MacLeod is a great writer! Thanks for this!

Furthermore, the implications of going to hospital in China are completely different from in the U.S. In China, healthcare is nationalized and so a hospital visit is not something an individual avoids at all costs — unlike in the U.S., where it can bankrupt you.

lol

… Democrats’ change of heart might not have anything to do with new scientific evidence and more to do with the fact that they now control the reins of power and are cynically using the same tactics Republicans used before them to ramp up hostility towards China.

So the new cold war is official bipartisan US policy, and the parties are only fighting over which of them gets to wage that war.

It [the Atlantic Council] advised Biden to draw a number of red lines around the country, past which the U.S. would directly intervene (presumably militarily). These include Chinese attempts to expand into the South China Sea

“How dare China expand into the South China Sea! It obviously belongs to the US!!”

At the same time, Twitter, under counsel from a U.S.-funded think tank, decided to delete more than 170,000 Chinese accounts in a single day, the think tank having accused them of spreading pro-China narratives.

IMO this kind of censorship was the goal of Russiagate and the post-2016-election congressional investigation of social media. The US bourgeoisie saw that social media were less effective at manufacturing consent for its white supremacist imperialism, so it started pumping out flak forcing the social media companies to fall in line.