The New(speak) York Times: “China’s Zero-Covid Policy Is a Pandemic Waiting to Happen”

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” ~Noam Chomsky, The Common Good (1998)

Say what you will about Noam Chomsky; in 1998 he nailed it. Social control is all about “strictly limiting the spectrum of public opinion.” The New York Times—all the news that’s fit to print!—is one of the media sources that defines and limits our spectrum, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the nonsensical opinion piece that appeared today: “China’s Zero-Covid Policy Is a Pandemic Waiting to Happen.”

The authors are Ezekiel Emanuel, a physician and professor of medical ethics and health policy at Penn, and Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota. Knowledgeable guys, right? Or so you’d think.

They start by talking about the “severe restrictions” that the Olympic athletes will face when they come to China: vaccine requirements, daily covid tests, and being restricted to an “Olympic bubble where they will be confined to prevent spread to the local population.” If you’re bringing 3000 athletes together from all over the world, mid-pandemic, this hardly sounds “severe,” but OK.

The authors let you infer that everyone in China is living like this—because “everyone knows” how authoritarian they are over there, right?—and then they make their main point: that “a zero-covid policy is a losing long-term strategy.”

In fact, they claim such a strategy leaves China vulnerable to omicron, because, as our American narrative would have it, “The coronavirus is not going to disappear—the world will have to live with it.” (That’s American-speak for, “Our leadership has shown itself completely incapable of dealing with this problem.”) They say that China is “set up for disaster.”

But is China really “set up for disaster,” or have they had different policies that attained different results?

To their credit, the authors acknowledge the obvious success China’s had thus far:

“Yes, China has weathered the pandemic well so far. Even with about four times the population of the United States, China has had fewer than 140,000 confirmed covid cases and fewer than 6,000 deaths since January 2020, according to the World Health Organization. A vast majority of factories continued to operate. Early in the pandemic, China added thousands of hospital beds to its health care system in days.

“All of this seems like an enormous success when compared with the messy and often chaotic response to the virus in the United States, where more than 860,000 people have died and some 2,000 more die each day. Many hospitals are under siege. The economy has been disrupted.”

Yes. All of this does seem to be an enormous success. China’s population is 1,448,000,000, meaning that 1 in 241,333 people in China has died. The US population is 334,000,000, meaning that 1 in every 388 Americans has died.

I’d say that’s an enormous success. And no, the people of China aren’t hiding dead bodies under the rug. We’re still struggling—but they’re not. We’re losing as many people per day as we did at the height of last winter—before vaccines were available to the public—but the Chinese were living their lives again by last winter, because they’d controlled things already.

I googled some “day in the life” videos in various parts of China, done by Americans living abroad. The first four I happened to click on are here, here, here, and here.

These videos range from last winter in Beijing, last spring in Nanjing and Wuhan, and this past October in Weixin. But all four videos tell the same story: life looks incredibly normal. The Americans showing us their “day in the life” go to the gym; travel on public transportation, in taxis, on bikes; visit crowded markets and indoor shopping malls; visit coffeeshops, cafeterias, and restaurants; go to theaters, to corner stores, to the park, to school, to labs, to lectures. The Wuhan video mentions that Wuhan has remained one of the top 5 tourist destinations in China.

You rarely see masks in the videos at all, except on public transportation (two of the videos mentioned that masks on public transportation are required). I didn’t see masks on campuses. You see people going about their lives normally – both the Americans living there, and the Chinese people featured in the videos. Life is normal there.

It’s really hard to see China as “set up for disaster.” In America, we’re still mid-disaster, still reeling, still losing thousands of people every day. In China, they’re living life.

The Wuhan video is especially interesting because the American video-maker asked several people she met about the early days of the pandemic. One of the women had a job where she continued to work, but the other three said they were locked down for three months. They all mentioned it being scary and difficult, and a couple of them mentioned that one person in a household could leave the house each week for essentials. It was a serious restriction, no doubt.

They had, in other words, “real lockdowns,” not the American-style “lockdowns” that many of us are still whining about—Oh God, never again! how did we ever live through it!?—where some stuff closed and a lot of stuff remained open, and people moved about as much as they pleased. On the busy street in my neighborhood, I never noticed so much as a decrease in traffic. People took their whole families to Target for extended outings because “there wasn’t anything else to do.”

No wonder “lockdowns don’t work”: (1) we didn’t have lockdowns, and (2) we didn’t have the level of cooperation that you see in more collectivist cultures. We didn’t even have the level of cooperation that we’ve seen in our individualist culture in the past, when faced with a dire threat (think Pearl Harbor, 9/11). We remained in our little social and political bubbles, sure that everyone else was either an idiot or out to get us.

In China, meanwhile, the leaders took initiative — initiative that one could argue was proportional to the threat— and the people cooperated. One woman who was interviewed in the Wuhan video described it like this: “After the virus, the government start a lockdown. We must stay home to protect our city, to protect our health. We follow the government’s suggestions and advice. We all want to keep the virus away, and our doctors and nurses spare no efforts to save lives. After 3 months of lockdown, our city just be free again.”

When asked if she was scared when it first began, she said, “Yes we are pretty scared because COVID-19 can kill us, but … we all believe in our doctors.”

Unity in a time of crisis is the bare minimum of what a functioning society needs. This is why America is sinking deeper into a pit of dysfunction and irrelevance (and we’d be even more irrelevant if we didn’t have all those pesky weapons of mass destruction). This is why China is ascendant as the world’s major power.

When I look at these videos, I see the results of capable leadership and successful policies. I see people freely living their lives—not dying, not restricted, not even masked, and certainly not at each other’s throats. I have a hard time believing that the authors of the NYT piece can say, with a straight face, that China’s policies are inferior to ours.

Instead, this piece seems like pure indoctrination. The New York Times is making sure we Americans “know the limits” of our lively national discussion:

We must live with the virus. We have 600 times more deaths per capita than China, but our policies are better and more successful than theirs. China is going to get their comeuppance with omicron—any time now!—because their policies have left China “wholly unprepared for what will become endemic covid.” (Endemic! The word that means whatever anyone wants it to mean at the moment.)

Boy oh boy, will China be surprised when omicron comes and mows them all down, while we in America are much more wisely letting it rip and fighting amongst ourselves.