Editor’s note for December 19, 2022
A note for Access newsletter readers from Jeremy Goldkorn.
My thoughts today:
COVID continues to rip through China, but the official death toll since the end of the COVID-zero policies is so far only two. No matter what happens, we’ll never know the real fatality rate (as I told Times Radio of London last night — the link is to a five minute audio with stock footage video on Youtube). But if Chinese government messaging is too different from the reality that ordinary Chinese citizens are seeing around them, the Communist Party might have some real trouble.
On the other hand, most people seem to be stoically enduring the wave of mass infection, at least based on my communication with people in China, and on social media messages. And the Party has an extraordinary track record of successfully changing the subject after disasters and policy mistakes.
This week’s Early Access edition of the Sinica Podcast is out: Host Kaiser Kuo interviews Jude Blanchette of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Ryan Hass of the Brookings Institute about an essay they have written that has just been published in the print edition of Foreign Affairs magazine: “The Taiwan long game: Why the best solution is no solution.”
Early Access is advertisement-free and is available only to subscribers. Please write to subscriptions@thechinaproject.com if you need help getting the feed.
Our word of the day is crematorium (火葬场 huǒzàng chǎng).
