So. November 12, 2019. Not to beat a dead horse but this is vastly more incriminating evidence than was ever available on Sverdlovsk... up until Ken Alibek defected, wrote his memoirs and said yeah Jerry put up a post-it saying 'don't run the exhaust fans the filters are out' but the glue on our post-its sucked so the note fell behind the cabinet. Other than that, the language is the same, the party responses the same, the euphemisms the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kremlinology To study the relations between Communist fraternal states, Kremlinologists compared the statements issued by the respective national Communist parties, looking for omissions and discrepancies in the ordering of objectives. The description of state visits in the Communist press were also scrutinized, as well as the degree of hospitality lent to dignitaries. Kremlinology also emphasized ritual, in that it noticed and ascribed meaning to the unusual absence of a policy statement on a certain anniversary or holiday. The Soviets had advantages and disadvantages. The French didn't help them with their labs, but they also weren't trying to do marketable research. On the other hand, nobody of any credibility in the US pretended the Soviets were anything but Soviet. There will come a time when liberals will realize that Trump can be right AND China can be awful. I don't know if I'll live to see it, however. That tag is a hard one to peruse.Party speak is “its own lexicon,” explains Reid, now 44 years old. Even a native Mandarin speaker “can’t really follow it,” he says. “It’s not meant to be easily understood. It’s almost like a secret language of Chinese officialdom. When they’re talking about anything potentially embarrassing, they speak of it in innuendo and hushed tones, and there’s a certain acceptable way to allude to something.”
During the Cold War, lack of reliable information about the country forced Western analysts to "read between the lines" and to use the tiniest tidbits, such as the removal of portraits, the rearranging of chairs, positions at the reviewing stand for parades in Red Square, the choice of capital or small initial letters in phrases such as "First Secretary", the arrangement of articles on the pages of the party newspaper Pravda and other indirect signs to try to understand what was happening in internal Soviet politics.
By then, however, the battle lines had been drawn. If you backed the lab-leak theory, you were with Trump. If you believed in science, you supported the natural-origin theory generally and the market-spillover theory in particular.
I thought this was one of the money quotes: We American scientists tacitly assume everyone does things the way we do things.“The WIV is under the thumb of the party state,” he says. “Just because you can’t see the political pressures they’re under doesn’t mean they’re not under them. American scientists have been slow to realize that.”
CCP has everything locked down so tightly, outsiders generally will never know the extent of censorship and totality of clampdown exerted. There were no results searching for mentions of Sitong Bridge Beijing on weibo or anywhere inside the great firewall recently. There are hundred or thousands or more police posted on bridges across China... And anyone who's spent time in China will be aware of the pervasive chàbuduō attitude. A mixture of a very pragmatic response to a situation, combined with meh, good enough, but it goes a lot further. It's also a very sharp, double edged sword. Cable won't reach? Drill a hole in the door, feed it through... very pragmatic|meh good enough. Can't afford to buy and process vegetable oil, gutter oil..., so pragmatic|meh good enough. Can't be bothered to follow to strict chemical/biological waste disposal procedures, dump it in the sewer. chàbuduō also means if you can get away with it, you definitely should. Now I'm not saying they were so slapdash with their attitudes, that a dangerous virus being experimented on for gain of function, funded by the US (because they aren't allowed to) - only co-incidentally the very virus that caused a worldwide pandemic killing millions - could have been exposed to the outside world accidentally because some fuckwit threw a virulent bat's carcass in the dumpster out back that one time because Joe Chao mixed up the labels on the infected/uninfected cages, or someone tore their protective clothing, or spilt a vial and just used a mop to clean it up because ... chàbuduō. But that is exactly what happened. Then the CCP machinery kicks in to cover it all up, now no-one will ever know the difference ... chàbuduō | meh good enough
Yeah I ain't a scientist. Grew up with 'em, know 'em, and there's a definite "I don't do it this way so nobody I respect does it this way, and anybody I don't respect isn't really a scientist." Anyone with any experience in political forensics, however, goes "the Chinese hid a whole Tienamen Square from themselves."