Not authoritarian rule but solid support from China’s citizens allowed its government to beat the Covid-19 and effectively deal with the coronavirus crisis, argues Singapore-based journalist Ian Johnson, in the New York Review of Books. He uses the Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City by Fang Fang, to show the government did not silence critics but did win majority support by its people, helped by indeed heavily manipulated media in China.Read More →

China is trying to contain a second wave of the coronavirus. Economist Arthur Kroeber looks at what the government wants to do. Unlike other countries, China tries to eradicate the number of cases to zero, whatever it might cost. Even though that is not realistic, it has huge consequences for some consumer good sectors and travel, who might not recover for the time being. An overview of the situation in June.Read More →

Journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao interviews author and journalist Yuan Ling after he got into quarantine in his home province Shaanxi. “The virus has already had a deeper impact on the people than even the [2008] Sichuan earthquake [that killed 69,000],” Yuan Ling tells Ian Johnson on the phone, for the New York Review of Books.Read More →

Super investor Jim Rogers discusses the monetarian measures by Western central banks, while in China their colleagues have not lowered interest rates to fight the effects of the coronavirus. In Europe and the US they have not even started to fight the virus and we have to see how that works out, he tells at CGTN.Read More →