Sorry, I’m not going to watch an almost hour-long thing to get maybe ten minutes’ worth of actual information. If there’s something to read, I’ll read it. (I read like lightning.) I do not have an hour out of my day to watch what is very likely a bunch of bullshit (given that it’s on Youtube).
Why are the attitudes of people there compliant both on micro and macro scales when compared to rest of the world?
Better education, more trust in expertise (because education is valued), and better government in the experience of an overwhelming majority of the population.
On that latter point, as incredible as it may sound, keep in mind that the single largest source of government interaction most people have is with their community officials … who are their literal neighbours. Keep in mind too that in my lifetime China went from a mostly-agrarian economy to the #2 economy in the world, having switched from (barely) rural majority to full-blown urban majority population not only in my lifetime but in the time I’ve been here. (It was 60% rural when I came. Now it’s approaching 80% urban, if I remember the stats right.)
The government, to the shock and dismay of western pearl-clutchers, has a lot of credibility with the Chinese. As I’ve heard from quite a few people: if everything changed today and genuine free and open elections were held, the current government would win in a landslide. (This is especially true given the utter shit show that the western world has become in controlling a disease that was almost contemptuously handled by Chinese authorities, not to mention the clowns the “free” world put into power around the world … including India.)
There are a lot of factors that play into why China handled COVID-19 so well, and its authoritarian government is probably the least important of them (though it obviously had an impact: building two massive hospitals in under a month is something that could not happen in Canada, for example, because there would be people profiteering from the land sale, people launching lawsuits to block it on stupid grounds, etc. etc. etc.)
Me and my friend discuss things, and we feel Western countries might still struggle with this for a year, and USA for even close to 2 years, at the rate the whole scenario is going on.
A year? You’re an optimist. Look at the chart I posted. Two years into a pandemic that has already killed over 5.5 million people and infected over 300 million and … Europe and North America both are having sudden rapid rises in infections. Two years in and they haven’t learned even the basics that China learned in the first three months or so (from the December start date, not the date of the Great Lockdown).
This is not going away anytime soon. Five years from now there will still be outbreaks all over the “free” world and more and more people are going to stack up in body bags.
I think you should at least open the link and check the video description and comments. Probably it might surprise you.
I’ll do so when I have some spare time. (Last night was a non-starter. I got injured working out so my night was spent mostly whining quietly in my corner. :D)
Harvard study made that very clear, and to every single person I have mentioned it as a response to “haha but gubmint evil CCP bad no freedom”, each of them has acted like a denialist. I always tell them as an asterisk that CPC does not get to fund Harvard, so they should use better arguments to convince me.
As a general rule of thumb, when I see people use “CCP” I map in “ignorant asshole”. It’s kind of … ballsy … to claim expertise in a subject when you can’t even get the name right, after all.
One more question here. Since Russia and other socialist countries also have “authoritarian” governments yet clearly have had a response failure, why is China so different? Socialist countries generally have people in solidarity, so I want to make sense of that.
Rice culture.
No, really. It’s a thing.
When the main crop of the bulk of your society is rice, and has been for thousands of years, cooperation is in your genes and memes. Rice is not a crop you can farm large-scale individually. Using ancient techniques, for a village to even farm enough rice to feed itself (not to mention an excess for use in trade) it takes a lot of cooperative behaviour that is not needed if you’re, say, farming wheat or potatoes or such. Any person not doing their thing kills the whole. Villages that didn’t learn that lesson starved to death and stopped the spread of their genes and their cultural memes. Farming rice turns out to be a powerful vaccination against maladaptive selfishness.
Russia (which is not particularly socialist right now, and maybe never really was) doesn’t have that need to cooperate hammered into its very genetic and memetic structure. Japan and South Korea (neither of which is even remotely socialist) both do. This is why Russia fared pretty pathetically in facing a threat that was society-wide and J/SK fared relatively well.
The CBC managed to interview a self-serving Canuckistani who was flexing how “brave” he was for not abandoning his family in Wuhan when the Canadian government sent evacuation flights, but not for dependent Chinese nationals. If an outfit as incompetent as the CBC can manage to track down an expat to interview, why couldn’t professional vloggers with boots-on-the-ground contact networks?
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Sorry, I’m not going to watch an almost hour-long thing to get maybe ten minutes’ worth of actual information. If there’s something to read, I’ll read it. (I read like lightning.) I do not have an hour out of my day to watch what is very likely a bunch of bullshit (given that it’s on Youtube).
Better education, more trust in expertise (because education is valued), and better government in the experience of an overwhelming majority of the population.
On that latter point, as incredible as it may sound, keep in mind that the single largest source of government interaction most people have is with their community officials … who are their literal neighbours. Keep in mind too that in my lifetime China went from a mostly-agrarian economy to the #2 economy in the world, having switched from (barely) rural majority to full-blown urban majority population not only in my lifetime but in the time I’ve been here. (It was 60% rural when I came. Now it’s approaching 80% urban, if I remember the stats right.)
The government, to the shock and dismay of western pearl-clutchers, has a lot of credibility with the Chinese. As I’ve heard from quite a few people: if everything changed today and genuine free and open elections were held, the current government would win in a landslide. (This is especially true given the utter shit show that the western world has become in controlling a disease that was almost contemptuously handled by Chinese authorities, not to mention the clowns the “free” world put into power around the world … including India.)
There are a lot of factors that play into why China handled COVID-19 so well, and its authoritarian government is probably the least important of them (though it obviously had an impact: building two massive hospitals in under a month is something that could not happen in Canada, for example, because there would be people profiteering from the land sale, people launching lawsuits to block it on stupid grounds, etc. etc. etc.)
A year? You’re an optimist. Look at the chart I posted. Two years into a pandemic that has already killed over 5.5 million people and infected over 300 million and … Europe and North America both are having sudden rapid rises in infections. Two years in and they haven’t learned even the basics that China learned in the first three months or so (from the December start date, not the date of the Great Lockdown).
This is not going away anytime soon. Five years from now there will still be outbreaks all over the “free” world and more and more people are going to stack up in body bags.
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I’ll do so when I have some spare time. (Last night was a non-starter. I got injured working out so my night was spent mostly whining quietly in my corner. :D)
As a general rule of thumb, when I see people use “CCP” I map in “ignorant asshole”. It’s kind of … ballsy … to claim expertise in a subject when you can’t even get the name right, after all.
Rice culture.
No, really. It’s a thing.
When the main crop of the bulk of your society is rice, and has been for thousands of years, cooperation is in your genes and memes. Rice is not a crop you can farm large-scale individually. Using ancient techniques, for a village to even farm enough rice to feed itself (not to mention an excess for use in trade) it takes a lot of cooperative behaviour that is not needed if you’re, say, farming wheat or potatoes or such. Any person not doing their thing kills the whole. Villages that didn’t learn that lesson starved to death and stopped the spread of their genes and their cultural memes. Farming rice turns out to be a powerful vaccination against maladaptive selfishness.
Russia (which is not particularly socialist right now, and maybe never really was) doesn’t have that need to cooperate hammered into its very genetic and memetic structure. Japan and South Korea (neither of which is even remotely socialist) both do. This is why Russia fared pretty pathetically in facing a threat that was society-wide and J/SK fared relatively well.
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It was a new motion and I fucked up. *shrug* It happens. Since it was a new motion we went with light weight so the damage was minimal.
Almost as if where by design, right? ;)
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It was a pleasant surprise, yes, though less pleasant was they didn’t seem to talk to any expats in Wuhan proper. That’s a damned peculiar oversight.
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The CBC managed to interview a self-serving Canuckistani who was flexing how “brave” he was for not abandoning his family in Wuhan when the Canadian government sent evacuation flights, but not for dependent Chinese nationals. If an outfit as incompetent as the CBC can manage to track down an expat to interview, why couldn’t professional vloggers with boots-on-the-ground contact networks?
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