Michael: China, yes.
Corinne: Now, China has had a real rollercoaster with this whole Corona time. But I think you arrived before that, right?
Michael: Yes. I’ve been here for seven years now, so I got to have some wonderful years before the Corona virus. And I do think it’s very interesting to be a foreigner in China during this time, seeing the mixture of Chinese perspectives on this and international perspectives. I think the West, for want of a better term, is a little bit complacent in some of their reporting on this matter. I think rather selective, perhaps the word is selective in what they choose to report and not report. Of course, China is exactly the same, but the West would like to believe it’s better in its reporting.
Corinne: The West believes that they’re being impartial, right?
Michael: They certainly are not. The big difference is that for 2020 and 2021, while the rest of the world was in panic and turmoil, China ran a strict closed border policy and effectively – life continued, push the shove the same as before inside China.
Corinne: Right.
Michael: This entire period where the West is going to lockdowns and with millions of people dying, or at least tens of thousands of people dying, and there’s all these travel bans and things, inside China – not that much had changed.
Corinne: That’s good. So you see this discipline has definitely paid off.
Michael: Well, it certainly did in terms of deaths, for example. So, Beijing is a city region of approximately, I think, 30 something million people. And the Corona virus death toll so far is nine.
Corinne: Wow, that’s amazing, isn’t it? Well, we could learn something from China then in that case.
Michael: Certainly, the first stages were handled way better here. And China did for a while completely eradicate. There were – I forget the exact statistics, but there were, at least in Beijing, we had over 200 days in a row with no new cases confirmed at all.
Corinne: Wow.
Michael: If the whole world had clamped down that quickly, that fast, then it would have been something that we could have eliminated.
Corinne: Yes, it would have been a quick sneeze, you know?
Michael: Exactly. Now, what’s happened since is because the world has chosen to live with the virus – for understandable reasons, because let’s face it, once the virus took hold in certain communities, especially in more underprivileged countries, there was probably no realistic chance of containing it. And certain communities can’t afford the lockdown that others can.
So, for understandable reasons, the rest of the world has chosen to live with the virus but it has put China in a very difficult situation because really China was hoping the rest of the world would eliminate the virus as China had. Now China has started to allow people to come back. So, you have flares up of cases, but they are all from effectively returning Chinese people coming back to the country despite the strict quarantine rules. This is why you’ll see when there is an outbreak that’s why they react so fast and so furiously to it.
Corinne: So, it might seem a little bit over the top, but it’s been seen to work.
Michael: Yes, it’s seen as being over the top if you’re in amongst it. But actually, I mean, this is a country of 1.2 billion people. So, by locking down 20 million, another 1.18 billion of us are allowed to go back to daily life freely.
Corinne: Yeah, which is a perfect example of our idiom, our British idiom. You’ve got to be cruel to be kind.
Michael: Exactly. Now, there is growing pressure from certain business sectors for more international travel, the richer classes. However, you also must remember that China has a huge population. The vast majority of whom are not connected to international schools or international travel.
These are people who – it’s a different world, you know? There are very few foreigners in China per capita. There is something like a million foreigners in China, but if you look at the statistics, what fascinated me was per capita there are more foreigners living in North Korea than in China.