[wastoute]

China sent some 430,000 people here from Wuhan AFTER they prevented those same people from going anywhere IN China. THAT is a WAR CRIME.

[Zhang Fei]

[China sent some 430,000 people here from Wuhan AFTER they prevented those same people from going anywhere IN China. THAT is a WAR CRIME.]

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It’s possible that Xi Jinping figured the West would gin up a solution chop chop, which China could use to fix its problems with this bug. There’s also a sense here that China is populated by stinking barbarians not much evolved from cave dwellers. We can’t possibly have the same problems with this disease that mud people living in mud huts out in that figurative ant heap we call China did. As an amateur China watcher for decades, that’s, nonetheless, at the lizard brain level, my instinctive response. For the average non-specialist, that response is probably even more of a given.

The numbers we’re seeing stateside, in a single month, are an order of magnitude higher than what I expected a month ago, for the entire year. If Xi gambled that the West was gonna fix China’s problem with this virus, he may have bet wrong, and earned himself a ton of badwill in the process. Perhaps he figured also that in the worst case, if the West could not produce a solution, this would at least hobble his enemies, much as invasion forces affected by epidemics sought to share the wealth by flinging infected carcasses into the cities they besieged.