[caligarn]

I see a lot of enthusiasm for these protests, but I think the caveat here is that we in the west get to see these protests, footage, and headlines, but truth is the majority of Chinese people do not see this. I think the biggest problem for people in China is access to information like this.

[themodelplumber]

According to people in China it's all over state approved social media, not just Western sources. Edit: Posted there, presumably seen by many, then taken down later.

https://twitter.com/vivianwubeijing/status/15966826381311713...

(Note that this journo appears to be threatened downthread, in Chinese on Twitter)

At least one journo, maybe it was this one, says they've seen nothing like it in their 10 years there.

Edit: 51 universities have also seen protests. Seemingly includes students holding signs of a formula...?

https://twitter.com/vivianwubeijing/status/15967562737305026...

Context: Total lockdown circumstances leading to e.g. deaths in lockdown fires. China simultaneously reporting record highs in COVID cases; Chinese vaccine apparently seen/known to be less effective than others.

[mlindner]

This is curious as China has strict control over the internet. If they didn't want to allow these posts to be up in China then they wouldn't be up (any western archives will of course stick around). Either Xi is losing control of the government or he's letting this happen for some purpose.

[sgu999]

Or he's not really aware of it, or at least the scale of it, because he surrounded himself with people who wouldn't dare tell him something he may dislike.

[tianqi]

That is Friedmann Equation. Homophone of "freedom".

[techdragon]

This is the sort of thing that is while easily understandable in principle, can be remarkably hard to keep up with. I’m aware of the general trend with how Chinese dissent is often done by pun like manipulation to avoid censorship, but it can be completely inscrutable at times when it’s something like a Chinese regional dialect specific homophone. They often frequently mutate as they spread, forcing the censorship efforts to play catch up on a massive scale… often the only good link for the censors will be proximity and volume, which is why you get some downright Orwellian sorts of things from time to time like the recent events leading to brief periods where the word “Bridge” was seeing people in certain locations getting flagged by the censors.

So thank you so much for providing the necessary context!

[caligarn]

The twitter account mentioned here appears to be based in New York and is from western media. Her bias seems to be obvious? How can she have a legit read on what Chinese locals are seeing on television, social media, and media?

[sneakerblack]

It's in her bio:

> Media studio co-founder. has worked as Head of BBC Hong Kong Bureau & BBC Chinese News Editor. China Editor @initiumnews. Legal reporter @scmpnews and others

SCMP is a Hong Hong-based news outlet. I'm assuming she has her sources, since all you need is someone in china with a VPN or someone in Hong Kong in mainland with WeChat/Weibo account that has access to community groups

[powerapple]

Chinese do see them. It is very interesting actually. I saw the pretext in DouYin, some people was saying something big was going to happen "tonight" on DouYin, so apparently there are organizations. Today, some friends in China shared with me some video clips. I am only connecting the dots now. It would be interesting to learn the full picture.

[caligarn]

DouYin’s algo is heavily monitored and manipulated by the state.

[dirtyid]

Big events gets posted on PRC social media faster than censors can censor. Much of Chinese with mobile will see this, the biggest problem is people in west thinking they know better, overindexing on a bunch of students stuck in shitty dorms protesting because lockdown in these facilities are genuinely terrible, while the protestors use some dead Uyghurs and libral values as pretense (yes many are genuine too) for international attention to pressure gov response.

This is just one of the thousands of "small" scale protests that happen every year in PRC, except young students are better coordinated and tech savvy (i.e. Shanghai protest organized on Telegram with western reporters in group), same with Henan bank who got some money back. Or Urumqi finally relaxing lockdown because 1000s of commoners got on the streets - imagine that CCP even listens to Uyghur pressure. I expect there's going to be some concessions for campus lockdowns (and organizers getting fucked), but until their parents get on the street enmass, this is western media who got kicked out or left PRC during covid getting overzealous on breadcrumbs of access they occasionally get through oblique channels from mainland.

E: over limit, @powerapple

Yeah, it's coordinated. Cabin fever lockdown students learned from HK protestors / Henan. I was peeping at @actionshanghai on telegram leading up. I think campus concessions will get attention or some priority. And should - lock down in Chinese dorms would suck. I'm sure organizers are going to get crushed, especially for inviting / appealing to foreign jouralists and rags like RFA or epochetimes is going to ruin some lives accordign to how HK NSL prosecutions are going.

[powerapple]

This may not result in anything, but these are synchronised acts, I watched the clip predicted it, and a few guys announced this before it happened on DouYin (Chinese TikTok).

[Yeahsureok]

What do you think the average response was in the West to covid protests last year?

Here in Australia the public and media overwhelmingly despised anyone protesting despite having some of the harshest covid restrictions on Earth.

[m-p-3]

Even worse would be the media not convering the protests at all, and actively suppressing any mentions.

[bsaul]

This period is going to be studied as one of history’s bizarre moments, that people in the future will have trouble understanding. The fact that no major western country, or major political party, strongly condemned those lockdown measures at the time is astounding.

But even crazier is the fact that now that everybody seems to have finally agreed that « live with it » was the most sensible response, not a single major country i know of has performed any serious commission work to established what things went wrong and why. It’s like nothing has happened.

[CharlieDigital]

> the fact that now that everybody seems to have finally agreed that « live with it » was the most sensible response

Your hindsight is missing a lot of nuance.

In the first few months, there was a fog of war. How transmissable is it? How deadly? What is the most effective course of treatment? How does the disease affect our internal systems?

In hindsight, we now know the facts.

We also developed a vaccine which reduces the severity of symptoms if not outright prevents infection in some individuals.

The initial reaction to lock down saved lives. Your own might never have been at risk, but there are many higher risk folks who benefited from the time we bought with lockdowns early on.

Lockdowns now do not make sense. We understand the disease. We have courses of treatment. We have functional vaccines. We have some level of population immunity.

[peyton]

I’m not sure what you’re saying is true. We spent way too much money not to take a very, very close look at what was achieved. I don’t see that happening.

[MyAccountYo]

That's completely false to my understanding. It reminds me of people saying that people got all worked up about y2k and then nothing happened. Nothing happened because everyone fixed their shit. In the beginning of covid hospitals were overwhelmed and the variants were more dangerous. Now large percentages of people are vaccinated and new variants are less dangerous.

I am sure some lock down rules and some implementations of them were not good. But "live with it" was not the same back then as now.

[bsaul]

most people (in france at least) haven’t got their 2022 shot, and we’re completely fine. The virus evolution is what changed things.

[kmos17]

Live with it is ok now because effective vaccines are available. A lot of lockdown measures went overboard but that was hard to tell at the time, when NYC had overflowing hospitals that required mobile morgues due to the overwhelming number of deaths it was more understandable.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

I think part of the issue that appears to be glossed over is that the lockdown measures as such faced a real legal challenge in US. Reasonable people may agree that there was a lot of initial risk due to lack of knowledge of the nature of the risk ( transmissibility and so on ), but, even for a full blown lockdown, the US system does have a solution in place for that ( it was not utilized however ). If there was a time to use that solution ( martial law ), it was at the very beginning, but needless to say, politically it was not a palatable move. That, however, unlike what followed, at least would have been in line with our supposed form of government.

But since that happened and life does go on, states started doing things that clearly stepped over the line for some people without appropriate authority unleashing legal challenges in the process[1].

[1]https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/10/legal-challenges-cd...

[bsaul]

People completely stopped vaccinating in france, and ICUs aren’t overloaded at all anymore. What changed isn’t the vaccination rates but the nature of the virus itself. Omicron completely changed the nature of the epidemic (that plus the fact that after 2 years and with super-contagious variant like omicron, almost 100% of the population have been in contact with the virus, either symptomatic or not).

EDIT : as for lockdowns, they were understandable in 202O when the virus was new. But locking down 20 yo students in 2021 made absolutely no sense, and all the evidence pointed to that. Note that in france at least, the most serious measures against non vaccinated people were taken in early 2022 (aka: not even allowed to take the train), despite omicron being the only variant remaining, and casualties becoming super super low.

[digital-cygnet]

I agree that this time will be keeping public policy academics and epidemiologists busy for decades to come, and that it's a very interesting question what the right calls were in retrospect.

However, I want to point out that you've moved the goalposts in your arguments. You started with

> everybody seems to have finally agreed that « live with it » was the most sensible response

But you're now saying that because of the mutation to Omicron and the prior exposure of "almost 100% of the population", just living with it is the appropriate policy move. Neither of these were true throughout 2020 or most of 2021, so cannot be useful in determining what the correct course was in the early pandemic.

Furthermore, I think you are vastly discounting the value of a single vaccination. Just because few people have taken the bivalent shot does not negate the value that their original shots in 2021 still provide against serious/spreading cases today.

For the record, my own low-confidence prediction is that future historians will bear out the early (first two months, say) phase of lockdown, and will agree with the utility of many of the later policies but take issue with the hubris of states thinking they could impose them on an unwilling population with no blowback. There will also be an endless list of easy-to-condemn overreactions to the virus or silly policies continuing way too late (e.g. a large park near where I used to live was shut down until late 2021, well after vaccination and after we were very confident that it basically didn't spread outdoors)

[ngcc_hk]

Whilst it is not good the first respond is to isolate is right. In fact by not doing it earlier and let the wu han people running cause the outbreak of the world (and I am not talking about the origin of virus but how the first wave started). And the first wave is not as tame as the current one.

Over time the virus tame and solution appeared hence measure should be relaxed.

If you just let it goes as Boris would want it would have killed a lot more.

[bsaul]

How would the situation have evolved if we have had no lockdown at all is an interesting question, and assessing the quality of the models that were used to predict casualties is, IMHO, one of the main things governments should do asap.

All the projections i’ve seen during the pandemic were off by at least 50% (in their most generous intepretation), and countries like sweden that locked people down the least didn’t see any difference in the number of casualties.