First-hand account from a friend of mine who was there for almost 2 years. Just reinforces why I don't trust any numbers they are publishing.
"I spent about 20 months in China. The history is fascinating. I was just telling my wife and daughter that it was only a couple of generations ago that the nation nearly starved to death. I felt I was very open minded and fascinated by the deep cultural differences and tried to understand “why?” Tried to accept things as they were but understand the deep differences from the west.
However, I also echo your comments about the CCP and the corruption. The class differences are astounding. BMWs pulling into plant parking lots where a poor shriveled old woman with bare feet and a handmade straw broom is sweeping the front sidewalk. She looks down as the wealthy executive walks by.
The surveillance cameras are EVERYWHERE. Being watched. Always.
New, modern, 30 story buildings such as offices, hotels and car dealerships. However, electrical outlets misplaced. Door moldings installed backwards. Windows out of line and they don’t operate. All new but workmanship was so pathetic.
Slide open the curtain and look behind the building. Across the alley was a large slum with holes in the roof patched by plastic sheets and a child hanging laundry on the fence post to dry. A green (GREEN) scummy stream flowing past the slums with garbage floating in the “water”.
The smell of burning trash everywhere. Smog so thick that you could not see across the boulevard to the buildings on the other side of the road.
I turned on the shower one morning in the hotel and brown water came out. I tried the sink. Brown. I don’t mean a rusty “tinge” to the water. I mean BROWN water as if it was being pumped from a mud puddle to my bathroom. This was in a brand new Chinese business hotel in Zhenjiang, similar to a Hilton or Marriott, judging from the facade. Nice sheets. Nice wallpaper. Brown water. And a musty smell like grandma’s basement.
Rivers so brown and green that you wondered how a fish could live? Oil slicks shimmering on the surface. Then, seeing people pulling fish from the river to eat. I often wondered how much cadmium and mercury were in those fish?
Chicken was always something like a chicken carcass that had been hacked with a meat cleaver and the boney chunks stir fried. Our Chief Counsel broke a tooth on a chicken bone at one meal. I made a habit of asking, “where is the chicken meat?” The response was always the same - at any setting and no matter the city or the group - “Ahhh. The healthiest meat is close to the bone. It gives you strength”. Uh huh. That means the nice chicken breasts and thighs were being served to the CCP party officials. I concluded that every school child is taught that the healthiest meat is the chewy stuff attached to the bone. Indoctrination.
Several episodes of public urination. Once, a taxi driver simply pulled over on the highway leading out of the airport. He went over to the guardrail and whizzed. So many nights walking to the hotel, there was the strong smell of urine. Coming out of the train station in Shanghai, there was a fresh puddle at the bottom of the staircase one night. I stepped over it and did not roll my suitcase through it.
We were building a plant. We insisted on hard hats and safety harnesses when doing work on the steel beams that were 30 feet up. Every morning, we would come in to find barefoot guys sitting high atop the beams with no safety harness, and dropping bolts and brackets to the ground. Clatter clatter clatter. People walking around with no hard hats. A guy doing arc welding and the cable (somewhat frayed) laying in a puddle that people were standing in. They simply did not care. A totally different value system.
One day, a poorly constructed trench for building utilities collapsed because it had rained all night and the rickety bamboo and slump block bracing gave way. Two people buried alive and they died. We ordered a stand-down and a re-education on all site safety requirements. The Chinese foreman argued with us. He wanted everyone to keep working. He explained that he would replace the people who died and there would be no delay of schedule. He was proud the accident mattered not a bit. He could not have cared any less that two workers just died. Not relevant.
I was in China the weekend of the horrific high speed train collision that derailed two trains and killed a lot of people. I was attempting to text my wife and a friend in the US to let them know I was OK. (I was in the same region). After just two texts and about 5 minutes my cell phone lost connection. I had been “disabled”. Censored. I turned to my laptop that was connected to the hotel internet. I attempted to email my wife. Everything had been working fine all morning. “connection lost - try rebooting”. Three tries. No internet. Censored. We would later learn that the Chinese authorities had started to bury the wrecked train with the bodies inside. They were bulldozering trenches and attempting to bury the entire cars to make the story go away. A public outrage erupted and the bodies were later given to relatives before the wreckage was buried. At least, as best as I could piece together the story.
In so many ways, it struck me as a country that is striving so desperately to be a modern and powerful player on the world stage. But, pull back the curtain just slightly and the values are so dramatically different from western expectations that it is hard to rationalize. The moral compass and sense of ethics are VERY different.
Sad. In many ways, I think this is party indoctrination. I often wondered “what could be?” if people were not living in a repressive state. But they are. And the CCP is corrupt. And China on the whole is not our friend. VERY different from the ally that aided Doolittle’s raider at the onset of WWII. That generation and those values are gone. It was been “socialized” out of the subsequent generations.
No surprise to me that this virus emerged. No surprise to me that the spread was covered up. And I have ZERO faith in Chinese reports that the spread has been contained with no further deaths. Bullsh**. As you said, what about those 21 million cell phone accounts? What about the persistent netizen murmurs of the morgues and crematoriums going round the clock and not keeping up? Why is the traffic data on the highways (TomTom tracking data) still showing very light congestion in some of the major cities in the central region? God help the innocents."
"I spent about 20 months in China. The history is fascinating. I was just telling my wife and daughter that it was only a couple of generations ago that the nation nearly starved to death. I felt I was very open minded and fascinated by the deep cultural differences and tried to understand “why?” Tried to accept things as they were but understand the deep differences from the west.
However, I also echo your comments about the CCP and the corruption. The class differences are astounding. BMWs pulling into plant parking lots where a poor shriveled old woman with bare feet and a handmade straw broom is sweeping the front sidewalk. She looks down as the wealthy executive walks by.
The surveillance cameras are EVERYWHERE. Being watched. Always.
New, modern, 30 story buildings such as offices, hotels and car dealerships. However, electrical outlets misplaced. Door moldings installed backwards. Windows out of line and they don’t operate. All new but workmanship was so pathetic.
Slide open the curtain and look behind the building. Across the alley was a large slum with holes in the roof patched by plastic sheets and a child hanging laundry on the fence post to dry. A green (GREEN) scummy stream flowing past the slums with garbage floating in the “water”.
The smell of burning trash everywhere. Smog so thick that you could not see across the boulevard to the buildings on the other side of the road.
I turned on the shower one morning in the hotel and brown water came out. I tried the sink. Brown. I don’t mean a rusty “tinge” to the water. I mean BROWN water as if it was being pumped from a mud puddle to my bathroom. This was in a brand new Chinese business hotel in Zhenjiang, similar to a Hilton or Marriott, judging from the facade. Nice sheets. Nice wallpaper. Brown water. And a musty smell like grandma’s basement.
Rivers so brown and green that you wondered how a fish could live? Oil slicks shimmering on the surface. Then, seeing people pulling fish from the river to eat. I often wondered how much cadmium and mercury were in those fish?
Chicken was always something like a chicken carcass that had been hacked with a meat cleaver and the boney chunks stir fried. Our Chief Counsel broke a tooth on a chicken bone at one meal. I made a habit of asking, “where is the chicken meat?” The response was always the same - at any setting and no matter the city or the group - “Ahhh. The healthiest meat is close to the bone. It gives you strength”. Uh huh. That means the nice chicken breasts and thighs were being served to the CCP party officials. I concluded that every school child is taught that the healthiest meat is the chewy stuff attached to the bone. Indoctrination.
Several episodes of public urination. Once, a taxi driver simply pulled over on the highway leading out of the airport. He went over to the guardrail and whizzed. So many nights walking to the hotel, there was the strong smell of urine. Coming out of the train station in Shanghai, there was a fresh puddle at the bottom of the staircase one night. I stepped over it and did not roll my suitcase through it.
We were building a plant. We insisted on hard hats and safety harnesses when doing work on the steel beams that were 30 feet up. Every morning, we would come in to find barefoot guys sitting high atop the beams with no safety harness, and dropping bolts and brackets to the ground. Clatter clatter clatter. People walking around with no hard hats. A guy doing arc welding and the cable (somewhat frayed) laying in a puddle that people were standing in. They simply did not care. A totally different value system.
One day, a poorly constructed trench for building utilities collapsed because it had rained all night and the rickety bamboo and slump block bracing gave way. Two people buried alive and they died. We ordered a stand-down and a re-education on all site safety requirements. The Chinese foreman argued with us. He wanted everyone to keep working. He explained that he would replace the people who died and there would be no delay of schedule. He was proud the accident mattered not a bit. He could not have cared any less that two workers just died. Not relevant.
I was in China the weekend of the horrific high speed train collision that derailed two trains and killed a lot of people. I was attempting to text my wife and a friend in the US to let them know I was OK. (I was in the same region). After just two texts and about 5 minutes my cell phone lost connection. I had been “disabled”. Censored. I turned to my laptop that was connected to the hotel internet. I attempted to email my wife. Everything had been working fine all morning. “connection lost - try rebooting”. Three tries. No internet. Censored. We would later learn that the Chinese authorities had started to bury the wrecked train with the bodies inside. They were bulldozering trenches and attempting to bury the entire cars to make the story go away. A public outrage erupted and the bodies were later given to relatives before the wreckage was buried. At least, as best as I could piece together the story.
In so many ways, it struck me as a country that is striving so desperately to be a modern and powerful player on the world stage. But, pull back the curtain just slightly and the values are so dramatically different from western expectations that it is hard to rationalize. The moral compass and sense of ethics are VERY different.
Sad. In many ways, I think this is party indoctrination. I often wondered “what could be?” if people were not living in a repressive state. But they are. And the CCP is corrupt. And China on the whole is not our friend. VERY different from the ally that aided Doolittle’s raider at the onset of WWII. That generation and those values are gone. It was been “socialized” out of the subsequent generations.
No surprise to me that this virus emerged. No surprise to me that the spread was covered up. And I have ZERO faith in Chinese reports that the spread has been contained with no further deaths. Bullsh**. As you said, what about those 21 million cell phone accounts? What about the persistent netizen murmurs of the morgues and crematoriums going round the clock and not keeping up? Why is the traffic data on the highways (TomTom tracking data) still showing very light congestion in some of the major cities in the central region? God help the innocents."
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