[DiogenesKynikos]

It's what I've been told by numerous people who live in China. It's what I see on Chinese social media, and it's what Westerners who live in China are saying on Western social media. I'm sure there are many on HN who live in China - they can also tell you what things are like there.

If there were a major ongoing epidemic in China, it would be impossible to hide. Hospitals would be under the same sort of pressure that they are in Europe and the US. People would have family members and friends who got sick or who died. That's not happening. China is simply too tightly connected to the rest of the world to keep things like this a secret. In December 2019, the existence of the outbreak in Wuhan was known around the world within days of the first patient test results coming back.

Even Western media began grudgingly admitting several months ago the virus was essentially gone from China. For example, German/French public radio did a pretty interesting documentary on post-CoVID-19 Wuhan. The first scene is in a packed discotheque:

* German: https://youtu.be/LmsI7lc2_Vg

* French: https://youtu.be/OyHt7-KmK7Y

* English subtitles: https://youtu.be/DEOyhN2-kPs

[loveistheanswer]

>It's what I've been told by numerous people who live in China. It's what I see on Chinese social media, and it's what Westerners who live in China are saying on Western social media.

Yep, that's how censorship works.

I'm sure you won't see too many people talking about Tiananmen Square on Chinese social media either, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Are we really going to pretend that the Chinese government hasn't been heavily censoring information which makes them look bad?

Early on in the pandemic, the Chinese covid death counts started to skyrocket, and activists within the country were using Github to make sure this information did not get 404'd. The same day these activists were dissapeared, the skyrocketing "official" chinese covid death count immediately went down to "0", where it has remained ever since. When using Google to browse the death counts by country, you can't even look at the death counts for China, the button is disabled.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/27/china-free-covid-19-acti...

[DiogenesKynikos]

> Yep, that's how censorship works.

China doesn't have the power to censor Western expats on Twitter, or the millions of live conversations going on at any given moment between people inside China and people outside. This view of China, that it's a black box that information can't escape out of, is simply not reality.

[loveistheanswer]

>China doesn't have the power to censor Western expats on Twitter,

Yes, they do, directly and indirectly.

Directly: Li-Meng Yan, the Chinese virologist who blew the whistle on covid in December 2019, but the Chinese government covered that up. She defected to the US, and published a research paper critical of the Chinese government, and Twitter banned her account.

Indirectly: How likely do you think it would be for the chinese government to renew an expats visa if they were doing activist work like the chinese activists who got dissapeared for reporting covid deaths on Github? They didn't even let a WHO investigation team into their country for almost a year

[DiogenesKynikos]

Li-Meng Yan didn't blow the whistle in December 2019. She's a Hong Konger who started making crazy claims months after the outbreak began. She flew to the US, claimed she was persecuted, and now works for Steve Bannon. She's made all sorts of crazy claims, including that SARS-CoV-2 is a bioweapon.

The first pneumonia patients in Wuhan got their test results showing a suspected SARS-related coronavirus on 27 December 2019. The local authorities put out an alert on 30 December, which was instantly noticed by people around the world who track emerging infectious diseases. In other words, health professionals around the world knew about the Wuhan outbreak within 3 days of the first suspicious test results.

I don't think you realize the sheer volume of communication between people in China and the outside world. Many millions of everyday people are in regular contact across the border. There are many millions more people with VPNs who say whatever they want on Western social media. Even Chinese social media is way too active for the government to thoroughly monitor. Almost anything major that happens in China nowadays is known about outside China pretty much instantly. The idea that there's been a massive epidemic underway in China over the past year and that the government has been able to keep that information from leaking to the outside world is utterly implausible.

> They didn't even let a WHO investigation team into their country for almost a year

Which WHO investigation? The WHO visited on 20 January 2020, just three weeks after the outbreak was identified.[1] Months later, for political reasons, the Australian PM started demanding an "investigation." China didn't like the accusatory nature of the Australian demands, and it took months to negotiate a process that all sides considered reasonable. But the WHO was in Wuhan long before Australia began demanding a different sort of investigation.

1. https://www.who.int/china/news/detail/22-01-2020-field-visit...

[lenkite]

As far as I know, it was well-reported in the papers that the WHO team was first blocked from entering. And then once they were allowed in, all the data was sanitised for them.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-ch... https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-china-blocked...

[DiogenesKynikos]

First of all, I'm talking about the WHO team that went to Wuhan in January 2020, not the team that went there a year later. The WHO was on the ground in Wuhan within weeks of the initial detection of the outbreak.

Second of all, you should take the claims of Western media about China with more than a grain of salt. The WHO team that went a year later wasn't blocked from entering. A few team members began traveling to China before their visas were approved. The data wasn't "sanitized." One team member said he wanted to see additional data. The newspapers trumpeted that, claiming that China had hidden everything. Other members of the WHO team then criticized the newspapers, saying that they had been given extensive access to the data they wanted.