Have you heard? Lunar new year starts next week! But all is not as festive as this display in the northeastern city of Shenyang suggests.
In a rare acknowledgment that the Chinese government's abandonment of its people to covid is taking a big toll, citizens have been encouraged not to visit elderly relatives who have not already been infected. “You have all kinds of ways to show you care for them," Guo Jianwen, a member of the state council’s pandemic prevention team, reportedly said, "you don’t necessarily have to bring the virus to their home.”
The true extent of the calamity is impossible to know. Estimates of five to nine to fifteen thousand dead a day can't be tested, but the official death toll of a mere forty in the last month is breathtaking in its mendacity. Everyone must know it's untrue, but the system is banking on nobody's being able to say with any certainty how untrue. Cynical but brutally effective. I can't but think of the words for which Chloe Zhao's Oscar 2021 triumph was censored in her homeland, that the PRC is "a place where there are lies everywhere."
The authorized story seems to be that, after waiting resolutely until it was scientifically safe, China has quickly and decisively achieved herd immunity from a now largely harmless covid variant. For most people, it's a matter of three days of fever and then they're good to go! The other people, the vulnerable, the unprotected? Nothing to see here, move right along!
No doubt a coup if it were really true. But how could anyone come to think it was true? Maybe leaving the dead uncounted will be counted "scientific" in a different sense, in terms of a "scientific Marxism" which accepts the deaths of untold victims as part of the historical dialectic. It's happened before. Will they get away with it again?
