China and Covid: silence from the Morning Star

Submitted by AWL on 10 May, 2022 - 8:12 Author: Jim Denham
Covid precautions in China

In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Morning Star gave extensive and enthusiastic coverage to China’s response, which did indeed appear to be impressive.

A piece entitled “The Planned economy vs the coronavirus” (republished on 30 January 2020 from the US Stalinist paperPeople’s World) noted: “The World Health Organisation is praising the Chinese government’s quick response to the crisis… The scale of that commitment is now ramping up in a massive way - showcasing the ability of the country’s socialist state to marshal resources rapidly and efficiently in the service of public health.”

A few days later (2 February) Morning Star Foreign Editor Steve Sweeney noted “China is set to open a new hospital in Wuhan to deal with the coronavirus today, just 10 days after construction began… Work began on the 1,000-bed Huoshenshan Hospital on 23 January and Chinese state media said that the last brick was laid yesterday morning… It has an area of 25,000 square metres, and 1,400 staff will operate the facility.”

It really did look as though China’s authoritarian, top-down system was dealing with the crisis with an effectiveness that a liberal western democracy found impossible.

The paper began promoting a campaign called “Zero Covid” for the UK, based upon the Chinese approach, advocating draconian lockdowns and (logically) increased state powers, though that was never spelt out.

Then it turned out that although the first case of Covid was reported on 8 December 2019, the Wuhan health authorities took over three weeks to issue any notification. Between 3 and 16 January, the authorities falsely claimed there were no new cases and no evidence of human-to-human transmission.

It emerged that a doctor, Li Wenliang, had warned an online chat group on 30 December, of a new illness spreading in Wuhan, only to be reprimanded by the police and made to sign a document stating that his warning constituted “illegal behaviour.” At least seven other medical professionals were warned over “rumour-mongering” and “disrupting social order.”

On 7 February Li Wenliang died of the virus. It was front page news in most bourgeois papers round the world while in China the authorities were unable to suppress social media posts mourning the death of a martyr. It wasn’t even mentioned in the Morning Star.

In April and May of this year, while most of the world is “living with Covid”, with no lockdowns and (as far as can be gauged) a lower excess-death rate than since early 2020, an estimated 340 million people in China have been subject to ultra-lockdowns. More than 25 million Shanghai residents have been forcibly barricaded into their homes and have protested that they are starving. People reporting infections have been forced into quarantine camps. Office workers have been forced to remain at their workplaces, sleeping at their desks for weeks. With Omicron’s high transmission rate, it is doubtful whether even such measures can stop the virus spreading. This has been an extraordinary demonstration of the authoritarian power of the Chinese state — and also of the limitations of the “zero Covid” model once trumpeted by the Morning Star and other supporters of the Xi Jinping regime.

China’s official Covid death rate of 5,000 compares very favourably with almost a million in the US, but the Chinese figures are not reliable: even now, with hundreds of thousands of infections in Shanghai, the authorities are claiming zero deaths.

An anonymous city official told Associated Press, “the criteria for confirming cases and deaths are very strict and susceptible to political meddling.” And China makes no attempt to account for excess deaths due to lockdowns and unavailability of health care for other conditions.

Much of the information about the latest Covid outbreak in China in this article comes from the Guardian,Observer, andSunday Times. None comes from the Morning Star for the simple reason that it has, so far, published not one word about it.

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