Could the coronavirus take China's
communist dictatorship down?
American Thinker,
by
Monica Showalter
Original Article
Posted By: Magnante,
2/11/2020 8:23:51 AM
Monday, China's leader, Xi Jinping appeared in public for the first time since a big swath of the country was shut down due to the coronavirus. (snip) In theory, he doesn't need to do anything. He's got absolute power and too bad if people don't like it. His government has been pretty secretive up until now, too. That Xi is now acting almost like a western politician, seeking to rally the people as the coronavirus epidemic ravages a lot of the country and makes China itself a disease pariah globally, rather suggests a dictatorship under strain and trying to shore up support.... Or more likely, he's running scared.
Reply 1 - Posted by:
iraengneer 2/11/2020 8:36:36 AM (No. 314749)
It appears to be a sign that the Chicoms have been stripped of "The Mandate Of Heaven". Which may be what Xi fears. Who or what rules next is yet to be seen. Gonna be real ugly.
9 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
Clinger 2/11/2020 8:58:22 AM (No. 314773)
I'm having a hard time figuring our exactly what is going on. The flu has killed more than 10 times as many Americans than the coronavirus has world wide if you can believe only 1,000 have died so far.
So why all the fuss? If the official count was true we wouldn't be having this conversation.
13 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
NorthernDog 2/11/2020 9:16:59 AM (No. 314790)
#2 - this is caused by a previously unidentified virus. They don't know its origin but probably is from bats. Viruses have the potential to wipe-out millions of people if not contained.
4 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
Ida Lou Pino 2/11/2020 9:21:27 AM (No. 314794)
Mao murdered 65 million innocent people - - yet he died with his jacket on.
So why should a few thousand deaths topple this generation of commies?
14 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
hurricanegirl 2/11/2020 9:26:49 AM (No. 314801)
For some insider information about what's going on in China, serpentza's Youtube videos are pretty good. He worked in China as a doctor but recently left the country. He still has contact with many of his friends in the medical field, and they have been getting messages to him since the outbreak.
I can't post a link to non-news sites, but you can use "serpentza coronavirus" to look him up on Youtube.
Based on what he says, the actual number of deaths are much higher than what's being reported. But that's a communist country for you--they don't want to make themselves look bad.
6 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
seamusm 2/11/2020 9:38:43 AM (No. 314814)
And exactly what is an unarmed populace supposed to do against a well-armed military force?
11 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
John C 2/11/2020 9:46:48 AM (No. 314825)
Did see a report that undertakers are so busy that bodies are being burned without counting them.
4 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
LadyHen 2/11/2020 9:54:28 AM (No. 314839)
It is curious this killer virus has been very nonlethal outside China. It could be Western medicine. I thought that in the beginning but goodness, by now if the statistics held up you would think a handful outside China would have died regardless of Western medical intervention if this is truly the murderous bug we have been told.
Is it possible China and the media are not being completely honest about this epidemic with the rest of the world? (hey, give me credit, I got that last sentence out without laughing)
4 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
MattMusson 2/11/2020 10:07:27 AM (No. 314857)
You don't close factories and quarantine cities for the ordinary flu. You don't risk crashing your economy for the flu.
10 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
Venturer 2/11/2020 10:24:13 AM (No. 314872)
I am still not convinced that this is not a bio-war generated virus that got loose from them.
14 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
VietVet68 2/11/2020 10:27:43 AM (No. 314883)
Although the corona virus is on a completely different level of failure it compares to the Chernobyl disaster in that it demonstrates the problems associated with communism. Communist party leaders at every level don't want to be the bearers of bad news so they minimize the problem by not speaking the truth. The result is that the problem gets well out of control before anyone listens. Hear that Bernie?
8 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
LC Chihuahua 2/11/2020 10:55:04 AM (No. 314918)
Will coronavirus take down China's leadership? Doubtful. China will just roll their tanks over another 1000 protestors. The only way coronavirus takes down the Chinese dictatorship is if they all catch the coronavirus.
3 people like this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
JunkYardDog 2/11/2020 11:56:43 AM (No. 314990)
It's been said that Chernobyl, not Reagan, took down the Soviet Union. The Chernobyl disaster convinced the people that the State could not protect them, in fact it lied to them, and put them in unnecessary danger. It's not too far-fetched to believe that the Chicoms could face widespread unrest from their own people because the State did not protect them, and did in fact lie to them. If this crisis continues to spread in China it could well be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
1 person likes this.
Reply 14 - Posted by:
DVC 2/11/2020 12:57:54 PM (No. 315050)
Not a viable theory, #13. I spent a lot of time in the former soviet states. EVERYTHING was broken in those places. There are still endless miles of closed and abandoned factories which used to employ people and used to make various (shoddy) goods and machines.
Chernobyl was a nothingburger against that scale of internal rot and economic collapse that had been going on for decades. I asked people in Kiev about it, and they said that it was bad for the people who lived there, but no big deal for Kiev, which is about 75 miles away by air. They found out months later that some radioactive particles had fallen, but nobody really was sick, nothing was out of the ordinary in the city.
2 people like this.
Reply 15 - Posted by:
NancyD 2/11/2020 1:20:34 PM (No. 315079)
I have a minority viewpoint here... but when people are being lied to and they figure it out, when they see people dying with their own eyes, I cannot help but think that outrage grows stronger and stronger, and when their lives and their families lives are being threatened, freedom can persevere. I think an inner strength and determination can become mighty powerful.
1 person likes this.
Reply 16 - Posted by:
Hugh Akston 2/11/2020 1:47:57 PM (No. 315113)
Don 't know about the dictators but I bet there are many, many companies looking to move their supply chains out of China now. Factories being closed, even temporarily, intrastate travel restricted, containers being held on the docks, if they even get there, etc, etc.
1 person likes this.
Reply 17 - Posted by:
Pete Stone 2/11/2020 7:14:13 PM (No. 315400)
Showalter makes some convincing points. One is that 75 years is commonly the life expectancy of a dictatorship. She uses the USSR and Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party as examples. (Okay, Mexico wasn't precisely a dictatorship, but it was for decades a one-party state.) Another consideration is that information gets around faster than it used to. (I wonder whether desktop computers and fax machines might have had a lot do do with the fall of the Soviet state.)
The Chicom government isn't really communist any more in any case. The Army is the power behind the Party; China is a military dictatorship. If the People's Liberation Army generals don't like what Xi is doing, he'll quickly retire to spend time with his family. The PLA leaders aren't thinking like communists; they're thinking like Chinese imperialists. That's why China now has a mercantilist economy (sort-of capitalist, but with heavy management by the government) rather than a collective one. After all, semi-free enterprise produces more than socialism. Now the epidemic has shut down that economy. "Mr. Xi, fix it or get fixed!"
1 person likes this.
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