There follows a guest post by Dr. David Livermore, Professor of Medical Microbiology in the Norwich Medical School at UEA, who says the extreme Chinese response to Covid in Shanghai gives a new meaning to an old word.
shăng-hī′, shăng′hī″
transitive verb
- To kidnap (a man) for compulsory service aboard a ship, especially after drugging him.
- To induce or compel (someone) to do something, especially by fraud or force.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition.
Forgive me if this verb is now unacceptable. I fear it is unwoke, but I mean no harm. My usage is apposite. It’s the poor bloody Shanghainese who are being Shanghaied.
Following rising case numbers, China is applying its ‘Dynamic Zero Covid’ strategy to its principal commercial centre, a metropolis of 25 million souls, where the old and new cities face one another across the curving Huangpu River. The old side – full of ghosts from the International Settlement – has the Bund at its heart, a few blocks of stone-built European trading houses long ago converted to Government offices. On its corner with Nanking Road stands the art deco Cathay (Peace) Hotel where I used to drink gin slings while listening to old Chinese men playing jazz, anaesthetising myself before returning to freezing quarters at the Academy of Sciences, where I was lodged. The new side – Pudong – comprises gridded neon-jewelled streets of skyscrapers, offices and restaurants. It sprang up, quite suddenly, around 25 years ago, and buzzes with China’s new wealth, though it’s thin on soul or ghosts. On recent visits, hosts have insisted on entertaining me there, though I’d rather drift back to the Bund.
The bizarre plan was to lock down the new side of Shanghai for five days, then the old, conducting mass testing to identify and isolate cases. But this has swiftly morphed into a lockdown of the whole city. Everyone is being tested repeatedly and those found positive are sent to vast quarantine hostels, principally the ‘Expo’ international exhibition centre. Infected children have been separated from uninfected parents; a corgi whose owners were quarantined was clubbed to death, and there are widespread problems in obtaining food. Streets are empty except for robot dogs sent to bark at those ignoring the lockdown. Circling drones exhort compliance from above. Even Melbourne’s nightmare looks humane in comparison.
All this has been reported widely. What’s much more interesting and unique is an interview that Freddie Sayers of UnHerd managed with a Ukrainian marketing manager for a Chinese music company, Jane Polubotko. I urge you to watch it. She was quarantined following an ‘abnormal’ test result and has since been stuck at the Expo Centre for 11 days.
The living is very communal. Capacity is 4,000. You and a stranger share a cubicle which corresponds to the area normally allocated to a small trade stand. There are no walls between cubicles. Washing is at long rows of sinks. The detainees wander about, laundering their clothes and awaiting their further Covid tests. These are done alternate days, with Jane’s flipping erratically positive and negative, she told us. She might be let out after four consecutive negative tests, she thinks, though she’s not entirely clear. Her consulate hasn’t been able to help and has other matters on its mind. The staff wear hazmat suits, but the inmates have only medical masks with all their questionable efficacy.
Jane took us on a tour, filming with her smartphone. No one looked desperately sick, and Jane said nothing about anyone being so. Not a single background cough interrupted the interview. She’d been a bit unwell at the time she was first confined, she acknowledged, but now seemed fully recovered. All things considered she was remarkably sanguine.
What Freddie and UnHerd didn’t do was to try to square this material with an Associated Press article, published on April 8th:
On Thursday, the [Chinese] Government reported 23,107 new cases nationwide, all but 1,323 of whom had no symptoms. That included 19,989 in Shanghai, where only 329 had symptoms.
This equates to only 5.7% of ‘cases’ identified nationally being symptomatic, and only 1.6% in Shanghai. Such tiny proportions are far below the international norm, where 25-75% of identified cases typically are symptomatic. They do, however, tally with the fact that Shanghai is repeatedly testing its entire 25 million population. Used 25 million times, a test with 99.9% specificity will throw up 25,000 false positives. And while we don’t know the details of the Chinese testing in terms of performance, methods, cycle threshold, let alone lab QC, it’s unlikely they’ll achieve better than 99.9% specificity.
It follows that Jane’s fellow detainees likely comprise a mix of a few true positives along with a much larger number of false positives. This inference agrees with most of those caught on Jane’s camera looking perfectly well. Incarcerating this mix together in a vast dormitory is the perfect way to ensure that the true positives infect the false positives. You might describe the whole facility as a very large Covid incubator, working exactly as U.S. military training camps did in the 1918 flu.
China’s Covid policy risks bringing a new depth of meaning to that dubious old verb.
Stop Press: Rioting has broken out in some parts of Shanghai, as starving locals loot food shops. MailOnline has more. Meanwhile, Bloomberg News reports that the Shanghai lockdown risks becoming the biggest crisis of Xi’s Presidency.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities whereas truth isn’t”——Mark Twain. —-Perhaps silly Liberal Progressives need to cut out all the fiction and check out some TRUTH
In the 20th century the Marxists murdered at least 100 million people. In Russia 18 million people passed through the Marxist slave-camps. Yet dimly flickering fragments of humanity like Sally Rooney still think there’s something wonderful about Marxism. Weird.
Pol Pot
Mao
The Kim dynasty
“dimly flickering fragments of humanity like Sally Rooney”
Now that is poetry.
Thank you.
Interesting, isn’t it?
It’s OK to be a communist.
For me anybody who declares his/her support for communism effectively says “yes, I think Lenin’s idea of the red terror was a great one, the forced labour camps and the summary executions were a fantastic way of keeping the population under control and there is a lot to be said for mass famine and starvation”.
“The Bolsheviks started out with the determination to remedy the abuses of Tsarist Russia. Under the Tsars, about 17 death sentences were carried out each year. The communist revolutionaries thought that outrageous. They screamed bloody murder: The death penalty should be abolished. However the contract contained a small footnote: In the beginning, there still would be executions it it was necessary to install communism itself as a system. In the first months after the Russian Revolution of 1917, there were 540 executions per year; after a few years, this increased to 12,000 per year; and between 1937 and 1938 more than 600,000 executions were carried per year.
Even more astounding than the numbers of victims was the arbitrary way in which people were sentenced to death. Each city and region was given weekly and monthly quotas that stipulated how many ‘traitors’ had to be arrested. If, at the end of such a period, the local mandate holders observed that the target number had not yet been reached, they took to the streets and arrested people at random:”
Extract from The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet.
Never heard of Sally Rooney. I don’t read any contemporary fiction. Still working my way through my parents’ book collection – that will keep me going for the rest of my days. Default assumption is that anything contemporary will be bollocks. There are hundreds or thousands of great works of literature I haven’t read. I feel no need to buy or read the “latest thing”.
Couldn’t agree more, although there is a contemporary work here and there that’s worth reading; it’s just that finding such rarities is so time consuming – while finding great works of art that were produced in the ‘past’ – a country Rooney doesn’t care to visit – is easy. So much great art to absorb, so little time. Rooney and her ilk just don’t matter.
Not long ago, the prospect of nuclear annihilation was the favoured excuse for non-fecundity, so the prospect of an imaginary climate apocalypse seems a remarkably feeble pretext. It wasn’t always thus – my sisters were both born in the darkest days of WWII, when a Nazi victory was a real possibility. (I’m a post-war boomer – boo, hiss(II)).
Tucker’s very enjoyable review of Rooney reminds me of the Beachcomber character who wrote “A marvellous book – I look forward to reading it!”.
I don’t quite get why somebody who starts off with ‘ I’ve never read any of her novels and I don’t intend to start now,’ has been given the task of her character assassination? That is just pure bias for its own sake. A massive drop in journalist standards by the Daily Sceptic here I’m afraid. I don’t agree with Hitler or Mao but at least I made an effort to read their writing before criticising.
I was disconcerted by his opening line too, but actually I got Tucker’s point pretty quickly, his dismissal of Rooney’s work without even reading it becoming perfectly acceptable to me: contemporary writing is sooo predictable – why waste one’s time with it? That’s not to say that nothing produced today is readable – but Rooney has been so repitively clear from the start about her views – she’s so much a purveyor of millennial angst and nothing else, and sooo happy to publicize it – that the assumption that this is just more of the same is probably justified. And “probably” is good enough for me, given how much good stuff there is out there. After all, Rooney herself is a fan of not reading things (see the ‘pre-1921’ reference in Tucker’s article). In the case of many writers, contemporary and otherwise, I’d agree with you; but you can smell the assembly-line predictably of Rooney’s views from a mile off – and, in the same vein, a big body-swerve of the kind that grown-ups give on principle to the effete 20/30/40-something tattooed, purple-haired, pierced brigade is a sign of maturity to me. I just know what they’re going to say.
It was hilarious. I loved it.
So did I!
What a miserable sounding vacuous, ignorant old woman – even though she’s 30 something
Never mind the politics, feel the grammar. I might be influenced by my early education in parsing and analysis of sentences, but a writer who can say “Me, my family and friends, we……” fails the 11+.
This was brilliant . Thank you. I too viewed Sally Rooney through the lens of looking at who read her. It’s the sort you overhear in Hackney. The poseur childless. I guessed her ‘characters’ enjoy the navel gazing of privileged post-university students aiming well-rehearsed barbs at the privileged. Novels have to write stinging dialogue because it’ snot as if the characters haven’t been able to think about what they are going to say.
Rooney produces derivative dystopian self indulgent and dim output. The unutterably stupid protest against Baillie Gifford sponsored literary festivals is a spectacular own goal. A fund manager which invests more than any others in a post carbon world. A poorly considered narcissistic own goal which harms literature and allows her to feel good about herself while revealing intense ignorance..
Her books are dreadful according to my daughter who is 24. Well she only bothered with Normal People. My son is in publishing and he his opinion was lower.