SA, the Chinese lockdown has been brutal. Doors to apartment blocks have been welded closed; this is not fake news, multiple residents’ videos have emerged. Entire families have died in their apartments; people wrote of screaming in the night. People have been arrested and held for considerable times, for videoing the backlog of corpses awaiting cremation, yet excess organic combustion products have been detected in the atmosphere by satellite. The Chinese government wouldn’t shut down Chinese manufacturing for a paltry 80,000 cases and under 4000 deaths, no more that the Western government would shut down road transport for far worse figures.

There are multiple indications that the Chinese authorities have suppressed the real figures.

SA, I do not join in with “us versus them” politics, not on any side. All states are repressive. The fact that the West propagandises against the Chinese state doesn’t absolve that state. All states are in the business of controlling their populations and destroying the biosphere for monetary profit. In XR we call it the Toxic System.