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heldupathome

I think it’s a disgrace that the Chinese government hasn’t apologized for

1.) keeping wet market open

2.) silencing whistleblower doctor that would have stopped a pandemic

3.) letting 5 million people leave Wuhan

4.) pressuring WHO to not recommend border shutdown against China - Conjecture

5.) silencing whistleblowers inside China and around the world

6.) at one point, was surfacing propagandas that the virus didn’t even originate in China (from japan or Italy). Also tried to float the idea that US planted the virus in Wuhan.

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The Chinese Government is an authoritarian regime. Agree that it's terrible, but of course they won't apologize for anything.

This comment is frankly lacking substance. Generally accepted, binary thinking like this is exactly the kind HN is best without.

Is any of the parents statement in doubt?

Do you really want them to write a politely worded apology to the UN?

No the UN should get serious and start pointing out the human rights violations for which they are guilty. The Chinese people deserve better than this.

preemptively stating that asking China to apologize is NOT racist.

Got any info on point 6? Did they really start that rumor?

> China Spins Tale That the U.S. Army Started the Coronavirus Epidemic: After criticizing American officials for politicizing the pandemic, Chinese officials and news outlets have floated unfounded theories that the United States was the source of the virus.

That's the headline of this story from March 13: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-ch...

They have been telling their own people source of the virus is the US:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-ch...

One under director of the Foreign Affairs office posted it on Twitter, a site blocked in China. By this logic, the US is also telling their own people that the virus is a biological weapon because one senator said it on Fox News.

"Mr. Zhao’s remarks were spread on China’s most prominent social media platform, Weibo, under a hashtag: #ZhaoLijianPostedFiveTweetsinaRowQuestioningAmerica. By late afternoon on Friday, that hashtag had been viewed more than 160 million times, along with screenshots of the original Twitter posts."

Do you find the US government responsible for a conspiracy theory being popular on social media?

Did a US official start it on a platform controlled by the US... then yeah maybe.

They certainly brought it to prominence:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-13/chinese-o...

My uneducated guess is that it's the western internet getting into a fit over what was essentially a Twitter fight between officials.

Related to that and some other stories about evil China - if China treated certain politician's Twitter feeds or Fox News articles as seriously as the West seems to treat China's equivalents, North America would probably be glassed by now.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/13/asia/china-coronavirus-us...

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/13/asia/china-coronavirus-us-lij...

The Chinese media spread the rumor, and they are an extension of the Chinese government. Whether they started the rumor is immaterial.

s/Chinese media/Fox News/, s/Chinese government/US government/, and see if this sentence still makes sense.

China's Supreme Court did somewhat apologize-without-actually-saying-sorry re: point #2 (by admitting that authorities should've taken Dr. Li's "rumors" about it looking like SARS seriously instead of trying to shut him up). This would also apply to point #5 (which seems to be a duplicate of #2, really).

(6) is a direct response to the White House's continued use of 'Wuhan virus', 'Kung Flu' and other racist/shitty deflection garbage.

I'm not defending it, but it isn't happening in a vacuum.

I'm a lefty, so I think it's important to consider that viruses or diseases are often named for the first person to have them, discover them or the region in which they originated.

- Hodgkins Lymphoma is named after... Thomas Hodgkin who discovered it.

- Ebola is named after the Ebola River in the DRC. (https://goo.gl/maps/dF1MMnpBBwXpAZ3k8)

- Lyme disease is named after Old Lyme, Connecticut. (https://goo.gl/maps/Haqg2fxmYwcHELRY8)

- Bornholm disease is named after Bornholm Island in Denmark (https://goo.gl/maps/LDWDw5iS9X2xsA3B8), which is caused by the Coxsackie B virus named after... Coxsackie, New York, a small town on the Hudson where it was isolated. (https://goo.gl/maps/RKrhBup2ZAgzXVGJ9)

The recent bout of sensitivity is likely a game of left v. right finger-pointing. Who cares whether it's the Wuhan virus, the Wengliang Flu (after the man who discovered it) or nCoV-19? Go find a cure, a vaccine, etc. Naming a disease after where it started is a long-standing tradition. [1] This kind of shit-stirring over something nobody is actually offended by is exactly what gets the right worked up.

[EDIT] In fact, having a disease named after you is considered honorific: "Eponyms are a longstanding tradition in Western science and medicine. Being awarded an eponym is regarded as an honor: 'Eponymity, not anonymity, is the standard.' The scientific and medical communities regard it as bad form to attempt to eponymise oneself." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymously_named_dise...

checkout HIV checkout "Spanish flu"

Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, German Measels, Zika, Guinea Worm, St. Louis Encephalitis, West Nile too. [1]

[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/30440/12-diseases-and-lu...

It's more likely that the CCP is responding to a more general allegation of Coronavirus-related racism against Chinese people (e.g. stereotypes about Chinese people as a race and/or culture being universally unsanitary) than specifically to the use of "Wuhan virus" (which is accurate) or "Kung Flu" (which is little more than a silly pun, though I'm partial to "Fluhan" myself).

No, (6) is a direct attempt to distract from the Chinese government's own screw-ups and defuse the outrage it caused within their own population. It was originally aimed at their domestic audience and appeared in the Chinese-language state press and social media before they started spreading the same conspiracy theory in the West.

Sorry to be the bearer of an unpleasant reality, but the latter racist phrasing is far more recent than the attempts by the CCP to spread propaganda about this virus being a US army bio-weapon (which started weeks ago) and calling it the 'Wuhan virus' may be provocative but is not inaccurate.

it's as racist as Spanish flu was racist.

How is calling it "Wuhan Virus" racist? It's literally the truth. I mean, the Spanish flu is also called the Spanish flu, and nobody's complaining.

It was happening long before the WH uttered a word, so if you really want to blame Trump for Chinese propaganda - you are going to have to argue for the concept of preemptive retaliation.

Or note the fact that members of the government outside the White House have made similar statements for some time now.

While also providing proof that those statements predate China's antics. When China was accusing everyone of fear-mongering, and hints of travel restrictions were met with speeches about the holocaust and hypocritical appeals to the WHO, which US official is to blame for that? I've been watching this thing since December, the USG is pretty much the last one to the party - China's state run media has been saying crazy stuff since day one.

>which US official is to blame for that?

Though it does not excuse many of China's initial actions, and I doubt this is the only reason for those actions, I can understand wanting to downplay something like this while you're in the middle of negotiations to stop a trade war. It's not hard to imagine the US calling for an immediate closing of the borders and shelving of the trade deal.

> Though it does not excuse many of China's initial actions...

This qualifier, "initial", makes me think you are arguing that their subsequent actions are excusable. I'd argue they aren't excusable, even from a completely amoral utilitarian perspective - because nothing they've done even looks rational. Accusing the other party in trade negotiations of releasing a biological weapon, coincidentally right next to your own infectious disease facility, isn't going to improve negotiation prospects - no rational person would think that it could. Threatening to interrupt medical supply chains during a pandemic... I can't think of a better battlecry for those who'd advocate pulling all operations out of China. Forcing workers to return to the factories and claiming that you are back at 85% capacity, when everyone has access to near real time satellite imagery proving that your coal plants aren't running, isn't going to strengthen your negotiation position.

>This qualifier, "initial", makes me think you are arguing that their subsequent actions are excusable.

Over the past months they have made many good moves, and their conduct after signing the trade deal in early January seems decent.

>Accusing the other party in trade negotiations of releasing a biological weapon, coincidentally right next to your own infectious disease facility

One member of the foreign department posting things on Twitter is not the actions of the state. Further, that man's post seemed to be made as a reply to the "US accusation" that the virus was unleashed intentionally by the Chinese. I don't understand how you can attack one while repeating the other.

And while I don't support forcing workers back to work or misleading economic reports, they're fairly common tactics worldwide.

> ...reply to the "US accusation" that the virus was unleashed intentionally by the Chinese.

Oh that is an easy one. That US accusation was actually open speculation by Indian and German researchers examining the only data that China was willing to share with the rest of the world. They weren't accused of intentionally unleashing it, but negligence was speculated - the lying and secrecy is the cause for that, and they have only themselves to blame. China had allowed only one outside crisis team in, from the WHO (which lost credibility long ago) - and they only spent a single day in Wuhan. Around that time it was discovered that China had been under-reporting infections by an order of magnitude, every province coincidentally made the same calculation error for the same period of time.

> ...they're fairly common tactics worldwide.

This is all unprecedented. We have never seen such transparent lies counter-messaged in near realtime by way of opensource intelligence. Grassroots btw, the corporate response has been denial - followed by a week or two of softening messaging, then admission to the truth. The information surrounding cross species transmissibility is a good example: videos starting popping up of Chinese people hurling their pets from rooftops in response to government warnings with regard to transmissibility. The corporate media immediately swung into action, declaring any such talk as racist FakeNews™ - but they were wrong again.

>Oh that is an easy one...

This seems to be referring to the immediately pulled journal saying some parts of the virus were very similar to HIV, at least that's the only Indian or German researcher based thing I've heard. That wasn't the start of the hoax, the "open speculation" was basically just that engineering this was possible, and the blame for these hoaxes does not rest on the Chinese.

>This is all unprecedented.

It's not, and I was referencing two very specific claims you were making. When you feel we are encountering an unprecedented level of misinformation, why do you think that your information is untainted?

> That wasn't the start of the hoax...

The only perpetrator that would provide an excuse for baselessly accusing the US military would have to be the US government. So when did they fabricate that hoax? Was it when the FBI started cracking down on spies in January? Are they the ones that pressured the Mounties to start clearing their level-4 labs of Chinese virologists last year?

> ...the blame for these hoaxes does not rest on the Chinese.

The lying and secrecy creates the environment in which that sort of thing thrives. At some point you can't characterize predictable consequences as victim blaming, for many the benefit of doubt was lost pretty early on, following the crackdown on doctors and journalists who accurately described events.

> When you feel we are encountering an unprecedented level of misinformation, why do you think that your information is untainted?

Let me be more clear: China lying about something is to be expected. What is unprecedented is the combination of two things: the lie being told has severe and unavoidable consequences to everyone, and the means to combat the lies are not only open to all - but are actively being employed to do so. The beauty of opensource intelligence is that any potential for manipulation can be quantified in a way that secretly sourced data cannot.

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