Print Page - Greetings from locked-down China !

Hello All,

My apologies for "disappearing" from the Forum for several months. I was heavily involved in the anti-government riot crisis of 2019 (on the side of the government and thus ANTI- rioters I hasten to add!) I was accidentally interviewed by AP on July 2 the morning after the break-in to our Legco building and somehow that video went viral in China (over 250 million views), which inevitably went on to further interviews. You can find some of these on English YT , but most of the interviews went out on the Chinese social media channels which you can read nor even access unless you can read Chinese.

But that's not my story here.

I want to tell you is about something extraordinary that that I have not really seen anywhere accurately reported (if even reported at all) in Western media - and certainly not in the HK western press like the SCMP.

(There are few vloggers on YT by westerners who are either in China or who have worked in China and now gone back to the West so they "think they know all about China" (ha ha !) . Some are good and reasonably accurate, some are bad and some a just plain awful. Among the most awful are two prolific vloggers : laowhy86 and serpentza whose stuff is pure   garbage feeding off the virus crisis + Trump -led anti-China hatred just to make money from their Patreon sponsors.   Among the best is a guy named Nathan Rich.  But take them all with a pinch of salt )

Here is the real story and it is extraordinary , in a good sense.

My wife and I came back for Chinese New Year (CNY) to her home town near Wenzhou city, just a few miles south of Wenzhou's second biggest city : Yueqing. That was on 20 Feb and even though our friends came over for meals at home in the days before CNY it seemed by general mutual consent that everyone we knew had decided to cancel all CNY celebrations in restaurants.

A lot of Wenzhou people do business in Wuhan, especially Yueqing people, and of course they had all come back for CNY bringing the virus with them. We heard stories on the grapevine that they had already been put in 14 day police-monitored home quarantine along with all family members and anyone else they had met after coming back to Wenzhou. Those that broke quarantine were put in prison for a week and then another 14 day home quarantine.

Remember that this was several days before CNY - thus around 20 - 25 January ! We all heard that Wuhan had been "locked down" but that was all that was reported in the WW news at that time.

During that week before CNY I went out for exercise on my bike and all the main roads were open, but I noticed that almost every small side-street had started to self-barricade itself in with local "vigilante" guards not allowing anyone in except locals (thus the children could safely go out and play in the streets). The same happened to the apartment block where we live : no-one was allowed in except residents.

This continued until about CNY day 2....3 (27   - 28 Feb) - a kind of voluntary home/ street quarantine / isolation by everyone, but no official rules. Everyone was wearing face masks and there was little traffic on the roads.

Then on about 30 Feb I went out cycling on one of my usual routes out of town and ran into a police road block. I was told that if I crossed the block I would not be allowed back into our home town so I turned round and tried a few side roads out of town, some of which were still open , but some were blocked by village local barricades thus preventing village through traffic without the need for official police intervention.

We were booked to fly back to HK on Sat 8 Feb on CX/KA (the only airline that flies direct to Wenzhou from HK) . I had a nasty feeling that things would quickly change for the worse, because although at that time the number of infections in China was only about 10,000 (nearly all in Wuhan) the HK "experts" estimated the real number was closer to 50,000 in China due to the fact that many of those with the corona virus show only very mild symptoms - no worse than a common cold if at all - and the incubation period is about 5-10 days during which time one is nonetheless infectious.

I tried to re-book our flights on Sat 1 Feb but there were no free seats, then on Sunday 2 Feb CX/KA suddenly cancelled ALL flights from Wenzhou (and also many other Chinese cities) to HK indefinitely and refused to accept new reservations until mid-March at earliest ! So much for our return flight to HK !

But then on Sun 2 Feb something even more extraordinary happened: the whole of Wenzhou, all 7 million people, were put on total lock-down for at least 14 days. The whole of our town was broken up into sections of about one square mile with police barricades across all roads , making sure that every section had a supermarket and even a fresh vegetable market . So even if our return flight on 8 Feb had not been cancelled it would have been impossible to drive to the airport.

From what we hear, this is not just in Wenzhou and Yueqing - it's the same for the whole of Zhejiang Province with 57 million people if not indeed for almost the whole of China . THE WHOLE COUNTRY IS ON TOTAL LOCKDOWN ! All one billion people !

Everyone is taking it very quietly and calmly. No panic buying as in HK. The supermarkets are full of food. The only unnerving thing is the total silence outside because no-one goes out except to buy food.

This of course means that all factories are also closed because no-one can go to work.

Today the number of cases in China has risen to 37,000, the great majority of which are of course in Hubei (27,000) with almost 800 deaths and 1,400 recoveries there . Next comes Guangdong with 1095 cases (but so far only one death !?) then comes Zhejiang with 1048 cases (and so far NO deaths !?). Of the Zhejiang cases almost half are in Wenzhou - almost 500, about 300 of which are just up the road from us in Yueqing city. (There's several websites which give the very latest numbers with reasonable accuracy , one is the John Hopkins University site, another is wuflu.live)

So while Hong Kong people are going crazy with their 26 infections (most of which are people who have recently returned from Wuhan) Wenzhou people are taking it all in their stride and doing the sensible thing. No long queues for face masks - in fact no queues at all - even though there is of course a general shortage of masks, so those with extra masks are sharing them with friends.

This must surely be the biggest country-wide effort in the history of the world to contain a virus, and while some - if not many - people in the West   like to criticize the CCP one must surely admit that they can do things for good that could never be done in the "free" West.

(Mind you - with what's going on with Trump these days I'm not sure that the West - or at least not the USA - is "free" in any honest and moral sense any longer !)

To put things in perspective, the 2009 H1N1 bird flu virus apparently killed between  250,000 - 500,000 people WW (the best estimate is 280,000) but that passed with ne'er a moment's panic (at least not in HK nor China) and even during the height of SARS I traveled freely in China on business.

I have no idea when or how we will get back to HK, where we are faced with another 14 days home quarantine due to a new law instituted last Friday midnight which affects everyone returning to HK from the Mainland, whether visitors or HK residents. I don't even know if the lock-down in China will last only 14 days : there are rumors it may be extended to 20 days.

But certainly China is doing its very utmost to contain the virus, both for its own people's good and also for the good of the people of the whole world, because if this virus takes hold in any other country there's no possible way any other country could ever take strong enough measures to control a run-away local infection epidemic.

Just 100 years ago Spanish flu killed 75 million people.

I have been tracking the infections and deaths numbers closely (anyway they are tracked graphically on the websites I mentioned above) and there is a definite slow-down in the rate of new infections per day in China. It has come down from over 20% increase per day to about 10% and most are still in Hubei. In Guangdong and Zhejiang the rate is already much lower.

I grant you that some of the death figures maybe not accurately recorded or even deliberately   fudged (really - zero deaths in the whole Zheijiang with 57 million people? ) but the fudging is surely at most a few tens or possibly a hundred in total , certainly not thousands.

My friends in HK advise me to sit tight in China until the panic in HK burns itself out and I think they are right !

Perhaps Geoff or Samson can give  some on-the-ground reports on what it's like in HK these days.

Well, sorry for the long rant and blurb but there's not much else to do these days while sat in China!

Thank goodness for Kindle, YT and our magic "Unblock TV" box which gives us free access to about 800 TV channels WW plus all the latest movies !

Cheers

Peter

PS: PS: It's well worth your while to watch this YT video. https://youtu.be/YKdg_IBOrBs

Chinese Snuff Bottle Discussion Forum 中國鼻煙壺討論論壇

The Gathering => The Lounge => Topic started by: Peter Bentley 彭达理 on February 08, 2020, 07:51:55 pm