[yocheckitdawg]

China in particular due to the lack of a free media. Pork is an important staple in China, so politicians chose to suppress the bad news about the hog supply which limited the information available to farmers to make changes to mitigate the damage being wrought by ASF. If Chinese farmers had access to more information more quickly, the crisis would be nowhere near as severe as it has become.

Once again another example of how Freedom of Speech is a foundational value of immense importance and should only be violated if there are extremely good reasons for doing so (and the vast majority of the time there are not).

[beerandt]

>should only be violated if there are extremely good reasons for doing so

I'm sure the Party thought they had a good reason.

In fact, I'd think everyone who ever suppresses speech thinks their reason for doing it is a good one.

[AmericanChopper]

> I'm sure the Party thought they had a good reason.

They did, and it’s one of the key reasons centrally planned economies always fail (really their resistance to failure is only determined by their people’s endurance for suffering). In a free market, value is set by supply and demand, bad decisions and bad ideas don’t survive, and you have some reasonably decent metrics to measure success. In a planned economy, value is set by the planning committee. As a decision maker in such a system, your value is determined by how successful you are at convincing those higher up the chain that you have good ideas and make good decisions. Every decision maker in the chain of command is incentivized to lie to their superiors, and the ultimate authority is incentivized to lie to the public. Small failures and course corrections are not possible under such a system, so for a failure to be acknowledged, it has to overcome the ability of the person who’s responsible for it to conceal it. It becomes essential for anybody with any power to control the “truth”.

You can see the same dynamics at play in any sufficiently large organisation (generally scaling proportional to the slowing feedback loop between decision and outcome, and with any form of complexity that would obscure the direct relationship between decision and outcome), though usually on a much smaller scale. China allows enough free market activity to take place to allow it to survive, but you can see the failures of its planning committees everywhere.

[thaumasiotes]

> Pork is an important staple in China

Indeed. For reference, pork in China is usually just referred to as "meat".

[kenneth]

It took me a while to figure out why one of my favorite Chinese dish, 卤肉饭 aka Lu Rou Fan, directly translated into "braised meat rice" when in english it's always "minced pork rice"

[fqye]

WTF. This crisis has been openly discussed in China from the very beginning. And yes pork price has been going up steadily , but there was no such thing as political crisis. I mean China is not angel but it is absurd to smear China with nonsenses like this.

[woodandsteel]

So is it your view that the Chinese government has done a good job of handling the crisis?

[fqye]

Can you read? In what way did I hint that?

[woodandsteel]

It's a perfectly legitimate question. You present yourself as someone who knows what is going on in the country, so what do you think? My guess is you avoided answering the question because you know it has screwed up badly, and don't want to admit it.

[ospider]

If you were not implying that the Chinese government has handled the ASF badly, your question should be: "How do you feel about the action the government takes?", instead of asking if the OP supports the government.

The Chinese government maybe evil, but it's NOT stupid and they do not hate piggies. Besides, you can say that pork is the most popular meat supply in China, but it's not like that the Chinese would die without pork, chickens and beef are both fine protein supplies. Please don't attach everything that happened in China to politics.

[woodandsteel]

You're right, I should have made that my question.

The article explained why the crisis is much worse than it would have been if the government had acted wisely. If you disagree, then present some specific arguments, not just the vague, general one that the Chinese government is not stupid and so therefore it must have acted wisely.

"Please don't attach everything that happened in China to politics" But the article was about governmental action.

But I am going to assume you know all that and you have avoided a discussion of specifics because you know that it indeed did screw up.

"Please don't attach everything that happened in China to politics" But the article was about governmental action. So what you are trying to do is divert attention away from the government's action. My observation is in the last year or so at HN, that has become the standard tactic for China government defenders.

[parrellel]

"This crisis has been openly discussed in China from the very beginning." and "but there was no such thing as political crisis."

implying the usual Chinese Government stupidity isn't happening.

[jxramos]

can you lend any references to that open discussion? That's definitely worth checking out to stack up against the other claim.

[fqye]

Checkout all the threads @ 知乎, China's Quora. And it's been all over China's news and social media since the beginning.

https://www.zhihu.com/search?type=content&q=%E9%9D%9E%E6%B4%...

[wonnage]

https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%9D%9E%E6%B4%B2%E7%8C%AA%E7%...

[billfruit]

I'd like to see some objective analysis and references to back up this claim.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

I read an article that people are purposefully spreading ASF in China to increase the price of pork. Is there any truth to this?

[gkanai]

there have been credible reports in China of Chinese farmers using drones to spread ASF for various reasons, so yes

[sterlind]

Holy hell. I'd love to understand why.. could you dig up where you read that?

I wonder if it was affected farmers keeping their competitors from getting a leg up, or some flavor of domestic terrorism.

[Apfel]

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3042991/chin...

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3042122/chi...

These should cover it. Most dystopian story I've read in years!