US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

>>lazycr+(OP)
First gen Chinese, grew up in NA. Have contact with relatives "on the ground".

My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them.

Which is exactly what this issue is about.

That's not to say we have compelling evidence that this was a lab virus, either. I think, for me, it's a, "we don't know, but I wouldn't be shocked at all if it was a lab virus".

>>ttz+rc
Is it just me or is there a deep irony here? I find it interesting that one of the oft maligned attributes of religious communities, especially those in authority in said communities, is this same behavior. Do good things and be open, but also very much protect the brand. As a naive westerner I've hear/learned/assumed that Chinese communism/society was areligious.

When described as you (OP) put it, it seems that abstractly, the Chinese Communist party is just the state religion.

I'm not trying to play a game of whataboutism. I'm curious why these structures seem to rise, regardless of what we intend or call the them. What is it about the human experience that so often results in this.

I apologize if this is overtly stereotypical, naive, assuming, or disrespectful. It wasn't meant to offend or annoy. Just cautiously curious.

>>travis+S81
The experience of changing from someone who believes all aspects of the “orthodoxy”, to someone who accepts that there are flaws in it, can be strikingly similar.

A Chinese friend once described to me the week he discovered YouTube after going to study in America, when for the first time he saw videos of Chinese leaders (2000-era) behaving very rudely toward reporters. He found that shocking, and over the next few weeks and more research, accepted that much of what he’d been taught about his history was fabrication. The experience was pretty traumatizing for him. He’s back living in China now, but with a very different perspective.

I was what you might call a fundamentalist Christian for most of my life, until I was exposed to enough of the counter-arguments that some of them finally stuck. The deprogramming process took a year and a half and was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.

In both cases, the in-group is well-protected from “improper information” (as the CCP calls it). In China they have the great firewall and the domestic censorship apparatus; in religion believers are inoculated against trusting information from “worldly” sources (though the motives of those involved in the actual suppression may differ). Neither system could survive in its current form if this information weren’t suppressed — that’s obvious by looking at what happens when individuals are exposed to alternate points of view and take them seriously.

zlacker