Mick Hartley

I'm really not sure what to make of this, but it's certainly – at least – an interesting contribution to the debate.

The author of this Tablet article, Michael P. Senger, argues, basically, that the lockdown approach to the coronavirus pandemic has been pushed by the Chinese, who've managed through the skilful use of social media to persuade the rest of the world that their approach is the only possible way to defeat the virus. And, as a result, we've all become a little more like China:

The CCP has shaped scientific narratives by consistently promoting the falsehood that “China controlled the virus.” Of course, “China controlled the virus” is a baldfaced lie. China expelled journalists in March and its infection data is manifestly forged; U.S. intelligence has confirmed China’s data is intentionally misrepresented. Nonetheless, China’s fake numbers have been paramount in scientific discourse. By demanding elite publications repeat the Orwellian lie that “China controlled the virus,” the CCP has normalized that lie for Western elites to repeat themselves, exploiting China’s fastidiously managed reputation and the fact that most Westerners do not yet know it as an untrustworthy, totalitarian state.  […]

Within China, the CCP has pretended to believe its own lies only at its own convenience, reserving the right to use COVID-19 as a pretext for unrelated authoritarian whims—demolishing retirement homes, detaining dissidents and reporters, expanding mass surveillance, canceling Hong Kong’s Tiananmen Square vigil and postponing its elections for one year. In Xinjiang, where over 1 million Uighurs are imprisoned, lockdowns have gone on since January and have involved widespread hunger, forced medication, acidic disinfectant sprays, shackled residents, screams of protest from balconies, crowded “quarantine” cells, and outright disappearances.

The most benign possible explanation for the CCP’s campaign for global lockdowns is that the party aggressively promoted the same lie internationally as domestically—that lockdowns worked. For party members, when Wuhan locked down it likely went without saying that the lockdown would “eliminate” coronavirus; if Xi willed it to be true, then it must be so. This is the totalitarian pathology that George Orwell called “double-think.” But the fact that authoritarian regimes always lie does not give them a right to spread deadly lies to the rest of the world, especially by clandestine means.

And then there’s the possibility that by shutting down the world, Xi Jinping, who vaulted through the ranks of the party, quotes ancient Chinese scholars, has mastered debts and derivatives, studies complexity science, and envisions a socialist future with China at its center, knew exactly what he was doing.

Worth reading in full.