41–50 of 167 posts
How does the authors know all this? This sounds like super detailed insider information.
One thing that I observe about how China deals with COVID: leadership assumes that they have perfect control over perfect people. Therefore they try these type of solutions like complete lock-down of a city of 26m people. They assume that they are perfect as leaders, so planning is perfect and takes everything into consideration. They assume that people will execute their orders perfectly, even under extreme hardship…
which is why all democracies defeated COVID with the three-week lockdown in which no one left home unless they had to and took proper precautions to ensure that they did not dare transmit any disease to anyone else
No, I would say that modern democracies and enshrine human imperfections into the process in order to further the will to power that exists in those seeking office.
> At this time the public opinion control system warning was triggered, and manual intervention began. ... manual intervention could not keep up with the speed of retweeting and posting. All available staff were called up to support the suppression effort. How does the authors know all this? This sounds like super detailed insider information.
How did this article get the view "behind the curtain"? Conference calls of the Beijing network surveillance office are hardly public knowledge? Together with the imprecise writing ("All the alerts went red") the articles claims are hard to take at face value.
> At this time the public opinion control system warning was triggered, and manual intervention began. ... manual intervention could not keep up with the speed of retweeting and posting. All available staff were called up to support the suppression effort. How does the authors know all this? This sounds like super detailed insider information.
> How does the authors know all this? This sounds like super detailed insider information.
My guess is it's made up: it reads like sci-fi (take an idea, and hang some plausible-sounding narrative on it), and I doubt someone actually privy to the inner workings of the Chinese censorship apparatus probably not say "retweeting."
Also:
>> View from China with an Austrian School of Economics Perspective
This (and a few other things) give me the impression of someone who thinks their ideology lets them see through walls, so to speak.
One aspect of this that i'm hoping a more informed person can comment on: Are the news reports of anger by shanghai residents directed against the national or provincial(?) government? From what I previously read Shanghai was discussed as a factional stronghold not wholly subservient to the national government (to Xi). That being the case i've been curious if these draconian measures have been imposed from the nation…
To the terminology question, Shanghai is a city (市) and not a province (省). However, it is one of four cities that have a special status formally equal to that of provinces. (Imagine if New York City was torn out of the several states it's technically in and made into its own state.) Practically, Shanghai is more important than some of the less significant provinces.
To the substance of the question, whether blame falls on the government of China or more specifically on the government of Shanghai, my view is limited. But I can report that one resident of Shanghai, a longtime friend of mine, is pretty vocal about blaming the Shanghai government.