Imagine a parallel world where the US brought Covid under control in two months, while China still struggled with it, a year and hundreds of thousands of deaths later.
And in this alternative universe, a leading Chinese paper runs an article on the US’s “efforts to hide its missteps” in the Covid pandemic.
What kind of contempt would you have for that propaganda outlet, and for so-called journalists who would engage in such a transparent effort to distract from their own nation’s failures?
“China’s leaders have little interest in dwelling on the past or revisiting their mistakes,” say journalists from a much smaller country where 87 times as many people have now died from Covid (New York Times, 1/10/21).
Well, that’s how you should feel about our own world’s New York Times, which ran an article (1/10/21) with the subhead, “The Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to hide its missteps have taken on new urgency as the anniversary of the world’s first Covid-19 lockdown nears.” The article, by Amy Qin and Javier C. Hernández, went on to say:
China has spent much of the past year trying to spin the narrative of the pandemic as an undisputed victory led by the ruling Communist Party. The state-run news media has largely ignored the government’s missteps and portrayed China’s response as proof of the superiority of its authoritarian system, especially compared to that of the United States and other democracies, which are still struggling to contain raging outbreaks.
It’s a puzzling passage, suggesting as it does that it’s “spin” to portray China’s Covid response as an “undisputed victory…compared to that of the United States.” Let’s do that comparison:
- China, a country of 1.4 billion people, has had just under 90,000 confirmed cases of Covid. The US, with a population of 330 million, has so far had more than 25 million cases.
- In China, less than 5,000 people have died from Covid, a little more than 3 out of every million people. In the US, it’s 433,000, more than 1 out of every thousand people.
- China is now averaging between one and two deaths from Covid per day. The United States’ current one-week average is 3,258 per day.
- China’s GDP grew by 2.3% in 2020, while the US’s shrank by 2.5%.
Given these realities, it’s no wonder China thinks it has responded to the coronavirus far better than the US has—because, objectively, it has.
The genuinely remarkable thing is that the New York Times, the US’s most prestigious newspaper, has devoted considerable resources to investigating why China didn’t address the pandemic even more quickly and effectively than it did (FAIR.org, 10/14/20, 1/20/21). These exposés of China’s “missteps” generally boil down to Beijing not taking the virus seriously enough before January 23, 2020, when it put the entire city of Wuhan in quarantine—at which point the virus had been implicated in 17 deaths.
To put that in perspective, there were 16 deaths from Covid yesterday just in New Hampshire, the US’s 10th smallest state.
The Times‘ specifying “the United States and other democracies” as the group of countries China is comparing itself to is a bit of a red herring. While it’s true that many US allies weathered the pandemic as poorly as the US did, there are several wealthy countries with multi-party political systems that did far better—including New Zealand, South Korea, Australia, Japan, Iceland, Norway and Finland. So the disparity is not so much between “authoritarian” states and “democracies,” as the Times suggests, as between countries that took the coronavirus seriously and those that didn’t.
The advantages of mass death
“China’s comparative success now risks hurting the country,” an apparently non-satirical New York Times op-ed (12/29/20) argued.
If maintaining that China’s Covid response wasn’t really all that great doesn’t seem plausible, maybe you could argue that it was too good? That was the actual argument of a New York Times op-ed (1/24/20), headlined “Has China Done Too Well Against Covid-19?”
The main evidence presented by author Yanzhong Huang that China was suffering from not enough people dying is that it is “over-exporting vaccines made in China in a bid to expand its influence internationally.” By this, Huang means that China is sending many of the doses it manufactures to places like Brazil, where a thousand people are killed by Covid every day, rather than keeping most of them at home, where Covid kills one or two people each day. If only the Chinese people had experienced mass death like we did to teach them the value of hoarding.
Huang, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, also claims that in China, “the population feels much safer than it should.” He cites as evidence a cross-national Ipsos survey (12/29/20) that found that just 80% of respondents in China would take a Covid vaccine if one were available. Huang doesn’t mention that that was the highest positive response rate among the 15 countries polled—compared to 69% in the US and only 40% in France, countries that have certainly not suffered from doing too well against Covid.
But, Huang points out, of the 20% disinclined to get vaccinated, 32% say it’s because they are not at enough risk from Covid. Of course, a third of one-fifth is less than 7% of the population, which hardly seems like enough to make one regret not having more Covid deaths. It’s similar to the fraction of people in the US who say they wouldn’t take a vaccine because they aren’t at risk enough, despite the advantage Americans have had of a 400,000+ death toll. But Chinese people who think that their risk of catching Covid is low are on solid ground, statistically: In the United States, your chances of coming down with Covid yesterday were about 1 in 2,000, whereas in China, they were 1 in 10,000,000.
The value of a scary danger
The New York Times (1/25/21) treated it as front-page news when Hong Kong reached the same number of daily Covid cases as the Brighton Beach zip code in Brooklyn.
Too good or not good enough, China’s coronavirus response is an obsession of the New York Times. On January 25, the front page of the Times‘ print edition was dominated by an ominous above-the-fold photo of people in protective gear behind police tape reading “DO NOT CROSS,” with a caption headline “Another Wave of Covid-19 Hits Hong Kong.” This “wave” consisted of residents of Hong Kong (population 7.5 million) coming down with Covid at the rate of 75 a day—whereas in New York City (population 8.4 million), people are catching it at the rate of about 4,000 a day. But the context that Hong Kong’s outbreak was roughly 1/50th as bad as what’s considered business as usual in the Times‘ hometown was entirely missing from the scary photo and caption on the paper’s front page.
Why make a relatively tiny outbreak of the coronavirus on the other side of the world front-page news at the New York Times? Like Donald Trump, the paper is certainly aware of the propaganda value of pointing to China as a scary danger—as illustrated by an ostensibly unrelated story adjacent on the same front page, with the print headline “US Counters Space Threat From China.” In that article, a gaggle of retired generals, now at weapons industry–funded think tanks, used Beijing to make the case that maybe Space Force wasn’t such a wacky idea after all.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
I’ve lived in Beijing for two decades and any time, I repeat, any time I read news about China in the NYT, it’s always negative, they just can’t help themselves. The same is true for Russia where I’ve also spent time, thanks for the article, Mike Liston
Letter to Editor/NYT:
Is the NYT an independent newspaper or is it a propaganda arm of the US Government?
The articles critical of the Chinese response to the pandemic are strange, considering that it is the U.S. response to the pandemic that is problematic. Why is the NYT criticizing China’s approach, when it is so much more successful than that of the United States? What is wrong with China sharing vaccine with other countries when the infection rate is so low in China.
Why is it shocking that Hong Kong has 75 new Covid cases a day with a population of 7.5 million, when New York City has thousands of new cases a day in a population of 8.4 million?
Sounds more like propaganda than reporting. This is NOT news “fit to print.”
You can do better!
Regards,
Beverly Alexander
Petaluma, California
NYT even admitted firsthand they send their articles to the CIA for vetting; if that isn’t a clear case of a US propaganda outlet in action then what is?
Exactly.
https://swprs.org/the-propaganda-multiplier/
touché
Fully agree. China has done the best job in fighting against the virus. 30 new cases in Shijiazhuang, a city of 14 Million in the south of Beijing, makes the city feel extreme pressure and take almost extreme actions to lock down the city. New cases in Shijiazhuang yesterday is 1.
From what I read, the govt. called in the chips on the CCP Members: they take an oath to ‘serve the people’, an the govt. took them up on ot.
I’ve been tested at least 5 times, and I’ve always been amazed at the people involved, standing out in the cold for hours at a time. I’m sure some of them are volunteers, and they’re a blessing. The Chinese put the whole system in place quickly, and they did it w/coordinated labor.
It’s also interesting that the Russian and Chinese vacccines don’t seem to be in short supply, whereas the pfizer and the astra-zeneca ones have not been delivered as per contract. It is expected to be scammed by a ‘western’ multinational.
Thank you for your wonderful article.
Below are parts of a comment I almost made in reading a recent NYT article about China:
One day, my neighbor, a Canadian government employee, after his first visit to Shanghai for business, came to me, saying something like: I just realized the Chinese people are just the ordinary people like us, talking about concerns of living as we do every day…. To him, it was a sudden and surprising wake-up, after reading reports about China on the western media for years.
He is not alone. Many people who visited China said that this is “the most misunderstood country in the world”. Doesn’t this mean to the western reporters in China that their so-called “objective, balanced and truth-seeking reporting of China ”is a shame? I still vividly remember that “report“ early last year by NYT reporter Amy Qin about China’s violations of human right in locking down Wuhan etc. Again, have you NYT ever reflected for a second that you have made so many mistakes in the reporting due to biases and prejudices which are so obvious to the people who have firsthand experiences about China? Have you NYT ever realized that your self-righteousness and the flag of “objective, balanced and truth-seeking reporting of China” had already failed long ago to fool the Chinese people? They know the saying, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
Thank you Jim for this article, as a Chinese living in the USA, I have long been concerned about Western Main Stream Media reports on China. Your case study analysis did a great job saying what I have felt but was not able to put into words. Why are the media so consistantly motivated in making twisted reports that make other countries look bad is a mystery to me. While reports on China like the NYT’s irks me from time to time because of the unjusts, what concerns me more is the long term impact on the people in USA. The people are deprived of the opportunities to learn about the real world from medias that they are mostly exposed to. I thought one of the US Democratic system’s foundamental assumption is that the voters are educated and well informed, therefore can collaboratively make best decisions on solving the countries’s issues. What happens when in fact generations after generations of voters base their beliefs on “alternative realities”? This already shows in many of the domestic issues that the USA faces, people seem to be more and more agitated towards extreme views. Articles like yours, however few and far between, therefor are expecially important. Thank you for that!
The NYT is capitalizing on our fear and loathing of communism, so be it but what is genuinely baffling to me is how our entire MSM acts as if SE Asia does not exist.
Japan, S. Korea, Taiwan, Thailand – population: 271 million, deaths: 7k. Instead, our apologists compare us to Europe and say, ‘see we aren’t doing to bad, or (CNN), we could do better’.
We would be saying, ‘wow, we really f*d up’, since all of the countries bordering China did so well, what can we learn from them. Is it racism, narcissism, our security state ignoring facts that are inconvenient in stirring up a new Cold War, a lazy MSM, or all of the above?
Same thing with their Russia, Venezuela, and Iran coverage. They are clearly parroting and amplifying the CIA, DoS and Atlantacist positions in everything they print.
Thank you for breaking it down in such a detailed fashion; it will be important for posterity and when convincing friends and family to end their subscriptions to the NYT. As I did in 2002.
Fantastic article, thank you. I’ve been appalled though not surprised at the NYTimes, in particular, in its coverage of China. No matter what the topic, but especially in science and tech articles, they always slip a little nasty remark in. It worries me that mainstream press so assumes that a Cold War with China is necessary, and that many, many people in the USA do.
Mr Naureckas A good analysis of the paper of Record the NY Times. The NYT reported the science of the collapse of 3 building in NYC on 9-11 for almost a year when after an article about molten metal they simply stopped. It has taken time to see but the absolute proof for the collapse of WTC 7 its symmetrical collapse in less than 7 seconds is proof of explosives. All the columns MUST fail simultaneously for the building to collapse as recorded on 5 different video cameras.
The collapse of each of the Tower starts with powder and the powder continues to be produced and in less than 12 seconds each Tower is gone. The trick to SEE is that the powder (called dust by the media) can ONLY be made by explosives. (Powder can only be made explosively or mechanically by two OPPOSING forces ie mortar and pestle ie grinding, smashing etc Will gladly share the rest of the story The TRUTH does matter as we have just experienced the largest (360 million folk) greatest social science experiment on the matter of the TRUTH Can you tell a lie for 4 years and still have a Democracy? Peace Tom Spellman 414 403 1341
Thank you so much for writing this judicious and clear-sighted article about the NYT’s consistent, Trump-style treatment of China!
This article fails to mention the incredible job Taiwan has done while mentioning Japan, which has done a considerably worse job by comparison.