The New York Times’ red-tinted glasses

The New York Times has continued its enthusiastic China cheerleading in a long article celebrating the authoritarian, but apparently effective, methods employed by Chinese leader Xi Jinping to contain the coronavirus across China’s vast territories. The article is interesting, detailed, informative — and strikingly uncritical. The authors breathlessly recount:

“In many countries, debates have raged over the balance between protecting public health and keeping the economy running. In China, there is little debate. It did both.”

There’s no reason to suppose that any of the feats of mobilisation reported in the article are factually untrue. But one wonders whether the house journal for America’s still notionally-liberal East Coast Brahmin class might have made more of the brute coercive power required to effect such mobilisation, than one passing reference to officials tying a man to a tree for sneaking out to buy cigarettes.

Likewise, one might wonder whether in celebrating China’s effective redirection of national manufacturing resources to critical Covid-era infrastructure requirements, the authors could have spared a sentence to note the decades of financialisation and globalisation, under Democrat and Republican administrations alike, that have hollowed out America’s industrial capacity.

The authors seem impressed by the “sense of patriotism, duty and self-sacrifice” that the Chinese government is able to call upon, to drum up popular enthusiasm for Covid mitigation measures. In that celebration, they might have reflected briefly on the New York Times’ attitude to American expressions patriotism, duty and self-sacrifice.