Thread by @doctorow

2020 was, obviously, a hell of a year, even by the standards of the decade, whose every New Year's Eve was heralded by some variation on "Thank goodness that's behind us, now we can FINALLY get back to normal."

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The ongoing, accelerating crises of capitalism and climate are attended by a long string of shock doctrine tactics and pathological political outcomes. The covid crisis provided cover for more looting AND provoked more toxic politics.

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In addition to this "normal" drumbeat of scandals, the pandemic also meant a lot of misgovernance: leaders who got out of their depth and, through hubris, panic or disregard, acted in ways that hurt and killed people.

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Following this in the USA alone is hard; even harder to track the Anglosphere, let alone the west. Most Americans probably didn't track First Nations uprisings in Canada; nor the bizarre twists of Brexit, nor Australia's climate denial in the face of undeniable emergencies.

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To say nothing of the Gilets Jaunes, the anti-masker Nazis who literally stormed the Reichstag, the farcical corruption scandals in Israel's parliament, the twists and turns of Denmark's mink cull, Nigeria's #ENDSARS uprisings, and so on and so on.

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Even if you followed all that, you probably weren't tuned into the scandals that roiled China in 2020; scandals that were unearthed by investigative journalists, including many at state media outlets, who took severe risks to bring out the truth.

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The @gijn has just published its annual roundup of 2020's most important investigative stories from China and Taiwan, and it's a vital window on otherwise largely invisible (and yet very, very important) political stories.

gijn.org/2020/12/14/edi…

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The picks include Freezing Point Weekly's scoop that Wuhan's health authorities maintained both official and unofficial diagnostic criteria for covid, which allowed them to make their handling of the outbreak seem far better than it was.

mp.weixin.qq.com/s/vysNta8IU2wb…

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Renwu Magazine's deep dive into app-based delivery drivers is eerily familiar to anyone following the worker-misclassification scandals in the west, but the difference is that Renwu's investigation sparked a national dialog and led to real reforms.

zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/225120404

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China News Weekly's comprehensive postmortem on the failures of health authorities to get a lid on Wuhan's covid outbreak was swiftly delete, but copies of it remain online:

k.sina.cn/article_140919…

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The Reporter gives us a Taiwanese take on Macedonian troll-farms, producing a masterful and nuanced look at influence operations with an emphasis on the Pacific Rim.

twreporter.org/topics/cyberwa…

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The list closes out with two horrific stories on domestic violence in China which is terribly under-covered by the Chinese press (which is, in this regard, no different to its western counterparts).

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First is Guyu Story Lab's terrifying tale of a woman who was immolated by her violent ex-husband. It sparked nationwide outrage over police indifference to domestic violence...and a campaign that was deleted from the internet within 24 hours.

thepaper.cn/newsDetail_for…

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And finally Sanlian Life's Serialeque true crime story of a woman whose husband was arrested for murdering and dismembering her. The story is a rich biography of both their lives, seeking some understanding from their origins.

finance.sina.com.cn/wm/2020-08-26/…

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