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Article posted on: 2021-09-15 21:33
Last edited on: 2022-03-24 11:49
Written by: Sylvain Gauthier

The West is officially more authoritarian than China

EDIT on 2022-03-24:

For the sake of intellectual honesty, this article did age poorly. China is now one of the last few places where lockdowns and quarantines are being actively enforced.

What did not age poorly however is my scepticism towards the usefulness of vaccines and related mandates and my suspicion of generalised corruption in the West, but only the future will tell us.

“We don’t want to live in a society à la Chinese!”

Recently I have been hearing this a lot from french milquetoast politicians and opponents to the covid passport. You can’t listen to TV (well, you shouldn’t in the first place) without having a random pseudo intellectual trying to sound like a freedom fighter defending “human rights”, likening the literally tyrannical measures in France and more generally in the West to a grossly distorted view of “lE EvIL chINesE rEgiME”.

“We are heading towards a society à la Chinese”, they say. “Soon there will be social credit score and QR codes everywhere, just like in China!” they say.

Let me try to put things into perspective, and show you that in many aspect, France, the US and the West in general are actually ahead of China in many ways, and that a society “à la Chinese” would actually be an improvement even in terms of personal freedoms.

Disclaimer, I have never lived in China, I do not know the language, I don’t know much of the culture and little of the history. However, I happen to have a few very close Chinese acquaintances who are in close contact with their relatives in the middle kingdom, and I can say the following is true beyond any doubt, at the time of this article in September 2021:

• China does not have mandatory vaccination. Some local authorities tried but the central government stepped in and said it would be illegal.
• China does not have vaccine passport. You can be unvaccinated and go to restaurants, cinema, and even take planes to the other side of the country.
• China recommends against taking the vaccine for:
  • pregnant women,
  • breast feeding women,
  • couples (women and men) trying to have kids (!!)
• The Sinopharm vaccine is a conventional, deactivated virus based vaccine, with adjuvants that are well know and have been used for decades.
• Sinopharm is state-owned, which somewhat mitigates conflict of interests, lobbying and corruption (unlike in the West and in particular France where we have a president who was literally involved in Pfizer’s finances before taking office, make what you want of that).
• The only QR codes you scan are to make sure you haven’t been in any hotspot.

Let’s compare that with what we have in France and in the West:

• Vaccine passport fully in effect.
• You cannot go to a restaurant, cinema, take plane, bus or train without being vaccinated or at least freshly tested.
• Pregnant women are encouraged to take the vaccine. This is also true where I live in Australia.
• In the West, the “main” vaccine is Pfizer, a mRNA injection which is a technology that has never been tested on humans before. Not to say mRNA doesn’t work or isn’t safe, but it’s at best unclear.
• Pfizer is a gigantic, privately own multinational with a track record of fines and class action lawsuits for dangerous products, bribes and misleading labeling that speaks for itself.

Really makes you think…