These are stories of passive people who mask up, hide away, and shrug, hoping for better days.Kind of related cause it’s about the pandemic, an Occasional Reader sent me a link to a video by Nathan Rich which slams a guy called Peter Zeihan. I’d never heard of either but watching the Rich “takedown” of Zeihan I found I was agreeing more with Zeihan than his critic Rich. Things really are crazy in Shanghai and crazy bad in Shanghai. I know that from talking to people in Shanghai. And from Weibo, China’s Twitter. If complaints of the lockdown are seeping through social media, despite draconian censorship, you have to know it’s something serious. Simply living in a place does not give you monopoly to state what’s happening there. Look at all the apologists for Soviet Russia, living there, while the greatest critic -- the one who proved the most prescient -- was George Orwell, living overseas.
Nathan Rich is a recovering Scientologist. Good for him escaping that evil cult. But he seems to have found a new cult. Now he’s a China Communist Party cultist. Living in China he’s decided — for safety or for true belief (I suspect the latter) — that he’s going to be chief apologist for China, for the CCP, for Xi Jinping and their zero covid policy. Which me, sitting here in Hong Kong, say is “crazy”. Why, even the WHO says its “unsustainable”!
Rich’s wiki page:
Since moving to China, Rich has started a video blog sympathetic to the People's Republic of China.[6][7] Among the views he holds are that those who had taken part in the Hong Kong protests were "terrorists" and "right-wing",[8] and that Taiwan was an integral part of China and could therefore not be a state.[9] He has also commented on the China–United States trade war[10] and China's handling of the coronavirus epidemic.[11]
Of these views I disagree with the first, the second and the last (on China’s handling of the pandemic, which has been sketchy at best, horrible at worst).
