I saw things in China that I would never see anywhere else, like a girl get killed when she was hit by a taxi (she was going against a red light, the taxi driver was going way too fast). The thump/crunch sound is one I’ll never forget. I guess it’s because there are so many people that the odds are good that you’ll see something crazy happen in real life and not just see it happen on TV.
I’m really glad I left China before COVID happened. From what I’ve heard from my friends still in Beijing, things have been really tough for the last couple of years. Yes, lives were saved by the suffering, but I’m still glad I personally didn’t have to go through it.
In any case, in the end it's all political posturing and propaganda from all sides but I don't think it's great to be framing things in terms of "well, this bad thing is actually not as bad as this worse thing, so we can overlook the less bad thing."
Maybe due to fear (at that time) that the pets would transmit COVID to human. One example is this hamster cull at a Hong Kong pet store [1].
Most likely it was some misinformed overzealous local official. Pets from pretty early on in the pandemic have been known to catch corona. I think the question of if you can catch the virus from a pet is inconclusive (last I heard) - but obviously very unlikely
If you are trying to get to zero COVID so your city isn't shutdown and thousands of people don't loose their way of life then you're prolly quarantining sick people. No one to take care of their potentially disease spreading pets, so local official decides better safe than sorry
It's messed up, but it's totally not unreasonable for someone on the local level to make this kind of call in a high pressure situation with minimal guidelines and the safety of a city on the line
If you're going to condemn an entire country based on local police killing a dog, surely the fact that police in your country frequently beat human beings to death is relevant.
A common talking point for evil. Everything happens; the statement means nothing. People die of cancer with and without treatment. Bugs are in software made by great coders in organizations with great process, and by bad coders with bad process.
So is everything pointless - freedom, democracy, cancer treatment, coding skill and process, etc. etc.?
What's your evidence for this?
Has it though? It seems to have mostly delayed things, things got horrible when they reopened a couple of months ago...
Not to mention the whole problem of not allowing foreign vaccines.
After the initial Wuhan outbreak was brought under control in early 2020, the vast majority of people in China didn't experience another lockdown until well into 2022. Life was actually much more normal in China for most of the pandemic than people in the West tend to think. It was much more normal than in the West for much of the first two years of the pandemic.
From spring 2020 until spring 2022, the main measures were 2-3 weeks of quarantine for people arriving in China, contact-tracing (supported by smartphone apps), and large-scale PCR testing (imagine testing everyone in a city of 10 million people in 3 days, and then doing it again). Lockdowns were rare until mid-2022, and were reserved for situations in which the other measures weren't enough.
That strategy worked extremely well for a long time - long enough to develop vaccines and administer them to 90% of the population.
I don't know when the decision was made to transition out of zero-CoVID, but the transition began in November 2022. It appears that the government initially wanted to do a slow transition, but then decided to completely open the floodgates in early December 2022. The fact that the virus spread so rapidly after that decision is a pretty dramatic demonstration of just how effective the measures were beforehand. After they lifted control measures, everyone was infected within two months.
If I was currently living in China I wouldn't be posting anything remotely political. Obviously they have it harder there
One can express support for a particular action of their government, or try to share some common misconceptions about life in China without being a supporter of the whole system.
I don't like the simple-minded demonization of China by people who don't know anything about it. Unfortunately, that's 99% of English-language discussion of China nowadays. That doesn't make me pro-Chinese-government.
China got through the most difficult part of the pandemic, when there were no vaccines, without letting the virus spread.
Over 90% of the Chinese population was fully vaccinated before the zero-CoVID policy was dropped. The biggest failure was that the vaccination rate was lower among the elderly. That's a problem that affects the Chinese cultural sphere, including Taiwan and Singapore.
- police beating people up because of their skin - not normal or encouraged by the gov
- police killing pets? who knows
but you cannot link the two with whataboutism
And it was such a big fucking deal that the President got involved, it was the major news story for a few days, and most likely the police will go to jail, after a fair trial.
The strength of a country isn't whether or not bad things happen, it's what happens _after_ bad things happen, and if there's accountability.
Things like this happen in big countries. I personally find the incident I described much more disturbing than the incident you described. At least the zero-CoVID policy saved millions of lives.