Weekly dispatch: covid denialists and class in China

I recently got into an argument with an old acquaintance on Facebook. Nothing surprising there, it often seems Facebook was designed to make people argue. The reason, though, is that this person (who I have known for years) turned out to be a Covid-19 denialist of the most extreme kind. After I messaged him to ask how he was getting on, our conversation quickly turned to the pandemic. To my horror, he argued that Covid-19 is no more dangerous than an ordinary flu, that there is no evidence that hospitals become overwhelmed when the virus is allowed to spread, that the whole world is in the grip of a baseless hysteria, and that it's ridiculous to shut people in their homes and wreck people's livelihoods for what is just an ordinary virus. 

I pointed out to this old acquaintance of mine (who is Italian) that during Italy's first Covid-19 outbreak, in Lombardy in March 2020, there were towns where a significant percentage of the elderly died, and the crematoriums could no longer take in all the dead. He claimed that in Bergamo (the worst-struck city in Italy and perhaps in Europe) it was actually the doctors who got the treatment wrong and somehow killed the patients by putting ventilators on them. This is how denialists argue: when the death toll is so bad they just can't deny the problem, they blame the doctors for killing the patients.

I knew by then that arguing with this person was a waste of time, but I just couldn't stop myself. I sent him a link to an interview with a Bergamo doctor from last March, in which the traumatized doctor describes having to choose which patients to save amid a shortage of ventilators. My acquaintance blasted the source (il Corriere della Sera, one of Italy's most serious and respected papers), and refused to engage with the article any further. He proudly claimed that he never wears a mask and goes out and meets people all the time. He said he was amazed that an intelligent person like me would believe this nonsense, and that I was part of the problem. People were losing their jobs and livelihoods because of this unjustified paranoia over nothing at all. Then he blocked me.

I certainly won't lose any sleep over this guy blocking me. I only met him in person years ago, and our subsequent interactions were all online. On the other hand, the level of disconnect from reality that he is displaying really is disturbing. I wouldn't consider this acquaintance of mine to be a great intellectual, but he also isn't a stupid person, by any means. He has lived abroad for years, and has seen the world. And yet he believes all the dead in Bergamo were killed by the doctors, not by Covid-19. And he's not the only one with such views, by any means. The Western world is clearly full of people who believe similar nonsense.

It is not hard, of course, to understand the psychological basis of these beliefs. There is a limit to how long people can be told to forego their ordinary daily pleasures. Everyone is tired, and wants to get back to living normally. But the virus is scary, and so people exorcise it by doing their best to convince themselves and others that it isn't really that dangerous to begin with. Of course, plenty of people are also losing their jobs or seeing their businesses go bust because of lockdown policies. There is crossover, probably, between those who oppose lockdowns because they threaten their livelihoods, and those who refuse to recognise the overwhelming evidence that Covid-19 is far more dangerous than an ordinary flu. I am lucky enough to have a safe job, in a country where I can more or less go about my business normally (although I can't go home). I realize that not everyone is so lucky. All the same, I like to believe that I would remain rational and not go around spreading lunatic conspiracy theories even if my circumstances were less fortunate.

In contrast with the West, here in China it is rare to hear people argue that Covid-19 isn't dangerous or doesn't deserve the measures used to contain it. That doesn't mean they can't be made to believe some highly dubious things; there is a not inconsiderable part of the Chinese public that believes, or claims to believe, that the pandemic actually originated in America, or in any case most definitely not in China. Still, whatever ridiculous beliefs people in China may hold, these don't get in the way of them exercising caution and staying safe, or accepting vaccinations when they are offered. If anything, the population seems to feel no resentment at all about following the government's anti-pandemic measures, even when they are clearly unnecessary and over the top.  

On a different topic, I recently came across this translation of an interesting Chinese article from 2014, which purports to dissect China's current class structure. According to this reading, which strikes me as fairly accurate, the Chinese population is divided into nine tiers: the first three tiers make up the ruling class, the next three make up the middle class, and the last three make up the underclass. What is noticeable is that in this analysis the "ruling class", made up of top party officials, business magnates and chancellors of elite universities, consists of a few thousand people; the middle class, made up of everything from top managers and important officials to ordinary white-collar workers, civil servants and urban home owners, includes around 3-400 million people; and the "underclass", comprising factory workers, migrant workers doing menial labour, owners of mom and pop shops and peasants, covers the remaining one billion Chinese. 

It is good to remember that the vast majority of the Chinese with whom foreigners in China work, make friends, date, hang out and discuss politics belong to that 3 to 400 million-strong middle class. There are another billion people further down the social scale with whom most foreigners living in China are unlikely to have much real contact, beyond perhaps the occasional chat with a taxi driver. And, due to the fact that social mobility has become much more limited than it used to be, it is becoming rarer to meet anyone in middle class circles who does not also come from a middle class background. This might be why it can sometimes feel to outsiders like everyone in China is flush with cash, when in fact GDP per capita remains far lower than in the so-called developed countries. It might also be why many of China's foreign residents receive the impression that support for the system is so widespread; quite simply, the people they talk to all belong to the luckiest 20-30% of the population.