COVID in China - What happened and why?

Part One: Introduction - Calling for Lockdown - German Scientific Debate- Plague Rat in an Asylum - Blaming the Chinese Communist Party

Dec 08, 2023

Introduction

In 1989, I witnessed the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing and the fall of the Berlin Wall first-hand. Afterwards, in stark contrast with the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialism, China flourished. Mainstream economics attributes China's success to the rise of capitalism. I challenge this view in my 2018 PhD, which addresses the question, Is China Still Socialist? It argues that Chinese development is driven by state planning based on public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy.1

My opinion column for China.org.cn website of the State Council covers news and views about China and the world. My first article published in 2009 was about the fall of the Berlin Wall.2 I chose the subject of my articles, although, occasionally, the editors asked me to cover a specific story. Western observers tend to think everything published in Chinese state media represents the official view of the Communist Party. It does not. State media outlets nevertheless worry about how articles are perceived at home and abroad. They have rejected all my submissions since June 2020.

Marxism examines society based on class conflict. The rise of capitalism and the appearance of billionaires in China generated massive corruption inside the Communist Party. Simultaneously, capitalist investment increased the relative and absolute weight of the working classes in society. The Chinese working class is sympathetic to egalitarian values and ideals; this represents a threat to corrupt officials. Consequently, the Communist Party and its state agencies feel compelled to improve the living standards and welfare of the masses and periodically rein in capitalism and corruption. Indeed, before Xi Jinping came to power, Bo Xilai, the former Mayor of Chongqing, appealed to the working classes during his barely-concealed bid for power. Bo Xilai was arrested and imprisoned for bribery, abuse of power, and corruption; nevertheless, the egalitarian ideals and development path that Bo had espoused became central to Xi Jinping’s programme and policies.

In 2020, I hoped to re-work my PhD thesis into a popular format book with the working title of Karl Marx in Beijing, where Marx’s ghost returns to study Chinese society. Then, along came Covid.

I Demanded a Lockdown to Protect the People

At the start of Covid-19, I cried wolf, and I was wrong.

When China first locked down my knowledge about health, viruses, epidemiology, etc was pitiful. In Britain heated debates about Covid-related issues were often shut down by people saying “What qualifies you to speak on these issues? You are not a scientist or a medical doctor. I prefer to listen to them”. My refrain was that Covid is a political, economic and social question that emerged in China. So knowledge of Chinese society is of direct relevance.

During the Wuhan lockdown, I fell for the idea that Covid was a deadly threat to the world. I thought that the organisation of the lockdown, the mobilisation of manpower, the provision of supplies, the building of fever hospitals, and the collectivist response by grassroots community organisations were what had enabled China to overcome the threat. I was particularly impressed by Zhong Nanshan, the man in charge of China’s Covid response, who spoke in calm and measured terms.

On 8 March 2020, I went to Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park, where I have spoken since December 1985, and called for an immediate shutdown. Many of the regulars in the park were bemused and, in hindsight, justifiably mocked me.

Speakers Corner on 8 March 20203

I was interviewed by Double Down News who made two videos and posted them online on 12 and 14 March 2020. The first video called for Britain to emulate China’s example.4 The second, called for the labour movement to mobilise its 500K+ membership to act as the equivalent of China’s neighbourhood committees, to ensure the vulnerable were protected and supplied with food, medical treatment, support and solidarity.5 At that time, Jeremy Corbyn was still the Labour Party leader, although an election was underway for a new leader. I hoped he would use his considerable authority with the membership to mobilise people behind Covid containment measures, and put his name forward for re-election as Party leader. The response to this message was flat. Labour supporters were demoralised and, initially, most people thought that Covid was probably a media scare story.

I felt vindicated when Boris Johnson announced a lockdown in Britain on 23 March 2020. When asked: what do we do now? I posted a link to Robert Bresson’s 1956 film A Man Escaped, about a French resistance fighter who is sentenced to death and then spends weeks using a sharpened spoon to carefully remove the door to his prison cell to escape.6 Wuhan began to reopen on 28 March 2020. It appeared that the lockdown eradicated the threat and this could be emulated elsewhere.7

German Scientific Debates on Covid-19

It was easy enough to find holes in the arguments being presented by the British government and its advisors. I turned instead to what I thought to be more authoritative voices; radio and video interviews with Germany’s leading experts in virology and microbiology, Christian Drosten, Alexander Kekulé, and Hendrik Streeck.8,9 There were significant differences in emphasis between them. The first breakthrough seemed to be when Hendrik Streeck and his team carried out a classical epidemiological investigation in Heinsberg. They went into a heavily infected area, tested people, animals, and surfaces, and conducted intensive interviews. The study found that they could not cultivate the virus from surface residue, and the infection fatality rate there was 0.36 per cent. These findings were reported to the public on mainstream German television news on 1 April 2020.10

The pathologist Klaus Püschel conducted autopsies on over 100 Covid deaths in Hamburg. He appeared on German TV news on 21 April 2020 and said that nearly all Covid deaths were people with a short life expectancy due to the moribund state of their bodies.11 He explained there was no shortage of beds or hospital capacity. Yet the original justification for lockdowns was that the health system would break down under the strain of excessive demand. This suggested that responses could be far less stringent where the health system was more advanced and competent. Sweden was the poster child for such an implied response.

I also watched videos from Sucharit Bhakdi and Wolfgang Wodarg who thought that the measures taken were the problem, not the virus or disease.12,13,14 It was only in the summer of 2020 that I came to realise that they were right all along.

A Plague Rat in a Lunatic Asylum

On 17 May 2020, I debated the issues at Speakers Corner with Jeremy Corbyn’s elder brother Piers, who organised the first protest against the lockdown restrictions in London at Speakers Corner where he was arrested. Piers believed that the virus was a fraud used to justify imposing tyrannical powers over society.

When Sucharit Bhakdi and Karina Reiss’s book False Alarm was published I did the first English language interview with Bhakdi.15,16 I found his arguments about the flaws in the PCR tests, cross-immunity with other coronaviruses, and the dangers of the vaccines under development to be compelling. Afterwards, I joined the protests against the coronavirus restrictions and further lockdowns and was arrested on multiple occasions.

The police treating me as a plague rat

The interview I conducted with Bhakdi was removed by YouTube. And a free speech radio show that I produced for Resonance FM in London was suspended, apparently due to complaints to the radio and TV regulators OFCOM. Friends and comrades who I had known for decades began to snub me or slander me as a far-right plague rat.

I focused on trying to defend free speech and the right to protest. In January 2021 my friend and comrade Mick Brooks died after coming down with Covid. He had suffered a stroke a few months before and his body proved too weak to fight off the pneumonia that he contracted over the Christmas period. At Mick’s funeral, his partner Barbara described the horrific way that the hospital had only allowed her to say goodbye to him wearing a Hazmat suit, even though she had already had Covid and recovered.

In early 2021 Britain resembled a lunatic asylum. People were queuing for tests in open-air tents and vaccinations were injected on buses parked on the road. Hysterical campaigns were launched against those refusing the jabs and against protestors on giant billboards, in the mass media, and on social media. Censorship was everywhere.

Among those critical or protesting against this tyrannical insane and dystopian world, many, if not most, regarded China as being somehow responsible. The theory that the Chinese Communist Party cunningly manipulated the world into adopting totalitarian norms to institute a globalist tyranny remains popular.

Is the CCP behind everything?

Dr Claire Craig is a British pathologist and an eloquent critic of the pandemic narrative in Britain and the USA. She spent the first months accepting the dominant narrative about the threat that Covid posed to people and then changed her mind and began to expose the fraudulent misuse of data used to justify masks, distancing, lockdowns and vaccines. Her book Expired: Covid the Untold Story provides a detailed critique of these measures based on evidence that airborne aerosol plays a central role in viral transmission and none of the measures taken could prevent this.17 She is scrupulous in verifying her evidence and openly discusses when and why she got things wrong. Yet, when it comes to China, all her scientific objectivity flies out of the window.

Craig believes scientific papers from China cannot be trusted as the Chinese Communist Party censors all submissions. “This political interference means that all Chinese scientific publications should be regarded sceptically and with consideration around the motivations of the Chinese Communist Party.[...] In fact, no reliance should be placed on official Chinese Communist Party data.” 18

The reference for this claim is an article published in Nature.19 But the article does not support Craig’s claims, instead, it cites two universities where this supposedly applied. It says that research relating to the origin of the virus may be vetted. Senior Chinese academics are also cited in the article denying the censorship of Covid-related research.

Craig praises Michael Senger’s book Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World for its “compelling” account of how Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party masterminded the imposition of lockdowns on the world and transformed free societies into totalitarian Communist regimes.20

According to Senger, the CCP covered up the outbreak and then encouraged theories that the virus was man-made. Fake videos circulated showing people dropping dead, being seized by Hazmat-suited police in giant nets, or sealed in apartments with the doors welded shut. Senger says that the world was tricked into emulating China’s lockdown. Western journalists became “foaming-at-the-mouth communists” and “Western media outlets came about as close as possible to an outright merger with Chinese state media”.

Senger’s racy narrative links everyone associated with lockdowns and the measures taken to Xi Jinping and the CCP. Similar views that implicate China and the CCP in a global Covid conspiracy are ubiquitous. I will show that this whole narrative is false.

Heiko’s Khoo Substack

Discussion about this post