On a meta note, I wanted to respond to your top-level comment to point out (playing devil’s advocate) that there are countries like Japan with conviction rates well exceeding 99% (but for different reasons).

I suspect that minor gotchas like this are capable of having the opposite effect: neutral people who care about nuance will feel like you are slightly adapting facts to suit anti-CCP narrative. Compounded by the fact that there is little verifiable information due to heavy censorship, this makes any argument on the topic quite challenging.

After your top-level comment got downvoted I didn’t feel comfortable expressing my opinion: some might think I downvoted you and/or others will mistake me for an astroturfer. Personally, I’ve upvoted it and I agree on general sentiment.

That's a good point to make, however it appears that the conviction rate in Japan comes down more to plea bargaining and only the most blatant cases being allowed to proceed forward [0].

I agree that kind of thing can erode the argument so thank you for pointing it out, I wasn't actually aware of that fact re: Japan and probably I'd put less emphasis on that knowing that there can be other alternative explanations.

I don't agree that it's a struggle to criticise the CCP more generally however as while they lock down as much information as they can, plenty leaks out (as always with totalitarian regimes) and there is overwhelming evidence including video, testimony, etc. as to treatment of Uighurs and Falon Gong. I intentionally added references to my original post as to avoid such criticism... for all the good it did me!

And please feel free to express yourself, I have upvoted you also :)

[0]:https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/468111?jou...

The problem with the line of thinking that China deliberately engineered/created/released sars-cov-2 is that there's zero motivation for it. What could they possibly gain from it? What's the strategic value of it?

Oh god... I didn't say it was deliberate!!!!

The argument is that they were profoundly negligent.

As for the lab side of things, the argument is that it was an accidental release (as happened multiple times with SARS 1).

My point is whether or not it walked out of the lab (by ACCIDENT) given they knew in 2003 that certain things were major risks, they should have come down on them like a ton of bricks. The fact they re-opened wet markets and took no further steps to tackle that makes them responsible through negligence.

The combination of facts is (I’m also giving some references to your points):

1) China is known to have contributed[0] to bat coronavirus research, my speculation is that Wuhan’s BSL-4 lab exists primarily for this reason.

2) There were documented lab escapes of original SARS-CoV from labs in Beijing[1] in 2004, as I recall resulting in at least one death.

3) WHO’s study starts this month, but they don’t seem to mention lab escape (not of some “engineered virus”, just straight up a natural sample escaping on a person) as a possibility[2]. I am not sure if they are playing politics or this is their sincere outlook.

I can’t stress this enough: China may have been unlucky to be struck by the original SARS-CoV, so it’s reasonable that they had the motivation to study its origins; that research is valuable and it’d be absolutely bonkers to criticize scientists for having done it. Even if lab escape did indeed happen to be the cause of SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, I am not sure this should be a basis for prosecution of a particular country (as opposed to e.g. tightening of BSL security practices): there’s human factor, and mistakes happen; if it hadn’t been China it could’ve eventually been another country.

What I find alarming is if an effort to obstruct the study of pandemic origins in order to save face (?) is taking place. If it was a lab escape, humanity’s future could be much safer if we knew how it happened—but how would researchers know it was a lab escape if they can’t look in that direction?

[0] https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-... (2015, two authors are with Wuhan Institute of Virology)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002–2004_SARS_outbreak#April_...

[2] https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/who-convened-global-...

yeah I'm not unreasonable about the pandemic situation, and of course it's feasible it occurred through no fault of their own in the first place, however it is clear that they were WELL aware after SARS1 that wet markets/traditional Chinese medicine/etc. were major pandemic vectors and re-opened e.g. wet markets very quickly after both SARS and SARS2-CoV. This is actually insane (as in mentally unwell) levels of arrogance and negligence.

Secondly they covered up the outbreak. Had it been reported a few weeks earlier apparently up to 95% of deaths could have been prevented. That is really insane.

The lab side of it is interesting and it seems just so much of a coincidence that the lab was right next to the oubreak, of all the places in all of the huge country of China.

I don't doubt they were motivated to study bat coronaviruses, of course they were and there was in fact very big competition with the US.

The problem is China is such a corrupt country where health + safety + following protocols is something of a joke, as with most communist/totalitarian systems people always try to get away with as much as they can that I have zero trust in their BS4 lab being properly constructed and procedures followed correctly.

They also covered up the discovery of a very similar virus some years ago (they actively anonymised records around it after covid19 emerged) in a bat cave (no pun intended) which already appeared to have bat-human transmission.

It is something like 96% similar to covid19 though some scientists say it isn't feasible that it evolved into covid19 except in nature. However I wonder whether some form of natural evolution of the virus was experimented on or encouraged in the lab or whether this assumption is in fact correct.

So the lab thing is definitely up for debate, however the general attitude from much of the media and certainly China is to dismiss it as a crackpot theory. Absolutely don't think it is.

Also I personally do not believe at all that any of this was intentional. I think it's a mixture of negligence, cover-up and face saving.

Keeping in mind the next virus might not be a 0.4% case fatality rate that mostly kills the very old, it's deeply frightening.

> Also I personally do not believe at all that any of this was intentional. I think it's a mixture of negligence, cover-up and face saving.

I agree completely.

The reason I - and others - commented, is that your initial comments made it sound like you believed it was 100% on purpose, that it was some weird plan of the CCP to gain power, somehow.

The fact that the BSL4 lab had a grant for "characterization of SARSr-CoV spillover risk" using "in vivo infection experiments" at around the time of the breakout is also a bit of a coincidence.

Whether it's deliberate is besides the point - they clearly lied about it, misled the WHO, and let their people transmit the disease worldwide for months before starting to share what they knew.

> they clearly lied about it

I fail to see the value of this, China is not Sweden, I am not sure why you hold them to the same standards, that seems strange to me

But anyhow, I just wanted to add that the CIA and the US state department was aware of a new Pneumonia surging on China back in November and sped to warn NATO and Israel of it[0], after all, no one ever needed to actually listen to what the Chinese government says, that's what intelligence agencies are for

[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-alerted-israel-nato-to-dise...

Good grief. You can't violate the HN guidelines like this—neither nationalistic flamewar nor personal attack is allowed on HN, and you combined them. This thread is full of people breaking the guidelines that but your post may be the worst I've seen. Doing this will get you banned here.

Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this again. If you want explanation, I've posted extensively in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616408

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25615903

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616086

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616042

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616205

and there are hundreds more past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

Look at economic situation of all big countries and China. Its atleast an important motivation.

This sort of nationalistic flamewar boilerplate is not welcome on HN, regardless of which country you have a problem with. This is not conversation, it's blaring through a megaphone, and it's not what this site is for. Internet battle rhetoric is off topic on Hacker News, because regardless of what the underlying topic is, it makes curious conversation impossible.

No, we're not communist agents or secret sympathizers; we're simply trying to moderate an internet forum that doesn't suck. Posts like this one destroy that like salt on a slug, so please fight your battles elsewhere. Edit: Sorry, I realize it probably sounds like I'm picking on you personally and I don't mean to at all—this kind of thing is unfortunately common, and it's a big deal.

Personal attacks and name-calling are also not ok ("your frankly very ignorant"), so please don't do those either.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> But they certainly gained a lot in the process and capitalized in every possible way

What did they gain? How did they capitalize?

> and tried to cover their corruption and continued to dissapear physicians, journalists and anyone who tried to expose their incompetence and maleficence in regards to COVID.

100% agree here. But that they're desperately trying to cover it up, regardless of origin, doesn't mean they gained anything from it.

> I can go on, but this should at least give you some context to your frankly very ignorant position on the matter.

Did you confuse me with some other poster? Nothing in that wall of text has got anything to do with my position, or this specific argument, and you still didn't address my actual question.

> What did they gain? How did they capitalize?

That they violated international Law and got to illegally occupy and then annex a major financial Hub, isn't that alone enough? I mean I go into detail about how it all took place.

They then got to quell dissenters and hunted them down in order to re-affirm Pooh's (Xi) stance as the tough man of the CCP. 3 high profile activists have been jailed for nothing more than being involved in a protest, a previously Civil Right in HK, 10 of 12 Hongkoners were captured for non-crimes and sent to be tried on the mainland, essentially bypassing the need for the extradition bill that got rejected due to the protests as was intended, but worked anyway due to the perverse nature of the National Security Law.

I'm not sure what more to say to the rest of your response, and I'm wondering if you even bothered to read any of it; are you not familiar with amount of money that flows through Hong Kong's Capital Markets at all? The value of the real estate in the most expensive place on Earth?

Also, I properly used paragraphs: so it's hardly a wall of text. Lengthy perhaps, but not a wall of text as its properly structured.

> I mean I go into detail about how it all took place.

No, you haven't given any reason whatsoever how the coronavirus allowed China to do all these things. How, specifically, did the intentional or unintentional release of the virus aid the CCP strategically?

What did the virus allow them to gain that they would otherwise be unable to do?

How did they capitalize on the global pandemic?

There do seem to be a lot of CCP apologists when the evident facts that they commonly lie to their people, strictly control emigration, and go as far as killing dissenters, should make it very clear that this is not a regime you want to live under.

> I honestly wonder whether it's ... just standard HNers who are in some sort of woke-led state of denial.

I don't think there's any evidence for that. Every woke tech person I know would rather quit their job than do work that benefits the CCP. I think that's why all the biggest tech companies have tiptoed up to that point (e.g. project dragonfly) but haven't been able to cross it.

There's loads of Chinese and Chinese-ancestry developers on here, some non-trivial proportion harbor nationalistic sentiment towards China and auto downvote anything critical of the CCP. I've worked with over 10 mainland Chinese devs who had emigrated out of China, and even though they're wonderful people and very talented (half of them PhDs from places like Tsingua or a college outside of China), they by and large were incredibly nationalistic and won't hear a single bad word about Mao etc.

I've worked with several Chinese engineers, who are quietly critical of the CCP. Since they still have family in China they know better than to be openly critical of China.

I am mainlander Chinese diaspora and this is such a reductionist portrait of the variety of opinions held by emigrants from China about the CCP, which can differ dramatically depending on when you emigrated, what age you are, what part of the country you are from, whether you are religious, your own specific family history, and who is currently in power in China.

There is also quite a bit of dissonance and public vs. private attitudes that you have to sort through. The mainstream and tolerated view in mainland china is that the cultural revolution was a huge mistake - there are way too many families that were fucked up by it - but Mao was still a great guy.

This is some of what I've seen, each entry being from a distinct person:

- One dev has a twitter account that's a nonstop stream of pro CCP ("Tiananmen is Western propaganda") and anti HK propaganda. I found it because it's named the same as his stackoverflow page which is a very unique identifier with the same uppercasing on specific letters.

- Another doesn't believe there were famines under Mao (we were discussing the Wiki page on it) and calls it propaganda. This was from a Uighur emigrant.

- Another agrees fully with the CCP ocean territory claims in the SEA that take basically all the oceans to the west of Philippines etc.

- Another thinks China can't be a democracy because the logistics of over a billion voting are too hard

- Another left HK early on because of disdain towards the democracy protests (long before attacks on mainland businesses)

I'm sure you're right that there's heterogeneity there (that almost goes without saying and is true of any group of people) and a public vs private distinction but that doesn't contradict what I've said.

Yeah in China the education system is hugely geared up to indoctrinate. I studied at university with many Chinese people, know people who have lived there and of course have read a lot about it. It is no surprise!

well things go bad when they actually realize and/or admit CCP isn't a beneficial entity for the Chinese...

they have family/relatives in mainland... have to be careful even in abroad

Things like "pandemic-unleashing" devalue your comment.

I do find the sensitivity on that phrasing hilarious given the absolute hysteria around US/UK politics and some of the phrasing used there. I won't make specific examples to avoid partisanship but it is just mind boggling.

would "gross negligence, face-saving, cover up and delay resulting in over a million more deaths than necessary" work better for you? [0]

[0]:https://www.zmescience.com/medicine/china-coronavirus-coveru...

"gross negligence, face-saving, cover up and delay resulting in over a million more deaths than necessary" So the Chinese government is acting like any other government?

err, no? This kind of (typically self-loathing) moral equivalence really bothers me. It's so entitled to think that govts leading countries like the UK and US which are nice to live in and have so many incredible freedoms and benefits which so many seem entitled and utterly unappreciative of.

China are literally harvesting organs, disappearing political dissidents and covered up the outbreak of a pandemic (to say the least you could about that), and their govt is responsible for 10's of millions of deaths of their own people.

Some nebulous Chomsky-ish nonsense doesn't rank against that, sorry.

Is that the cause of the riots in the US? Nice living and freedom? Or are you comparing apples and oranges and ignore the true costs? How is the living for the lower classes? They get exploited, imprisoned, killed. Not for the communist party but for the market. Same same but different. And that are only their own people. What happens to other nations is worse. Strange enough that the victims of the US war on drugs and war on terror aren't attributed to the US government although they are the consequences of government actions and lies. The Shah in Iran, the killing of Kurds by Saddam, the lies about WMD in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands killed in the Iraq wars, Guantanamo, the emergence of ISIS, etc. And that's only the middle east. Is that cognitive dissonance or ignorance? You probably enjoy the benefits of the "free world", that puts you in the top 10%, as it does me. I bet the top 10% of China are satisfied with the government too. Do you have as much sympathy for the Muslims in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, etc as you do for the Uyghrs in China? Or are they just terrorists or savages for you? Do you even know any of the names of the corresponding ethnic groups in these countries, or are they uninteresting because they are just collateral damage of the good guys? And don't start with whataboutism, the West has the longer history in this respect.

> It seems criticising the US, UK etc. for the slightest thing is fine but criticising totalitarian genocidal sabre-rattling pandemic-unleashing states is beyond the pale

Yeah, because you are not calling for "criticism" but state level character assassination which is rather different

Just again the suggestion of conspiracy theories can be a topic of discussion if you want, but I don't believe you are interested on discussing specifics which is rather sad to me

Please do not take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are, or how badly they are behaving.

I understand very well that there is extra pressure on a minority view that feels embattled, but it doesn't make it ok to break the rules. When you break them it dissuades people from giving you a hearing anyhow, so individual interest and community interest are the same.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's a conspiracy theory that wet markets and traditional Chinese medicine (in which raw animal parts are mixed together etc.) are huge pandemic vectors? And that re-opening the markets and putting absolutely no controls whatsoever on them for 17 years after the SARS 1 outbreak is significantly increasing the chances of a pandemic?

And that it's not impossible that the virus could have escaped from a lab (since the SARS virus did multiple times before [0]) by accident? Though there is some real debate about that so I'm not blindly advocating that theory, only saying it's not entirely implausible.

I mean I'd love to hear your arguments as to the contrary, since you accuse me of 'state level character assassination' by... providing a large number of references to incredibly evil behaviour by the CCP? Please feel free to rebut any 'specific' which you accuse me of refusing to discuss?

I am making specific criticisms none of which I see you have chosen to rebut or discuss rather you are instead trying to smear me. Am happy to hear your actual arguments...

[0]:https://www.the-scientist.com/news-analysis/sars-escaped-bei...

> wet markets and traditional Chinese medicine (in which raw animal parts are mixed together etc.) are huge pandemic vectors?

Ofc, that's why they were reformed, current meat and grocery markets commonly found are nothing like the markets of SARS

And yeah, huge reforms took place on Chinese Healthcare policy[0] alongside South Korean and Vietnamese Healthcare policy, which is why all three countries have been doing so well, they learned all the lessons from SARS which were ignored in the West

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK92479/

Overall sad to see that you are clearly not engaging in good faith, as these discussions are very important :/

> And that it's not impossible that the virus could have escaped from a lab by accident?

And no, once again you show the conspiracy angle, no, it is not the case because the virus has been genetically analyzed all over the world now and not datasets have been produced which could show manipulation, let alone the fact that patient Zero was found a while ago[1], but of course I am sadly not expecting you to actually accept it, as I am sure you will pivot to another branch of the broader "China == Evil" conspiracy-adjacent beliefs :/

[1] https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coro...

Please keep flamewar swipes like "once again you show the conspiracy angle" and "I am not expecting you to" and "I am sure you will" and so on out of your comments here. As this thread shows, the topic is extremely activating to people. Everyone needs to take responsibility for staying within the zone of curiosity and respect. As a bonus, doing that makes your posts much more likely to be heard. Perhaps you won't persuade the person you're arguing with, but there are thousands of other readers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You have repeatedly misrepresented me, spread misinformation and defended a state that organ harvests political prisoners and runs concentration camps.

You're either a troll, very naive, a patriot to the point of delusion or in the employ of the CCP. Think for yourself and think about what you're defending.

This sort of flamewar comment is not allowed on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please stop posting before things get to this stage. No matter how important the issues are or how strongly you feel, you need to stay within the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You broke them badly and repeatedly in this thread. That is not cool.