I was living in Shanghai in 2020 and 2021, and after the initial covid chaos, when things had settled down and the contact tracing and testing systems were in place, things were quite stable, the case numbers were low, etc. Like, you can have an opinion on how extreme the control measures were, but they were effective. Basically nobody I knew got covid, and like, I was taking the densely packed subway at rush hour every day. If it was out there to be exposed to, I'd have been exposed.
And I remember telling people back home in North America about this, and they just... wouldn't believe me. They were insistent that there were mass cases, mass death, and that the government was just covering it up.
And I was like, "No, like, we'd know. Like, you know tons of people, if they were getting covid and getting locked down, or worse, dying, you'd be aware of it." But nothing would persuade them. And I'd ask how it was supposed to be the case that tons of people were dying, and we just weren't noticing. And pretty often they'd say something like,
"Well, there's so many people. They just don't value life there like we do."
Which is a fucked up thing to say, even if you're talking about, like, labour safety standards, which is nominally what people pretend to be talking about when they say shit like that usually. But to talk about people dying of covid? Like, you think when a Chinese person loses a relative to covid they just don't care? Because there's a lot of other Chinese people?
So, yeah, a lot of white North Americans were perfectly happy to whole-ass tell me that they don't see Chinese people as complete human beings.
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