> It has been perfectly clear with the Chinese negligence around Covid
Urgh, let me tell you some facts.
On February 1 2020, I travelled from China (not Wuhan) back to the Netherlands, having aborted my holiday early. Wuhan was in lockdown for a week at that point, and my flight to the Netherlands was the very last one I could get. At that point, the WHO also declared global emergency.
I arrived in Germany and the Netherlands. What happened in the airports? No temperature checks or other checks. Nobody who took note of my name for contact tracing. Nothing.
Back in the Netherlands, I called the CDC: can I get tested? Reply: no, not even if I pay for it myself. I ask: do I need to quarantine myself? Reply: nope.
I didn't trust that. Chinese media has been raging for weeks about how infectious and dangerous it was, and that it could be spread asymptomatically. So I voluntarily quarantined myself and my family for 2 weeks. Turned out I wasn't infected.
Up until March or April or so, I saw on tv and newspapers and how multiple western governments called covid just a flu, that we're "well prepared", even criticizing the lockdown in Wuhan as a human rights violation.
You want to talk negligence? Okay, China could have done a better job, but let's say they were earlier by 2 weeks and reported to WHO mid-Dec rather than late-Dec. Would that have changed anything when for months the west totally dismissed the virus as being dangerous, and gleed at China's misfortune?
> and how they treated the doctors that sounded the alarm
Li Wenliang was not jailed. He was reprimanded by the police, and could go back to work the next day. He wasn't the first one: the first doctor who said something was Jiang Jixian, whose work led to the WHO escalation on Dec 31, 1 day after Li Wenliang said something. The Chinese court later ruled that the police's treatment of Li Wenliang was unjustified. The police then apologized.
See also: "Some whistleblowers are more equal than others"
https://www.mango-press.com/some-whistleblowers-are-more-equ...
> the HK issue and with the Uighur concentration camps
These are whole different, and rather complicated topics. I could go into them, but I need to know from you: do you actually want to discuss, or is this meant as a diss to me?
> So you're not behind the great firewall huh? Reminds me of Chinese agents bullying Chinese students in Canada to not badmouth the government
So what? I don't "bully" others for disagreeing with me about China, I talk to them. If you ask me whether those students should bully, then I'd say no: they should discuss. That's something they need to learn.
But the same applies to a great many people in the west, who despite being raised in a free society, prefer to cancel rather than talk.
Still, that doesn't mean that those students' support for China is not genuine or legit.