How some media progressives talk about China is WILD
China’s going through a lot of protests and there’s reasons to criticize the Chinese government. There’s even arguments that the current protests, primarily about Zero COVID policies but also talking about censorship, have decent points at this stage in the pandemic. Those are worth considering and debating. But then you get something like this from a senior editor and “progressive Montanan” Bob Brigham:
This, is insane. On many levels. First, there’s no argument that China’s population numbers would fall significantly due to COVID. Estimates are about 5 million people would’ve died without the lockdowns they’ve done which is less than .4% of their population. Huge human cost! Not much change in population.
Second, as Naomi Wu points out, there’s no argument that China is uniquely overpopulated. Density as a whole is less than a number of European states, though some large provinces in the East like Guangdong are quite dense still in the 700/sq km range putting them at about 40% of Malta’s density (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1183370/china-population-density-by-region-province/). But true, density isn’t the only thing that matters. How about water resources? Well in per capita water renewable resources, China has a similar amount to the UK and about 60% more than Germany according to the World Bank (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ER.H2O.INTR.PC). China’s forest coverage as a percent of land area is similar to Belgium (https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/forest_area/). You could think of other things like per capita emissions and there’s none of that where China is substantially higher than European countries Brigham gives a pass for. Or hell, even some US states!
What this all adds up to is fairly blatant racism because now he’s not complaining about actions of the Chinese government but the existence of Chinese people. Which if anything I’d say China’s earlier one child policy and now more relaxed two child policies deserve critique for being unhelpful interventions when birth rates drop quickly and naturally from just urbanization and women’s education being combined...two things China’s proven quite good at in recent decades! And this is combined with unhinged hatred of lockdowns far in excess of where even the protestors have been at.
Chinese people in general were in favor of lockdowns and some still are (though that number has certainly dropped more recently)! That’s why you didn’t see these protests during the rest of the past two years of them. And the lockdowns were working until fairly recently as clearly shown by China’s extremely low death toll (a death toll that is likely pretty close to accurate or at least no more wrong than anyone else’s simply because hiding millions of deaths isn’t a thing governments have ever been able to do, there are too many different threads of information to control for that).
If you want to make arguments that lockdown policies have stayed in place too long, especially since widespread adoption of vaccines, that’s a point that’s worth considering. That’s what the protestors are arguing. But to say they were always anti-science is some crazy bullshit when it’s not just China that strict border controls and lockdowns worked in for well over a year. You’d also need to throw countries like Vietnam, New Zealand, and even Taiwan under that bus.
Lots of other folks make more reasonable and measured criticisms of China, some that are still OK to argue over and disagree with since even a reasonable take can be wrong, but guys like this are in prominent positions of our media apparatus. Which should probably also give people some pause in just what perspectives they get on China relying on even progressive news sources in the West.
