I've been watching the transition from where the view was China bungled its response to COVID-19 to the view that China was successful in its response. A lot of it really turns to insularity on the part of western media discourse and the view of China as an Other
That is, once things started getting bad in western nations, western media discourse started to look at China as a successful example of fighting COVID-19, juxtaposing it as a foil to the West's perceived failures
It's actually not so different from the logic of western tankies, who are always going on about how China is doing things better and how the West is bungling everything, because China is framed as this idealized Other and there is this strong desire to self-flagellate
That actually stems from an inability to think outside of a worldview which centers the West (Itself a nebulous construct, but that's another discussion) and fails to understand the rest of the world in its own terms, instead seeing the rest of the world only as foils to the West
Again, a profound insularity in terms of understanding the rest of the world. Euro-American political discourse is very good at doing that, something reflected in the media landscape
As for me, I have friends from Hubei and Wenzhou and I'm privy to their stories. I think about the death of someone like Li Wenliang and the Chinese government using medical workers worked to death as propaganda. Yeah, no, this really really ticks me off
Again, the Chinese state tried to suppress news of the spread of COVID-19 before it became clear that it couldn't simply do that. It was thanks to the self-sacrifices of people like Li and others and the rage of everyday people that pressured the Chinese government into responses
It's through the everyday heroism of many anonymous regular people that there have been successes fighting COVID-19. I would rather credit them than the dictates of the Chinese state. The state always claims that: "I, the state, am the people"
This is another case in point, with the Chinese government now grandstanding about all this. It's absolutely disgusting.
For further reading, @lnachman32 and I put together a list of pieces on the Chinese state's handling of the coronavirus, problematizing the narrative that the Chinese state is to credit for successes fighting the coronavirus. Check out in this thread:
