaller country, with 331.9 million people. 1.25 million excess deaths among 331.9 million gives us an excess death rate of ~0.38%
That means America’s policies were 5x worse on a per capita basis. This is why American life expectancy has fallen behind Chinese life expediency. “Ineffective and unnecessary” by what measure?
If China had responded as badly as the US and had an excess death rate of ~0.38% then over 5 million people would have died. Even if we take your pessimistic numbers at face value, zero COVID saved so many lives that Chinese life expectancy actually rose above American life expectancy!
America is the worst of its cohorts, but the rest of the West failed too!
France had 151,000 excess deaths. At that rate China would have lost over 3 million
Germany had 254,000 excess deaths . At that rate China would have lost over 4 million
Britain had 237,000 excess deaths. At that rate China would have lost just under 5 million.
In fairness, according to your data, China only barely outcompeted South Korea at 42,000 excess deaths - at that rate China would have lost 1.14 million instead of a measly 1 million. That’s still 140,000 lives that were saved because of zero COVID that would have died with South Korean policies.
In conclusion, China is a positive force in the world and I know which side I’m on in the next Cold War.
You can have the last word. Pick a side lib.
The data is literally from the CCP itself, so you don’t need to question it. You trust the CCP right? The CCP claims a COVID mortality rate of 0 after April 2020, which is downright idiotic and requires the suspension of disbelief to work with. Based on that, I won’t even make an effort to believe that the CCP’s figures are in any way trustworthy.
The entire reason why this isn’t a simple discussion, and why we have to use the “excess mortality” as a proxy metric in the first place, is because the CCP lied and fudged the data into order to present “zero covid” as a success. Had the CCP simply shared the actual COVID death rate, this would’ve been a matter of simple comparison, but they didn’t.
However, that is fine. Data scientists can construct statistical models to account for the discrepancies. The Economist’s Model illustrates this well. While estimates for the US, Germany closely track the actual numbers reported with some specific gap, CCP-China’s estimates diverge sharply from their reports. The average estimate for China is worse than US or any other Western nation, unless you pick the “massaged” figures they have reported, which are certainly false. Only the lower bound of the estimate can be considered better.
This claim is hilarious in any context, but even moreso in the context of COVID. China has been gaslighting people about the pandemic from the very beginning, and repressed whistleblowers who attempted to warn the world about it. The world lost crucial weeks and months of much-needed response time because of the CCP’s obsession with controlling the narrative even when the extent of the problem was obvious. Why jail medical workers who spoke out? Pointless cruelty, especially considering the news was all over the place at that point. Why spread misinformation about vaccines? And why bother fudge the numbers when the discrepancy is obvious to any observer?
I’ve already made it clear I’m not on your side, or the CCP’s side, Ms./Mr. Tankie. There’s a reason why tankies are, and continue to be, a fringe movement within the left almost everywhere: You’re faced with the Sisyphean task of attempting to sell the CCP as a force for good, which is extremely difficult considering the fact that the entire world is aware of the CCP’s nature as a repressive, totalitarian regime.
Call me “lib” all you want, at least non-Tankie leftists are actually somewhat effective at improving conditions of the working class (compared to CCP’s “achievements”, which are a sad joke). European socialists can point to successes in both labor rights and on the social front (LGBT rights in China are an even sadder joke). The only thing tankies succeed at these days is shilling for the CCP, for Russia, for the Taliban, or for whatever regressive, repressive, authoritarian “anti-western” / “anti-US” force is popular nowadays. My bad, they’re also remarkably successful in alienating people from the wider leftist movement - but thankfully, tankies are still seen as a joke and beyond parody in most of Europe, so we don’t have this problem over here yet.